Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week...
Scientific warnings are being ignored, misinformation is spreading, and prominent Republicans have said that addressing the problem is either too expensive or too difficult. No, this isn’t climate change: This is the new reality of the novel coronavirus, the deadly pandemic sweeping the planet.
Over the past several weeks, as global cases of COVID-19 have climbed to over 500,000, conspiracy theories and fake news have also been on the rise. On Monday a man died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, an ingredient in an anti-malarial drug that President Trump had heralded as a coronavirus cure.
Meanwhile, the website Snopes has been forced to scale back its fact-checking work in response to the overwhelming number of fake stories around the pandemic. (Some disturbing highlights: claims that the coronavirus was released by world governments to distract from a planet-ending doomsday asteroid, or that breathing hot air from a hair dryer can kill the virus.)
‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denial by Shannon Osaka, Grist, Mar 28, 2020
Hat tip to the Stop Climate Science Denial Facebook page.
CLAIM: "CO2 is a plant nutrient...it’s not a pollutant that threatens human civilization. If CO2 was so terrible for the planet, then installing a CO2 generator in a greenhouse would kill the plants."
VERDICT: 
SOURCE: If carbon dioxide is so bad for the planet, why do greenhouse growers buy CO2 generators to double plant growth? by Mike Adams, Natural News, June 22, 2013
KEY TAKEAWAY: CO2 can increase plant growth but its effects, which decrease with higher concentrations, are limited by the availability of other plant nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. CO2 emissions can negatively impact natural ecosystems through global warming—e.g. by increasing evaporation and drying up soils in some regions or increasing heavy precipitation in others.
CO2 can increase plant growth in greenhouses while also negatively affecting ecosystems and human societies by Nikki Forrester, Climate Feedback, Mar 19, 2020
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 29 March, 2020
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