Questions tagged [environment]
Referring to the surrounding ecosystem of the planet Earth, its natural mechanisms and balances, and study of the effects of human interaction with it.
197 questions
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Are building paints the leading source of microplastics in the environment?
The 2025 French documentary Homo Plasticus, available on the German/French TV station arte is about microplastics found in the human body. It states the following (at about 10:50):
The origins of ...
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Was the concept of ecological or carbon footprint invented by fossil fuel PR to shift the blame for climate change?
Several sources claim that the concept of an ecological footprint or carbon footprint was invented by fossil fuel lobbyists to shift the responsibility for climate change from big oil to private ...
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Does running an NLP model generate 300 tonnes of CO₂?
The AI critic Kate Crawford writes in her book The Atlas of AI:
With a focus on trying to understand the carbon footprint of natural language processing (NLP) models, they began to sketch out ...
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Do car tires create more pollution than exhaust fumes?
The article Exhaust fumes don't pollute nearly as much as this part of a car
claims that tires cause more pollution than exhaust fumes.
Car tires are worse for the environment than exhaust fumes
In ...
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Are global wildfires decreasing?
According to the World Health Organization,
Climate change is directly contributing to humanitarian emergencies from heatwaves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes and they are ...
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Has Azerbaijan "not had any environmental activist initiatives for the past decade"?
A long article about the Azerbaijani blockade of the (now former) Lachin corridor claims that:
Azerbaijan is an authoritarian country that has not had any environmental activist initiatives for the ...
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Is there an increase in whale deaths due to windfarms?
During a recent speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump blamed offshore wind farms for the rise in whale deaths.
Trump made the remarks about offshore wind’s possible link to the surge in baleen whale ...
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Do lost people tend to unintentionally walk in circles?
Is it fact/myth that when you get lost in the wilderness, you go round in circles?
Common belief has it that people who get lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles. Although ...
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Is the honey bee apocalypse real?
In 2013 Time magazine wrote
A World Without Bees: The Price We’ll Pay If We Don’t Figure Out What’s Killing the Honeybee.
In 2021 New York Post writes
Why the honey bee ‘apocalypse’ is based on a ...
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Was the 2023 Ohio train derailment the 'worst environmental disaster in US history'?
According to Impact Nottingham:
East Palestine, Ohio: Exploring The Worst Environmental Disaster in
the History of the USA
On 3rd February 2023, a freight train carrying various potentially
hazardous ...
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Would covering 10% of hydro-power reservoirs with solar panels generate as much power as fossil-fuel plants worldwide?
This article in the journal Nature, claims that:
Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-...
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Does flying a small GA aircraft use less fuel than driving the same distance by car?
This is a notable claim by Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU party and a member of the German parliament:
„Ich bereue nicht, dass ich zur Hochzeit von Christian Lindner geflogen bin. Um es mal auf den ...
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Is the equivalent of 2000 American football fields lost every hour due to drought and desertification?
BBC states the following
Approximately 12 million hectares (46,000 sq miles) are lost around the world each year as a direct consequence of drought and desertification. That's the equivalent of 2,000 ...
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Was plastic from a seaplane shot down in 1944 recently found in an albatross stomach?
The environmentalist website Ocean Sentry makes the claim (citing Calgary Herald) that:
The massive clockwise North Pacific Gyre is carrying plastic that is over 50 years old. Last year, plastic ...
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Are more than a billion umbrellas thrown away every year?
I own a Blunt umbrella. From their and other umbrella sites, there is a claim that over a billion umbrellas are thrown away every year.
Blunt claims it on their website
Finisterre claims it
Senz ...
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Does glass decompose in one million years?
Is there any authoritative reference to the claim that glass decomposes in one million years? I came across that figure multiple times (for example, 1, 2, 3). They often cite The New Hampshire ...
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Does the average carbon footprint per bitcoin transaction range from 233.4 to 363.5 kg of CO2?
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X says,
According to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, Bitcoin’s energy use in 2018 translates to a carbon footprint of 19.0 to 29.6 ...
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Is photosynthesis 60% efficient?
In this article it is claimed that photosynthesis efficiency could be up to 60%.
The closest process to artificial photosynthesis humans have today is photovoltaic technology, where a solar cell ...
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Do banana peels take 2 years to decompose?
A Google search for "banana peel decompose time" gives the result: 2 years.
This claim is repeated in several reputable sources, such as: Popular Mechanics, The Guardian, and BBC.
However, ...
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Do windmills in freezing climates require power so they don't seize up?
This graphic shared on Facebook, says windmills require active heating in freezing climates when not producing electricity. Its exact text reads,
Germany's millions of solar panels are blanketed in ...
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Feasibility of electric car production given current production levels of various elements and compounds
This infographic (source) shows the elements required for production of 20 million Tesla cars per year, and compares that with current production rates of those elements. Looks like this was in ...
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Publication Bias in Climate Sensitivity Estimates
It is claimed by Rickova and Irsova, in a paper titled "Publication Bias in Measuring Climate Sensitivity" [A], that:
We present a meta-regression analysis of the relation between the ...
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Are there currently more large fires in Africa and South America than the rest of the world?
This has been doing the rounds on Twitter:
NASA fire map shows the absolute failure of mainstream media for not expressing how devasting fires in southern Africa and South America are.
Certainly to ...
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Does 1 acre of hemp produce more oxygen than an equivalent amount (let alone 25x) of forestland? [closed]
I have a friend who likes to promote hemp on Facebook, and one of the posts had this "factoid":
Looks highly doubtful to me but I can't find any real supporting/disputing info.
Is there ...
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Does rolled sod produce 40x as much oxygen as a pine forest?
