The fact checker who didn’t even look into the claim he was fact checking

The title of this Newsweek fact check caught my attention:

Fact check: Did Greta Thunberg Delete Claim That Humanity Will End by 2023?

As most of you would probably already know, Thunberg posted a tweet in 2018 with a short-term prediction and deleted it when its end date approached. This resulted in quite some reactions, putting forward that this deletion again shows that her alarmist claims are weak and unsubstantiated, therefor not worth paying attention to.

The Newsweek fact check starts by listing three examples criticizing the deletion of the tweet, stating that they all refer to screenshots of this deleted tweet, but no such screenshot was provided in the fact check, only the text of the tweet was given:

A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.

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The fact check of the (hard to find) claim that the heat wave of 1976 was hotter than 2022

Belgium had some hot days between July 17 and July 20. As expected, the media was full of it. I noticed that around the same time some news media companies made a comparison with the summer of 1976, putting forward that it was hotter now than in the summer of 1976 and, although the number of hot days were much lower, that this doesn’t mean that its severity is being exaggerated by them.

The Flemish public broadcasting company (VRT) did a similar thing and made it into a fact check format. Here is the title of the fact check (translated from Dutch):

CHECK – No, the hot summer of 1976 was not hotter and doesn’t show that climate change doesn’t exist

I naively expected that the fact checker actually found some examples of claims that the summer of 1976 was hotter than 2022 and that this observation somehow would call climate change into question. The fact check linked to four examples that seemingly illustrate such claims, but following those links that isn’t the case…

Déjà vu: fabricating a “skeptic” claim

Almost a week ago, I got a comment on my post about the framing of the Greenland melt as worse than it is. It contained two videos and two links. One of those links went to the skepticalscience website and the commenter encouraged me to read it in order to get more information on the reason why “the IPCC is too conservative with models”.

It was with mixed expectations that I followed the link to the climate myth “IPCC is alarmist” page. What started as a puzzling experience, culminated into something very funny.

Let’s start with the things that puzzled me. I was presented this link so I could find some information about the “inherent conservatism of climate models”, yet I didn’t even see the word “model”, nor in the title, nor in the post. Also, the url suggested that the article was about the “IPCC scientific consensus” and the title sounded as if it was about the “IPCC underestimating climate response”.

Initially I had the impression that I was presented the wrong url.

The most puzzling thing however was that the subject of the webpage (the “climate myth” that the “IPCC is alarmist”) was unrelated to the skeptical statement from Roy Spencer that was given as an example:

“Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.” (Roy Spencer)

I didn’t find the claim that “the IPCC is alarmist” in this statement. So I followed the link to Spencer’s post and also found exactly 0 (zero) instances of “alarmist” or even “alarm” in that post. The subject of the post was in fact about the IPCC ignoring natural variability by focusing completely on external forcing (anthropogenic greenhouse gases), a focus Spencer considers unscientific. That is not the same as “the IPCC is alarmist”.

But, if that claim was not in the summary and also not in the Spencer’s post, then where does that “IPCC is alarmist” claim comes from?!?!