10 items

TL;DR

• Public green space treated as food and biodiversity infrastructure: Andernach’s free downtown harvest and Ethiopia’s 1,500-year-old church forests.
• The Maldives’ 2004 “uninhabitable” warning resurfaced three times this period — and the catalog’s own reply thread pushes back on the framing.
• Geologist Ian Plimer drove two skeptic clips a few hours apart — “cooler than Roman times” and “the great CO2 fraud” — both drawing sharp rebuttals.
• A Dutch engineer cuts the other way: Dutch per-capita CO2 may be back to 1956 levels, but real emissions run 40–50% higher once imports count.
• A sarcastic “is the Arctic ice-free yet?” jab undercuts its own sourcing.

Andernach hands out 101 tomato varieties downtown while Ethiopia’s churches guard its last old-growth

A mature apple tree drops 400–500 pounds of fruit a year, and a pear tree can keep producing for 75 — numbers that make the German town of Andernach’s experiment look less like whimsy than infrastructure. According to Give A Shit About Nature, the city filled its town center with 101 tomato varieties for public harvest, then kept going: beans, onions, fruit trees, lettuce, zucchini, berries, and herbs, all city-maintained and free. The idea has clear American precedent. Philadelphia’s Orchard Project has seeded 67 sites with thousands of food-bearing trees since 2007, and Baltimore, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Asheville all run public orchards. The closing line does the rhetorical work: we’ve decided cities should have trees, just not that those trees should feed anyone. A very different force preserves green space in Ethiopia, where destroying any plant or creature on church grounds counts as a sin — a theological conviction the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has held for fifteen centuries, and the reason roughly 35,000 “church forests” survive in a country that has lost about 90% of its original tree cover. No government enforcement, no funding, no outside intervention preserved them; only belief did. The forest islands now shelter endemic species, pollinate nearby crops, and protect watersheds feeding the Nile, with some trees estimated at 1,500 years old. Ecologist Alemayehu Wassie, who has spent his career documenting them, describes stepping inside as “going from hell to heaven.”

→ Edible cities turn public green space into free local food → Ethiopian church forests preserved biodiversity through sacred tradition

The Maldives’ 2004 “uninhabitable” warning got saved three times this week — and the replies bit back

Twenty years after the BBC reportedly warned the Maldives were “soon to be uninhabitable,” the islands are still here — and, @Electroversenet argues, thriving: 12 new airports, 170-plus resorts, over 2 million annual visitors, and no statistically significant sea-level rise since the 1980s per satellite data. The same claim was saved three times this period in near-identical form, which says more about how the tweet circulated than about the Maldives. The framing also runs into pushback inside the catalog’s own discussion thread: the most-liked reply contends the 2004 report actually said the islands could become uninhabitable within a century given that 80% sit under a meter of elevation — a conditional projection, not a failed forecast. Both saved images, notably, are decorative resort stock photos that advance none of the argument.

→ Maldives sea-level doom claim contrasted with decades of growth → Maldives defied 2004 sea-level rise predictions, now thriving → Maldives sea level claims debunked: islands survived 20+ years despite BBC warnings → Maldives defies 2004 BBC warnings: islands remain habitable despite sea level rise fears

Plimer calls human-driven warming “the great CO2 fraud” — but Dutch data says real emissions run 50% higher

Temperature rose first and CO2 followed “only centuries later” — Professor Emeritus Ian Plimer reads that ice-core sequence as inverting cause and effect, the core of what he calls “the great CO2 fraud,” insisting “no one has ever demonstrated that human emissions drive temperature.” In his telling, CO2 is “the gas of life,” credited with a greener planet and record crop yields rather than catastrophe, and “runaway warming” is propaganda built on fear. A second, widely-shared Plimer clip leans the same way, arguing today’s temperatures still sit below those of the Medieval, Roman, and Minoan warm periods and framing modern warming as a natural rebound from the Little Ice Age; replies pushed back hard, noting the Medieval warmth was regional and patchy, not the globally synchronous, CO2-aligned spike we see now. The skeptic mood gets played for laughs by a Dutch user who dryly asks whether the Arctic is ice-free yet, “14 years” on from predictions it would be — though even his own follow-up concedes the “all ice melted in 10 years” claim he’s mocking isn’t actually in the article he cites, thin sourcing worth flagging. Cutting directly against the “it’s overblown” framing, author Martien Visser stresses that while Dutch per-capita CO2 is back to 1956 levels, that figure counts only emissions on Dutch soil; add the outsourced production behind imported goods and the real footprint runs 40–50% higher.

→ Dr. Ian Plimer challenges climate change consensus, calling CO2 a gas of life not pollutant → Modern warming may be largely natural, not a climate crisis → Spot met oude claim dat de Noordpool al ijsvrij zou zijn → Nederlandse CO2-uitstoot per inwoner terug op niveau van 1956