Let’s talk about heat pumps and why adoption in many parts of the US has been slow compared to Europe and elsewhere. 1/

The academic progression: Assistant prof: Everybody judges you and treats you like a junior colleague that doesn’t know anything. Associate prof:Everybody still judges you but you don't get the benefit of the doubt from being early career. Full prof: Everyone is surprised you aren’t dead yet.

There is a tradition of journalists and climate scientists flying into places—and New Orleans—seems to be a favorite— and proclaiming that disaster is looming and everyone must leave. 1/

Told the 13 yr old that the only social media he is allowed is LinkedIn. That ought to put him off social media . . . or he will become a "thought leader" and "motivational speaker" with top 3 three lists of How to Improve your Productivity.

I was asked to teach a large intro climate class and have been behind in my prep all year. I finally read the textbook chapter on climate solutions and the book mentions the “tragedy of the commons” without context about the racist/eugenics connection (or actual research in that area).

This is an interesting, if provocative perspective. I agree with most of what the authors say except I view the paradigm they advocate as more of a “yes and” rather than a replacement for our current understanding. 1/

Guys, they literally wheeled out the tv so we could all watch the launch in class and then we had to conjugate verbs as the teacher quietly cried in the hall. And we had just started to get over some of the shit that went down in The Neverending Story.

There is this whole academic debate going on about the tradeoffs of mitigating methane vs carbon dioxide which has been going on for decades and would be way more compelling if, you know, we were actually doing the mitigating and talking about tradeoffs in actual implementation.

There is a growing body of literature that points to serious learning issues when students use AI. Part of the problem is that students don't retain information, but also students fail to recognize that they have learning and retention issues.

I saw a bumper sticker that said "if you voted for Biden you owe me gas money" and I have so many questions

Just going to put this out there. Where I live the goal of rooftop solar is to add about 5 MW of capacity. Utility scale can add 100s of MW. The data center oracle is building will use 1.4 GW of power.

Contrary to this thread, individual actions are not and have never been in conflict with community centered actions. Buying an EV, installing a heat pump, putting up solar panels are all great . . . if you have the money. Good luck doing any of that if you are a renter.

I think this thread is a bit unfair. Most of these articles are simply not saying individual actions don't matter—just that they're not enough on their own.

Seeing lots of academics justify using AI in writing and I can’t express in words how much I don’t want to be asked to review your AI generated slop.

Everything about this is right, but my experience is that students are equally terrified of their AI future.

Most climate solutions are local, nitty gritty decisions and not international treaties or tech revolutions. I suspect this lack of glamor is how we end up with bonkers shit like “launch mirrors into space to reflect sunlight” or “build a giant wall around the Antarctic ice sheet”.

This year . . . Econ bro: I need to hire econ and finance bros for climate risk. Me: Pretty sure you need a climate scientist or an engineer on your team. Econ bro: Good point. Let's get an AI agent to feed the econ bro climate data because nothing could go wrong with that. Me: Arrghhhhh.

Last year . . . Econ bro: I need to hire an econ or finance bro for climate risk. Me: Umm, I think you need a climate scientist or at least an engineer Econ bro: I need a cost benefit analysis Me: You know engineers invented cost benefit analysis, right?

I am so fucking tired of being told to "pivot" from climate research. The climate didn't stop changing because of an election. The impacts of climate change didn't slow because of a change in funding priorities.

New policy for academic publishing. Authors, reviewers and editors need to disclose AI use under both author contributions and conflicts of interest. Did you use AI to help write your paper or make figures. Disclose.

Techno-optimism around AI reveals the contempt these CEOs and tech bros have for the work most of us do. They think writing, thinking and art can all be automated by AI because *they* can’t do any of those things.

Ok, but can we funnel some of the SSP 8.5 skepticism towards the “overshoot” scenarios which introduce a magic CO2 removing button? Like, what are we doing here? There is no remotely plausible technology that does this and the entire scenario is predicated on “and then something magical happens”.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if a response to a review was filled with really bad puns and references to Star Wars, I’ve got you covered. I just hope the reviewers rise to the occasion because I think we can do something really special here.

I don't want AI. I don't want AI doing my writing. I don't even want AI to help me code. But if I'm going to have AI shoved down my throat, at the very least can we get a copy-paste function that doesn't immediately and always reformat a Word document to look like a ransom note?

The level of racism and transphobia and shear callousness involved in people outside the US looking at what the US government is doing to people of color and trans folks here, some of whom are US citizens, and saying “these people are privileged” is intense

I would like to propose a small corner of academia be kept AI free. A handful of journals could vow to forbid AI in any form by authors, editors and reviewers. Let's go back to old fashioned mail correspondences.

