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rampant

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Homeopathy’s ‘super guru’ wants homeopathy to return to the dark ages

George Vithoulkas * (GV) is one of today’s most influential lay-homeopaths, a real ‘super guru’. He has many bizarre ideas; one of the most peculiar one was recently outlined in his article entitled ‘An innovative proposal for scientific alternative medical journals’. Here are a few excerpts from it:

…the only evidence that homeopathy can present to […]

Read the rest here: Homeopathy’s ‘super guru’ wants homeopathy to return to the dark ages

Monday 30 October 2017

The Queen’s homeopath seems to sense that homeopathy is on its last leg

Dr Peter Fisher (I have mentioned him several times before, see for instance here, here and here) claimed in his recent editorial ( Fisher P, Homeopathy and intellectual honesty, Homeopathy (2017) – not yet available on Medline) that 43 systematic reviews of homeopathy have so far been published, and stated that “of these 21 were […]

Read the rest here: The Queen’s homeopath seems to sense that homeopathy is on its last leg

Saturday 28 October 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #43

A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week. 

Editor's Pick

Coal use must 'pretty much' be gone by 2050 to curb sea-level rise, researchers say
Antarctic Sea Ice
Warming waters are melting the Antarctic ice sheets from below. Photo: APT
Coal use will have to be "pretty much" gone by mid-century if the planet is to avoid sea-level rise of more than a metre by 2100 as Antarctic ice sheets disintegrate faster than expected, new modelling by an Australian-led team has found.
On business-as-usual projections, sea-level rise by the end of the century could exceed 1.3 metres compared with the 1986-2005 average, or 55 per cent more than predicted in the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to research published in the Environmental Research Letters journal.
"We have provided a preview of what will have to be considered and assessed in more detail by the upcoming Sixth IPCC report," due for release in 2021, said Alexander Nauels, lead author of the report, and a researcher at Melbourne University's Australian-German Climate & Energy College.
Coal use must 'pretty much' be gone by 2050 to curb sea-level rise, researchers say by Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 26, 2017

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How should alt med practitioners be educated and trained?

The German Heilpraktiker (a phenomenon vaguely equivalent to the ‘naturopath’ in English speaking countries) has become a fairly regular feature on this blog – see, for instance here, here, and here. The nationally influential German Medical Journal, a weekly publication of the German Medical Association, recently published an article about the education of this profession.

In […]

Read the rest here: How should alt med practitioners be educated and trained?

Thursday 26 October 2017

Survey data show that, in Europe, homeopathy is used by only a tiny minority

I have often cautioned about what I call the ‘survey mania’ in alternative medicine. Yet, once in a while, an informative survey gets published. Take this recent survey, for instance:

It was based on a design-based logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 7. The researchers distinguished 4 modalities: manual therapies, alternative medicinal […]

Read the rest here: Survey data show that, in Europe, homeopathy is used by only a tiny minority

Wednesday 25 October 2017

Regrettable journalism around the tragic death of a chiropractic patient

The British press recently reported that a retired bank manager (John Lawler, aged 80) died after visiting a chiropractor in York. This tragic case was published in multiple articles, most recently in THE SUN. Personally, I find this regrettable – not the fact that the press warns consumers of chiropractic, but the tone and content […]

Read the rest here: Regrettable journalism around the tragic death of a chiropractic patient

Tuesday 24 October 2017

Did you know that TCM originated from Bavaria?

You may think that all TCM treatments come from China – most people do, but they are wrong. It is the Bavarians who have invented much 0f TCM long before the Chinese ever thought of it. Remember Oetzi? Well, he was (almost) Bavarian. He had acupuncture points tattooed all over his body , and he […]

Read the rest here: Did you know that TCM originated from Bavaria?

Monday 23 October 2017

Animal experiments in alternative medicine research – a new and odd phenomenon

For some time now, I got the impression that the research literature of alternative medicine is yielding more and more animal experiments. But impressions can of course be misleading, so I did a small statistical analysis. I went on to Medline, searched for all papers on ‘complementary/alternative medicine’, and counted the number of animal studies […]

Read the rest here: Animal experiments in alternative medicine research – a new and odd phenomenon

Sunday 22 October 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #42

Story of the Week... SkS in the News... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... Graphic of the Week... SkS Spotlights... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...

