The fiery failure of an electric vehicle led to countless other cars being damaged and caused conditions hostile enough to send nearly two dozen people to the hospital.
The devastating incident unfolded on the morning of Aug. 1 as an electric Mercedes-Benz EQE caught fire while parked in a packed underground garage below an Incheon, South Korea, apartment complex.
The vehicle was not charging or running when it ignited.
According to Korea JoongAng Daily, the fire department received nearly 200 calls while the fire spread and belched black smoke into the sky.
In total, 177 first responders arrived to fight the fire and handle evacuations of the complex.
Despite the massive response, it took emergency crews eight hours to extinguish the blaze completely.
In total, 106 people were rescued as smoke filled the area, and 103 others were evacuated. No deaths were reported, but 21 people were sent to the hospital with injuries sustained during the fire.
Several children and a firefighter were among those hospitalized.
A surveillance video from the garage showed white smoke streaming from the Mercedes. An explosion followed a few seconds later, igniting the blaze.
In an Aug. 5 update, Korea JoongAng Daily reported the electric vehicle contained batteries made by a Chinese firm.
An August 7th article in The New York Times (NYT) titled, Heat Raises Fears of ‘Demise’ for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation claims recent warm ocean temperatures could be catastrophic the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) within 30 years. While there may be a kernel of truth to the temperature data, the claims of the GBR’s demise are false and ignore temperature history and the GBR’s development going back thousands of years.
The article claims:
This generation will probably see the demise of the Great Barrier Reef unless humanity acts with far more urgency to rein in climate change, according to scientists in Australia who released new research on heat in the surrounding ocean.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system in the world and is often called the largest living structure on Earth. The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that recent extreme temperatures in the Coral Sea are at their highest in at least 400 years, as far back as their analysis could reach.
It included modeling that showed what has been driving those extremes: Greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans burning fossil fuels and destroying natural places that store carbon, like forests.
Claims of demise of the GBR due to climate change have been around for decades. Such claims usually invoke sea level rise (SLR), increasing temperature, or both. However, the truth of the matter is that corals thrive in warmer waters, and they deal with SLR effortlessly.
Australia’s GBR began forming in the early Holocene after 9,000 years ago, and the Holocene maximum sea level occurred around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. The GBR’s Holocene evolution has been influenced by several factors, including sea level rise, tectonic deformation, and accretion rates.
Sea levels rose rapidly then, flooding the continental shelf by about 6–7 meters per thousand years until around 7,000 years ago. The coral kept up with the rate of SLR which is significantly faster than what is measured today. NASA satellite instruments, with readings dating back to 1993, show global sea level rising at a pace of merely 1.2 inches per decade, or 120 inches (3 meters per thousand years)
Coral evidence suggests that ocean temperatures at Heron Reef in the GBR were cooler than present around 5,200 and 7,000 years ago. However, other evidence suggests that a warm period known as the mid-Holocene Thermal Maximum occurred between 6,000 and 6,800 years ago, when the tropical ocean surface was about 1°C warmer than today. Figure1 below shows just how temperatures then compare with today.
Figure1: Temperature reconstruction from present day to 11,300 years ago showing the warmer than today period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum. Source: S.A. Marcott et al., Science, A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years, 8 Mar 2013.
As discussed in Climate at a Glance – Coral Reefs, coral has existed continuously for the past 60 million years, thriving amid and expanding their range in temperatures and carbon dioxide levels significantly higher than what the Earth is experiencing today, or any levels reasonably expected in the future. The primary reasons for coral bleaching events, which vary significantly depending on the time and location, include sediment and chemical pollution from nearby coastal lands, chemicals found in sunscreen (oxybenzone), fertilizer and nitrogen loading from agriculture, and cold temperature events. The argument that corals are being decimated by man-created carbon dioxide emissions is easily disproven by the available data.
Clearly corals in the GBR have survived temperatures and sea level situations far greater than what is being experienced today. The study referenced by the NYT article uses computer models to project the future of the GBR, but completely ignores the temperature and sea level history of the past.
Figure 2 – Data from AIMS and Dr. Peter Ridd show the GRB reached a record high coverage in 2024.
To be clear, in recent decades, the GBR’s extent was lower, much lower, than at present when ocean temperatures were cooler, and it has grown considerably in the aftermath of bleaching events.
The worries of GBR demise don’t reflect actual data, the GBR’s history, and present experience at the reef. The threats exist only in the models, in the minds of the researchers, and the minds of the so-called journalists that push the idea. There is no evidence that climate change is worsening the health of the GBR. The resilience of the GBR serves as a reminder that nature is more adaptable and robust than we often assume. It was irresponsible for the NYT to publish this article, rife as it is with inaccuracies and misleading claims. But that seems to be par for the course in the media these days, ignoring history, context, and data to dogmatically push the climate catastrophe narrative.
Over at Whatsup, Willis has been telling porkies again:
“With Roger Tallbloke, I’m banned from commenting on his site, Tallbloke’s Talkshop.”
This is a lie. Willis last came here to gnaw the same old bone in 2019 on the thread ‘Crying Cowboy’s Censorship Complaint Codswallop’. I told him I hoped he wouldn’t make frequent use of the privilege.
