Sheila Gunn-Reed and Michelle Sterling expose Facebook’s selective censorship of Friends of Science, a group challenging climate narratives like the misused RCP 8.5 scenario, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s promises. With $200M+ in federal funding since 2017 backing activist groups while suppressing dissent, they link Tech Frontier Oil Sands’ cancellation—costing $91B in economic impact and 7,000 jobs—to orchestrated protests involving CBC Kids and parents tied to media outlets like the Globe and Mail. The April 6 Calgary event, featuring Donna LaFromboise and Dr. Roy Spencer, faces smear campaigns, revealing how platforms like Facebook, via Climate Feedback partnerships, silence scientific debate under pressure from climate-aligned elites. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
My guest tonight is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
Now, if you like listening to the show, then I promise you're going to love watching it.
But in order to watch, you need to be a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's what we call our long-form TV-style shows here on Rebel News.
Subscribers get access to my show as well as other great TV-style shows too, like Ezra's Nightly, Ezra Levant Show, and David Menzies' fun Friday night show, Rebel Roundup.
It's only eight bucks a month to subscriber.
You can subscribe annually and get two months free.
And just for our podcast listeners, you can save an extra 10% on a new Rebel News Plus membership by using the coupon code podcast when you subscribe.
Just go to rebelnews.com slash subscribe to become a member.
And please leave a five-star review on this podcast and subscribe in iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast because those reviews are a great way to support Rebel News and also help people find our podcast without ever having to spend a dime.
And now please enjoy this free audio-only version of my show.
Facebook is censoring our friends at Friends of Science.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Facebook has recently announced, or rather, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced that he's going to do less censoring of divergent viewpoints.
Facebook's Climate Censorship00:15:33
How nice of him.
But it's a strange statement to make when his company is still censoring people who are skeptical, not of climate change itself, but rather at the responsibility being allotted to humanity for an ever-evolving climate.
That's exactly what's happening to our friends at Friends of Science.
So joining me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon from her home in Calgary is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science to tell us about how they are being censored by Facebook, but also to talk about the young German anti-Greta, why Michelle thinks tech pulled the plug on its Frontier Oil Sands mine, and a whole host of other issues happening in the world of climate change.
Joining me now from her home in Calgary is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
Michelle, it's been a while since I talked to you.
Last time I talked to you, Davos was just wrapping up and we'll get to that in a second.
But you have a great new video out about Alberta's climate future.
And you dismantle meticulously this report done by a high-profile climate scientist, the one that Catherine McKenna always runs to to back up all of her crazy claims.
You took it all apart.
She has this doomsday scenario out there for Alberta and you just meticulously dismantled it.
Well, we haven't quite gotten into the most meticulous part.
We're still working on that, but certainly a foundational premise of any of these catastrophic reports is to check and see if there's a thing in there referred to as the RCP 8.5, which is the representative concentration pathway.
And these are referring to a set of climate models or simulations which the researchers use to try and determine what are the drivers of different climate scenarios.
Like, let's say with the 8.5, we go back to entirely using coal and we have no climate mitigation.
So that makes it a very extreme response in the model, so a great deal of warming.
But they never intended for people to use them as optional pathways.
Like if we go to the 8.5, we get this.
If we go to the 2.6, we get that.
Because the 2.6 RCP 2.6 is 3 billion less people.
So you can see how some people have misunderstood these things and are actually advocating for depopulating the planet.
In the Alberta Climate Future report, this 8.5 scenario features prevalently, and it was never meant to be used that way.
And there's a climate policy analyst named Roger Pielke Jr. in the States.
His father is a very well-known climate scientist, but Roger Pielke Jr. is a climate policy analyst.
And he's made quite a detailed study of this.
And he's found that actually these two green billionaires in the States, Thomas Steyer, who killed the Keystone XL pipeline, and Michael Bloomberg, who recently was trying to run for president, they and a group of activists have published this report, Risky Business, in about 2014.
And they used this, what he calls the climate porn scenario, which is the RCP 8.5.
Now, they also funded the promotion of this risky business report.
So it's become very, very popular in business circles too.
So when people tell you that they think there's a climate emergency on the horizon, that's where it's coming from.
It's coming from this very unrealistic, not meant to be used this way, RCP 8.5.
So everybody can just calm down about climate change.
And whenever you see a report that's scary, look at that paper and see if it uses the RCP 8.5, because probably it does.
And this stuff just gets repeated and repeated and repeated, and it ends up in just about every single argument for carbon taxes, for carbon trading, for carbon offsets.
They just keep building on this one fallacy.
Right, that's right.