Story of the Week...

September 2017: Earth's 4th Warmest September on Record
Hurricane Irma Sep 6 2017
The deadliest weather-related disaster of September was Hurricane Irma, which killed 80 people in the Southeast U.S., and 44 people in the Caribbean and Bahamas. In this VIIRS infrared image of Hurricane Irma at 1:35 am EDT Wednesday, September 6, 2017, the island of Barbuda was in the eye, and Irma was a Category 5 storm with 185 mph winds. Image credit: UW-Madison/CIMSS.
September 2017 was the planet's fourth warmest September since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and NASA this week. The only warmer Septembers came during 2015, 2016, and 2014. Minor differences can occur between the NASA and NOAA rankings because of their different techniques for analyzing data-sparse regions such as the Arctic.
Global ocean temperatures last month were the fourth warmest on record for any September, according to NOAA, and global land temperatures were the third warmest on record. Global satellite-measured temperatures for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were the warmest for any September in the 39-year record, according to the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS).
September 2017: Earth's 4th Warmest September on Record by Jeff Masters, Weather Underground, Oct 18, 2017

SkS in the News...

Ari Jokimäki's series of original SkS articles about the infamous Florides et al. 2013 paper was highlighted in the Denier Roundup section of Climate Nexus' Hot News broadcast email of Friday, Oct 20. The Climate Nexus summary in its entirety:
Plagarism’s Just One of Many Problems with Florides’ 2013 It’s-Sun-Not-Co2 Paper 

With deniers running DC and creating political shenanigans, it’s been a minute since we focused on some shoddy denier science. So we were pleased to see a new series of posts at Skeptical Science detailing the many, many problems a group of researchers found with a 2013 paper by lead author Georgios Florides, and the long and winding road that led to the publication of this series all these years later.

The Florides paper in question concludes “no sound conclusions can be drawn” about climate change, because the “natural signal of solar forcing has been mistakenly overlooked for an anthropogenic change.” But is it accurate? Has the Sun’s influence been overlooked or confused for a human signal? In the spirit of not just assuming everything that contradicts the mainstream is bunk, let’s take a look.

In the first post in a four part series, Ari Jokimäki of Skeptical Science shows that the paper very obviously plagiarizes a lot of material: from IPCC AR4, from Wikipedia, other studies, and even the study author’s own book (which itself lifted language from elsewhere). Jokimäki and the SkS team focused on the 27 paragraphs of the first two chapters of the study, showing 78% contained portions of other texts not properly cited. Though there were some changes in some places, the edits “were trivial enough to suggest that there were deliberate copy-paste-editing involved.” When looking at the side-by-side comparisons, it is blatantly obvious Florides et al lifted others’ writings. (In one case, a word in the middle of a sentence is Capitalized, because that’s where the sentence started in the material they copy-pasted.)

In part two, Jokimäki goes into the content of the paper itself, detailing the many logical fallacies, misleading discussions, cherry-picking, omission of relevant research, misrepresentations and more that are standard for denial work. The Skeptical Science researchers found 43 individual problems in just the first two chapters of the paper. This means about 70% of the 27 paragraphs contained errors, averaging out to 1.6 problems per paragraph. Which, to Florides’ credit, makes it impressively wrong. For example, the paper reaches its conclusion that the Sun’s influence on climate has been overlooked by mainstream climate science by overlooking the mainstream science that deals with the Sun’s influence.

For the next act, the Skeptical Science folks put non-plagiarized sources cited by Florides under the microscope. Not surprisingly, 40% of the paper’s sources aren’t even peer-reviewed. A similar percentage of the paper’s references are to “contrarian” or “alternative” sources--i.e. other denier papers that we know are likely to suffer from the same failings as this one.

Finally, Jokimäki details in the fourth post the long and painful process of dealing with the journal that published this clearly awful paper. For three years now the SkS crew has been bringing these many damning problems to the otherwise solid journal, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews and its popular publisher Elsevier. Despite the obvious plagiarism, which gets papers retracted all the time (and the journal essentially sidesteps by only comparing the study to one of the sources from which they copy and pasted, not all of them) and despite the overwhelming abundance of fallacies and errors, the journal refused to retract the paper. And despite an initial invitation from Elsevier’s editor-in-chief Lawrence Kazmerski to write a comment reply, after years of work and waiting for a response, Elsevier decided not to let Jokimäki et al publish their rebuttal.