Very technical, but fun preprint up for comments. The idea behind this dates back to a paper and series of correspondences written by John Nye, one of the founders of quantitative glaciology in the 1950s that has recently been revisited by the geophysicist Roger Buck. 1/

Europe’s temptation is to seek a diplomatic solution to Trump’s threat to invade Greenland. This is the wrong approach because it treats a lack of impulse control as a diplomatic problem. Y’all need to assemble a team of preschool and kindergarten teachers and let them have at it.

Frederick Douglas gave a speech 150 years ago today in Ypsilanti about civil rights, masked kidnapping and violent repression of free speech.

This is an example of when this app can be truly wonderful with an expert chiming in with a deep and delightful dive about the history of Mark Twain quotes in response to my inability to track down a source for a pithy statement attributed to Mark Twain about climate.

I'm teaching a 200 person intro climate course and the textbook has a nice quote attributed to Mark Twain "Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get". The problem is that, as far as I can tell, Mark Twain never said those words.

Anyone asserting that professors are indoctrinating students needs to teach a 200+ person intro class. How am I going to find time to indoctrinate students when I spend all day responding to emails with variations like "As stated in class and in the syllabus . . ."

Everyone understands that the Trump administration rhetoric towards Greenland, a sovereign nation, means that the Antarctic Treaty is effective dead right?

As someone who mostly works at the local scale, I find these vague arguments about “supply side” and “demand side” to be counter productive. The reality that most of my climate peers are ignoring is how much the battle for net zero is fought in local zoning meetings and planning commissions. 1/

Just a few things I'd like to say about this @hausfath.bsky.social piece. The first is that every 10th of a degree of heating over 2C raises risks for multiple irreversible catastrophes MORE than every 10th of a degree of heating under 2C. That's why the 2C target exists. It's not random. 🧵

Writing down the unwritten rules is good, but why not put some of the rules directly in the advertisement? We can tell people not to include marital status because of discrimination concerns. Or not to email directly. You can even include templates for cover letters with the honorific you prefer.

There is an increasing emphasis on climate migration to plausible climate havens, like the Great Lakes. I’m skeptical because most research suggests that, with some exceptions, most people stay close by when they move. 1/

By this logic, shouldn't we also require opinion columnists (and presidential candidates) to submit their SAT scores to ensure they are qualified? Of course, the first question we all ask when looking for a plumber is what was your SAT score?

I've been mostly offline for the past few weeks. Woke up this morning and made the mistake of checking in to find out we illegally started a land war and kidnapped the president of Venezuela???????

As a glaciologist, I find it delightful that the fundamental unit of HVAC systems—the ton—is based on the latent energy it takes to melt ice.

Grad student Tanner May has a new fun paper out in the Journal of Glaciology that is kind of magical. The magic trick that Tanner performs is that he manages to estimate thickness of glaciers using only surface elevations and nothing else. This shouldn't work, but it does. Let me tell you why.

Heat pumps are a terrific technology, but I wish more people understood that there are regions where heat pumps don’t make economic sense and this has to change if we are going to electrify and decarbonize.

The strongest letters I've seen are able to put the candidates work in context and explain why your research program is exciting and innovative.

I think we need to have AI disclaimers in our manuscripts so I have helpfully started to include one: No AI, generative or otherwise, was used in this work and all awkward phrasing, misplaced semi-colons and poorly commented code are solely attributed to the authors discretion and poor taste.

Geoengineering will never be a meaningful climate solution because the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is thousands of years and that fact will never stop the quasi-monthly think pieces about how we need to do more "research" on geoengineering.

Funny story. Back in 2022 we won an *Emmy award for a documentary we made about an expedition to Greenland. Due to an elaborate game of paper-rock-scissors, the Emmy award now sits in my office and I like to joke that I want to be introduced as an Emmy award winning climate scientist.

With COP going on (again) and sea level rise back in the headlines, I have been reminded how much the major controversies in glaciology echo previously controversies. For glaciology, these have always revolved around flow, fracture and friction. 1/

I have been vigorously lobbying for a Crime Scene Investigation Antarctica (CSI-Antarctica) for the past decade, but the networks seem strangely uninterested.

Alright let me tell you a story about a prominent scientist in my field and my first conference. This was in the days when most had adopted PowerPoint, but some of the older folks still showed up with actual physical slides to show on one of those old fashioned overhead projectors.