And Roger Pielke Jr. has written a couple of good articles on Forbes, like Risky Business was the basis for 11 talks at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
A 2016 paper published in the prestigious Journal of Science from the Risky Business Project introduced the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP scenario to the other.
And this is what Catherine Hayhoe does in her presentation.
Inside our video, we have a little clip that we shot at the University of Calgary when she was here.
I think it was in 2018 for the Cities Conference.
And she does exactly that.
She shows RCP 8.5 and saying, you know, we were going up here, but now we're reducing the curve.
We're bending the curve and we're going to reduce our emissions.
And she points to RCP 4.5.
And then she says an amazing thing.
This is a climate expert.
She tells us that we're reducing our emissions because of China.
because China's installed so much wind and solar, which is absolute nonsense because China puts out in a month what Canada puts out in a whole year.
So, you know, just looking at that, you can say, okay, well, if that's how much she knows about emissions in the world, we better question also this paper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Global News reports it as, you know, as, you know, the catastrophe of the climate is right around the corner and you better stock up on toilet paper.
It's just, you know, it's a crazy, crazy thing.
Now, you mentioned, I just want to bump ahead because you actually already mentioned this, that some of these doomsday scenarios or some of the data they're using is based on the fact that there's 3 billion fewer people on the face of the earth.
And Friends of Science had a press release out that you put out February 11th that talks about this sort of depopulation idea, thought bubble, that was kicked around Davos.
Now, they don't mean that they are going to depopulate.
They mean the rest of us.
Well, yeah, you know, it is quite scary when you have, say, Jane Goodall, very famous woman, done a lot for, you know, she's advocating for like the planet would be a lot healthier if we had a population like several hundred years ago when I forget what the number was,
it was like a population of about 500 million people, like some ridiculously small figure.
And this she's saying in front of all the most influential business and economic people of the world and world leaders.
So what conclusion are people to draw from that and then add to it all of these scary scenarios, which often refer to this 2.6, RCP 2.6 as if it's a pathway, you know, to reducing emissions?
Well, yes, let's knock off a bunch of people.
And I mean, sadly, we've even seen this on Twitter with the horrific sadness, the tragedy happening in China, where some of these climate advocates are saying, well, look at this.
It's great how China has reduced its emissions while people are dying and not working.
It's like, are you people safe to be around?
Yeah.
I mean, it's so, it's so anti-human.
They tell me they're not a religious cult, but when Tim Gray, so the director of environmental defense, who was on the oil sands advisory group appointed by Notley, when he says stuff like the coronavirus or COVID-19 or the Wuhan flu, whatever they're calling it today, when he says stuff like, that's just, you know, an angry earth telling us to change our ways.
Yeah.
Gaia's revenge over my SUV is this disease that could harm, you know, all of the old people.
I mean, it's just so crazy that they say these things with a straight face.
Then are welcomed into polite society and elite society like they're not complete lunatics.
Well, you know, the other thing you should know is that based on CRA documents, Canadian taxpayers are funding environmental defense for about 30%.
That makes perfect sense.
I did an investigation into the Pembina Institute, just how much money they've received since Justin Trudeau took office and actually since like 2017, and it's in the millions versus I think it was $200,000 in grants over the 10 years that Harper was in government.
They really, these environmental groups have sort of become an arm of the federal government.
They're like the research and development and policy arm of the federal government.
I mean, when all of their funding is coming from the federal government and all of the policies, the crazy policy ideas are being fed upstream and adopted by the government, they're really not any different than the government.
I just can't ATIP them to find out what they're talking about.
That's very true.
And Parker Gallant has done a very interesting series of blog posts about the new Canadian Institute for Climate Choices, which also use those same RCP 8.5 and 2.6 in their charting our course document.
We're paying them $20 million to have a panel of people who all agree with each other that we should be carpented to death.
So that's just great.
Let's just bump ahead now to, you guys have a great video about a girl I've actually met.
I met her actually in Madrid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Naomi Seibt.
People call her the anti-Greta.
I don't know if she likes that term herself, but she's a kid on the other side of the debate who just wants the debate.
Right.
Whereas little Greta seems to be a bit of a tyrant.
She wants to tell grown-ups what to do.
She wants to tell politicians what to do.
She doesn't want to go to school.
Sounds like a typical teenager, if you ask me.
But Naomi, on the flip side, she just says, hey, let's talk about this.
There are two sides.
And she's sort of becoming a little bit of an internet sensation.
Yes, well, we did a video where we work with Clintel, climate intelligence organization out of Holland.
And we are trying to stimulate debate.
Of course, that's what Clintel has been doing too.
They've been taking formal declarations to the EU Parliament.
They sent a registered letter to the United Nations the same day that Greta was there.
