We often get scary stories saying that Arctic methane emissions are increasing. Recently many are panicking about a story in NewsWeek which has been widely retweeted. When you drill down to the details is about a tiny patch of Arctic methane bubbles in the sea, four or five square meters in area.

• Sea "boiling" with methane discovered in Siberia: "No one has ever recorded anything like this before"

This is the original Russian text, as auto translated:

This is another scary headline that doesn’t mean what it seems to mean from the titles. We do not risk a world without the conker tree and there is no way it can go extinct. After all it is easy to cultivate. Here is an example story to debunk:

'Alarming' extinction threat to Europe's trees (BBC)

They say

Ravaged by moths and disease, the horse chestnut is now classified as vulnerable to extinction.

The tree is among more than 400 native European tree species assessed for their risk of extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

About half face disappearing from the natural landscape.

As young children worldwide protest over climate change, I thought I'd do a post about Bernie Sanders' Green Climate Change plan.

(click to watch on Youtube)

Bernie Sanders' idea is one of many ideas but one of the ones that promises the most radical action most quickly. He plans to spend $16 trillion on it, and claims that all of this will be recovered, that it will pay for itself.

This is another study that has hit the news, this time scaring people with the idea that the whole of the US may lose all its birds rapidly in the near future.

Short summary - studies like this are hard to do and the 3 billion figure should be treated cautiously - there can be observer effects. If accurate, the reductions are mainly in the most common birds, and some of them nuisance species such as the starlings. There is no possibility of the most common birds in the US going extinct.

This is a story that is scaring some people. New research that is suggesting that perhaps the climate is more sensitive to CO2 than previously thought - but this is way jumping the gun. We get many results like this sometimes running too hot, sometimes too cold. Only the ones that go too hot hit the headlines. But the IPCC will look at all the evidence with their next high level review in 2021. Meanwhile we should use the values for the high level review in 2018 which remains our best estimate to date.

It's only 0.11% of UK greenhouse gas emissions and there are replacements already in use industrially as we ramp down to zero emissions by 2050.

This is a known problem, the technology to solve it has been in development since 2016 and in commercial use since 2016. Although it's only a fraction of a percent of emissions, it is important for the future as we ramp down to zero emissions. There is nothing here to be scared of, and we can still use renewables. This is another click bait article by the BBC that’s being shared widely on twitter today. Dozens of shares.