Climate Science is Merely Opinion
John Stossel, among other activities, was a longtime correspondent and then co-host on ABC’s weekly television newsmagazine called 20/20. For years he hosted a program segment called “Give Me A Break” a skeptic’s commonsense look at undue government regulation and cultural censorship and fear. After short stints at Fox News and Reason TV, in 2019 Stossel formed his own video company imaginatively called Stossel TV.
In December of 2021, I wrote, for the second time concerning John Stossel suing Facebook for defamation citing that they unjustly censored two of his YouTube monetized videos on climate change resulting in a significant loss of viewership and subsequent revenue.
At that time, based on Stossel’s court appearance, Facebook claimed that they could not be sued for defamation because their “fact checks” are mere statements of opinion rather than factual assertions. Essentially Facebook in their deposition documentation admitted that their, suppression and flagging of climate opposition was merely opinion.
In this court case the Meta (Facebook) lawyers wrote, “Beyond this threshold 230 problem, the complaint also fails to state a claim for defamation. For one, Stossel fails to plead facts establishing that Meta acted with actual malice – which as a public figure, he must. For another, Stossel’s claims focus on the fact-check articles written by Climate Feedback, not the labels affixed through the Facebook platform. The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion. And even if Stossel could attribute Climate Feedback’s separate web pages to Meta, the challenged statements on those pages are likewise neither false nor defamatory. Any of these failures would doom Stossel’s complaint, but the combination makes any amendment futile.”
While not admitting it directly, Facebook even tries to distance itself from Climate Feedback which is their climate watchdog flagging all things posted on Facebook that are in opposition to human-induced climate change. This is fully acknowledged in the next article.
Recently Bloomberg protecting proponent climate change personnel published the article, “Researchers Hit With Lawsuits, Records Requests for Fact-Checking Climate Claims”. Near the beginning of the commentary in respect of Douglas MacMartin, Senior Research Fellow at Cornell University, the author, Margi Murphy, writes, “Last fall, while he juggled washing the dishes and entertaining his newborn son at home, complete with flecks of vomit on his shirt, a stranger rang the doorbell and served him with a lawsuit”.
Apparently, a little compassion and then clemency needs to be given only to proponent scientists since those opposed to the theory must assuredly never go through the standard rituals of raising a newborn child.
The Bloomberg article reminds me of Michael Mann receiving an email request for his data relative to the hockey stick proxy temperature graph, to which he replied, and I paraphrase since I could not find the exact quote, “Why should I give it to you? After all, you just want to prove me wrong”. Many employed in the advocacy of climate change, like Mann, are university professors, and most of their employers are public organizations prone or susceptible to Freedom of Information Requests (FOIA).
In an upper academia poll of tenured college professors, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 10 to 1 – in another survey Democrats tallied a total of 87% of all professorships. In essence, for the most part, if university professors created or crafted climate change papers to show there was no culpability by human action, they would be shunned, spurned or fired.
The story implies that climate change refuters purposely litter advocates with FOIA requests simply to inundate and overwhelm them with paper work. The actual fact is that most proponent papers no longer try to prove climate change, but merely accept the theory and then hypothesize on the impending devastation coming to the world.
Should all of these research papers, studies and investigations be so honest, impartial and forthright, there would be no need for the term “consensus”, yet that is where they always turn.