Which is completely baffling. The errors are numerous, and plagiarism like this would get students at even the most lax school expelled! Why wouldn’t they retract such a fundamentally flawed paper? What the hEllsevier? 

Toon of the Week...

2017 Toon 42

Quote of the Week...

“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
Warning of 'ecological Armageddon' after dramatic plunge in insect numbers by Damian Carrington, Guardian, Oct 18, 2017

Graphic of the Week...

2017 on Track to Be Third Hottest Year Nationally
US Top Ten Hottest Years on Record
Download high resolution versions.
Through the end of September, 2017 is the third hottest year on record in the U.S. These figures are even more impressive in the absence of an El Niño, which gives a small boost in average global temperatures. This is further evidence that the observed long-term warming of the globe is from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The U.S. will likely finish 2017 as the third hottest year since scientists began recording temperatures in the 1890s. If that holds true, then five of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. will have come since 2006. Only two of those 10 hottest years came before 1998, so those five hottest years are each hotter than the hottest of the Dustbowl years, 1934.
Through the end of September, the U.S. is having its warmest consecutive 24, 36, and 48 months on record. This consistent warmth over the past four years has been practically independent of the warming waters of an El Niño. In fact, La Niña years are now warmer than El Niño years from 30 years ago.
Speaking of oceans, they play a critical role in the earth’s longer term temperature, as 93 percent of the energy from human-caused warming is going into the oceans. This means that in addition to more warm days the planet is experiencing a more intense water cycle, which is behind the observed global increase in heavy precipitation.
METHODOLOGY: The top 10 years in the U.S. are NOAA calculations using anomalies based on the 20th-century average; 2017 is based on the year-to-date anomaly through September.
2017 on Track to Be Third Hottest Year Nationally, Climate Central Staff, Oct 18, 2017


SkS Spotlights...

GEF Logo
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) was established on the eve of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to help tackle our planet’s most pressing environmental problems.  Since then, the GEF has provided over $17 billion in grants and mobilized an additional $88 billion in financing for more than 4000 projects in 170 countries.  Today, the GEF is an international partnership of 183 countries, international institutions, civil society organizations and the private sector that addresses global environmental issues.
The GEF is…
  • A UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP of 18 agencies — including United Nations agencies, multilateral development banks, national entities and international NGOs — working with 183 countries to address the world’s most challenging environmental issues. The GEF has a large network of civil society organizations, works closely with the private sector around the world, and receives continuous inputs from an independent evaluation office and a world-class scientific panel.
  • A FINANCIAL MECHANISM for 5 major international environmental conventions: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the Minamata Convention on Mercury.
  • AN INNOVATOR AND CATALYST that supports multi-stakeholder alliances to preserve threatened ecosystems on land and in the oceans, build greener cities, boost food security and promote clean energy for a more prosperous, climate-resilient world; leveraging $5.2 in additional financing for every $1 invested. Read more + 

Coming Soon on SkS...

  • 2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Waming Digest (John Hartz)
  • Americans want a carbon tax; but how to get one?  (Dana)
  • The F13 files, part 3 (Ari)
  • Guest Post (John Abraham)
  • Interpreting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C temperature limit (Joeri Rogelj & Carl-Friedrich Schleussner)
  • New research this week (Ari)
  • 2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup (John Hartz)

Poster of the Week...

2017 Poster 42

SkS Week in Review... 


97 Hours of Consensus...

Thomas Stocker

Thomas Stocker's bio page
Quote derived with author's permission from:
"[Climate change] challenges the two primary resources of humans and ecosystems, land and water. In short, it threatens our planet, our only home." 
High resolution JPEG (1024 pixels wide)



from Skeptical Science via IFTTT

Naturopathy for cancer … claims that have the potential to be lethal

The nonsense that some naturopaths try to tell the public never ceases to amaze me. This article is a good example: a “naturopathic doctor” told a newspaper that “We do have a reputation associated with cancer, but we don’t treat cancer. We use highly intelligent computer software to find out what is wrong with the body at […]

Read the rest here: Naturopathy for cancer … claims that have the potential to be lethal

Saturday 21 October 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42

A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week. 

