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Environment

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Is It Really All over for Dugongs?

Are dugongs really “functionally extinct” in China? That was the big environmental news, this week. But, as I always warn: When an article claims, “science says…” or “new study shows…”, assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise. That means you should always try and go to the original source,

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EV Plate Fail

EV Plate Fail

Kay O’Lacey wokejoke.nz Warning Satire An unnamed Auckland man whose wife bought a set of personalized plates for his birthday to fit to his new Tesla is facing derision from his mates as well as the wider community. “I chose the Tesla as it enabled me to show

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What a Great Way to Die!

What a Great Way to Die!

Daniel Falk University College Cork Since I was a child I wanted to become a dinosaur scientist – a palaeontologist. In 2014 I did it! I currently don’t deal with dinosaurs, but with Eocene individuals and their skeletal taphonomy and soft-tissue preservation (“Geiseltal collection”, Germany). However, I still have a

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YACA Barrier Reef

YACA Barrier Reef

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Flood Plains Flood – Who Knew?

Flood Plains Flood – Who Knew?

How deep should the taxpayer go to bail people out of the consequences of their own foolish decisions? All the way, it seems. The Bible warns against foolish people who build their houses on foundations of sand. Then there are the people who build their houses on floodplains – and are

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Coming to Their Senses on Nuclear

Coming to Their Senses on Nuclear

It looks as if Germany and Japan are both making their smartest decisions since running up the white flag in 1945. In a big ol’ middle finger to the Climate Cult, both nations are reviving their nuclear industries, after the post-Fukushima panic. Despite its apocalyptic image, outside of the communist-enabled

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Clearing the Planet to Save It

Clearing the Planet to Save It

If you’ve ever wanted to get an idea of the sheer size of modern wind turbines, just pull your car over while a truck carrying a single blade crawls past, taking up most of the highway. Then remember that that’s just one blade, on one turbine, out of

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Face of the Day

Face of the Day

Energy and Resources Minister Dr Megan Woods expects Lake Onslow will contribute to NZ’s 100 per cent renewable energy system. MBIE has spent over $8m on the feasibility study of pumped hydro at Lake Onslow. If the scheme proceeds, it will be NZ’s largest hydro project ever and

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The Scientific Evil and Good We Do Lives On

Dr. Jay Lehr cfact.org CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon. Shakespeare said it in the

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Sri Lanka: the Danger of Faux Environmentalism

Jackson Paul fee.org Jackson Paul is a policy intern for the American Conservation Coalition. Find him on Twitter: @CJacksonPaulTX At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa gave a speech bragging about his country’s move toward sustainable agriculture. Less than a year later,

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Lake Mead Reveals Its Secrets

Lake Mead Reveals Its Secrets

Interesting things can happen during a big drought. Not just the “interesting” stuff of, y’know, dying herds and baking fields, but the, “now that’s interesting” sort of stuff such as putting an end to local legends and bringing long-drowned secrets to light. The volcanic plains south-west of Melbourne

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clown fish on coral reef

Great Barrier Reef Feeling Much Better

It turns out that reports of the death of the Great Barrier Reef were greatly exaggerated. Not only is the Reef very much not dead, it’s just hit record coral cover. Now, it should be borne in mind that “on record” means, in this case, “in the last four

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Weather Eye with John Maunder

Weather Eye with John Maunder

John Maunder The ‘Maunder Minimum’ is the name given to the period from 1645 to 1715 when the number of sunspots – ‘storms’ on the sun – became almost zero. The period is named after the solar astronomer Edward Walter Maunder (1851-1928), who was working at The Royal Observatory at Greenwich when

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Weather Eye with John Maunder

Weather Eye with John Maunder

John Maunder The weather of the past : July 27 1863, July 28 1939, and July 1993 Each day the New Zealand Herald publishes “On this day” which relates to the weather on that day in the past. In view of recent weather events, these excerpts over the last 160 years

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Pushing a Steady Diet of Fear-Porn

Pushing a Steady Diet of Fear-Porn

There are just a handful of books which I can say truly revolutionised my thinking, like an electric bolt of enlightenment. One of those is Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. Sure, the book has its minor inaccuracies, maybe (the attacks on it are almost entirely either pure whinging, or

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Plastic Free July for Zealots

Plastic Free July for Zealots

Those of you who were readers of Whaleoil may remember that four years ago I was writing a lot of articles about the removal of ‘single use’ plastic bags from supermarkets. They were not actually ‘removed’ from supermarkets, of course; they were just no longer given out for free. Supermarket

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