Robert Inventor

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 all topsy turvy. The underlying situation hasn't changed significantly. Scientists knew all of this (in less detail) decades ago.

Another post to help people scared of the Iran - US situation. For most people the personal risk is zero. Short summary: Trump seems to have ordered a strike on selected Iranian facilities - and then backed down at the last minute after attempting a diplomatic phone call with Iran and talking to a couple of Iranian officials. He says he did it becaue he was told at the last minute that it would kill about 150 people in Iran which is not proportionate for shooting down an unarmed drone. He may also have been influenced by reports that powerful national leaders in Iran were angry at the drone shooting and didn’t order it.

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 balanced to some extent by snowfall in winter, which also was low this year.

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.

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.

This article is scaring people, with the usual “all going to be extinct soon ” hype that we have had so many stories about this year. It is running in many news sources. I am not singling out the BBC as such but many people have come to rely on the BBC as a respected source on such matters so I'm taking them as an example. Similar remarks apply to most journalism in this topic area recently. In this case most of the articles were more measured, and the BBC one unusually was the most click bait of them all.

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.