Editor's Pick

New Fire Danger Threatens to Worsen Most Disastrous Wildfire Season in California History

Santa Rosa CA Wildfire 10-14-17 

A firefighter holds a water hose while fighting a wildfire Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017, in Santa Rosa, Calif. Image credit: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez.

A record-breaking heat wave will build over Southern California over the weekend and peak on Tuesday, bringing triple-digit temperatures that could set marks for the hottest temperatures ever recorded so late in the year in the Los Angeles area. Accompanying the heat will be the notorious Santa Ana winds, which will bring a multi-day period of critical fire danger, Saturday through Tuesday.

According to NOAA, the hottest temperatures ever recorded after October 23 in Southern California (along with the Weather Underground forecast for Tuesday) were:

105°F Riverside, 10/28/1915 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 100°F)
101°F LAX Airport, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 96°F)
101°F Longbeach, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 100°F)
100°F Downtown Los Angeles, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 101°F)
100°F Burbank/Glendale/Pasadena, 10/26/2003 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 99°F)
100°F San Diego, 11/4/2010 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 91°F)
99°F Bakersfield, 10/27/1906 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 90°F)

The heat wave and Santa Ana winds will be caused by a large near-record-strength dome of high pressure expected to settle in over the Great Basin, a few hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. The difference in pressure between this high-pressure system and lower pressure over Southern California will drive gusty northeast winds over Southern California. Since these winds will originate over desert areas, they will be hot and dry. As the air descends from the mountains to the coast, the air will get hotter and drier, due to adiabatic compression—the process whereby the pressure on a parcel of air increases as it descends, decreasing its volume, and thus increasing its temperature as work is done on it. 

New Fire Danger Threatens to Worsen Most Disastrous Wildfire Season in California History by Jeff Masters, Weather Underground, Oct 20, 2017 


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Lies, damned lies, and homeopathy

If you had chronic kidney disease (CKD), would you be attracted by an article entitled ‘How to Reduce Creatinine Level in Homeopathy’? (Elevated levels are normally caused by CKD which makes it an important diagnostic test to diagnose the condition) I am sure many patients would! A few days ago, an article with exactly this […]

Read the rest here: Lies, damned lies, and homeopathy

Friday 20 October 2017

UK government response to petition ‘Stop NHS England from removing … homeopathic medicines’

Herbal and homeopathic lobby groups have petitioned to stop NHS England from removing herbal and homeopathic medicines: NHS England is consulting on recommendations to remove herbal and homeopathic medicines from GP prescribing. The medicines cost very little and have no suitable alternatives for many patients. Therefore we call on NHS England to continue to allow doctors to prescribe homeopathy and herbal medicine. The petition received around 16 500 signatures.

Now the UK government has responded. I take the liberty of posting the full response below […]

Read the rest here: UK government response to petition ‘Stop NHS England from removing … homeopathic medicines’

Herbal Remedies Have Been Linked To Liver Cancer Across Asia | IFLScience

Herbal remedies containing aristolochic acids (AA) have been linked to liver cancer from samples collected in hospitals around the world. The dangerous compounds are found in the birthwort family of plants, which are commonly used in traditional medicine to “help” with childbirth and promote healing.

The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, found that in 78 percent of liver cancer samples collected in Taiwan showed a distinctive mutation consistent with AA exposure. The team looked at 98 samples of hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of liver cancer, and the most common cause of death in people with cirrhosis... Read on: Herbal Remedies Have Been Linked To Liver Cancer Across Asia | IFLScience

Thursday 19 October 2017

Acupuncture for gastro-oesophageal reflux disease? No, I don’t think so!

Gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD) is a common, benign condition. It can be treated by changing eating habits or drugs. Many alternative therapies are also on offer, for instance, acupuncture. But does it work? Let’s find out.

The objective of this meta-analysis was to explore the effectiveness of acupuncture for the treatment of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease […]

Read the rest here: Acupuncture for gastro-oesophageal reflux disease? No, I don’t think so!

Wednesday 18 October 2017

Is chiropractic treatment safe?

