This is a story that's running at the moment - hugely sensationalized and made as pessimistic and gloomy as could be. in many of the papers, especially the sensationalist press, it's presented as a "Doomsday prediction". It's nothing of the sort.The number of scientists, 15,000 is correct, and that they were warning about climate change and other issues is correct, so the snesationalist press got that much right. However, they don't say the world will be destroyed.

The letter actually says there is much we are doing right, but that there is much more we have to do to see ourselves through to 2100 and beyond. Their message is that we have to continue what we are doing, and do more, in order to avoid widespread misery in the future.

This is yet another example of how outrageously bad Google News is when it comes to astronomy. I get asked this rather often, whether Earth is endangered by some distant planet or galaxy or black hole, by children or adults who have read stories in the sensationalist press that appear in Google News. This is a particularly outrageous one so I thought it would help highlight the issue to write a post about it here. To anyone scared by the story who is reading this - short summary, this planet is far away, orbiting a distant star and is not the slightest risk to Earth.

Stephen Hawking tends to exaggerate, using hyperbole - exaggerations for emotional effect. In this talk he takes our exponential population growth and extrapolates it forwards to 2600 and predicts that human beings will cover the globe shoulder to shoulder and that our electricity consumption will turn the surface of Earth red hot through the waste heat. Stephen Hawking hasn't taken account of the fact that our exponential growth has stopped. The same number of children were born in 2005 as in 2017 and our population is currently growing due to increasing lifespans, not through exponential growth. The middle of the range estimate is for it to level off at around 11 billion by 2100.. This story is scaring people and that's my motive for debunking it here. 

This is a speech Stephen Hawking gave at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Monday. It’s actually an upbeat and optimistic speech, but one particular phrase from the speech is scaring many people. Stephen Hawking has a love of the dramatic, and he often way overstates things - it's what they call hyperbole, overstating things for emotional effect. I'm also surprised that amongst all the news articles running stories about it, I haven't found a single one that is skeptical of his beliefs or even suggests there could be other views on the matter. 

As he stated it, 

To see the problem try a google news search for Planet X - and see if you find anything there about the genuine astronomical search for planets beyond Neptune. It's filled with stories saying that the nonsense planet Nibiru is about to fly past Earth or hit us (what professor Brian Cox once called the imaginary bullshit planet Nibiru).

I've been writing Doomsday Debunking articles for a couple of years now. The amount of fake news about the end of the world on the web is incredible. What makes it worse is that stories that say the world is about to end get widely shared, linked to, read over and over, and rise right to the top of Google and Apple news. If you are intrigued by a news story about the search for "planet X" by astronomers, say, and go to Google News, the top result is usually one or other article from the Daily Express who regularly publish fake news saying that an extra planet is about to hit Earth or fly past Earth in the next week or month.This is followed by pages and pages of search results consisting almost entirely of "news" in a similar vein.