A study by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research suggests that over 90 percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean flows into it from just 10 rivers. Alex Gray of the World Economic Forum reports: By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean. Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
But according to a groundbreaking analysis by Australian researcher John McLean it’s far too sloppy to be taken seriously even by climate scientists, let alone a body as influential as the IPCC or by the governments of the world. “It’s very careless and amateur,” he says. “About the standard of a first-year university student.” Among the many errors found by McLean were: Large gaps where there is no data and where instead averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia. Almost no quality control, with misspelled country names (‘Venezuala” “Hawaai” “Republic of K” (aka South Korea) and sloppy, obviously inaccurate entries. Adjustments – “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that more than 50 percent of adjustments were incorrect,” says McLean – which artificially cool earlier temperatures and warm later ones, giving an exaggerated impression of the rate of global warming. Methodology so inconsistent that measurements didn’t even have a reliable policy on variables like Daylight Saving Time. Sea measurements, supposedly from ships, but mistakenly logged up to 50 miles inland. A Caribbean island – St Kitts – where the temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions (somewhat implausibly for the tropics) A town in Romania which in September 1953, allegedly experienced a month where the average temperature dropped to minus 46 degrees C (when the typical average for that month is 10 degrees C). Yet this is the temperature record from which the IPCC has formed its judgement that the “global warming” since the mid-19th century is sufficiently alarming for governments around the world to have to take urgent action, which is currently costing taxpayers around $2 trillion per annum.
“There’s a huge political problem here,” said Ebell, who called politicians like Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), former senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, “eco-imperialists” who blame climate change for wildfires while not taking action to prevent them based on their environmental activism.