This is the question asked by the American Chiropractic Association. And this is their answer [the numbers in square brackets were inserted by me and refer to my comments below]:
Chiropractic is widely recognized [1] as one of the safest drug-free, non-invasive therapies available for the treatment of neuromusculoskeletal complaints [2]. Although chiropractic has an […]

Read the rest here: Is chiropractic treatment safe?

Sunday 15 October 2017

The Natural Cancer Cure Lie | Home | Cancer Answers, MD

As we walked back towards the waiting room following the scan that would serve as the blueprint that we would use to plan Darren’s radiation for his cancer, he asked a question that stopped me in my tracks. “If I decide to cancel my radiation appointments, can I just call you?” To determine whether this was just a simple question of curiosity in the case of an emergency or something more, I asked him to clarify why he would consider canceling. Standing in the hallway between two clinic rooms, he stated that in the time between our first meeting and today’s visit, he had been doing some online “research” and thought he would consider doing something “more natural” to keep his cancer at bay...

Read on: The Natural Cancer Cure Lie | Home | Cancer Answers, MD

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #41

Story of the Week... El Niño/La Niña Update... Toon of the Week... Graphic of the Week... SkS Spotlights... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...

Story of the Week...

Firefight in Sonoma County reaches second week as flames force thousands to evacuate

Sonoma County CA Wildfire

Firefighters from Compton put a scratch and wet line around a fire on Lovall Valley Road in Somona, Saturday, Oct 14, 2017. (Kent Porter/The Press Democrat) 2017

An army of firefighters with a larger aerial arsenal at their disposal held their ground and made some gains Saturday on devastating wildfires ravaging Wine Country, but evacuation orders that forced thousands from their homes before dawn and a rising death toll were clear reminders of the peril that still grips the region.

Northeast winds that arrived early Saturday whipped up a new fire in the hills outside eastern Santa Rosa, and spread an existing blaze outside Sonoma, prompting another round of nighttime evacuation orders.

Thousands of Santa Rosa residents were forced to leave — some for the second time since last Sunday — while others faced their first mandatory orders in Sonoma. 

Firefight in Sonoma County reaches second week as flames force thousands to evacuate by Kevin McCallum & Randi Rossmann, The Press Democrat, Oct 15, 2017 


El Niño/La Niña Update

The task of a climate forecaster is to see the forest, and not get hung up on the individual trees. Especially that extra tall one over there, with the gnarl that looks like a face, and the low branches that would be so easy to climb, and… uh, right. My point is that we try to look beyond shorter-term weather to see longer-term monthly and seasonal patterns. After all, a particular winter can have several colder-than-average days and still be warmer than average overall.

Which brings me to the current situation in the tropical Pacific! The October ENSO forecast says La Niña conditions are favored during the fall and winter 2017-18, but at press time the ocean-atmosphere system didn’t quite meet the criteria for a La Niña Advisory. Specifically, while the atmosphere is generally consistent with La Niña, the sea surface temperature in the Niño3.4 region has been volatile, recently edging up close to average following several weeks near or below the La Niña threshold (0.5°C colder than average).

 

Animation showing sea surface temperature departure from the 1981-2010 average from early August through early October 2017. Graphic by climate.gov; data from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab.

Is the overall pattern truly La Niña, with some short-term fluctuations temporarily obscuring the pattern? Or has the atmosphere-ocean system really not settled down into a consistent pattern at all? The difference between these two scenarios is subtle, and the ENSO forecast team is maintaining the La Niña Watch as we wait for a clearer picture. The forecast is for that picture to become clearer soon, with La Niña conditions 55-65% likely during this fall and winter.

October 2017 ENSO update: Still watching for La Niña by Emily Becker, NOAA's Climate.gov. Oct 12, 2017


Toon of the Week...

2017 Toon 41 


Graphic of the Week...

Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to repeal the Clean Power Plan. In response, Janet Redman, U.S. Policy Director of Oil Change International issued the following statement:

“Pruitt’s move to repeal the Clean Power Plan shouldn’t come as any surprise. He’s repeatedly partnered with fossil fuel companies to sue the EPA for regulating the industry’s air, water, and climate pollution. This kind of cronyism is exactly what happens when government agencies are captured by the corporations they’re supposed to oversee.

