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.

Gonna point out the obvious. When protestor are protesting law enforcement, the response of law enforcement is a counter protest.

Ono was a disappointment who exhibited little leadership during his short layover at the University of Michigan. But these contracts that strip University presidents of power are poison. We need leaders that are empowered to be independent of their boards.

This administration’s budget guts science and y'all need to understand that they didn’t suddenly decide that cancer researcher, mathematicians and astronomers are too woke. No, the budget reflects the view that universities, education and knowledge are threats.

I don’t want AI to help me write, plan my kids party or do creative things that I enjoy. I want it to empty the dishwasher, do my laundry and put away clothes so I have time to do the other things.

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Was told today that we couldn't accept a new NASA award because the terms require that we certify that we do not operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and I don't know if I should be happy or sad.

I talk to a lot of communities about climate change planning. Climate scientists and especially glaciologists talk a lot what will happen in 2100 and beyond. But the time scales that I have found most relevant are what I like to the “Back to the Future” and “Wonder Years” time scales. Why? 1/

Everyone needs to understand that dismantling NSF will have devastating long term consequences in our competitiveness and innovation in science, technology and beyond. 1/

It's Earth 🌎 day so let's talk about federal funding for research and education and how unprecedented the current defenestration of federal funding is. 1/

This whole issue is so transparently about transphobia and not about kids because the obvious solution to kids not having opportunities to play sports is providing more opportunities for kids to play sports and not making it harder to pee.

Would really like to see Space-X go through the competitive grant process we go through to get funding from NASA or NSF. I regularly return unspent funds at the end of a contract or grant. How about you Space-X?

This article is absolutely infuriating. The entire thing is based on vibes with no evidence and conflates things like not letting racists say racist shit on campus with dismantling all of higher ed and disappearing people like they are the same thing.

Academia loves to put scholars and even institutions in competition against each other and we are even seeing this now where institutions are fighting to claim the mantle of "defender of academia" like it is a competition when we would all be better off if we coordinated action together.

Alright, this might be controversial, but my experience is that hoping for some massive climate legislation is a recipe for disappointment. What if climate was factored into *all* legislation and policies even if climate is subtext? For example, take the Great Lakes Compact. 1/

Fun little story. Google is one of the leaders in AI and years ago as they switched to AI to help identify spam email, they suddenly decided that all emails from my wife were spam. This was not great for my marriage, but also illustrates that AI sucks at corner cases and bad input.

I guess we have to talk about this again because dismantling and defunding NOAA is about to destroy far more than climate science. NOAA is, of course, involved in weather forecasts and weather modeling and this is important for a lot of industries, but it goes much deeper than that.

Gonna point out that executive orders aren't laws and don't have the force of laws. Think of them like when your department chair asks you to serve on a committee with the biggest asshole in your department. You can just say no and it might create some friction but nobody is going to arrest you.

Some context. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFLD), a branch of NOAA responsible for developing climate and weather models, is located on the Princeton campus with cooperative agreements with Princeton dating back to the 60s. This is more than a hit to a research program.

I was offline for a few days and my first reaction to all of the dire wolf headlines was what has RFK done now?

For crying out loud, we are now calling geoengineering “climate repair”. 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. 1/n

People are going to die because they can't afford to run their AC in the summer with more expensive energy. More people are going to be unhoused and face food insecurity because of tariffs. Wish economists focused more on that than the inconvenience of not replacing my 20 year old refrigerator.

If only we had scholars and a rich literature devoted to understanding how to ethically work with communities to co-produce knowledge but alas . . .