Played a little hooky from #AGU25

Under current climate policies, 79 per cent of the world’s glaciers will disappear by 2100, endangering the water supply for 2 billion people and raising sea levels dramatically

Efforts by the USACE and facilitated by accurate NWS forecasts appear to have significantly reduced impacts from record flooding on the Skagit River in WA last week. A look at how that worked and why we have to protect the foundations of our fed science/water agencies. tinyurl.com/bdebat4m

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

The 2025 #Arctic Report Card is out! #AGU25 🧪🌊🦑🐻‍❄️ Check out the executive summary by the editors M.L. Drunkenmiller, R.L. Thoman, and T.A. Moon. @alaskawx.bsky.social arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/...

WOW. @haleaziz.bsky.social with a new scoop: ICE now gets a running list of every person who is going to be taking a domestic flight inside the United States from the TSA and runs it through their database looking for targets. This explains the Babson College student's arrest.

It's not just social media. Looks like visitors to the US from Europe and other countries that are part of the visa waiver program will have to submit an enormous amount of data about themselves and their families, including DNA, if proposed new rules are accepted

We've gotten absolutely pummeled with rain in the PNW, but all that water is running right out again (through houses and farms and towns...). What we really need is snow, to hold the moisture in place and get us through our dry summers, but that will get more and more rare as the climate warms.

Millions of gallons of toxic waste dumped and oil spilled in the rainforest, and now restitution is ordered to be paid... to the oil company insideclimatenews.org/news/1012202...

A question for the biologists—with our western Washington streams and rivers turned into intense firehoses of water right now, what will happen to the salmon eggs that were just laid? To all the fish and invertebrates etc? Seems like there's very little way to hide from getting scoured right out.

I think about this quote from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social a lot: “The idea that some people may freely poison others is one of the most astonishing but least contested aspects of modern life.”

Writers and editors, don't forget to nominate work for The Best American Science and Nature Writing! Deadline is 12/20 (for anything published by then). Info and submission form here: jaimegreen.net/basn

Impacts of an industrial deep-sea mining trial on macrofaunal biodiversity www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy Thanksgiving! Please enjoy this recipe for whiskey cake that I found in an otherwise normal community cookbook I found at my mother-in-law's house

Flashes of an overextended Milo Minderbinder trying to get everybody to eat cotton dipped in chocolate

when its definitely not a hostage situation

The Trump Administration seems to be handpicking deportees to test a new approach to mass deportation: sending people to nations where they had no ties, and to places that were not safe, and where they are subject to indefinite detention abroad. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/YAjCKA

I've brought up this wildly fascinating Larissa MacFarquhar article to basically every person I've spent time with during the past month. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

NEW: ICE has finally released post-shutdown detention data. The latest data reveals that a full 40%(!) of people arrested in the interior and held in ICE detention have no criminal record; no criminal charges or prior convictions. That is up from just 4% when Trump took office.

I wrote this week's Screenland column about the houses collapsing in the Outer Banks, an unusually visible example of a problem--the potentially rapid collapse of assets in a quickly changing world--that's much bigger www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/m...

You are infinitely closer to struggling than you ever will be to billionaires

Kind of wild that while food assistance was withheld from millions of families, one Trump-supporting billionaire (Ellison) saw his net worth grow more this year than the entire SNAP budget. And the YTD gains of the other four richest men would’ve fully covered salaries for all 2M federal employees.

I've posted before about how much I enjoy the random and detailed pedantry of fact-checking. Just off a call that required watching YouTube clips to parse the correctness of a simile involving the way Imperial Walkers fall over in Star Wars.

During his campaign, Trump (& RFK) promised to rein in the use of dangerous pesticides, but the EPA has loosened oversight and is accelerating pesticide approvals. Notably, the top 4 positions in the new Trump EPA’s chemical safety office are held by former pesticide and chemical industry lobbyists

you just haven't seen any of them for the last 15 years because they go to another school

Remembering this 2022 study that found that universal health care in the US could have saved 330,000 lives in the early days of covid. It could also have saved us $105 billion -- ON TOP of the annual $438 billion we could save in non-pandemic years. www.scientificamerican.com/article/univ...

“We’re going to help Americans with their ACA premiums by sending everyone a paper bag of ripe bananas.”

Where we are in the climate crisis: Amazonian dolphins dying in hot tub lakes. www.cbsnews.com/news/dolphin...

He beat the wrap, they must be reuben those charges www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000. More than 260,000 will be children. Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

When you’re riding public transit you realize that what’s good for everybody is also good for you. If the bus runs faster, if the train is cleaner, if the AC works, we all benefit when you’re driving a car, every other car on the road is your personal enemy

Pennsylvania voted for Trump in 2 of the last 3 presidential elections, we have a Republican senator, and a closely divided state legislature. But sure, by all means call us a blue state.

Just reported a cool coyote encounter I had recently on Seattle's urban carnivore citizen science tool, and I have... questions for the people who saw a bear in Denny Triangle and a mountain lion in Montlake. carnivorespotter.org/urban-carniv...

"This spring, Binance took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion. Trump granted Zhao a presidential pardon last week..." www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

"These notes describe orphan wells spewing toxic water near homes or into streams, leaving scars of salt residue. A homeowner reported that his grandchildren often play near a purging well. Ranchers have lost calves, which, drawn to the salty water, died after drinking it."

I spent much of Tuesday talking to some of the top hurricane experts in the country about how climate change helped turn Hurricane Melissa into such a beast of a storm. Here's what they told me: www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/c...

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Definitely not endorsing any prankery but someone I know swiped a bunch of those huge inflatable holiday decorations in the dead of night... and then set them all back up, but every yard now had a different one than it started with.

“For us, it was quite clear that climate change does impact our basic human rights." For the NYT Magazine's climate issue, I wrote about a group of law students from the South Pacific whose clarity and tenacity helped reshape international law gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/m...

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Meteorologists are sounding the alarm on Hurricane Melissa: "It makes you wonder if this is going to become a new normal going forward when we get storms like this." from @mollytaft.com

I knew the gov was putting insane banner notices related to the shutdown on official pages but this language is beyond. What the actual

Have you noticed plane turbulence is getting worse? It’s not your imagination. It’s climate change.

I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day

Please can we just have some subtle metaphors for once

Retired intelligence analysts confirm what the political scientists are telling us — and what the world outside is telling us — the goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"These days, your money belongs to Donald Trump, and he does whatever he wants with it. The White House belongs to Trump, and he does whatever he wants with it. That’s what kings do. And it's part of the broader breakdown of democracy." — @snipy.bsky.social

We can all understand why the military being paid off by anonymous randos is bad, yes?

Periodic reminder that The Open Notebook is a public good and an amazing resource for people interested in learning to write about science

Ed Luce watching democracy die in the United States of America