“According to Pruitt, this is just another way to even the playing field for coal, oil, and gas – but he knows as well as anyone that fossil fuels already get massive government giveaways. In fact, permanent tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry are seven times higher than those for renewable energy.

“The fight to curb the worst abuses of the fossil fuel energy industry won’t stop here. Federal legislation, the courts, and millions of voters have made it clear that the federal government is obligated to protect American workers and families from the deadly impacts of dirty energy, not hand polluters taxpayer dollars.”

Permanent Tax Breaks for Renewable Energy v Fossil Fuels FY2016 

Oil Change International Statement On Clean Power Plan Repeal, Oct 10, 2017


SkS Spotlights...

CLEAR Banner

The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Portal was launched in 2010 as a National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathways project. It is led by the science education expertise of TERC, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. As of 2012, CLEAN has been syndicated to NOAA's climate.gov portal.

CLEAN's primary effort is to steward the collection of climate and energy science educational resources and to support a community of professionals committed to improving climate and energy literacy. 

The three key components of the CLEAN project are: 

1. The CLEAN Collection of Climate and Energy Science resources- high-quality, digital resources—including learning activities, visualizations, videos, and short demonstrations/experiments—geared toward educators of students in secondary through undergraduate levels.

2. Guidance in Teaching Climate and Energy Science – pages designed to help educators understand and be equipped to teach the big ideas in climate and energy science. 

3. The CLEAN Network – a community of professionals committed to improving climate and energy literacy.  


Coming Soon on SkS...

  • The war on coal is over.  Coal lost (Dana)
  • The F13 files, part 1 - the copy/paste job (Ari)
  • Guest Post (John Abraham)
  • Americans want a $15 per month carbon tax; but how to get one? (Dana)
  • New research this week (Ari)
  • 2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42 (John Hartz)
  • 2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Waming Digest #42 (John Hartz)

Poster of the Week...

2017 Poster 41 


SkS Week in Review... 


97 Hours of Consensus...

97 Hours: Ken Denman 

 

Ken Denman's bio page

Quote derived with author's permission from:

"The issue is not a lack of scientific evidence, the issue is the unwillingness of people and governments to act. It seems to defy logic. But a lot of addictions defy logic. Our society is completely addicted to cheap power." 

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Guess what – we just received an ‘Ockham Award’ !

It was Alan Henness who persuaded me and helped me to start this blog. He probably feared that, after my retirement from my Exeter post, I might stop being a nuisance to Prince Charles and other quacks. The blog certainly prevented this possibility!

The very first post on my blog went live on 14 October […]

Read the rest here: Guess what – we just received an ‘Ockham Award’ !

Saturday 14 October 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41

A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week. 

Editor's Pick

Record Amazon fires stun scientists; sign of sick, degraded forests
Amazon Fire
If climate change continues to worsen unchecked, and forest degradation continues unabated, then unstoppable Amazon mega-fires could be seen in this century; such fires would greatly increase the release of carbon into the atmosphere worsening climate change. Photo courtesy of IBAMA 
  • With the fire season still on-going, Brazil has seen 208,278 fires this year, putting 2017 on track to beat 2004’s record 270,295 fires. While drought (likely exacerbated by climate change) worsens the fires, experts say that nearly every blaze this year is human-caused.
  • The highest concentration of fires in the Amazon biome in September was in the São Félix do Xingu and Altamira regions. Fires in Pará state in September numbered 24,949, an astonishing six-fold increase compared with 3,944 recorded in the same month last year.
  • The Amazon areas seeing the most wildfires have also seen rapid change and development in recent years, with high levels of deforestation, and especially forest degradation, as loggers, cattle ranchers, agribusiness and dam builders move in.
  • Scientists warn of a dangerous synergy: forest degradation has turned the Amazon from carbon sink to carbon source; while globally, humanity’s carbon emissions are worsening drought and fires. Brazil’s rapid Amazon development deepens the problem. Researchers warn that mega-fires could be coming, unless trends are reversed. 
Record Amazon fires stun scientists; sign of sick, degraded forests by Sue Branford & Maurício Torres, Mongabay, Oct 11, 2017

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