Robert Inventor

This is a story running in the news, even on the BBC website, which is scaring a few people. There isn't any prediction of an accelerating population collapse. Indeed our population is increasing and is expected to level off some time between 2050 and 2100 and AFAIK nobody is saying our population will collapse in 2050 except these two CEOs in their interview.
This is another article I'm writing to support people we help in the Facebook Doomsday Debunked group, that find us because they get scared, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal about it, by such stories. Do share this with your friends if you find it useful, as they may be panicking too.

This is me according to the Daily Express. End of world: Scientist’s terrifying warning of apocalypse asteroid - ‘Would boil oceans!’ It is nonsense! I gave no warning, and as a science blogger I am not the person to issue a warning either. I wrote an article to HELP scared people who panic about such things. It was awful and many are panicking and it is not impossible someone has committed suicide over this.

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 biomass on Earth, or even if all plant life magically stopped producing oxygen for thousands of years. Or they worry about the effect on the Paris agreement:

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 is me according to the Daily Express. End of world: Scientist’s terrifying warning of apocalypse asteroid - ‘Would boil oceans!’ It is nonsense! I gave no warning, and as a science blogger I am not the person to issue a warning either. I wrote an article to HELP scared people who panic about such things. It was awful and many are panicking and it is not impossible someone has committed suicide over this.

Elon Musk has just tweeted about his "Nuke Mars to terraform it" idea. He talked about that some years back, in 2015 when many people responded with articles saying it is impossible. Now he is tweeting again.
This is surely just a joke. He can't be serious. Even 3000 nuclear bombs a day exploding over Mars as in his "minisuns" idea is likely not enough.

Here is his throwaway remark about it in 2015. It was reasonably clear he was not putting forward a serious worked out future plan for Mars. But is there any potential in the idea?

Another two harmless asteroids being shared in the sensationalist press. I am getting PM's from some really scared people about these. These two asteroids not only are harmless, they never were even considered for the Sentry table. And no they are
not planet killers. They are not big enough to do more than have minor
global effects like a few months of cooler weather because of dust in
the atmosphere. Large enough to have some effects on the yields of our
crops for one year. But that is an academic question becaue they can't hit.
To debunk:

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.

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.

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.

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 and scared by the journalist exaggerations and pessimism.

With the greenland ice melt in the news, what can we do to adapt to a rising sea level, and how much will it actually be? First, the melting this summer was nothing unexpected. Last year Greenland had so much snow in 2017–8 that it actually gained ice rather than lost ice. So, now we have a warmer summer and it loses more than usual - not a big deal. This of course is the northern hemisphere summer which is why this news is about Greenland rather than Western Antarctica.
Mark Serreze, Director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, interviewed by Discovery blog put it like this: