- Obsession watch part I: We got an email from Scientific American with a story headlined “Could AI Kill Off Humans” in which a senior scientist at RAND “and his colleagues focused on three existential threats: pandemics, climate change and nuclear war.” The good news, from the article, is that “Finally, if AI were to accelerate garden-variety anthropogenic climate change, it would not rise to an extinction-level threat. We would seek out new environmental niches in which to survive, even if it involved moving to the planet’s poles.” Alas “Making Earth completely uninhabitable for humans would require pumping something much more potent than carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bad news is that those much more powerful greenhouse gases exist.” Or that Scientific American has gone insane. Either way.
- Obsession watch part II: We got an email from Euronews.green that “Europe faces billions in economic losses from summer heatwaves, droughts and floods, study warns” and “Dogs, cats and hedgehogs: How pets and animals are helping with climate communication”. So here’s an imaginary hedgehog to teach your kids about an imaginary crisis.
- Obsession watch part III: The New York Times offers us “Times readers’ most pressing climate questions” and we tiptoe in to find such gems as “What are the implications of a renewable energy world dominated by China, which seems to be very likely at the moment?” and “But what can we do about it when protests don’t seem to do anything? And when everything is happening at once across so many sectors, which cause do you pick?” Notice what’s missing? Right. Anything connected with boring old science.
- Well, this one is awkward. The Manhattan Contrarian notes with art that the “climate cult” in his home state has become obsessed with “climate resiliency” and spent $300 million “fixing” Wagner Park, “originally opened in 1996 as part of the Battery Park City development” and “previously just a pleasant waterfront lawn of about 3.5 acres”. So they raised it ten feet and turned the accessible green space into a series of forbidding white terrace walls. Plus if the seas really did rise massively, which they show no signs of doing there or anywhere, the rest of Manhattan would be flooded leaving the park a desolate island. So expensive, ugly and pointless. Not a good look.
- The Weather Network has the gall yet again to run a story “Key ocean current weaker than previously thought, could collapse in 30 years”. To which our response this time isn’t the usual “unless it doesn’t”. It’s “Can you really run the same item on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current” being more vulnerable, less stable, totally weak and wobbly etc. than previously thought week after week, month after month, year after year without even deciding that at some point it was thought to be fragile even if it isn’t?
- Meanwhile from the “Canada pivots but doesn’t” file, the National Post’s Tristin Hopper takes a look at “all the times the Liberals said they would build an oil pipeline”. And then didn’t. As Hopper adds, despite declaring that by his various magic powers Prime Minister Mark Carney will make Canada an energy superpower, conventional and alternative, and repeatedly suggesting that a pipeline could well be among them, Carney finally unveiled his first five megamassive “nation building” mighty projects and… no pipeline. But fear not. We are a rhetorical superpower.
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24 Sep 2025 | News Roundup
“What are the implications of a renewable energy world dominated by China”
China is an industrial nation with a population four times that of the US and is known, not unreasonably, as the workshop of the world. For this it needs vast amounts of electricity. However, unlike the US it has very little oil or gas. Rather than importing oil and gas it chooses to burn coal, of which it has a large supply. Renewable energy, i.e. wind or solar, adds a little to the mix but is only a minor contribution in the greater scheme of things. So to answer the question, the implications of a renewable energy world dominated by China are that we would be advised to burn coal if we want to catch up with China.