Protecting The 'Climate Crisis' Narrative: Rapid Response Censorship At The Conversation

I posted a comment on this article at the Europe edition of The Conversation:

https://theconversation.com/earths-energy-budget-is-not-in-balance-should-we-be-concerned-204729

The comment is not there. It was removed within about a minute of me posting it, with no explanation.

I didn’t even get time to copy it, but it was emailed to a subscriber friend so I now have the text of the comment fortunately.

This is what the author is claiming:

The greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane) let solar radiation pass, but not the radiation emitted by the Earth, thus trapping this energy. Earth’s near-surface temperature, which is 15°C, would be around -19°C without the greenhouse effect.

If the difference between the incoming energy – solar radiation – and outgoing energy – the sum of the solar radiation reflected by the Earth and the radiation emitted by the Earth – is not equal to zero, as is the case currently, we refer to this as Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI).

It is human activity, through the emission of greenhouse gases (generating an additional greenhouse effect), that has caused the Earth energy imbalance.

The consequences of the imbalance

Global warming has negative impacts on humanity and ecosystems, as the recently published Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reminds us. This report warns that, currently, between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are very vulnerable to global warming.

The people who live in coastal areas are particularly affected. The risk of coastal floods increases with sea level rise, which is mainly due to the thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of the land ice of glaciers and of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. To provide some numbers, the contributions of the ocean thermal expansion and of the land ice melting to sea level rise were, respectively, 55 per cent and 36 per cent for the period 2005-2019.

Global warming is not just a threat to our physical health, but also to our mental health. In effect, sudden-onset events (e.g., hurricanes, storms) can cause trauma. Changes in the climate variables (e.g., drought) can generate a sense of uncertainty. And the awareness of climate change can cause climate anxiety.

This goes to show that the imbalance of the climate system can lead to our own imbalance.

Here is what I posted:

This article simplistically frames a whole list of ‘bad’ things (sea level rise, hurricanes, drought, mental health issues even) as being due to a physical problem (earth’s energy imbalance) and proposes a simple solution – stop emitting man-made greenhouse gases. If only life and complex earth systems really were that simple!

In reality, there is no evidence that hurricanes are being made more severe or frequent because of a rise in global mean surface temperature – or an ‘energy imbalance’. There is little robust evidence that severe weather (including droughts) is being made more severe by global warming. But critically, this article gives the impression that earth’s energy imbalance is directly measurable – it is not. Even more importantly, ESTIMATES of the energy imbalance are error-prone (especially in the pre Argo float era) and the magnitude of the imbalance is tiny in relation to the total in/out energy flux. This is not made clear by Marta, who simply says:

“As an expert in atmospheric science, I aim to shed light on Earth’s energy imbalance and its consequences for humankind.

If the difference between the incoming energy – solar radiation – and outgoing energy – the sum of the solar radiation reflected by the Earth and the radiation emitted by the Earth – is not equal to zero, as is the case currently, we refer to this as Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI).”

The reality is somewhat different. Top of the atmosphere energy fluxes CANNOT be measured directly and even indirect methods, using inventories of heat changes in various earth system components, are fraught with error, especially pre-2005. A recent study by Trenberth et al states:

“It is not (yet) possible to measure EEI directly, although changes measured from satellites are believed to be reliable, albeit biased. The only practical way to estimate net EEI is through an inventory of the changes in energy.

Assessing EEIIn our assessment of the EEI, the focus is on the well observed period from 2005 to 2019 (see section 3). The EEI is about 460 TW or globally 0.90 ± 0.15 W m−2 (Trenberth 2022). This can be compared with the net ASR and OLR of about 240 W m−2 as an estimate of the flow-through energy. Consequently, the EEI is very small and cannot be directly discerned or measured.”
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ac6f74

This article is unnecessarily alarmist and unjustifiably certain as to cause and effect re. a whole list of complex effects.

There is nothing that would justify the almost instant removal of that comment, other than that it challenges The Science as presented by one of the ‘expert’ authors at the Conversation and demonstrates clearly that readers are being mislead. Comment moderators or the author must be extremely sensitive to challenges to The Science or The Conversation has installed an AI-powered censorship model which is picking up on certain phrases in comments and immediately deleting the comments. Either way, it proves that The ‘Conversation’ is a complete farce and a contradiction in terms and it is just a climate change propaganda machine which spits out any dissent or robust challenges to the unquestionable narrative it pushes onto its readers.