Dork Scratchings

What's Strange about this clip?   (fair use)   This programme about the future appeared on my TV last night, and it touched on an issue close to my heart: the future viability of life on Earth.     The first 3 minutes 45 seconds delivers some of the stark evidence for what we are doing and projections for where we are heading.  There's no emotion on display, but that's fine - we can't be emotional all the time and there's room for dispassionate analysis as well as appeals to the heart.  But then something strange happens at 3:48 - the presenter Hannah Fry introduces the next subject with an incredibly chirpy "Flying Cars! There - I've said it". Watching this one is left thinking:   Either I'm mad or everyone else is.  We've just been told that the average population decline across all species between 1970 and 2020 will be 67%.   And after dedicating three and bit minutes to that we're now talking about flying cars!  I'm worri...

Credit: NASA This article in the guardian points to some recent research.  The article begins: Planting billions of trees across the world is one of the biggest and cheapest ways of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere today, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”. and goes on to quote the lead scientist from ETH Zürich saying "This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one" Let's test this claim with two tools everyone has at their disp...

[Or was it the editing...?]  At first glance it appears that this recent news article on the BBC is going to be a complete hatchet job on Professor Jem Bendell, author of the Deep Adaptation paper.  The paper is an honest, if uncomfortable appraisal of the likelihood of civilisational collapse caused by the climate crisis, and a blueprint for how we can work together to survive it as best we can. The first indication it's going to be hatchet job is the title: "The 'climate doomers' preparing for society to fall apart" Clearly, calling someone a "doomer" is a way of dismissing their point of view without actually challenging it.  Of course the BBC have taken the approach of distancing themselves from any responsibility by putting 'climate doomers' in quotes.  That's a standard trick for when you want to say what you think without having to justify it. The first paragraph of the article is in bold , and is highly dismissive of Ben...

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