Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the discussion is nuanced. But this nuance is lost by Facebook slapping a label on his content as "misleading", which for all intents and purposes means "wrong". Sounds like defamation to me. Why is Facebook involved in adjudicating the nuance of unsolved public policy debates?

Totally agree that Facebook's label bypasses any nuance, but that isn't illegal and we can't make it illegal. It isn't defamation by the dictionary definition (it isn't a false claim), and it certainly isn't defamation by the stricter legal definition. Imagine what would happen if you could sue anyone for accurately quoting you but leaving out a piece of context. Could you sue a movie critic for a bad review that misunderstood the director's intentions? Could you sue for an internet reply that quoted only part of your comment and misrepresented your views? Could you sue a journalist for not printing every interview unedited in its entirety? Could you sue the NFL for stating that a team lost without explaining that a star player was injured at the time?

Edit: Actually, the fact check includes a lot of nuance and discussion, it's not just a "misleading" label with no other context. Read it here: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores...

> Why is Facebook involved in adjudicating the nuance of unsolved public policy debates?

Indeed, and what does anyone at Facebook even know about the subject, other than what the prevailing opinion bubble of everyone else working there is?

Where is the nuance? It opens by mocking politicians for blaming the fires on climate change, then it spend the rest of the video explaining that forest management is the cause of these large fires. Facebook's brief version is an excellent summary of his video's content. What is this nuance that it has left out?

I don't know. From what I have seen, so-called "nuance" is often explicitly invoked as an excuse to be deliberately misleading.

> But this nuance is lost by Facebook slapping a label on his content as "misleading", which for all intents and purposes means "wrong". Sounds like defamation to me.

I can't speak for other countries, but in America reducing nuance is not defamation; provably false statements of fact are defamation.

The 1st Amendment protects your right to oversimplify things.

>why is Facebook involved in adjudicating the nuance of unsolved public policy debates

presumably because that debate took place on Facebook. Is it unusual to you that the party that is responsible for hosting a public debate adjudicates said debate? That's generally how it works.

In the video, it also says "climate change is real", "climate change has made things worse", and "CA warmed up by 3 deg in the last 50 years". And they blame the CA gov for stopping controlled fires in the last couple of years for no real reason that made this huge time bomb that we've experienced. There is nothing misleading in that.

> And they blame the CA gov for stopping controlled fires in the last couple of years

This is what is crazy to me. Growing up in the Midwest, we always had controlled burns on extended family's rural farmland near forests, to prevent future wildfires. It was a regular occurrence

Looking up how absolutely little CA does for controlled burns compared to the Midwest and Southeast was an insane eye opener to me.

Florida alone does like 50x the amount of controlled burns than CA.

Minnesota, which is tiny by comparison, does more controlled burns than CA (or at least used to within the last few years)

Minnesota is 50% of the land mass of California and 1/8 the population. easier to burn with less people affected

CA, also is largely federal forests. Not sure how florida compares to that.

The multi year drought probably influences number of controlled burns in CA

I'd encourage you to read the fact check to understand why they described it as misleading: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores..., https://climatefeedback.org/responding-to-stossel-tv-video-o...

> Given that many pieces of content posted on Facebook can separately make the same claim, it is not necessary to create a separate claim review article for each post we rate.

I mean they are admitting here that Stossel never made the claim they say he did. Then use all the rest of the article to stretch out that their interpretation of Stossel's "climate change has made things worse but" is actually the same "Not by climate change". Which is obviously untrue.

I'm not sure how someone could watch that video and think "not climate change" was the main takeaway vs "forest management was the more-primary factor, though climate change contributes"

The video talks about how climate change contributed and is getting worse, it just points out that there is a clear policy factor that are the main cause for these factors, and climate change is being used as a political scapegoat to justify policy inaction.

> The discussion about forest management was valid and important, it should just be happening at the same time as discussion about climate change.

I disagree. From where I sit, if you want to have a discussion about forest management, you first have to address the "it's all climate change's fault" smokescreen. Otherwise everybody shrugs and says "climate change, what can you do" and nobody will talk about what you actually can do.

In none of your quotes is Stossel saying climate change was not a cause.

All of your quotes support the assertion that Stossel was claiming they aren't the main cause.

It's as though language is failing as us as a culture when public discourse is impossible due to constant strawman fallacies. The claim quoted by the fact checkers is reworded to omit "main."

