Writers are going to find a way to make their work topical. The most important article I ever wrote (in my estimation), in the Wall Street Journal, came out about five weeks after I wrote it, and with a different lede.

The news cycle had kept pushing it back but then a new event occurred which made it compelling and the editor saw the hook and had me redoo it, but the rest was evergreen facts.

Last month, Indonesia’s previous Minister of Research and Technology boasted that in 2019, Indonesia had overtaken Malaysia and Singapore in the number of published academic articles.

This is not a high quality paper, it's riddled with errors. It should never have been on mainstream news or on TV. Those 11,000 scientists are not authors - they are just signatories and one of them is the illustrious professor Micky Mouse of the Micky Mouse Institute of the Blind in Namibia. Of course they removed those names once they were discovered, but this shows how easy it was to add signatures to it.

Climate change is a serious issue but it does no good to promote things like this as if they were on a par with the IPCC reports.

The only section number cite to the IPCC is mistaken, says that it says we need carbon taxes much higher than $15.25 - the actual figure in that section for an example carbon tax together with other measures is $7.

Exercise is recommended for people who are overweight or obese as a way to reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But people don’t always have time to exercise as much as they would like, so finding ways to increase the health benefits of exercise is important. Our latest research has found a way to do just that, and it’s to do with timing. This means you might be able to get away with doing less exercise if other commitments, such as family and work, always seem to get in the way.

How do solar panels work? – Nathan, age 5, Melbourne, Australia.

The Sun produces a lot of energy called solar energy. Australia gets 20,000 times more energy from the Sun each day than we do from oil, gas and coal. This solar energy will continue for as long as the Sun lives, which is another 5 billion years.

Solar panels are made of solar cells, which is the part that turns the solar energy in sunlight into electricity.

Solar cells make electricity directly from sunlight. It is the most trusted energy technology ever made, which is why it is used on satellites in space and in remote places on Earth where it is hard to fix problems.

In 2014, the world's top polluter, China, told the United States president they unequivocally  would not even discuss emissions caps or targets until 2030 and American speechwriters quickly tried to spin that into a positive. China had never even agreed on a future date before, they rationalized, so that was progress.

Well, not really, but it was as much as almost everyone else was going to do under the Paris Climate Agreement.

In 1605, England’s parliament was sitting on a powder keg, literally. Like now, the country was bitterly divided between two factions, with religion at the heart of the schism after the Reformation pitted Protestants and Catholics against each other in a life or death struggle. History tells us that instead of seeking a political solution such as an election, a group of 13 Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up parliament.

This is running with click bait titles suggesting massively more people are at risk of sea level flooding than before. But it’s just better elevation maps. The sea level rise is the same but more people than they thought are already living below sea level protected by dikes, as for Holland.

It makes no difference at all if the elevation data is already good. Example story to debunk:

• Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows

This is mainly due to an increase in their estimate of the number of people currently below sea level (many people already live below sea level not just Netherlands). They estimate that

This is the first day that countries can give their one year notification to leave the Paris agreement. It's no surprise that the US has given notification. But he is not speaking for the city of Pittsburgh, who have taken strong action on climate change for over a decade, and many others in the US are in support of the agreement. Withdrawal is largely symbolic, and won't change anything, as there is no longer central federal support for climate action in the US as is.

In February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a bombastic press release to announce its 2019 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was going to to Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana, anti-glyphosate protesters who claim a causal connection between glyphosate and chronic kidney disease.

AAAS has long been a political body, its leadership has come solely from one political party for the last 35 years. and that means it is often going to pick and choose the science it accepts based on its political skew. But a whole lot of Democratic scientists are in biotechnology, they recognize the consensus on glyphosate and GMOs is even greater than it is climate change, and the blowback to this award announcement happened rapidly.