If there was an award for worst fact check of the year, the recent attempt by the French state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) to smear the Daily Sceptic would be the clear favourite to win. Taking issue with our report of a recent paper published by Nature that found no “surge” in global temperatures since 1970, the AFP author Manon Jacob branded the article “misleading” purely on the basis of a random selection of what other commentators had written on social media. The so-called fact check is so bad it could well be used in future journalism schools as an example of how not to take a poke at well-sourced material, just because you don’t like what is written.
Lesson one might look at how Jacob and his state paymasters start their mission in bold type with the following:
A 2024 research paper in the journal Nature found no statistically detectable surge in the global warming rate since the 1970s, but social media posts claiming this is evidence climate change is not real are false. The data in this study and numerous others confirms a steady increase in surface temperature during this period, according to its authors and independent scientists.
There is no attempt made to dispute what was written in the Daily Sceptic, just the immediate erection of a strawman to knock down. In Jacob’s world, if the Daily Sceptic reported that man had landed on the moon, AFP would call it “misleading” because some conspiracy berk said it was filmed in the backlot at Universal Studios.
It gets worse. The article’s heading reads: ‘Scientists found “no change” in global warming rate?’ Note the question mark, a punctuation that is absent in the heading of the Nature paper that states: “A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet.”
Halfway through the article a large red cross is placed across the promoting tweet sent by Daily ScepticEditor-in-Chief Toby Young that read:
A sensational paper in top science journal Nature has found “no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s”, blowing holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging, says Chris Morrison.
What is the problem here, it might be asked. The first part of the tweet is factually correct as evidenced by the paper itself, while the comment that follows is justified given the ubiquitous claims by alarmists that the recent temperature spike was evidence of accelerated warming. What might have upset AFP is that the message was retweeted almost 3,000 times, helped along by a push from Dr. Jordan Peterson and his four million-plus followers. The article was also reposted in a number of journals including the popular science site Watts Up With That?
Read More: Clueless ‘Fact Check’ of Daily Sceptic Climate Article Descends into Pure Gibberish