From an advertisement for turf / rolled sod by a German company:
250 m² Rollrasen produzieren etwa so viel Sauerstoff wie 10.000 m² Kiefernwald oder etwa so viel, wie eine vierköpfige Familie zum ...
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Did British homes increase greenhouse gas emissions by 4% in 2018?
According to this report from The Times,
Greenhouse gas emissions fell in every sector — including transport, industry and energy — in 2018, but emissions from homes went up 4 per cent, government ...
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Do "big-battery" electric vehicles release more CO2 than diesel equivalents over their lifetime?
Autocar report that Mazda have made a surprising claim about electric vehicles with larger batteries (i.e. 95kWh):
Mazda says it will never build a ‘big-battery’ electric car, because it believes ...
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Have 500 million mammals, birds and reptiles died in the 2019 Australian bushfires?
Several news sites have reported that almost 500 million animals* have died in the 2019 Australian bushfires. Example: article in news.com.au (Jan 1st 2020)
Ecologists from the University of Sydney ...
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Does the production of a Tesla battery produce as much CO2 as driving 200,000 km?
Recently I read on Greenpeace's website, that the production of a 100 kWh battery, as in the Tesla Model S, produces as much CO2 as driving a regular car for 200,000 km.
Source: Tesla car ...
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Did the 2018 drought in Europe result in 2019 worldwide grain crop not meeting demand?
An essay on T-Online.de makes the following claim:
Schon ein einziger Dürresommer in Europa 2018 führte dazu, dass die Getreideernte in diesem Jahr weltweit den Bedarf nicht mehr deckt (noch gibt es ...
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Do termites produce 10 times more CO2 than humans?
On October 21 2019 Australian Federal MP Malcolm Roberts posted an image to his Facebook feed claiming termites produce 10 times more CO2 than humans in a year. Is there a factual basis to this?
...
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Is the water used in coal burning power plants "never returned to the environment"?
According to a Duke University press release titled Replacing Coal with Gas or Renewables Saves Billions of Gallons of Water:
Water consumption – the amount of water used by a power plant and never ...
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Are a third of the proteins we consume dependent on synthetic fertilizer?
In July 1997, Vaclav Smil wrote an article in Scientific American on humankind's use of the Nitrogen Cycle (emphasis added):
Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken ...
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Did Finding Nemo encourage people to flush pet fish down the toilet?
A Smithsonian article about goldfish starts out with (emphasis added):
The 2003 Pixar film Finding Nemo popularized the misconception that all drains lead to the ocean, encouraging young fans to ...
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Does having one fewer child reduce my carbon footprint as much as 71+ people going vegan?
In July 2017, ScienceMag reported on a study:
Eating no meat cuts an individual’s carbon footprint by 820 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year [...] by choosing to have one fewer child in ...
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Is food becoming less nutritious because of depletion of soil minerals and nutrients?
Over and over, I have heard and read claims that the soil growing much of the planet's crops is "depleted" and thus our foods do not have sufficient minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients.
Five ...
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Is there more forest in the Northern Hemisphere now than 100 years ago?
In April 19, 2019, there was a public debating event called "Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism" featuring Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and psychoanalytical philosopher Slavoj Žižek as the ...
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Has ExxonMobil sequestered over 40 percent of all captured CO2?
From ExxonMobil's website on carbon capture and storage (CCS):
With a working interest in approximately one-fifth of the world’s total carbon capture capacity, ExxonMobil is a leader in one of the ...
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Is pollution the main cause of Notre Dame Cathedral's deterioration?
A 2017 Time article discussing the crumbling, wearing out, and water damage of France's Notre Dame Cathedral prior to the 2019 fire writes (emphasis added):
Notre Dame, which looms over the capital ...
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Does Germany produce more waste than the US?
According to the German Environment Agency, Germany produced 411 million tons of waste in 2016. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US produced about 260 million US tons (236 ...
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Claim that CO2 is less relevant because it is logarithmic [duplicate]
This video presents and claims that doubling the CO2 levels would only increase the global warming by 1%, whatever that means. Now it seems like the graph contains real data, so what is up with the ...
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Is Bhutan the only carbon neutral/negative country?
Twitter moments recently had a moment about Bhutan being the only carbon neutral country in the world: Why Bhutan Is All Alone in the Carbon-Neutral Nation Club and one tweet in the Twitter moments ...
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Does the Earth only have 60 years of harvests before the top soil is lost?
According to this 2014 Scientific American article by Chris Arsenault
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top ...
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Does carbon dioxide pollute the atmosphere? [closed]
Following the explosive growth in the use of coal for industrial processes, in which the UK from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s was memorably darkened with soot, the public became aware of "pollution"...
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Is only 4% of original forest left in the US?
The 2009 video The Story of Stuff makes several rather incredible claims. For example:
Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.
My gut feeling tells me ...
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Do vegan diets have lower environmental impact? [duplicate]
The Guardian has a 2018 article, Avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on earth, which is commonly brought up by my vegan friends:
Avoiding meat and dairy products ...
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Do "smart meters" bring about any significant savings?
UK television stations are showing multiple commercials such as this one which make claims about making significant savings if you get a smart meter (the linked ad claims fitting a smart meter would ...
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Have we wiped out 60% of vertebrate populations since 1970?
According to The Guardian (reporting an analysis by WWF) humanity stands on the verge of an ecological catastrophe as:
Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, ...
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Is the Taylor oil spill on the scale of Deepwater Horizon?
According to CNN, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill leaked 176.4 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. By comparison, and also according to CNN, they say
According to the [the Department of ...
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Has regulated hunting never led to threatened or endangered wildlife populations?
Hunting advocates and various fish and game bureaus argue that hunting is an effective and needed means to control various species and manage wildlife. One such claim says that "hunting benefits all ...
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