> Yet as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has noted, many of the recent climatological events and trends “can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” without excluding an indeterminate influence from atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. In the same report, the WMO said that, at this time, researchers have not yet been able to ascertain “the respective roles being played by climate variability and human-induced climate change.”
The report is six years old, the first quote is taken out of context, the second doesn't even exist in the paper, and here's the first paragraph of the paper's conclusion:
> Understanding the Earth’s climate and trends in temperature, precipitation and extreme events is of vital importance to human wellbeing and sustainable development. As the report The Global Climate 2001–2010 confirms, climate scientists can now link some natural oscillations to seasonal climate trends. They also understand the mechanisms by which humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global average temperatures.
Regardless of where you stand on climate change, this is a pretty gross abuse of the source.
Repeat this kind of thing across most articles, throw in some editorializing to push your opinion in "news" pieces (see paragraph 3/4 of article), add "PHD" to your byline even if your field has nothing to do with the material being covered...
Bad sources aren't about deliberately lying, they're about constructing an alternative, semi-plausible reality that meets idealogical goals. Frankly, I'd class most anti-AGW articles as provably fake based on the scientific consensus for the last twenty years, but who am I to judge.
I'm curious about this too. A cursory search showed a couple of Politifact articles, one where Breitbart incorrectly said the Californian flag was supposed to be a pear, not a bear, and another where they mistakenly said that Loretta Lynch was a member of Bill Clinton's defense team.
My suspicion is that the people trying to muzzle Breitbart have never read it extensively. It has a very obvious conservative slant to it, but I've never seen flagrantly false articles by them (like the one claiming that Trump actually won the popular vote).
>Always, but always, it has been about the cynical exploitation of mass crowd hysteria and about the sly manipulation by activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance.
Let's not be disingenuous. There's tons and tons of stories like this.
I personally believe in global warming, but I also previously believed that major cities would be underwater by the year 2000 due to the 'greenhouse effect' (since that's what we learnt in school) so can understand someone else believing that news organisations often tend to sensationalize science.
>This article is a report of findings by US physics professor Mike van Biezen.
That's a very liberal reading of that article. Like most yellow journalism and conspiracy theories, there's always of tinge of truth or credibility. The rest of it dives down into completely contrived fear mongering and conspiracy theories, as well as willfully ignoring the mountain of contradicting evidence to the point the article is trying to make. The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
It cites real data from a real scientist. I disagree with the conclusion and the premise just like you do, but it's absolutely not "fake news".
>The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
You could say this for a ton of MSNBC and Fox News articles. Should they also be banned as fake news?
People in this thread generally aren't saying Breitbart should be considered a reputable source for anything; in fact I'd bet most of the Breitbart defenders in here are leftists or at least not far-right like Breitbart. I'm saying there shouldn't be calls for it to be censored in any way. Censorship is extremely dangerous; far, far more dangerous than Breitbart publishing their silly headlines.
>Why should we turn a blind eye to a source that continually posts provably fake and completely contrived news stories?
I interpreted your statement here to mean you should group it along with other fake news distributors and which Facebook and Twitter are now beginning to block. If you didn't mean that, then I apologize.
It's reporting on sources. Opinionated, yes. False? Maybe. But let's remember all the decades when the MSM were peddling stories how e.g. salt is bad, saturated fat is bad, etc. (now, we're starting to see stories about the reverse).
A large part of the coverage I have seen of Breitbart on mainstream news sources has taken the headlines of some of their overly provocative satire pieces and made the claim that they were reporting those headlines as fact.
As an aside, I think that if we were to nitpick CNN, FOX, or any of the other "real" sources we would find just as much "fake news" as they are claiming exists on alternative news sites. Of course it would be in their interest to discredit those sources when they fear losing viewership to them.
