Pierre Friedlingstein member picture

Pierre Friedlingstein

Professor, University of Exeter

Expertise: Climate change, Carbon cycle, Ecosystems

Daily Wire article misunderstands study on carbon budget (along with Fox News, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Breitbart…)

“The article selectively quotes from interviews and scientific papers to create the false perception that climate models significantly overestimate the rate of warming. The article also falsely implies that the cited paper is about the so called “hiatus” while the paper is actually about the carbon budget for the 1.5 ºC target.”

Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong

“While it is clear that ongoing warming of the global climate would eventually have very severe consequences, the concept of the Earth becoming uninhabitable within anywhere near the timescales suggested in the article is pure hyperbole. The author has clearly done very extensive research and addresses a number of climate threats that are indeed major issues, but generally the narrative ramps up the threat to go beyond the level that is supported by science.”

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.”

Analysis of "Thanks to climate change, the Arctic is turning green"

“The article reports about recent evidence that terrestrial ecosystems are ‘greening’ in response to human activities, principally the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. The author presents this ‘greening’ as a new finding while annual global carbon budgets have reported that about 25% of the fossil-fuel emissions have been taken up by the biosphere since the 1960s. Nothing is fundamentally wrong in the article but it is organized in a somewhat misleading way”

Analysis of "…in many ways global warming will be a good thing"

“This article presents a highly biased view of global warming, only presenting the “positive” aspects of it. As the author is criticizing media doing the opposite (always showing the bad side of climate change) it is a shame the author didn’t present a balanced view here.”