James Grime

speaker

31 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 1 Jul

James Grime’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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More or Less · Examining the numbers behind Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchester Miracle’ · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, there was a lot, but I think this figure about whales and carbon capture stuck out the most, with a headline claiming that whales… …could capture 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 a year.

Sorry, that's Dr Olaf Meinecker.

He studied whales for years.

He actually co-authored a paper with a team from Griffith University in response to the media hailing Wales as the next big thing in fighting climate change.

And the headline of the IMF report is Nature's Solution to Climate Change.

So the IMF report looked at various scientific studies to try and calculate what a whale's worth is in monetary terms in the fight against climate change.

The report concluded that great whales could capture 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon a year.

So, yeah, these are just basically like big whales.

So baleen whales like blue whales and humpbacks and toothed whales like sperm whales.

Now, this paper is based on recovering the whale population from its current 1.3 million back to its pre-whaling number, which is thought to have been around 4 to 5 million.

You done?

Okay.

So we've said the IMF has scaled the whale population up to their pre-whaling size.

Then they assumed that each whale stores 33 tonnes of CO2 through their lifetime and that this carbon vanishes once they die.

No.

Olaf wasn't a fan of this take.

He thinks it overgeneralises because the study is based on one species of whale, not all whales, and it doesn't take into account carbon that whales release through breathing, metabolising, being metabolised and rotting.

So he says overall the amount of carbon stored by whales after they die is negligible in the grand scheme of things.

No, but the main part of the 1.7 billion figure actually comes from something else, phytoplankton.

No, it isn't.

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