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Could High Quality Masks Solve China's COVID Problems? Idea For A Randomized Control Trial Of Masks In Households To Find Out

This is a suggestion for a way to resolve questions such as: How effective are the best...

Why Doesn't NASA Respond To Public Concerns On Its Samples From Mars Environmental Impact Statement? (short Version For Experts)

First for anyone who doesn't know, NASA’s perseverance rover is currently collecting small...

Why Doesn't NASA Respond To Public Concerns On Its Samples From Mars Environmental Impact Statement?

First for anyone who doesn't know, NASA’s perseverance rover is currently collecting small...

This Is Your Opportunity To Tell NASA You Want To Keep Earth Extra Safe During Their Samples From Mars Mission

For those who don’t know the background, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gathering...

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Robert WalkerRSS Feed of this column.

I'm Robert Walker, inventor & programmer. I have had a long term special interest in astronomy, and space science since the 1970s, and most of these blog posts currently are about Mars and space... Read More »

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This asteroid is now known to miss. It was always classified as NO HAZARD so it was no surprise at all when they proved it couldn’t hit.

UPDATE - they proved it would miss in July through non detection.

On July 4th and 5th they focused on the small patch of sky where it would have to be if approaching Earth. It wasn't there, so can't hit. It is the first example of ruling out an impact through non deteciton.

ESA and ESO confirm asteroid will miss Earth in September | EarthSky.org

This asteroid is now known to miss. It was always classified as NO HAZARD so it was no surprise at all when they proved it couldn’t hit.

UPDATE - they proved it would miss in July through non detection.

On July 4th and 5th they focused on the small patch of sky where it would have to be if approaching Earth. It wasn't there, so can't hit. It is the first example of ruling out an impact through non deteciton.

ESA and ESO confirm asteroid will miss Earth in September | EarthSky.org

This is scaring so many people, but is full of mistakes and has no scientific credibility. It's written by a couple of businessmen, with a foreword by a retired admiral, and no scientific peer review. For instance they misunderstood a paper about "lethal heat" which was referring to the heat waves we have at present, 30% of the world population experience this every year already, e.g. Europe this summer.

You have probably seen the headlines “One million species threatened with extinction and humans to blame” and such like. But did you know, the UN study that lead to those headlines analysed the reasons we continue to lose species to extinction, and found a solution? Not only that, they found a solution that is practical, feasible, makes economic sense, and has preliminary government interest too, to the extent that over 100 governments were happy to sign off on their conclusions as a “summary for policy makers”.

Yes we are getting extinctions at a far higher rate than normal. But it is nowhere near a mass extinction yet. Just the start of a slide towards one that may play out towards the end of this century and in the 22nd century. Also we are not risking a major mass extinction like the Permian / Triassic one. The word “mass extinction” does not have a well defined threshold but I think many who read these stories think it means that there would be almost no animals, fish, trees, plants or insects left or hardly any. No it doesn’t mean that. It means fewer species of each but not a world without them.

My aim here is not to dispute the many scholarly articles about us being at the start of a new mass extinction, but rather, to clarify what they mean.

Almost nobody seems to report the positive side of our recent climate change action. It’s remarkable what we’ve done in two years, which gives us much hope that we can indeed rise to the challenge. I have never in my life seen such a coming together of nations worldwide to solve a problem. Three years ago, after the slow progress of the Kyoto protocol agreement, all this would have seemed impossible. There is a lot of publicity about what we aren't doing yet, but hardly anyone talks about what we have already done. That's the key to success, to build on what we already have and what we have already done.