Dave Vetter Profile picture
Climate journalist; consultant @TheSmithSchool @UniofOxford. Not posting much here now. Find me @ davidrvetter on Bluesky + Threads.
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Nov 19, 2023 11 tweets 2 min read
The Sunday Times today published in its opinion pages what appears to be a variant of Great Replacement theory, the conspiracist fantasy that lies at the heart of several extreme right-wing ideologies🧵 Screengrab of an opinion piece in the Sunday Times by Matthew Syed, titled "Migration is being used to enfeeble us, so it's clear what we have to do" In his piece, Matthew Syed seems to suggest that countries such as China, Iran and North Korea form an "autocratic axis" that "stoke conflict as a geopolitical weapon" in order to force people to flee to western Europe. The plan of these states, he says, is to "enfeeble us".
Sep 10, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
🚨This constant framing of climate action as something that will hurt people is profoundly backward, disingenuous - and lethal. Some thoughts🧵
theguardian.com/politics/2023/… Just and equitable policies are a *necessary condition* for a successful net zero transition. You would only seek to obscure this fact if you felt that you, personally, had something to lose by promoting that which is just and equitable.
Sep 5, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
The air can generally hold around 7% more moisture for every 1C of temperature rise:
Image
Image
Here:
Jun 19, 2023 11 tweets 2 min read
It's unclear why The New Statesman chose to publish this low-rent, bad-faith nonsense from one of America's less-accomplished conservative pundits. But publish it they did. For starters, if I wanted an informed take on the challenges facing working class Britons, I'd not consult a wealthy Yalie lawyer whose dad was the assistant attorney general for Texas. This is, at best, entry-level concern trolling and fantastically dishonest.
Jun 18, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Musk, Rogan and the entire Debate Me Bro community are just this cartoon. A cartoon by @twisteddoodle... Courtesy of @twisteddoodles
Feb 20, 2023 19 tweets 7 min read
At the anti-LTN rally in Oxford, I picked up a copy of British conspiracy newspaper The Light, which brings together many of the beliefs to which many vulnerable people now subscribe. I read it so you don't have to. A thread! 🧵 Cover of "The Light" newspaper, with a story claim Bearing the tagline "the uncensored truth", this issue of The Light runs to 28 pages and is mostly poorly written anti-vax screeds, such as this item about adverse reactions to the Pfizer jab. A headline reading "Latest Pfizer documents: even more
Feb 18, 2023 16 tweets 9 min read
I'm live at the pro-traffic rally in Oxford city centre. Ostensibly a protest against LTNs, or low-traffic neighborhoods, it's an intoxicating mix of far-right conspiracy slogans, antisemitism and really terrible hip-hop. There's a fairly hefty police presence, and turnout occupies about a third of Broad Street at its widest. There's about an equal contingent of confused tourists.
Jan 2, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
Good question from Leon. What's Peter Mandelson's solution to the climate crisis? Let's dive in, shall we? 1) Being Bold is Bad: Keir Starmer is right to never be bold.
Dec 31, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
"A mountain which is nothing but lithium": Zimbabwe has banned all exports of lithium ore - a significant move in the context of global decarbonization, Chinese energy security and African economic development. 🧵 Image Here's Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa talking on Dec 4 about his reasons for drawing up the ban, which came into force Dec 19:
miningzimbabwe.com/watch-nomore-r…
Dec 21, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Hi @Expedia @ExpediaHelp. I've just been informed that the car hire company that failed to provide me with a car is refusing to refund me, and that there's nothing Expedia can do about it. I've already wasted a day on this. Please let me know how you're going to fix this. To recap, I booked a car through Expedia with a hire company called Priceless. I arrived at the Priceless office in Jersey City to discover there is no office; just an Exxon gas station. The gas station attendant was strangely aggressive when I asked where the office was.
