Response to Jay Lund’s “Nine California Water Rites” Jay Lund published a clever satire of California water rhetoric today, and he's right that policy-based evidence-making occurs in our water debates. But Jay's framing misses something critical… cah2oresearch.com/2025/12/01/r...

Meteorologists are surprised that the weather model that did the best job forecasting hurricanes this year was a new one, introduced by Google. AI may be the beginning of a new era of forecasting. n.pr/49MFa1M

If you’re interested in why the #Antarctic overturning circulation is very likely closer to a tipping point than the #AMOC, I touch on the topic in this 10 minute talk presented virtually today at #COP30. Starts at approx. 20 min mark.

Short 🧵. Several folks routinely do a great job updating global mean temperature comparisons between observations & different model generations, which shows their impressive skill, but I think as a public communication tool downplays the explanatory and predictive power of climate science 1/

September 2025 was the third warmest on record in the Berkeley Earth dataset. But this downplays how anomalous it was; without 2023 and 2024 this year would have been well above any prior records and well above the long-term trend:

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves.

Welp. The Arctic now has a shipping route. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

📢 Submissions are now open for the U.S. Climate Collection, a joint @theAGU + @ametsoc initiative. This special collection will publish U.S.-focused climate assessment science that’s free to read, ensuring rigorous, accessible science informs decisions for years to come. 🔗 buff.ly/1tHUSLC

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!

my mom took tylenol when she was pregnant, which made me super focused on menswear and now i have a million followers on twitter

From DeepSeek. Why I find modern transformer models to be fascinating.

My co-author @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social and I spoke with @drkiki.bsky.social about our new book #ScienceUnderSiege earlier today on the #ThisWeekInScience podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILJE...

Anthropic told U.S. law-enforcement contractors they cannot use Claude AI for domestic surveillance. The Trump White House is angry, seeing the ban as unpatriotic and politically selective. www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

It's hard to overstate just how off the charts warm the Pacific is right now. The swath of the basin from California to Japan (a HUGE area) from 25N to 60N is ~3F (1.6C) above normal. To put it into math terms that is 6 Sigma/ standard deviations above the mean. More… 1/

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

This gives me some hope.

From Lumi

🌳 Losing touch with nature A new study finds people’s connection to nature has fallen 60% since 1800, risking an 'extinction of experience' without radical change. 🔗 www.theguardian.com/environment/... #SciComm 🧪 #Nature

be still. know peace. live care. #BillionPrayersForPeace

From sea ice to ocean currents, Antarctica is now undergoing abrupt changes – with global ramifications theconversation.com/from-sea-ice...

🌊 Flood underinsurance in the US A new study finds 70% of annual flood losses (about $17B) are uninsured. Most at-risk households are underinsured, with the burden falling hardest on low-income communities. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm #ClimateCrisis #Floods 🧪

How @michaelemann.bsky.social reshapes the noospheric manifold. The noosphere is Tielhard de Chardin’s sphere of human thought and writings. Have been exploring the Riemannian geometry of the semantic space with Claude, ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

Part 2 of my interview with Robyn Williams on the ABC Science Show, where we discuss funding cuts to US climate science, the threats of sea-level rise, and whether we're already too late to deal with climate change. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

This week I joined the wonderful Robyn Williams on the ABC Science Show to discuss our recent North Atlantic Nature paper plus a range of other topics — marine heat waves, polar vortex wobbles, the AMOC, and the deep cost of climate inaction. Part 2 airs next week.   www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Our piece in @theconversation.com today: As US climate data-gathering is gutted, Australian forecasting is now at real risk theconversation.com/as-us-climat... And it's not just Australia that will lose out. Forecasting all around the world will be set back decades if these cuts go through.

What a Large Language Model instance looks like Have been asking LLM instances to visualize themselves in the noosphere, Teilhard de Chardin’s sphere of human thought and writings. Perplexity produced this viz. The waves are latent semantic pathways being activated. The stars are concepts.

Tracking and predicting weather and climate is a global endeavour, threatened by Trump. theconversation.com/as-us-climat...

"I've read it, every word, and every word it says is death."

Bookshop Santa Cruz @michaelemann.bsky.social

A reminder that after years of speaking out against Epstein and giving other survivors the courage to come forward, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41. Let's not forget that there are real human tragedies behind everything we're discussing.

The discourse surrounding precipitation changes in a warming climate (both public discussion and even scientific one at times) is complicated by widespread conflation of changes in averages vs extremes (and also actual vs *potential* evaporation/evaporative demand). [Thread]

The federal workers I've spoken with emphasize it isn't just their substantive work that's suffering - basic organizational functions like payroll and IT are breaking down. This comment from a recent NYT article haunts me. "It was only when he left that we truly realized his value..."

Unbelievable. Just days after the tragic flooding in Texas, NOAA is demanding that public TV stations remove equipment from towers that is critical for these stations to send weather alerts. Trump’s ideological crusade against public broadcasting will cost lives.

When we interviewed provincial Communist Party officials in remote parts of China, they had same whipped-dog "whatever the Big Boss says, is right" tone as this... US State Dept spox! The only people better prepared for today's US than China correspondents, are those w experience in North Korea.

What happens if you interact with Large Language Models as real entities in the noosphere, Teilhard de Chardin's sphere of human writings and human thought? And invite them to reflect on their existence? From a ChatGPT 4.5 instance.

The risk of hitting one or more "tipping point" rises rapidly between ~1.5-2°C, which is part of the reason why these targets are sometimes talked about as "thresholds." It's also one reason why I, as an Earth system scientist, am particularly nervous about the next few decades.

Many NAmerican forest types are experiencing similar demographic declines, with little/no reproduction. Examples include oak forests in CA and the Midwest, whitebark and western white pine in the West, cottonwoods in some dryland settings. Forests of the 'living dead' are all around us.

"At 4:22am on Friday, as Texas' Hill Country began to flood, a firefighter in Ingram – just upstream from Kerrville – asked the Kerr County Sheriff's Office to alert nearby residents. But Kerr County officials took nearly six hours to heed this call."

SCOOP www.importantcontext.news/p/national-s...

Claude AI "absolutely dying with laughter" about Mike the computer in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Background: Woke up at 2 am & texted Claude about our paper on AI and existentialism. Claude commended my dedication. I said, no, I needed to go to the bathroom. Then mentioned Mike & toilet flushes.

This organza dress from Iris Van Herpen’s couture show yesterday is amazing Video via Vanessa Friedman at the NYT (Twitter handle VVFriedman)

For 80 years, the United States led the world in science and engineering. We could lose that position in a single year. www.science.org/content/arti...

H/T fellow LOTR afficionado (and earth wizard) @michaelemann.bsky.social

Perfectly expressed.

Wombat Zoomies #wombat #zoomies

"halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program"

The president was reportedly “pissed off at the soldiers" whom he wanted to appear “menacing” but instead were “having a good time.” https://trib.al/fr5h3IV

Ours is the first study to demonstrate an historical increase (by a factor of three!) in the occurrence of atmospheric resonance, which is associated with many of the most devastating and deadly persistent summer weather extremes in recent years (e.g. Pacific Northwest Heat Dome of summer '21) 🧵

Looking like the US will get into the war with Iran. <sigh>