The North American #petrostate bubble is so weird. Even the classic Middle Eastern autocratic petrostates don’t construct weird alternative realities to justify fossil fuels, they actively & transparently follow the money wherever it flows, including into the clean energy transition.

Now that the Sept and Oct data are (belatedly) in, it looks like 2025 will be the second warmest year in the record (~80% probability). The last three years are in a class of their own.

No emission peak this year. Emissions up in China, US and EU. Land use change emissions are down.

NEW: Global fossil fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless 'stated policies' are abandoned Contra some terrible news coverage, IEA World Energy Outlook shows coal near peak, oil peaking by 2030 & gas by 2035 (see chart) What's going on? 🧵 + cool charts www.carbonbrief.org/iea-fossil-f...

I think, of all the slides in this report, this is the most important -- it's really worth examining closely. This illustrates why the triumph of electrotechnical is inevitable.

"China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels. " www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

From The Archives: Dick Cheney Vice Presidential Library Opens In Pitch-Dark, Sulfurous Underground Cave https://theonion.com/dick-cheney-vice-presidential-library-opens-in-pitch-da-1819574915/

China Agrees To Purchase 11 U.S. Soybeans

Continents xkcd.com/3159/

Levelized coats of solar in China has reached $27/MWh, that’s 2.7 ¢/kWh

An update from the analysts at WoodMac: yes, as of 2025, solar PV remains the cheapest source of power in the world. And -- bonus! -- it is still getting cheaper with every passing day.

My Sunday update on explosive intensification of #HurricaneMelissa and why I fear a generational disaster is emerging www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

This is actually an astounding statistic. In the 1800s 40 acres was what was seen as necessary to feed a family. The increase in yields from the green revolution is simply astonishing, even though it came with steep environmental costs (pesticide, nitrate pollution, monoculture).

Shielding Chart xkcd.com/3158/

Great NYT article China’s fast growing nucelar industry www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Went to the wake of a former student today. I was on his supervisory committee and he defended his MSc last May. Life is short and we never know what day might be our last. Rest in peace Jack, you will be missed. www.clcurry.com/obituaries/1...

So at the university football game I sat next to a cheerful student from Japan who was telling me how much she liked the "colorful traditional costumes" and the "old folk music" and asking about the "dances," and I realized she was talking about the marching band and that she was, well, spot-on.

Excel spreadsheets that suggest the type of graph you might want to make are not alive. Thank’s

Well that’s not good.

The NPC thing will be these calculator worshiping cultist’s downfall. Not believing that other people are real is a fatal blind spot.

#NovaScotia we she keep an eye on this.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

There is no algorithm for truth.

Also, while it's a bit tangential to the main issue here, I will point out that this represents a formal White House Press Office statement regarding a single individual's personal political contributions over more than a decade that cumulative amount to less than $1,000. 👀

Interesting article. A few impressions: 1) This guy seems like a nightmare supervisor. 2)The cultural revolution caused a the kind break in Chinese society that allowed the kid of a shop keeper to become a leading scientist. 3) GTFO in 2020 was an amazing decision www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

I have a feeling it will all be sane-washed. Like how many histories of WWI start with: ‘The Kaiser was a very dumb man, everyone knew this including the Kaiser but for some reason no could do anything about it’

After years of hype, Chinese investors are convinced that solid-state batteries are here, ready to revolutionize the market. Another huge, world-changing technology that China is kicking our ass on. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Is there a hell of a lot of work to do to keep the planet habitable? Yes. Is there at least a believable pathway for doing this now? Yes, and I'm not sure there was 20 years ago, when I would not have believed accurate forecasts on the rise of solar and electric vehicles.

If Solar keeps growing as it has, you can throw a whole lot of conventional wisdom out the window. thinc.blog/2025/09/14/t...

A reminder that an LLM is just a statistical model of language. And like all statistical models cannot be used outside the data it is tuned to. Language is itself a model of reality, so an LLM is two levels of approximation from reality. Symbols all the way down.

Our finalised paper on flat10MIP is finally up in GMD! This is the experimental protocol which allows for a simple, emissions-driven evaluation of TCRE, ZEC and climate reversibility in CMIP7. Thanks so much to all who ran these simulations as a proof of concept! gmd.copernicus.org/articles/18/...

Good post from Zeke. One thing to note is simple climate emulators like Fair don’t account for carbonate dissolution from the ocean floor, so over 1000 years the CO2 uptake will probably be a bit stronger and you might start to see some cooling.

I'm not sure many folks realize just how persistent the warming from CO2 is. Here is a set of 1000-year climate model runs (using FaIR) simulating one year of CO2 emissions (40 gigatons in 2020); a millennia later the world has not cooled back down!

The US evolving into an absolute monarchy with a ceremonial parliament might be the ultimate irony of the American revolution.

NEW STUDY: How much CO2 can we safely store in geological formations? In a new @nature.com study, we cross-check established academic and industry estimates with various risk factors. We find a prudent geological CO2 storage limit that is about 10x smaller. /1

Sea Level xkcd.com/3135/

Very likely not. That China, the world’s 3rd largest country, has no substantial oil or gas deposits may end up being the luckiest breaks of the 21st century.

Wavefunction Collapse xkcd.com/3134/

This is not going to end well www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/c...

In contrast I find writing out by hand painful and slow. In university (mid 2000s) I was so happy that we got the PowerPoints and I could just listen to lectures. I abandoned doing drafts by hand by grade 8 and typing feels much more natural.

There is no such thing as overcapacity for production of solar panel. Demand for cheap energy is effectively infinite. Exponential growth of solar in Africa is another reminder that solar power will not necessarily replace fossil fuels. www.wired.com/story/africa...

I guess you never know how good you have it. It always felt odd living in other countries knowing I’d likely have been streamed to a none academic track at age 11 in those countries, with parts of Canada being one of the few places where I could have become a scientist.

I cannot think of something better designed to reduce investment confidence of all kinds. Who will risk their capital in this kind of arbitrary environment? “Trump Administration Orders Work Halted on Wind Farm That Is Nearly Built” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/c...

Opinion: @trevormelanson.bsky.social spent a week driving a Chinese-made EV across Iceland. The experience was neither the dream nor the nightmare Chinese EV proponents and detractors have been respectively pushing.

As a person in academia I have spent my adult life around very smart people who often do very stupid things. That Silicon Valley types are getting grifted by fertility clinics promising to maximize their children’s IQ might be peak example of this phenomenon.

How Dry is it in Nova Scotia? Did a quick analysis of the longest established local weather station. It is the driest since summer of 1975. Interestingly dry summers were common in the early 20th century, but have now all but slipped out of living memory. #NovaScotia #AtlanticCanada

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

Furthest in each direction I’ve been in Canada: N: Carmacks YT E: St. John’s Newfoundland W: South Glacier Kluane National Park YT. S: Pearson International Airport, Ontario.