Environment

In America, some groups tell us expiration dates on food are just a conservative guideline while other groups insist that if someone buys expired food the merchant should go to jail. In Europe it can be even more strange, they once tried to ban ugly fruit from being sold because it would likely be purchased by poor people, If you are a believer in the precautionary principle over all, you buy armloads of organic food at the farmer's market on Saturday, ingest herbs and supplements to promote probiotic health, and religiously obey expiration dates, your refrigerator is probably where food goes…

This is something puzzles and scares some people. Why is most of the Amazon jungle still untouched by fire? Isn't there a risk that the Brazilian wildfires sweep across the entire Amazon and destroy all the remaining tropical forest? However, we get wildfires in Brazil every year, and this hasn’t happened before. In 2005 for instance there were many more fires than today, yet only a small part of the Amazon burnt. So why is that? I will also cover some other things that scare people, for instance many are scared we will run out of oxygen - no - this can't happen even if we burnt all the…

Not so long ago it was thought that Amazonian forests and other tropical rainforest regions were completely immune to fires, thanks to the high moisture content of the undergrowth beneath the protection of the canopy tree cover. But the severe droughts of 1997-98, 2005, 2010, and currently a large number of wildfires across northern Brazil have forever changed this perception. These severe ‘mega-droughts’ in the Amazon were most likely driven by interacting large-scale climatic events, with the warming of the Atlantic increasingly outweighing the drying effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation…

The Washington Post has long been a left-leaning publication and it is said that's the paper satirist Mort Sahl was lampooning when he began joking about the headline of a liberal outlet after a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR: “World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”  Some are concerned that since being taken over by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos they lurched even farther from the center and that may sound truth-y, if you believe America is more polarized than ever, but it's not like Washington Post was ever seen as centrist by most. It was on the left in 1988,…

Short summary: we have had wild fires for many years now in the Amazon, even in the tropical rainforest - mainly started by humans for forest clearing and ranching. It is not enough to impact significantly on the Paris agreement pledges yet, though it is important in the long term if this continues for decades. It does of course have major and immediate impacts on forest residents, nature services and the biodiversity in Brazil. This image is being shared widely, for instance in National Geographic's "The Amazon is burning at record rates - and deforestation is to blame". Similarly, the BBC…

If you read English newspaper The Guardian, you will be convinced farming is killing us all. Instead of being the negative they persistently insist, food is a basic resource, we will literally die without it, and the modern world is creating more food at affordable cost with less environmental strain and less energy than once even dreamed possible. Actual data show all land use combined, types of farming, forestry, etc. are only 23 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and not all greenhouse gases are equal. As the west switches more to cleaner natural gas for energy, which is methane,…

This is an interesting paper but it’s been misreported widely. Over the last decade the world has continued to get greener almost everywhere, because of the CO2 fertilization effect, lengthening growing seasons in northern latitudes and human initiatives to improve agricultural yields, restore degraded land, reverse desertification and plant trees. That's especially so in India, greening by over 6% per decade mainly through intensive agriculture, and in China, greening by over 10% per decade, because of its work on reafforestation, restoring degraded land and more intensive agriculture. Only…

This is a plan for a wind turbine hub in the North Sea on Dogger Bank, that could up to 180GW by 2045 in time to help Europe achieve net zero emissions. The “Dogger Bank”, is the sunken Doggerland, a region of the North Sea that used to be above the sea in the last ice age. It is far from land, so winds would be much more steady. It has now split into two projects. The Sofia Offshore Wind Farm is developed by a UK company and will supply power to the UK. The rest of it is being developed by companies in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands as the North Sea Wind Power Hub The shallowest parts…

These "Living Planet Index" population figures are potentially confusing if you don't know how to read them and they have lead to many mistaken media stories.It does not mean that there are 88% less total numbers of large animals in our rivers and streams. We do not risk a world without salmon, hippos, beavers or crocodiles. Many outlets also ran it as a story about a greatly increased extinction risk for these animals. They did not even assess extinction risks and nothing in this report overrides the work of the IUCN red list. This paper is using the “Living Planet Index” which is designed…

You can always find bad news if you look for it.With the internet and social media we learn about every bad thing that happens throughout the entire world almost instantly. However the good news doesn't get shared so much. For instance how many of you are aware of the vast amount of work being done worldwide to restore eroded damaged landscapes (see below). How many people share them? Hardly anyone. While working on my posts for the Debunking Doomsday blog, I come across a lot of good news that never gets into the mainstream media. Sharing some of them may help those of you who get depressed…