- At some point you have to stop announcing the “we are all going to die” story-of-the-week or people will become weary and irritable. But Euronews dips our patience in vitriol with “Planetary health check reveals oceans have breached critical acidification boundary”. As in “Humans are pushing the planet “beyond the limits of a safe operating space” as yet another critical Earth system boundary has been breached. A damning new report reveals the planet’s ocean acidification – where the water’s pH is lowered due to CO₂ absorption – has entered the danger zone for the first time ever.” So how going to die are we? Seven of nine, apparently: “The 2025 Planetary Health Check, published by the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), warns that seven of the nine critical Earth system boundaries have now been breached, one more than last year.” And yet the hull of spaceship Earth apparently resembling Swiss cheese has had zero effect on our actual vitality.
- Speaking of apocalyptic weather rhetoric, as we predicted, the return of something called “Fall” has put a stop to media hyperventilating about “scorch” and “soar”. But they’ve found something new. From the Weather Network (via MSN) “Heavy rain batters London, Ontario”. Batters, you say? It didn’t just fall? Batters, we say. As in “Heavy rain batters parts of Southern Ontario”, with conditions not seen in… two months. Not to mention “Heavy rain batters Odisha” and “Heavy rain batters Mumbai”. (And from the July files “Heavy Rain Batters Florida, Gulf Coast on Flood Watch”.) From New Zealand we hear “On Sunday, gales of up to 244kph battered the summit of Mt Hutt” and we say that’s a legitimate use of the word, glad we weren’t there. But when after a dry late summer we finally get some welcome rain in Ontario, don’t try to kill us with climate-disaster-world-ends rhetoric.
- From the “but you said it was cheaper and better” file, AOL (yes, still) informs us that “Over $2 Billion California Solar Plant Built To Last, Now Closing Over Inefficiency”. The “Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert” was “greenlit in 2010 and completed in 2014” and was meant to last until 2039 but um uh seems the government wasn’t totally on top of the technology of the future the way politicians incessantly claim to be based on no actual experience. And since California has very nearly 40 million people, that $2 billion whacks each of them for 50 bucks, not just the Hollywood stars. Add $200 to the power bill of a family of four, just for one spectacularly failed plant, and tell us it’s cheaper. As for better, well, shuttering it kind of shuts that one down.
- We received an odd notice from Ottawa Weather Records that “Today is #Ottawa’s 112th consecutive day with maximum temperature ≥18°C which puts this run in 2nd place for the longest run on record.” Of course if you poke enough numbers something odd will come out. But if it looks as though Ottawa seems to be heading up, with a long run of blazing chilly days, the problem isn’t just that the record was set in 1937 (yes, the 1930s were the hottest decade in the modern instrument record once governments get their thumb off the scales). It’s that we’re tied with… 1925. Just ahead of… 1921, 1908, 1874, 2003, 1995, 1884 and, tied for 10th, 2015 and 2004. So most of the hot streaks, if this counts as one, were a century ago. Some climate crisis this is turning out to be.
- Stop the presses: a Euronews.green headline shouts “Former world leaders call for fossil fuel taxes to fund global climate action”. Yeah? Why didn’t you say it while in office or even (gasp) do it? Too economically and politically disastrous? Or because no one cared what you said when in office, in which case why would anyone care now? The story wails “In recent years, the rise of leaders sceptical of climate science has broken the fragile consensus needed for enduring action. On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump used his speech at the UNGA to call climate change ‘the greatest con job’ ever perpetrated. He also dismissed carbon footprints as a ‘hoax made up by people with evil intentions’.” And while we deplore the use of “hoax” and “con job”, we’re curious which other leaders they have in mind, why the consensus was “fragile” if the evidence is so strong, and why everyone else can’t just go ahead while Trump’s battling a sabotaged escalator or something.
- Heatmap doesn’t buy the “con job” language either but their reasons are a bit different. “As global emissions of carbon and other planet-heating gases have surged over the past several decades, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Celsius, an increase that the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world attribute to pollution from fossil fuels and agriculture. The Trump administration issued a report written by contrarians who raised the possibility that climate change won’t be as bad as most scientists say, but more than 1,000 peer-reviewed researchers signed onto a letter condemning the findings.” Then it quoted the dispassionate “Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency chief and the Biden administration’s climate policy director” that Trump is “rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.” Then it offered a patronizing primer that peddled the inaccurate claim that there are statistically significant trends in bad weather. So rather than saying Trump’s a buffoon but we should engage with the reasonable skeptics, it just went right on trying to bulldoze opposition. As did Bloomberg Green with a dismissive reference to Trump’s “misinformation and falsehoods in an attempt to downplay the risks of climate change.” So a hoax and a con job to you too.
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01 Oct 2025 | News Roundup
