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Articles tagged with "carbon"

How Creationism Hurts My Brain

How Creationism Hurts My Brain

Last weekend three of us intrepid skeptics attended a creationist talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”, given by Mike Collins at the Abundant Life church in Wellington. Mike is an aircraft maintenance engineer who, since leaving his real job, has shacked up with Creation Ministries International (CMI), the evangelical Christian group who run the creation.com website and is one of their regular speakers at churches all around New Zealand.

Be-leaf it or knot: Are tree-planting initiatives up to snuff or are they going up in smoke?

Back in the March 21, 2022 edition of the Skeptics Newsletter, I wrote about the scheme/scam of becoming a fake Scottish Lord (or Laird as the case may be). One of the new sales tactics is to take on a conservation mission to your purchase, the promise that you are saving some wildcats, creating a nature reserve, or having a tree dedicated in your honour. The impact of these add-ons is questionable, subject to lawsuits and allegation of funny financial dealings. Even more concerning is the lack of transparency about who is advising these companies about the reintroduction of nativa trees and the deforestation of invasive ones.

Introduction

This week I've got an eclectic mix of topics. I cover Matariki weekend, the awful Roe v. Wade US supreme court decision and the implications here, and look at my carbon footprint.

Life on Mars

Amidst a global pandemic it's sometimes easy to miss science news. But this one really piqued my interest.

Stuart Landsborough feedback

Last week Mark published an item from Stuart Landsborough, from Wanaka's Puzzling World about his recent epiphany about how we can deal with climate change. I found Stuart's item contained some great points, and it resonated with me. I'm worried about whether we'll be able to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Car makers' climate denial

Car makers' climate denial

You probably already heard that Exxon knew about climate change back in the 70s and 80s, and chose to double down on the misinformation, but now, as an EV driver myself I was interested to learn the latest news to come out about climate change denial relating to big Auto, specifically Ford and GM. In the first part of an investigation by E&E News, we find out that the automakers were well aware that car emissions caused climate change 50 years ago. Their own scientists were telling top executives that emissions from the vehicles they were producing would lead to climate change.

Dr Jim Mason - Creationist

He is a nuclear physicist, whose PhD focussed on nuclear decay. He worked in electronics for the military for nearly 40 years, and argues that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

Forum

Either this water is alive, or it contains carbon. Either way I'm not drinking it.

The Holcomb Hallucination

Dr Robert R Holcomb was in Wellington in January to announce a technological breakthrough. Before an audience of New Zea-land government, business and environmental leaders, he announced for the first time a revolutionary new technology, Electron Stream Carbon Dioxide Reduction (ESCO2R), commonly called the Carbon Dioxide Converter, that goes to the heart of the global warming problem. The converter is patented.

The Case of the Living Fossil

"Scientific" creationists are fond of easy examples that seem to contradict evolution: so much the better if they seem to make scientists look silly.