This is scaring so many people and is running in so many online news outlets, but has no scientific credibility. It's written by a couple of businessmen, with a foreword by a retired admiral, and no scientific peer review. I was glad to see that at least some of the most highly regarded news sites didn't run this, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, The Times, The Guardian, BBC News, Nature, or the Smithsonian magazine.

You have probably seen the headlines “One million species threatened with extinction and humans to blame” and such like. But did you know, the UN study that lead to those headlines analysed the reasons we continue to lose species to extinction, and found a solution? Not only that, they found a solution that is practical, feasible, makes economic sense, and has preliminary government interest too, to the extent that over 100 governments were happy to sign off on their conclusions as a “summary for policy makers”.

Yes we are getting extinctions at a far higher rate than normal. But it is nowhere near a mass extinction yet. Just the start of a slide towards one that may play out towards the end of this century and in the 22nd century. Also we are not risking a major mass extinction like the Permian / Triassic one. The word “mass extinction” does not have a well defined threshold but I think many who read these stories think it means that there would be almost no animals, fish, trees, plants or insects left or hardly any. No it doesn’t mean that. It means fewer species of each but not a world without them.

My aim here is not to dispute the many scholarly articles about us being at the start of a new mass extinction, but rather, to clarify what they mean.

Almost nobody seems to report the positive side of our recent climate change action. It’s remarkable what we’ve done in two years, which gives us much hope that we can indeed rise to the challenge. I have never in my life seen such a coming together of nations worldwide to solve a problem. Three years ago, after the slow progress of the Kyoto protocol agreement, all this would have seemed impossible. There is a lot of publicity about what we aren't doing yet, but hardly anyone talks about what we have already done. That's the key to success, to build on what we already have and what we have already done.

First, this is totally harmless. Tiny and far away, shrouded with dust and gas. They can only see it using radio waves that go through the dust. And the photo of course changes nothing, we've know it is there for a long time away. This is a screenshot from the press conference:

And over four separate days:

Short summary here

Am debunking this page because it makes a scary prediction of a 10 °C rise by 2026. It is very very silly. By far the silliest post I’ve seen on climate change, and that’s saying something, I’ve seen some ridiculous posts, but this takes the biscuit. I can’t find out anything about Sam Carana who runs this blog, but he would flunk high school maths and physics if he gave material like this in answer to exam questions.

This is not about the IPCC report which is often misunderstood as saying something similar. For the journalistic misunderstandings of the 2017 IPCC report see my