Environment

Last November 12 the city of Venice was flooded by the second-highest tide in recorded history. The sea level, pushed by 60 mph SE winds and intense rainfalls, surged to +187 cm above average, a mere 7cm less than the disastrous event of November 4 1966, which put the city and its surroundings to their knees. Damage has been enormous, a couple of people have died, and anger has risen again against an administration of the region which was utterly incapable to bring to completion the "Mose", a system of moving barriers set on the water entrances to the Venice lagoon, which cost over 5 billion…

Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” is scaring many people, sometimes referred to as "The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy"- yet - it is not a published paper. It is an unpublished draft that has been rejected for failing the minimum standards of an academic paper. It is written by a sociologist, not a climate scientist. As its main cite, it uses a blog post by a system analyst recording a talk he gave to a group of businessmen. When he submitted this draft to a journal, they requested major revisions because it didn’t meet the minimum standards for an academic…

The New York Times has done numerous mistaken climate change stories. They would never run an obituary about someone who hasn’t died. They wouldn’t make up a sports result and say one team won the superbowl when in fact the other did. They wouldn’t say that the UK has left the EU when it hasn’t. Why do journalists feel that it is okay to invent whatever you like about climate change and claim it is the truth? Here are my annotations for this article using Hypothes.is, the academic web annotation tool: How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong - annotations Note - I have only annotated a…

It’s so good to see some climate scientists at last starting to speak up about the awful over the top things Extinction Rebellion activists are saying, though I wish more would speak up and speak up more strongly. Here is a meme that may help with sharing: Yes XR activists, climate change is a serious issue BUT “Please STOP telling kids they may not grow up” IPCC author Dr Tamsin Edwards Background image: Smiling child at school by Shlok Nikhil Rupert Read is a philosophy professor. He is also a frequent spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion on national TV here in the UK where I live.…

This is not a high quality paper, it's riddled with errors. It should never have been on mainstream news or on TV. Those 11,000 scientists are not authors - they are just signatories and one of them is the illustrious professor Micky Mouse of the Micky Mouse Institute of the Blind in Namibia. Of course they removed those names once they were discovered, but this shows how easy it was to add signatures to it. Climate change is a serious issue but it does no good to promote things like this as if they were on a par with the IPCC reports. The only section number cite to the IPCC is mistaken,…

This is running with click bait titles suggesting massively more people are at risk of sea level flooding than before. But it’s just better elevation maps. The sea level rise is the same but more people than they thought are already living below sea level protected by dikes, as for Holland. It makes no difference at all if the elevation data is already good. Example story to debunk: Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows This is mainly due to an increase in their estimate of the number of people currently below sea level (many people already live below sea level not…

This is the first day that countries can give their one year notification to leave the Paris agreement. It's no surprise that the US has given notification. But he is not speaking for the city of Pittsburgh, who have taken strong action on climate change for over a decade, and many others in the US are in support of the agreement. Withdrawal is largely symbolic, and won't change anything, as there is no longer central federal support for climate action in the US as is. Right now China is the key, as their are the biggest emitter, and their emissions are still rising, while the US emissions…

Here I debunk an article in the Financial Times - although by the title it is supposedly about myths about green technology and renewables, it actually perfectly highlights most of the scientific and even financial myths about renewables propagated by some economists who claim that green growth is impossible. I am annotating this article with Hypothes.is - the academic online web commenting tool. You may be able to read my annotations online here: The myth of green growth - annotated This is another article I'm writing to support people we help in the Facebook Doomsday Debunked group, that…

It's a surprise for Americans to learn that the U.S. has more open land than the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is 3X the size of the U.S., and it is an even bigger surprise when people learn that, of all the area not covered by ice, half of the world's land remains wilderness.  The inventory of open land was conducted in 2017 and 2018 by the National Geographic Society but a new study says that the wilderness is getting more fragmented. That makes sense, but it's not a bad thing. If a new housing development goes up and a city designates a lake and surrounding marsh…

A new study finds that if the United Kingdom did as The Guardian routinely advocates and abandoned modern agricultural science, people would starve. Or diets would change to where the rich had a variety while the poor suffered on subsistence fare. Organic advocates are wealthy so they only argue that emissions would decrease, but that ignores the extra land that would be needed. If the whole world switched to organic farming, a billion would starve in places where the land is not viable without science, and the rest would see new farmland equivalent to the entire country of India go under the…