How do we know humans are causing climate change?

It pains me to have to write a blog on this topic in 2019. I feel that at this point, people who claim they haven’t seen enough evidence that humans are changing the climate are, frankly, just not looking very hard. Plenty of people have covered this topic in the past and there are some great summaries available, at all different levels of scientific detail.

Nevertheless, this is a question I’ve found myself being asked to address repeatedly over the last few weeks and months. So I thought I would just write down my answer here instead.

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An End to Superfluous Salad

I’d like to talk about a problem. It might seem like quite a small problem, but it’s a pervasive one. That problem, is salad.

Yes, that’s right, I said salad. Not high on the list of major world perils, but perhaps it should be. I mean, for starters, it’s everwhere. Lurking in every supermarket-bought sandwich, mocking you from the side of every pub lunch, withering beneath every take-away spring roll. And that sad bit of salad that came with your meal, that you never even for a moment considered eating, has caused a surprising amount of damage to the environment.

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Trading Aliens:
How Politics Helps and Hinders Invasive Species

The spread of non-native species across the globe is a major concern – species out of their natural range can cause millions of pounds of damage, spread diseases to humans and livestock and threaten native wildlife. They are a huge financial burden to control, but almost impossible to eradicate. New invasive species reach foreign lands by hitching a ride on our trade routes, so changes to global trade could have serious implications for our economies and our ecosystems.
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Study tracks young sea turtles in Pacific for first time

What do those cute little baby sea turtles do after their epic sprint to the water? Until very recently, we simply didn’t know. Nobody had been able to study the movement of juvenile sea turtles in natural conditions – they were simply too small and too difficult to track. But a new study reveals for the first time just what the young turtles have been up to in the Pacific ocean – and it shows that they are just as determined and tenacious as they were on land, fighting strong currents to reach their preferred feeding grounds.
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Social Supergene is a Green Beard for Fire Ants

Scientists have found the final missing link answering a long-standing question about how social behaviour evolves. New research shows that a social supergene in fire ants coordinates a host of biological processes and behaviours, that ultimately determine how sociable their colonies are, and who they choose to be their queen.

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Beetles Escape Extinction Because They’re Hard

The brilliant mathematician and biologist JBS Haldane is famously quoted as once having said, “God had an inordinate fondness for beetles”. He was referring to the fact that nearly half of all insect species known are beetles, but over 50 years after his death, scientists are still gaining new insights into their amazing success. A new study reconstructing the beetle family tree suggests that it is the versatility of beetles that has allowed them to survive even the most testing of times.

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Jurassically Inaccurate

The time is finally here. After fourteen years, Spielberg has opened up the Jurassic World for us again, and everybody’s talking about it. In the twenty years since the release of Jurassic Park, we’ve learned a huge amount about how dinosaurs looked, moved, behaved and reproduced. We’ve learned about how their appearance changes through development, about their social behaviour and how they held themselves, and we’ve learned more from their genetics than we ever thought imaginable when Michael Crichton was writing his Jurassic novels.

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