They've gone to Oslo.
They sent a letter to the World Economic Forum.
Anyway, and we find that, you know, Naomi Said is a very interesting young woman.
She's actually an adult now because she's 19.
Although she did begin the climate issue quite some years ago, I believe.
And, you know, just the fact that she is actually advocating for something that is a calm and open debate, which is also what Clintel advocates for and what we also advocate for at Friends of Science, open civil debate.
So it's very interesting to see that now our young people also have another role model who is very polite, very calm, well-informed, and willing to talk rather than berate.
Yeah, yeah, she has, I've met her, she's a very nice young lady and not angry.
I'm a grown-up.
She didn't yell at me.
So I think there's a strong divergence from Greta.
Well, I want to just say I did just read Scenes from the Heart, the book that was presumably written mostly by Greta's mom.
And, you know, that poor girl has grown up in a very unusual family.
So I think probably it has helped Greta to do her mission.
her, but it hasn't helped the millions of other kids who are now having sleepless nights and terrors and fears of an apocalyptic end.
And, you know, unfortunately, like she just keeps misinterpreting the science just as this 8.5, RCP 8.5, as I mentioned to you.
Well, she went back to school.
She might be able to take another look at that science and maybe understand it a little better.
Yeah, I definitely have compassion for Greta.
She grew up in a weird household.
She's basically a child actor, and we know how life is for a lot of child actors.
And I do think that her activism is probably giving her some sort of reason for being.
But so does being a girl guide.
You know what I mean?
I do.
Yes, I do.
And unfortunately, I think for someone who's already terrified of climate change, it's probably not good for your mental health to put you on a stage and have you say terrifying things about climate change every day.
Probably better to calm people down, give them a broader perspective.
And, you know, like Naomi's trying to do, like Clintel is trying to do, and like what we try to do to open the conversation, get more perspective, get some historical perspective, and calm down.
Children's Climate Activism00:06:08
Yeah, speaking to kids calming down, this is like a social contagion with kids and climate change.
The tech frontier oil sands mine has been tragically canceled, taking with it 7,000 jobs, $21 billion in construction, $70 billion over the course of the project's lifetime to governments.
And CBC Kids was, you know, for all intents and purposes, promoting kids going on a hunger strike across the country against the mine.
And, you know, 200 kids, according to CBC, 200 kids from across Canada had pledged to go on a hunger strike.
How do you do business in this country when you have the national broadcaster, the state broadcaster, promoting kids hunger striking against jobs for other kids' parents?
Yes, well, you know, many people thought that Tech pulled out, I think it was Warren Kinsella, perhaps, was it yesterday, Dave Jeager was on Daniel Smith and he suggested that Warren had hinted or said on Twitter, I didn't see it, that perhaps Cabinet had called Tech and said, hey, you know, the blockades are problematic and maybe you should just step back.
But I think, you know, if I was the CEO of a corporation, I'd be willing to negotiate with all these people along the way.
But the minute you tell me you're going to have hunger striking children against my project, sorry, you know, that would be the time to leave the building.
Like, this is ridiculous.
And then I understand from another colleague that some of the one of the children involved is the son of an environmental writer who frequently writes for the Globe and Mail.
And his father is a media photographer.
So, you know, you got to wonder about where's the media in Canada on this too.
Are you kidding me?
Like, you're setting up your kid to hunger strike to block billions of dollars in economic development and thousands of jobs, jobs that would benefit you too, because that spin-off income goes all across the country.
You know, and you're going to put your kid at risk.
Like, what is this fad?
I mean, we're supposed to protect our children.
We're not supposed to put them at risk.
We're not supposed to put them in sailboats out in the middle of the ocean.
It's a very weird world we live in.
Yeah, it's strange that nobody is looking at this.
Not to say that nobody's looking at this.
Let me correct myself.
You and I and all the normals out there are looking at this through the lens that this is just child exploitation.
Yes.
They're kids.
You know what?
I wouldn't let my kid go on a hunger strike.
I don't let my kid get up from the table till supper's done.
You know what I mean?
That's how you parent.
And these parents were willing to allow their children to starve themselves.
This isn't like an adult going on a hunger strike either.
This is children who, their brains are growing, their bodies are growing.
They need these nutrients.
And these parents, who are, of course, environmentalists, who've passed on their contagion, their social contagion to their children, they were going to allow their children to starve themselves.
And nobody in the media thought, what the heck is wrong with you parents?
You know, your kids are going to jeopardize their health.
It could have lifelong ramifications.
And you're fine with it because you don't like tech.
It's insane.
Yeah, it's very problematic that people think that this is okay.
