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Brazil Appoints Climate Sceptic As New Science Minister

Ocean 'Calamities' Oversold: Scientists Call For More Scepticism



The state of the world's seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. It is not just journalists who are to blame, they maintain: the marine research community “may not have remained sufficiently sceptical” on the topic. --Daniel Cressey, Nature, 14 January 2015

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Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science. -- The New York Times, 15 January 2015 There are a lot of conversations around meetings about the excess doom and gloom in our reporting of ocean health, but perhaps this is the first paper to bring these concerns out of the privacy of peer conversations. This is a silent movement, as there is a lot of peer pressure against voicing those concerns openly, so my co-authors and I expect significant heat upon us to be derived from our paper. --Carlos Duarte, University of Western Australia, Nature, 14 January 2015 Despite fears that global warming is harming the Arctic region faster than the rest of the world, Greenland is defying climate scientists and currently growing at its fastest rate in four years. The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that Greenland’s ice sheet has seen more growth so far this year than in the last four years. Greenland’s growth in 2015 is also higher than the mean growth for 1990 to 2011. --Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 13 January 2015 The appointment of a reputed climate change denier as the head of Brazil’s science ministry has some scientists worried about the country’s environmental future. Others are withholding judgment, at least until the new minister, Aldo Rebelo, appoints the team of scientists and policymakers who will work with him for the next 4 years. Rebelo, a hard-line communist, labeled climate change an “environmental scam” in a 2010 open letter to environmentalist Marcio Santilli, according to Bloomberg View. --Lizzie Wade, Science Insider 9 January 2015 Science is not an oracle. In fact, there is no scientific proof of the projections of global warming, much less that it is occurring because of human action and not because of natural phenomena. It is a construct based on computer simulations. In fact, my tradition links me to a line of scientific thought that prioritizes doubt over certainty and does not silence a question at the first response. Parallel to the extraordinary advances and conquests that Science has bequeathed to the progress of Humanity, come innumerable errors, frauds or manipulations always spun in the service of countries that finance certain research projects or projections.-- --Aldo Rebelo, Brazil's new Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Open Letter July 2014 Growth in Antarctic sea ice extent measured by satellites since 1979 is real and is probably due to natural internal variability, according to new research. The new research published in Geophysical Research Letters highlights satellite data showing that Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing at a rate of around 1.5 per cent per decade since this generation of satellites first began making regular measurements in 1979. --Reporting Climate Science, 12 January 2015 Polar bears are a conservation success story. However, you’d never know that from the output of polar bear researchers, who lately seem to have forgotten that the most crucial part of their job is the unbiased collection and presentation of scientific data. --Susan Crockford, Financial Post, 15 January 2015


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