Prior to that, he banned himself, see his comment in the headline screenshot.
“It started with him banning Joel Shore from his site for saying that N&Z’s gravity analysis violated the conservation of energy. From a post during that time, Roger’s exact words to Joel were:
… you’re not posting here unless and until you apologise to Nikolov and Zeller for spreading misinformation about conservation of energy in their theory all over the blogosphere and failing to correct it.
“Then, in a separate incident, I put up an actual proof that N&Z’s claim violated conservation of energy. I’m sure that didn’t endear me to N&Z. In the comments to that post, Rog got angry at me and banned me. I guess I’m double-banned.
This is another lie. You can see my comment in its entirety below.
“So me commenting on an N&Z post hosted at Tallbloke’s Talkshop … well … let me just say there are forces at play and leave it at that.”
Here’s my 2012 response to the attack on Nikolov and Zeller and me that Willis made on the thread “A matter of some gravity” he refers to above. WIllis censored this comment. Whatsup also banned Ned and Karl. Some time later, he realised that if he censored my comment, he couldn’t then whine about me ‘censoring’ Joel Shore, a motormouth who never backed his thread-enveloping verbal diarrhea with evidence, and who left the climate debate over a decade ago after getting his sorry arse handed to him. So after the debate had moved on, he reinstated it. Here it is for the record, in case Willis decides to censor it again:
Apologies for the long comment, there’s quite a lot to deal with here. Nikolov and Zeller’s extended conference poster ‘The Unified Theory of Climate’ was originally posted at the Talkshop a day before it was posted here at WUWT. On my website Willis says of it: ” I find the work of Nikolov and Jelbring to be laughable. I cannot even understand Nikolov. I invited him to state the core of his theory in a few sentences, since his writing is unintelligible….. He talks about atmospheric sponges and bowls, I can’t make sense of it…..As a result, I can’t tell if Nikolov’s theory violates the laws of thermodynamics.” I ran a word search on the text but could not find any references to “atmospheric sponges and bowls”. Willis often complains that people argue against what they think he said rather than directly quoting him. I think he should follow his own advice and extend the same courtesy to others. I also republished Hans Jelbring’s 2003 E&E paper ‘The Greenhouse Effect as a function of atmospheric Mass’ on which Hans Jelbring was kind enough to engage with Talkshop contributors. Willis didn’t place any comment on that thread but said elsewhere on my website: “Here’s the short proof, by contradiction. Jelbring proposes that a perfectly transparent, GHG-free atmosphere will raise the temperature of a planet’s surface well above the S-B temperature obtained from the average impinging solar radiation. (This is the situation of the Earth, for example.) But if that is so, and the surface is somehow warmed above the S-B temperature, and the atmosphere is transparent, then the surface must radiate more energy to space than it is receiving, which is clearly impossible. Q. E. D…..I said the same thing to his face—his theory breaks the laws of thermodynamics.” Once again Wiillis is doing what he tells other people not to do; arguing about what he thinks Dr Jelbring said instead of quoting him: Here is a brief excerpt from the beginning of section 2.1 where Hans Jelbring sets up the definitions for the model Earth in his 2003 paper. It is sufficient to dismiss Willis’ ‘proof’: “A simplified model of Earth will be considered. The model planet does not rotate. It neither receives solar radiation nor emits infrared radiation into space.” Hans Jelbring tells me he has never met Willis face to face. To help resolve this apparent contradiction Willis could tell us when and where he “said the same thing to his face—his theory breaks the laws of thermodynamics.” Perhaps Willis is speaking figuratively, and is referring to an interaction with Hans Jelbring on the old CS email list? Before banning himself from the Talkshop because I ‘banned Joel Shore’ Willis should have engaged directly with Hans Jelbring on the same page where the entire E&E paper is published. That would have been the more scientific (and courteous) thing to do in my opinion. Willis complains that I am preventing Joel Shore from expressing his scientific beliefs. This is incorrect. I won’t let Joel engage in the various very active and nicely undisrupted threads we have running at the moment but instead offered him a guest post where he could set out his scientific position formally on a thread of his own. It’s a strange kind of censorship which offers the ‘victim’ the microphone and points the way to the stage. According to Willis: “Joel may have a hundred reasons not to want to invest the time and effort in a guest post.” Joel himself says: “I’m not particularly interested in doing a guest post. I have my hands full just trying to respond to all the misguided people over at WUWT and, with classes starting again tomorrow, I won’t be able to allow this time sink to continue for too much longer.” Considering the much bigger loudhailer Joel has here at the biggest climate site in the world, it’s understandable why he would think it more important to spend his time here rather than on a website which gets around 1/20 of the traffic WUWT does. The benefit to the Talkshop is that it enables its contributors to continue calmly discussing the merits and demerits of the properly set out scientific positions in the papers kindly provided by Nikolov and Zeller Hans Jelbring Gerlich and Tscheuschner R.P Sheehan Johann Josef Loschmidt Coombs and Laue Roman et al. Velasco et al. William Gilbert and Dean Brooks Cheers TB.
Iowa Climate Science Education 