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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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The Writing of a Book

The Writing of a Book

John Maunder Over 50 years ago, in April 1968, when I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography in the University of Victoria in Canada, I remember very well when on a Wednesday morning the representative from the British publishers Methuen and Co came to see me in

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Floods of Fake News From the ABC

Floods of Fake News From the ABC

Contrary to mythology, the quintessential Australian isn’t a rugged Outback type laconically shrugging off adversity with a “She’ll be right”. It’s an outraged suburbanite, shrieking that “The gummint should do somethin’!” Australia has long been one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Even by the

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Weather Eye with John Maunder

Weather Eye with John Maunder

John Maunder Each month Professor Ole Humlum of The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), in Norway publishes on his very comprehensive website a large number of updated charts and related analyses of data from international sources. His latest website can be found at: www.climate4you Record of recent global air

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Weather Eye with John Maunder

Weather Eye with John Maunder

John Maunder Since instrumental records became available in the 1850’s, climatic values show a range from the highest temperature of 42.4 degrees C recorded in Rangiora on February 7, 1973, to the lowest temperature of-25.6 degrees C in Eweburn, Ranfurly on 17 July 1903. In terms of

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black and white cow on green grass field during daytime

A New Farming Proposal to Reduce Carbon Emissions

Ralph Sims Massey University Ralph Sims began his career in Sustainable Energy at Massey University, New Zealand in 1971 making and testing biodiesel from animal fats. After 4 years based at the IEA (International Energy Agency) in Paris (2006-2009) as a senior analyst working on renewable energy and climate change

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How Do EV Owners Sleep?

How Do EV Owners Sleep?

Ever since you got a hybrid car you’ve gotten so smug that you love the smell of your own farts! South Park There may be a more smug class of people than EV drivers, but only on two wheels. As South Park satirised them, EV drivers are bourgeois hippies

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Mugged by the Reality of “Net Zero”

Mugged by the Reality of “Net Zero”

In just three weeks, the Albanese government has been thoroughly mugged by political reality. The party who boasted of a vague “plan” to “fix it” are body-slammed with simultaneous energy and cost-of-living crises, including the biggest interest rate hike in 22 years — and suddenly, the “plan” is nowhere to be

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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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