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.

I'm in Toronto and it is hard to express how much an entire nation is willing the Blue Jays to win to spite Trump.

The question isn’t will the seas rise, but what are we going to do about it because even the most optimistic projections tell us that sea levels are going to continue to rise and it increasingly looks like the more pessimistic scenarios are more plausible.

I was interviewed for this great piece about sea level rise. Solid reporting here on the scientific controversy, but I like that Evan ended with my bigger picture quote that a lot of the controversy doesn't really matter because by 2100, we will be talking about a radically different coastline.

Most climate scientists strongly believe our mission is to provide better climate information for decision making. The mantra at every meeting is let’s reduce uncertainty and provide full probability distributions!

It should be obvious to everyone, but for the hedge fund managers at the back, a compact that restricts academic freedom isn't about merit or access. The goal is control and a return to a segregated system where elite institutions solely serve the interests of the wealthy. 1/

My soapbox for today is that physical climate scientists need to be exposed to qualitative methods.

The University: We need to become leaders in climate and sustainability and there is an urgent need to develop climate science courses. Me: Our department has climate in the name and we already offer courses on climate science at every level. The University: Who invited you to this meeting?

This isn't important, but I'm getting tired of academics using "climate" and "sustainability" interchangeably. There is overlap between climate and sustainability work. Conflating the two and not being precise about what you mean creates confusion.

Here are some takeaways from the panel on AI and climate. AI is being used to speed up some research tasks, but this comes with significant costs. Those costs includes the environmental impact, which can be immense and will be paid by future generations. 1/

Panel on AI and climate actually went well? At the end I had the audience and panelists get up and move to one side of the room or the other depending on whether they thought AI was a net harm, neutral or positive for society. That is a real histogram.

I just got a spam email asking me if I'm attending Fruit Attraction this year and I have so many questions.

I am scheduled to moderate an AI and Climate panel tomorrow for climateweek at umich and, remembering that I thought the iPhone would bomb and picked betamax over VHS, I might be the worst choice to moderate any tech related conversation.

Heat kills more people than flooding, but we invest way more money in preventing flooding than cooling people. Strategies like more air conditioning, accessible cooling centers and strategic green space are all effective at reducing mortality and need to be promoted.

A new study point out that polar geo-engineering is both dangerous and unfeasible. This study is getting press, but the article is accompanied by a curious response from a handful of authors that have been strongly advocating for polar geo-engineering. 1/

Alright so I think after the RFK hearing, the DoE climate report, attempt to rescind the EPA endangerment finding and *waves hands* everything, it is clear that we are seeing the most sustained attack on science in my lifetime. And, believe me, I’ve seen some shit.

Lots of misunderstanding about sea level rise and the potential for extreme sea level rise and collapse of ice sheets. 1/

The sea level rise chapter is silly. You can’t infer global sea level rise from a handful of tide gauges in the US because global sea level is *global*. 1/

Columbia now has a vice provost for authoritarian compliance.

I have never used AI nor do I ever intend to because if I actually wanted to be more productive I can stop procrastinating, but where is the fun in that.

I talked to a journalist today about glacial geo-engineering and the thing that stuck to me was how much of the interview kept coming back to the “debate” in the community. Not everything is or should be a debate. 1/

Folks, the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is centuries and overshoot scenarios involve CO2 emissions shooting above the threshold and then dropping below again *this* century.

Lots of talk about overshoot scenarios where we zip past temperature thresholds before coming down and stabilizing. We all agree that there is no remotely plausible technology or mechanism that would suck out enough CO2 to allow our emissions pathway to come back down right?

Once again, I'm begging people to recognize that nearly 84% of students attend "non selective" colleges and universities.

About 84% of students attend colleges that are considered “non selective”. If these dudes really wanted to improve access they would push to make public universities free. These dudes don't want more students attending public colleges. They want universities to keep certain people out.

Tipping culture in the US is out of control. Way too early this morning my dog jumped into bed and offered me a dollar to feed her breakfast.

I hear folks bemoan climate inaction relative to ozone depletion. But I think the better analogy is the battle with Big Tobacco and skirmishes over teaching evolution. The lobbyist and dark money groups learned from those battles and have been furiously applying them to fight climate action.

I often tell people that over 30 years—a typical mortgage—there is about a 3% chance of a 1000 year flood and a 26% change of a 100 year flood. What climate change is doing turning the 1000 year flood into a 100 year flood and that means a pretty high risk of catastrophic happening flooding to you.

🚨🚨The White House is pissed off about this ad so you know what to do, share it everywhere! ICE is disappearing people just because of the color of their skin! No Warrant! No Due Process! This is not who we are as Americans! #MAGAKidnappers want an all white America, fuck that‼️

The blog below gives a good sense of the meteorological part of the problem. And I really don’t want to speculate, but the magnitude and speed of the water surge is something that I usually associate with some type of water infrastructure failure, like a dam or something.

Realizing that the longer I'm in academia the more unhinged my papers are becoming.

A nerdy science 🧵 to give you a break from the news: the first lead-authored paper by @gtsciences.bsky.social PhD candidate Aminat Ambelorun about “The Integrated Ice Sheet Response to Stochastic Calving”, now published in ‪the @igsoc.bsky.social‬ Journal of Glaciology doi.org/10.1017/jog....

Gonna point out again that heat kills more people than flooding, but we spend way more money mitigating flood risk than heat.

Termination of these data products has now been pushed to July 31. NOAA's notice today states that the terminations are to "mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk." Navy told me the program "no longer meets our information technology modernization requirements." www.eenews.net/articles/tru...

I'm starting to add this statement to the acknowledgement section of my papers. "No AI, generative or otherwise, was used in this work and all awkward phrasing, misplaced semi-colons and poorly commented code is solely attributed to the authors discretion and poor taste."

Given the decimation of funding in the US, I'm going to write my next proposal about sea level rise as a romantasy.

Historians talk about the three eras of slavery starting with chattel slavery, then Jim Crow and then mass incarceration. Worth contemplating that instead of 1930s era fascism we are heading into a 4th era of slavery that combines some of the horrors of the previous three.

Unpopular take. University students are already using AI whether we like it or not. We are going to need to shift how we teach to reinforce critical thinking and this is going to mean rethinking some of the more traditional assignments and lecture based teaching styles.

This is pretty much a transcript of every faculty meeting ever.

I guess we are doing geoengineering discourse again. As has been explained over and over and over again, geoengineering will never be a meaningful climate solution because the only way to stop greenhouse gas caused warming is to stop emitting greenhouse gases. Why is this so hard? 1/

I’m no strategist, but if I was the governor I would offer to put them all up in a Best Western in Long Beach so they get to spend all day commuting and ensnarled in LA traffic. This would limit mischief and also serve to demonstrate the need for public transit.