Nov 27, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
Disinformation vendor Toby Young says doubts are being raised over record UK temperatures seen in July 2022. "Whose doubts?" you ask. Turns out the doubts are those of Young's very own Salacious Crumb, Chris Morrison, who's written them down in a blog post. As usual, Morrison begins by talking about a topic wholly mysterious to him - this time, air temperatures. He pontificates about what caused the high of 40.3°C seen at RAF Coningsby, citing a plane spotter's website as evidence that jets caused it.
thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/spotting/conin…
Nov 26, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Musk has begun suspending left-leaning accounts and journalists from Twitter, in a purge of those he regards as his political enemies. Meanwhile, he is reinstating the accounts of far-right activists. Musk has now endorsed far-right homophobe, racist and climate skeptic Ron DeSantis for president.
Nov 4, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
Toby Young acolyte and hapless pseudoscience grifter Chris Morrison has asked me to promote his latest squirt of science-illiterate climate denial. Sure, why not? Image Morrison has breathlessly claimed on his blog that two scientists have "revealed" that satellite data show 50% less warming over 50 years across the eastern US. To prove this he's provided 1x link to the extremely normal blog of Roy Spencer.
Nov 2, 2022 17 tweets 8 min read
On Monday, we [the MSEE cohort at @TheSmithSchool, @UniofOxford] met visionary systems thinker @KateRaworth and spoke with her about reimagining what and who the economy is for. Yet you won't hear her thesis in a mainstream economics lecture. 🧵 1/16 In her 2017 book #DoughnutEconomics, Raworth showed that mainstream economic thinking is based on a set of flimsy conceits and assumptions, in particular about GDP growth. These conceits have helped enable and accelerate global ecological and climate breakdown. 2/
Oct 23, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Being a conservative guy is all about telling strangers on the internet how completely terrified you are of nice places that have really good bagels. Whom amongst us dare steppeth foot in Brooklyn Towne Image
Oct 6, 2022 14 tweets 5 min read
"Global warming has largely stopped in its tracks"! Everyone's favourite pseudoscience promoter was back at it again today - except this time, Toby Young deleted his post along with said claim. But why? Join me on a journey into the mists of ... Thursday morning. 🧵 1/ The post linked a Daily Sceptic article by Chris Morrison titled "Sensational New Data Show Decade-Long Cooling Across Europe, Asia and Africa". Huge if true! Ok, that piece was deleted too, but it's available via Wayback Machine 2/
web.archive.org/web/2022100608…
Oct 3, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Update: Pseudoscience blogger Toby Young and colleagues misrepresented the work of Japanese scientists in an attempt to claim that anthropogenic climate change is "fiction". Report author Dr Shinji Matsumura has emailed me, flatly rejecting Young and co's claim. 1/ In a post on pseudoscience blog Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison wrote that Matsumura et al's findings in Greenland "play havoc with the simplistic ‘settled’ science notion" of anthropogenic global warming. 2/
Sep 23, 2022 12 tweets 3 min read
This is deeply concerning: the head of one of Britain's largest unions has branded climate action "bourgeois environmentalism". Here's what this tells me and what I think should be done. 🧵 1/ That a union official can wrongly portray efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change as some sort of middle class affectation indicates that we -climate communicators and researchers- have _absolutely failed_ to do the right work in the right places. 2/
Sep 22, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
"ExxonMobil has done more damage to the world than any other company" - Lord Deben speaking right now at the Oxford World Forum on Enterprise & the Environment #wfee On net zero: "The private sector doesn't have the luxury of prevaricating on our commitments" - Abyd Karmali, Managing Director of Climate Finance for Bank of America speaking at World Forum on Enterprise & the Environment
#wfee
Sep 11, 2022 12 tweets 4 min read
Toby Young wants to "debate me, bro" about climate change. Here are some thoughts on that. 1/ In my view, the primary function of publishing the sort of lazy pseudoscience touted by climate science deniers is to attempt to grant it, via "debate," the same legitimacy as generations of painstakingly compiled evidence from the world's foremost research institutions. 2/
Sep 8, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
On fracking in the UK, here's Prof Stuart Haszeldine, from the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh: “An inconvenient fact – like it or not, the UK has not discovered any good shale for onshore gas production." 1/ There isn’t much gas: "The most important new evidence to emerge since Cuadrilla gave up on its Lancashire boreholes has been to analyse gas production from real rock samples. This shows that the measured gas ... is 15 times less than the original theoretical estimates" 2/