First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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In the current deluge of publications Kot asks a very relevant question: How much pure and utter nonsense is out there, that is not intentional and produced by humans?
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I would not have been surprised to read Cressey in the Sun or in Bild, but nature? In an ideal lossless world, converting CO2 to fuel would release exactly the same amount elsewhere, in the real world it amounts to several times that. Referring to hydropower is pure bunk. That power is already being produced and consumed in full. Diverting some of it to this subsidy grabbing showcase results in a shortfall somewhere else, that will be picked up from fossil resources.
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I continue to be very skeptic about claims of resilience and adaptation in the archaeological record as invoked by Flohr et al. Yes, when crops failed people did move to hunting (European Late Neolithic) or herding (Africa) and survived – some of them. Many or most did not adapt and starved. People also were resilient and adapted to the waves of Black Death, the Irish potato famine, and the Little Ice Age and thirty years war. A second point is, that things do not usually happen synchronously. Depressives commit suicide just when they are feeling somewhat better and the large waves of extinction did not happen in the worst of the cold but just when climate improved again (Cooper 2015, list of 2015-08-26).