The New Zealand Institute of Physics has its AGM today. I have to write a president's report. This is part of it.

Dream job alert: Terrestrial vertebrate biologist/ecologist (tenure-track) in New Zealand! Join us @ Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Lecturer ≈ US Assistant Prof. NZ lifestyle, weird animals, & great colleagues Apply here: tinyurl.com/mubu7np8

this right here is why New Zealand is going to lose a generation, or more, of scientific talent — and will probably also contribute to Luxon losing his job #nzpol

'"Luxon said the goal was to "brutally commercialise our science system". "I want professors to become millionaires because they're partnering with entrepreneurs and building out businesses...' I can't imagine a statement that less understands why people become scientists.

Just out in @natgeosci.nature.com we use ice sheet modeling to identify & characterize behavioral regimes, & the nature of ice sheet regime shifts. We do this using the Shannon entropy signature of mass loss, and find evidence of bistability under high, but not low, entropy regimes. rdcu.be/fmIe1

a quirk of killing the Marsden and replacing it with an MBIE-run fund is that MBIE caps the number of apps-per-university for their larger grants the Marsden was an even field: any academic could apply. if its replacement has caps, it further restricts our scientists' ability to fund their labs

well that's all i need to know.

"But I am going to insist that the fact we are poor – that we struggle to pay for the basic needs of our society, and with increasing difficulty – is because we have underinvested in the scientific ecosystem over many decades." @nicgaston.bsky.social

So what's the bottom line? What does the science tell us that we know, without a shadow of a doubt, about the future? Not which scenario is "right" -- because none of them are. They are just pictures of possible futures demonstrating the outcome of plausible human choices. This is what we KNOW ⬇

RCP and SSP scenarios are not emission scenarios. I repeat: they are not emission scenarios. They are radiative forcing scenarios. Forcing = human emissions + the response of the climate system to those emissions You can only back out emissions by making assumptions about climate sensitivity.

The companies that drilled these cores decades ago couldn’t have known the scientific treasures inside.

Well that's our first year uni student totally screwed over then - and all first and second year students tbh. Student Loans are a hardship to pay off, leave our young people saddled with debt, make it harder to build capital & create poorer social outcomes www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

I've also written up an analysis on the implications of these findings for MPs: The report must be a wake-up call to politicians. Decisions around cost-sharing and managed retreat may be unpopular, but kicking the can down the road is an abdication of responsibility. newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/07/t...

Good morning! The Climate Change Commission has just released the first National Climate Change Risk Assessment in six years – and I've read the key document. In short: Climate change is here, we're not ready, but there's lots we can do to prepare. For more: newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/07/l...

Castlepoint is looking a bit different after a big storm stripped away a heap of sand and exposed these folded turbidites! I *think* these are the Whakataki formation, ~20 million years old. Overlain by incredible 2.4 million year old limestone of the reef. One of my favourite places in the world 🥰

Time for my yearly update on how we're doing in AoNZ vis-a-vis PhD stipends (poorly). I use the Marsden Fund PhD and Masters stipends as the benchmark because they are at the *top* end of what is offered, btw. 🧪

Decided to update my reckons on the science system reforms this week. Tl;dr they haven’t changed, BUT

Widening Channels and Westerly Winds Together Formed Earth’s Strongest Current The Antarctic Circumpolar Current could develop only once wind patterns aligned with new ocean passages 34 million years ago, a new study suggests. eos.org/articles/wid...

Comment from Auckland University: A science system focused only on outcomes risks becoming a Christmas tree with no roots – pretty to look at, but destined not to last.

Incredible stuff. Personally I would be bold and say that in terms of my views on double tap missile strikes on schools during school hours that kill over 100 school girls, I'm against it.

new zealand's 47-page govt report on science, out today, uses the terms "basic science", "discovery science", and "fundamental science" zero times "curiosity-driven research" appears only in regard to cutting it a foolish report released on April Fool's Day www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/repor...

It's almost as if sustained policymaking with this aim could have steadily reduced our reliance on fossil fuels over the past couple of decades www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

These people have a funny way of saying "Environmentalists have been proved right yet again."