I mean, people keep saying things like, well, you know, the young people are showing us the way.
You know, children, I can remember when I was a kid, I thought my great-grandfather was an aviation pioneer.
And I remember when my dad told me about him, one day I thought, wow, I think I was about six or seven.
I thought, you know, I could jump off the roof of the garage.
And if I had wooden wings, I could fly.
You know, fortunately, he intervened while I was making those wings and said, what are you making?
And I told him and he said, no, you're not going to do that.
But, you know, this is the problem.
Children don't have that perspective.
They have lived experience.
And they are often very well-meaning.
And it's often straight from the heart for them.
But that doesn't make it a wise decision.
I just, it's just a failing of the parents involved and the media for not even thinking about, like, they don't see anything through a normal lens at all.
It's like, there's the media operating in this bubble where they think, yeah, kids on hunger strike, that's a great idea.
And the rest of us are mortified about it.
It's so crazy.
However, if it keeps up, I'll have job security for the rest of my days.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about somebody we both know, Drew Barnes, UCP, MLA, fantastic guy.
He is like you and I in that he believes in hearing all sides.
So, you know, he's in trouble now from the professional scolds on the left and in the mainstream media because he wanted to hear all sides of the climate change debate.
I was reading the article in the Medicine Hat News.
Drew Barnes' Dilemma00:12:16
Oh, Jeremy Appell.
You know what?
As soon as I saw the author, I knew this was bad.
Anyways, Barnes says attending Climate Skeptics Groups event will be about listening and learning.
And listening and learning is, of course, in scare quotes because you can't listen and learn from the other side of the debate.
And this is the event, your Friends of Science event, it's your event that they have a problem with.
And it's not like you have wackadoodles here and doomsday preachers at this thing.
You have like scientists and pretty notable people.
Investigative journalists.
Notable people who know what they're talking about.
Tell us about this.
Okay, so we're hosting an event on April the 6th, God willing, and COVID-19 and all that.
I hope everything works out.
But we're hosting the event here in Calgary at the Red and White Club as we do every year.
And we have two guest speakers.
One is Donna LaFromboise.
She's an investigative journalist, and she also wrote the book The Delinquent Teenager, which is about the UN IPCC, the climate panel that puts out the climate Bible that all governments rely on for setting climate policy.
And she did this way back in around 2011.
And we actually hosted her in 2012.
Everyone really enjoyed her, so we decided to have her back.
And she found that groups like Greenpeace and World Wild Fund are these activists, are lead authors on some of the IPCC supposedly science reports.
These groups are the same groups who were actively in the tar sands campaign shutting down jobs in Alberta and trying to totally destroy our economy.
And they've done a very good job, I must say.
Anyway, so she will be speaking on freedom of speech because she's been tracking this issue associated with the climate movement for many years.
And she finds that the climate activists really want your freedom.
They want everything.
They want your job.
They want your house, your car, your travel, everything.
And they won't stop till they get it.
It's not something to laugh about.
They're quite serious for the most part, the more radical people are.
And, you know, let's not confuse the environment and climate change.
Everybody wants to have a clean, nice environment.
And we're doing a good job of that in Canada.
So climate change is something else.
It's carbon taxes, it's carbon dioxide, and mythical models.
So our next speaker is Dr. Roy Spencer.
He's a NASA award-winning scientist.
He and his colleague, Dr. John Christie, handled the satellite data out of the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
And the satellite data, of course, shows that there's been very little warming over the past 20 years or so.
Whereas some of the land temperature records show that there has been warming.
So this is why Dr. Spencer is an interesting person.
He's deemed to be a skeptic.
He says that he's not a skeptic.
He agrees that humans cause some warming.
But how much?
That's the question.
And what exactly is the driver of it?
You know, because we do many things that change climate regionally, like land use, agriculture, deforestation, building big cities, diverting water like James Bay Dam.
These things have climate effects regionally, and they're all things that humans do.
So there's no doubt that we do affect climate.
But how much?
And will a carbon tax change that?
So, you know, these are very respectable speakers.
And I find it very odd in the two stories.
There's one from chat radio and one from the Medicine Hat News, that they didn't really bother to talk much about the credentials of the people, or they haven't contacted us.
They don't seem to want to know anything more about the speakers.
They just want to smear Drew Barnes and, you know, smear us, call us a bunch of climate deniers.
And really, again, that's the freedom of speech issue and freedom of scientific inquiry.
If you can't have a dissenting point of view and discuss it in the public forum, then I guess you live in a dictatorship.
And we should do everything we can to prevent that from happening.
Yeah, as you mentioned that, I was just taking a peek through the article.
