Environment

This article is being shared in the media widely as a report that even common birds like blue tits and great tits risk extinction. But that can’t be what is meant. What did it really say? It is notable enough to be a paper in Nature. But it seems to be more of a specialist paper for expert researchers in the topic area and has surely been misrepresented in the media reports. It is not challenging the IUCN results for these species which list them as being of least concern. The Great Tit for instance occurs in diverse habitatas all the way from the tropics to above the Arctic circle and its…

The most disgusting thing about cigarette smoking for most isn't the smoke, nor is it the prospect of toxic carcinogens causing cancer in smokers the rest of us will end up subsidizing, it is that smokers often throw their garbage on the ground afterward and expect someone else to pick it up.(1)  A recent estimate is that around 4.5 trillion cigarette butts get discarded annually, a terrific amount of plastic pollution but if it were going right into garbage and therefore landfills, that would be a manageable issue. But academics at Cambridge did admittedly uncontrolled samples and noted…

This is being reported in a way that scares some people But this is not new climate research, and changes nothing about the 2018 IPCC report. It is just a public education paper, helping people to understand the consequences of climate change, and evaluate environmental policies. It could have been written any time in the last decade and would have been essentially the same with minor tweaks. The amount of warming is far more at high northern latitudes and most of all in the Arctic. For instance London is likely to experience conditions similar to Barcelona at a warming of 2°C, which is no…

This paper in Nature shows that if the world including China and India gradually ramp up their commitments to become 1.5°C compatible, then the new coal fired power plants they built recently or are building right now will need to be used at low capacity or for a shorter than usual lifetime than the industrial average of 53% capacity for 40 years. However, that isn’t really anything surprising or unexpected, for instance this NGO report from March 2019 came to the same conclusion. There are some details about the way they did the analysis and the paper that gives a new slant on it all that is…

It's so sad when people think they can't have children because of climate change. Two years ago most of these parents weren't despairing; they didn’t even give it thought. Climate change was not an election issue in the US elections in 2016, or the UK elections in 2017 even. Now it is one of the top issues for most governments worldwide. This gives so much more hope for the future, for those who have been following it all along, but many of those who have just begun to give it serious attention for a couple of years are already despairing only three years after the Paris agreement. This is…

Throughout human history, humans have artificially selected food. The sweeter, the better. When agriculture came into being, such genetic engineering became commonplace. A banana we eat today has nothing in common with one of a few hundred years ago. At one time we couldn't consume corn at all. That evolutionary legacy, we once didn't have confidence when our next meal might be, is still evident. Sweet foods sell well and science has made them affordable; so affordable we have the opposite of the starvation problem poor people faced in the past. Yet there may be too much of a good thing,…

Short summary: This is another climate change story hitting the news which is not the scary thing it seems to be. Yes it is likely to be due to global warming and yes it adds to sea level rise. Yes, the early melt this summer is likely to mean a significant net loss, similar to 2012 which also had an early melt. It is dramatic and draws attention of the public to the reality of climate change. However this one year doesn't mean that the Greenland ice loss has suddenly increased its long term rate of loss of ice. One year of new data is not a new trend. It is just natural variability. It is…

This has lead to some clickbait headlines such as “Glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show”. However, that’ not what is new about this study; its figures just confirmed earlier results. Increased glacier loss is one of the more robust predictions of climate change, though the details are harder to model. The new thing about this study is that it covered the entire region in a uniform way. This let the authors conclude that the ice is most likely being lost due to warming rather than to precipitation changes or soot from cities. The billion inhabitants who depend on water from…

Comes the news that the British online food retailer Ocado is making major investments in two vertical farming companies. this week in a bid to become what it described as “a leader in the newly emerging vertical farming industry”​. First, the company’s ventures arm has signed a three-way joint venture deal with 80 Acres Farms and Priva Holding. 80 Acres and Priva have been working together for over four years to design turnkey solutions to sell to vertical farming clients worldwide, with forecast revenues in 2019 of over $10m. The new venture will be called Infinite Acres. ... “We believe…

This is about that much publicized insect collapse in Puerto Rico, which the authors blamed on climate change. It turns out that they made a natural but rather big mistake, not correcting for the effects of Hurricane Hugo, which increased the numbers of birds and insects before one of their main data points. A more in depth analysis of the data finds no decrease, but rather, an increase of insects in the canopy with warming temperatures. It also finds an increase in numbers of frogs as temperatures increase. I wonder how many of the papers who ran the original story, or who refer to it, will…