Scientific/Academic Fraud

Manipulating Information To Overstate Global Warming

"Exaggerating the degree and impact of climate change has been part of the global warming alarmists' strategy. Now it seems even academics are doing it, publishing a paper that provides a "rationale" for lying.

Stirring up fear over man-made global warming isn't a new approach for the alarmists. Years ago many said it was acceptable to embellish global warming and its effects. After all, the public doesn't get it, and it's for their own good.

Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, economics professors at Asian universities, recently published a paper titled "Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements," in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Was this a handbook for twisting the truth? In their abstract, Hong and Zhao note that "it appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change." But rather than try to introduce facts and get the science right, they appear to come to the aid of the exaggerators.

"This article," they write, "provides a rationale for this tendency. ... We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value."

Hong and Zhao say their paper has been misrepresented by the media. In an explanation they sent to food and agriculture economist Jayson Lusk, who last month "raised some questions about the ultimate desirability of information manipulation," the authors say they were looking at media bias in two ways: one, why it exists; two, what its outcome is.

In a note to the press, the authors vow that "we never advocate lying on climate change."

But as Lusk noted in an earlier comment on the paper, the authors constructed "a mathematical model to suggest that exaggerating consequences can have positive impacts by getting people to 'do the right thing.'"

There's also this statement: "Our key result — that overpessimism alleviates the underparticipation problem — implies that the propaganda of climate skepticism may be detrimental to the society."

So maybe they would "never advocate lying on climate change," yet they approve of using propaganda and silencing or marginalizing skeptics?

At least they're not in favor of, as far as we know, arresting global warming skeptics. That can't be said of some, including journalist Adam Weinstein and assistant philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello.

But these two should be a reminder: The growing extremism is a sign that the global warming/climate change scare is losing its strength."