> Our review was based on one specific formulation of a claim we saw frequently appearing amidst record-setting wildfires on the US West Coast: “Forest fires are caused by poor management. Not by climate change.” We relied on comments supplied by three scientists for a previous appearance of this exact claim by Michael Shellenberger—who was also the guest Stossel interviewed in his video. The scientists explained that this claim is misleading

They re definitely in defensive mode with regards to this. It's funny to see the liability being thrown around like a hot potato. Stossel says it's facebook's, FB says it's the fact-checker's, the fact checkers say it's the scientists'. Yeah something smells bad when such things happen

Possible he could sue facebook in countries that have stronger libel laws?

> fires are not caused by climate change

Maybe it's wrong to base the entire premise exclusively on climate change. I am pretty sure we had forest fires before the current age. For example, 1920s in California were particularly bad. Sierra Nevada forests were on fire and even made it all the way down to Oakland and Berkeley resulting in hundreds of homes being lost.

Facebook's fact checkers need to be a bit more educated and exercise greater finesse regarding these types of subjects.

Sorry if I was unclear, when I said that the video implies fires are not caused by climate change, I was referring to the specific fires discussed in the video, not all forest fires. I'd encourage you to read the fact check, I think they demonstrate quite a bit of education and finesse: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores..., https://climatefeedback.org/responding-to-stossel-tv-video-o...

I read your link and, frankly, I find their science shoddy at best. They seem to simultaneously dismiss and indirectly state that forest management is important.

For instance, they state dismissively: "While forest management practices, specifically fire suppression, have increased the fuel load, scientific evidence... [it don't matter cause climate change]"

The question that's not answered is whether or not we would have these fires had the forest management been done aggressively as it has in the past.

This guy (http://www.excelhero.com/blog/2010/04/california-climate.htm...) analyzed NASA weather station data for the last 120 years in California only (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/). The average temperature has increased by 1 degree over that time. He then filtered only to stations that have been in service for 100 years to produce stability in the dataset. That reduced the temperature increase to half a degree.

He then further filtered the set to rural weather stations only to remove the Urban Heat Island Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island). That reduced the number of stations from 114 to 26, but the temperature change actually showed slight cooling.

So given that forests in CA are largely in the rural regions where temperature hasn't changed much, wouldn't it stand to reason that the other change (reduced forest management) is largely responsible?

I didn't read the blog post you linked to. It appears from the date in the link that the guy analyzed temperature data from 1890 to 2010, roughly. He threw out out data from weather stations that hadn't been continuously in service for at least 100 years -- to "stabilize" the dataset. This implies that NASA (or whoever compiled the data) hadn't already analyzed and corrected the data to ensure that the readings (i) over the 120-year span and (ii) from disparate locations and different instruments were commensurable. If so, limiting his exercise to 100-year-plus stations provides a surface veneer of illusory "stability", but doesn't speak to the accuracy of the reduced or full dataset -- and the accuracy is key to conclusions that can be drawn from analysis. (And if NASA did analyze and correct the readings in the full dataset, then the guy is cherry-picking.)

The guy then drastically restricts the dataset to only include rural weather stations, to less than a quarter of the original set of 100-year+ stations. At the least, there has to be some accounting of geograpical distribution in the analysis. The bigger question, though, is why would he remove the urban heat islands? Does their effect on the climate stop at the city limits, with a partition rising straight up into space? The whole concern about climate change is whether human activity (which certainly includes urban heat islands) will eventually lead to irreversible climate change that will have catastrophic effects.

(If folks feel "catastrophic" is alarmist, I suggest they Google "nine planetary boundaries", of which climate change is but one of the interdependent boundaries, for some truly alarming reading.)

Anyway, someone more knowledgeable than me can perhaps provide a better perspective on whether any climate-/weather-related elements have more of a role than temperature in affecting the initiation and spreading of forest fires. I'm particularly thinking of low humidity and drought caused by climate-change-induced storms, winds, etc. Are forest fires less likely to occur in cooler regions experiencing low humidity and drought?

Aah, starik36 and Excel Hero have gotten me interested in researching further; thank you, sincerely!

Yes, you got the outline of the blog post right. You should still read it - he provides many more details than I did.

To be fair, this was more of an exercise in showcasing what Excel could do than anything else. Climate change data was just used for effect.