Last month, conservative propaganda shop PragerU published a video featuring Steve Koonin, and just like basically everything else he’s ever said about climate, it was swiftly fact-checked and one of his key claims about Greeland’s ice melt was found “mostly false” by Politifact.
But of course Facebook’s Instagram didn’t actually do anything but put a tiny note at the bottom of the post, and a million views later, ClimateFeedback has another fact-check as devastating as it is comprehensive. They cover the Greenland ice melt claim, as well as Koonin’s misleading arguments on heat waves, hurricanes, floods, attribution, etc.
We were going to get into it, but then we got distracted by something just as scientifically reliable as anything Steve Koonin has to say about climate science or policy, but about a million times more fun and fascinating.
You may remember back at the start of 2021, when Twitter and Facebook took the belated steps of purging the sorts of dangerous Q-anon content, and the rightwing Gab platform welcomed them with open arms. We were doubtful at the time that Gab would take off, and so far that seems to be the case.
We’ve been taking the occasional peek at Gab’s biggest “climate skeptic” group, where a scant 300-ish members are treated to regular posts from a handful of users with mostly unremarkable climate denial links and such. But a recent one stood out: “Soon There Will Be A Severe Wobble in the Earth’s Motions.”
What’s this now? A wobble? Yes, “the Council of Worlds has decided to allow a Severe Wobble on Earth to force the global establishment to acknowledge the reality of Nibiru.” Now, we know what you’re thinking, as does the author who addresses the obvious in an aside: “[This is NOT the Severe Wobble that will begin 50 days before the 2026 catastrophe that occurs every 3650 years.]”
Whew! Glad that’s out of the way!
Anyway, “this temporary Severe Wobble will have to displace the current Daily Earth Wobble,” and this is where another bracketed aside makes things really interesting, “[the true cause of Climate change that has been obscured by the elite].” Ah-hah!
The climate isn’t changing because burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases. Nope! It’s just part of the current Daily Earth Wobble that’s apparently controlled by “the benign aliens arranging to fulfill the Council’s edict.” And when they make the hidden planet Nibiru’s “North Pole to drop and point at the Earth, a mega/Severe wobble of Earth” will trigger “major changes to sunrise, transit and sunset” which “will be noticed by everyone on Earth, and the establishment will scramble to explain it.”
Exciting!
What’s weird, though, (besides, y’know, everything) is that the user is actually quite concerned about sea level rise, posting that the aforementioned 2026 Severe Wobble, sea levels will “rapidly rise by 650 [feet]”, putting the East and Gulf Coasts and most of the Mississippi Delta under water.
We did some digging around to figure out what it’s all about, and found that the Nibiru cataclysm was a doomsday scenario put forward by someone named Nancy Lieder in 1995. (Unclear if Gab poster “ROGTruth1” is Lieder or just a fan.) Lieder claims to talk to aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system, and has a long running website called ZetaTalk that is, frankly, incredibly entertaining.
For example, did you know that the Council of Worlds that’s directing the Wobble is apparently also in charge of space tourism to and from Earth? With two and a half decades of creative world-building about an impending pole shift that will collapse governments and usher in the Aftertime, Lieder’s supposed communications with the Zetans is as rich and endlessly fascinating as any of the best science fiction works around.
Best of all, the Zetans are also apparently in the business of myth-busting, so maybe they’ll join all the Earthbound fact-checkers and give Steve Koonin an intergalactic debunking!
