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Recent academic analysis of previously secret documents from major PFAS-producers DuPont and 3M shows that companies knew PFAS were “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, 40 years before the public health community.

The companies used several strategies to influence science and regulation, including “suppressing unfavourable research and distorting public discourse”.

The parallels between the PFAS industry and the denial tactics of the Big Tobacco and fossil fuel industries are clear, and now we can see the legacy of that approach. Today in the Netherlands it is recommended not to eat fruit or vegetables coming from gardens within a one kilometre radius of a DuPont PFAS factory.

Now the regulation of ‘forever chemicals’ is firmly on the EU political agenda, with a proposal for an EU-wide PFAS ban on the manufacture, sale, and use of PFAS. And the industry has wised up.

Desperate to take the heat off their products, PFAS polluters are going out of their way to recognise public concern about ‘forever chemicals’, while simultaneously trying to persuade decision-makers that they are willing to sort it out themselves.

Having established this narrative, the PFAS public relations operation moves into phase two, with a much more ‘business as usual’ approach i.e.: to argue that a producer or user’s own PFAS are in a special class and therefore need special treatment, such as an opt-out to the ban.

Apparently the five or 12 year temporary opt-outs already included in the EU proposal are not enough.

Instead the new game in town is to attach your PFAS product to an EU strategic priority, whether it is the remnants of Ursula von der Leyen’s Green Deal or the EU Chips Act which aims to boost European competitiveness in the field of semiconductors.

The industry’s hyperbolic insistence that PFAS are critical to these sectors denies how regulation can be a key driver to finding sustainable alternatives. After all, replacements for PFAS are being found for various supply chains, and many consumer-focused companies are demanding a comprehensive ban.

Nonetheless, PFAS polluters are largely sticking to these strategies – presenting themselves as reasonable, concerned actors, and then demanding a special opt-out for their products. And following these chemical producers and their corporate clients into battle are a legion of bespoke PFAS lobby groups, PR consultancies, and law firms.

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A warming world could reduce levels of Antarctic sea-ice, but the current dramatic reduction could also be due to local weather conditions or ocean currents, explains Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.

She emphasises it is not just a record being broken - it is being smashed by a long way.

"This is nothing like anything we've seen before in July. It's 10% lower than the previous low, which is huge."

She calls it "another sign that we don't really understand the pace of change".

Scientists believed that global warming would affect Antarctic sea-ice at some point, but until 2015 it bucked the global trend for other oceans, Dr Holmes says.

"You can say that we've fallen off a cliff, but we don't know what's at the bottom of the cliff here," she says.

"I think this has taken us by surprise in terms of the speed of which has happened. It's definitely not the best case scenario that we were looking at - it's closer to the worst case," she says.
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Climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, is unequivocally warming the Earth’s temperature, NASA scientists said.

And El Niño, the natural climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures and influences weather, has only just started in recent months and therefore is not having a huge impact yet on the extreme heat people around the globe are experiencing this summer, said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Melting ice on a small tundra pond in Greenland. Long-lost Greenland ice core suggests potential for disastrous sea level rise “It’s really only just emerged, and so what we’re seeing is not really due to that El Niño,” Schmidt told reporters. “What we’re seeing is the overall warmth pretty much everywhere – particularly in the oceans. … The reason why we think that’s going to continue is because we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Until we stop doing that, temperatures will keep on rising.”
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United Nations Human Rights chief warned us the other day that the growing climate crisis is going to leave us in a bleak dystopian future.

PFUCK.