And yeah, they don't mention the credentials of the two speakers, but they go on to, you know, insinuate that this is basically an event of non-science-y people.
And actually, even in the chat news today write-up of the story, they include tweets from people saying, what a joke.
What exactly could a bunch of ideological non-scientists teach?
Discussing we even have politicians that would consider attending.
But that's because no one is telling the truth about who you have speaking.
Because if you tell the truth about who you have speaking, then oopsie doodle, maybe you are science-minded and it's the other side who isn't.
And I just think it's so funny because your event is called Freedom of Speech, No Climate Emergency.
And then they don't want a politician attending and exercising his speech.
Yeah, it's so crazy.
It's so crazy.
Now, one last thing before I let you go, because I know you're slightly under the weather.
Go ahead.
Facebook.
Yes, Facebook, exactly.
So that's what I wanted to talk about because your freedom of speech event about scientific inquiry is currently being censored by Facebook.
It's so perfect.
Yeah, it's really crazy.
It's like Facebook appears to have partnered with this group called, well, Pointer Institute in the States, claims to be a bastion of democracy and freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and that's what they're defending.
And they run this thing called the International Network.
And a subset of that is called Climate Feedback.
And so Climate Feedback is a collection of climate scientists who effectively are protecting their turf on the climate emergency thing.
So anytime there's a dissenting view out there, this gets shuffled off to climate feedback for fact-checking.
And so the International Fact-Checking Network and Climate Feedback become the moral and scientific authorities on what can be said about climate.
And once they make a stand, then Facebook takes whatever they say at face value and will block and demote and censor anything that you post that's contrary to what this little gaggle of journals says.
And it's pretty bad.
They did it to us also for the Australian bushfires.
And, you know, we had consultation with a forestry expert.
Nope.
No, no, these journals know.
And so it's really depressing that Facebook, which has such incredible power.
And also Mark Zuckerberg, just a couple of weeks before that, had been in a public forum and he said, well, we're not going to censor as much as we used to because, you know, I feel very just a little.
So anyway, we've written some extensive rebuttals to this.
We did a little video about it.
So.
Now, just to wrap up, let's get around the Facebook censorship.
Tell people where they can get tickets to your event.
And let me say, the food is great at these things.
Go on an empty stomach because there's lots of food, lots of open discussion, and people at home, you're going to learn a lot.
So I encourage you to buy tickets to Michelle's event.
Well, it's coming up for April the 6th.
We are close to selling out, but you can go onto our main website or Eventbrite.
It is held in Calgary, so you would have to look under Calgary.
On our main website, friendsofscience.org, you will see the banner poster for the event.
And right underneath, there's a link to Eventbrite, so you can buy tickets there.
And it's at the Red and White Club in Calgary at McMahon Stadium.
And it's a very nice evening.
We let the speakers have the floor for the most of the time, but we do have a lot of networking at the break.
We have some tables with Bling and bits and pieces that people, books, and DVDs.
So most people find it a very convivial evening.
And we do allow people to ask questions via question cards.
So if you want to stick around to the end, then we get to hear from people as speakers.
And how do people support the work you do at Friends of Science to encourage open scientific debate?
There's a button on our website, friendsofscience.org, called donate, join.
So you can donate or join or both.
You can become a member and then we'll send you our bi-monthly newsletters.
One is called Kli Sci and one is called Extracts.
One is a roundup of scientific material and the other more on the global political IPCC events and such like.
So join us.
Donate.
Or just share our stuff.
You know, lots of people maybe don't have the money.
You can get on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
YouTube, LinkedIn, you know, and have a chat and say what you think.
We want to hear it.
We only block people who are very disrespectful or use foul language.
So ask repeated questions about where our funding comes from.
Comes from people like me.
It does, actually.
That's exactly right.
Okay.
Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I will probably see you April 6th.
Yeah, and we'll have you back on again very soon.
Thank you so much, Sheila.
Okay, all the best.
Bye, Michelle.
bye-bye the federal liberals election cops started hassling ezra for writing a book that hurt justin trudeau's feelings ezra's book went to number one overnight five months after its release because people don't like censorship
Not only is there a morbid curiosity about wanting to see things that people don't want you to see, but there's also a natural defiance happening, especially from conservatives, when some elite authoritarian do-gooder somewhere in an office cubicle thinks that they know what's best for you.
What you should eat, what you should read, how you should dress, how you should talk, what you should watch, and what news you should be allowed to consume.
Left-wing journalists and big tech elites have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of all acceptable opinions.
And I'm very happy to see organizations like Friends of Science make the connection between climate change and free speech and how these two issues are going to be the key ways that the powerful left will control our lives if we let them.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.