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Dan Jones

Physical Oceanographer, British Antarctic Survey

Expertise: Ocean circulation, Ocean modelling, Air-sea gas exchange

Atlantic ocean circulation system is slowing down, as accurately described in The New York Times article

“This article is well-written, and the visuals are outstanding. It is a very strong piece of science communication. That being said, there is at least one error. The author mistakenly conflates the long-term warming hole with the shorter-term North Atlantic cold anomaly. The two phenomena have very different timescales and are likely driven by different mechanisms.”

Video interview of Ian Plimer at Sky News falsely claims that a new study announces an incoming ice age, partly based on an incorrect Daily Mail headline

“This video is chock full of false and misleading information, and presented in a way to make the correct scientific information seem like a farce. For example, the direct link between human emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming is very well established. The physics and chemistry of this link has been understood for well over 100 years, and science continues to affirm it.”

Ian Plimer op-ed in The Australian again presents long list of false claims about climate

“This article is a mixture of misdirection, misleading claims, and outright falsehoods. The author attempts to paint a picture of current climate change as simply a continuation of natural changes that have occurred in the past. But this neglects the clear evidence that climate change over the last two centuries has been shown to be largely man-made, that it is much more rapid that anything we have seen in the last two thousand years if not longer, and that it is occurring in the context of a globe with more than 7 billion human inhabitants.”

Forbes article accurately describes research on Atlantic ocean circulation weakening, but headline goes farther

“This is an accurate, concise summary of the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and its possible future states. There are a couple of minor issues: specifically, one of the links goes to an irrelevant article, and it would be useful to have a couple more citations to the scientific literature. The title is possibly a little overstated; I might instead say that the AMOC is at risk of collapsing in a warming world.”

Playing semantics, misleading Breitbart article downplays US contribution to climate change

“This whole post is based on semantics and basically one big strawman fallacy. The author is deliberately confusing air pollution from suspended particulate matter (as discussed in the WHO report) with pollution from carbon dioxide emissions (as discussed in the Reuters link and the Paris Agreement). Even though CO2 does not impact our health through “disease-causing pollutants that get into people’s lungs”, it does change our environment and the Earth’s climate, and in that sense does classify as a pollutant.”

The Telegraph publishes false information about Arctic climate

“This article suffers from a common error in reasoning. The author focuses on individual “snapshots” of the state of the climate while ignoring the long-term trends. Those trends occur over many decades and must be observed/considered over those time scales.”