A Bolt From the Blue. We’re on our hands and knees, and still sucking up fossil fuels. Seems like we wouldn’t know an alternative if it bit us on the bum. My Stuff #cartoon today #NZpol #FossilFuels #EnergyCrisis #Climate

The best time to have invested in renewables, walkable cities and transit to avoid the oil crisis shock was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

Ooof: 5m tonnes of CO2 emitted in just 14 days of US war on Iran, analysis finds www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

This is a stumper! www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...

Getting direct measurements of CO2 from Pliocene-aged ice has been a Holy Grail of climate science! A new paper by @jmarkspeterson.bsky.social provides a record of CO2 going back 3million years(!), with (let's say) intriguing implications for anthropogenic climate change doi.org/10.1038/s415... 1/

Super happy for VUW PhD student Hana Ishii to have her first lead author paper published, based on her MSc work at the University of Hokkaido with Osamu Seki and Masanobu Yamamoto. Hana explored Antarctic core-top GDGTs to better understand how distributions change with water mass and temperature.

The irony of the government being taken to court for cutting climate policies that would have significantly reduced NZ’s oil consumption from cars - our biggest user - and freight, just as the country faces an oil shock is ... difficult to ignore www.rnz.co.nz/news/environ...

Can’t say Muslims. Can’t say mosques. Can’t say white supremacism. A coward who is scared of his own base and overpowered by his own bigotry. In the month of Ramadan too. Disgusted.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Honestly if NZ parties don’t front up about their plans for climate & basic infrastructure we should be deeply ashamed -NZ has a sewerage crisis in all our major cities, we have flooding & landslides causing loss of life & critical failure s- thinking we can cap rates & manage this, is crazy

A piece of Glossopteris leaf from the late Permian of Antarctica ~260 million years old 🌳⛏️. Broken but showing nice detail of the veination. Glossopterids are seed plants that were found on all of today's southern continents during the Permian. Happy #FossilFriday! #paleobotany #botany

The second #kakapo chick of the #kakapo2026 breeding season hatched this morning: Hine Taumai-A1-2026 on Ako's nest on Te Kākahu. We transferred the egg from Anchor two nights ago. This is Ako's first-ever chick, which is just a few hours old in this video. #conservation #birds #parrots

Some good news for anyone depressed about the world right now: the kakapo are getting it onnnnn thespinoff.co.nz/science/13-0...

There's a lot of useful numbers in this post.

Crises in the cryosphere keynote session this morning #CLIC2026 - talks by Lauren Vargo, Petra Heil, Nick Golledge, Chris Stokes. Topics ranging from mountain glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice - using images, observations, and models. Great talks - depressing session. 🥶🌊@clic

William Nordhaus received the Nobel Memorial Prize for these flawed economic models, and Bjorn Lomborg built a highly lucrative career on them. They told rich and powerful people what they wanted to hear. While helping to consign us all to catastrophe. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

97% of central govt expenditure was on responding to and recovering from natural disasters, only 3% spent on risk reduction and resilience. Yet…“the Government cannot commit to providing financial support for the business case at this stage”. #nzpol www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

The current reforms of the research system are now on track for another failure. They double down on mistakes that undermine long-term growth, well being & safety. We must ask for accountability and transparency about three key issues as we go into the election year. scientists.org.nz/news/13593197

good riddance to Minister Judith Collins, who orchestrated the present gutting of New Zealand's science funding establishment I've not seen or heard any coverage today that mentions this tiny detail, affecting 100s of millions of public dollars and endangering NZ's entire intellectual community

By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol

4,500t is emitted in New Zealand every half-hour. And the extra emissions if New Zealand reneges on our current Paris Agreement target - 84Mt - would cause 19,000 extra deaths around the world. It's tempting to look away when disasters and deaths are overseas, but sometimes they're here. 3/-

People. are. dying. A negotiator friend used to say that in the Paris Agreement carbon markets negotiations when the debate veered into obstructionism and game-playing. There were sometimes embarrassed laughs: it was hard to equate the bean-counting work being done there to life and death. 1/-

The tragic loss of lives in NZ flooding events this week are climate change deaths. Media and govt are avoiding the topic. Leaders and commentators must acknowledge the emerging reality of ordinary summer rainstorms carrying volumes of water akin to tropical cyclones of previous decades.

I've had some frustrating conversations with council over this. We need an actual long term plan (decades not election cycles) and hard decisions, instead of an expensive and ultimately futile exercise of fixing the same stuff repeatedly and hoping it won't happen again for a bit (spoiler it will).