In 2017, Criselda Vasquez painted this portrait of her parents and titled it "The New American Gothic." Last month, her father, the man in this portrait, was abducted by ICE after being in the US for 30+ years. The family is now struggling with bills. A GoFundMe has been started: gofund.me/456d8a193

the trump administration assertion that it is “unlawful” for private organizations to pursue diversity is nonsense. what this is, once again, is an effort to roll back desegregation that the ABA has surrendered to.

Elon Musk cut aid that researchers estimate will kill 14 million people, mostly children, mostly Black and brown. Then he found time to complain about a Black woman in a movie. The existence of non-white people seems to be his problem.

Another for instance! Down in Queensland, Australia, fossil gas used to provide all the peak power. Then batteries start nibbling at it. Then chomping on it. And now they've basically eaten it all up. No more gas. Look at this graphic! Glorious. reneweconomy.com.au/big-batterie...

Only possible silver lining to this is if it gets NSF/OMB to stop dismantling NCAR.

France is mandating solar panels on every large commercial car park in the country — turning millions of square metres of idle asphalt into one of Europe's most productive clean energy assets. I have been mentioning this for months - they are shooting up on all the supermarket car parks.

This should be applied to proposals too.

This seems sub-optimal.

Art x Climate is an integral part of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), restored by Climate.us. #sciart One of the featured artworks is “Concrete Jungle” by Jessica Beshears. Year and Medium: 2023, digital collage

This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in U.S. history. I know we’re numb to all of this but this is a seven-alarm fire. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/b...

Brooklyn tomorrow! www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cbh...

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

IMO, if you want to protect "the children," you should do something about the two leading causes of death for US children. (Guess which party works relentlessly to prevent any progress on this score.)

📡 The NAS Earth Science Decadal Survey 2028–2037 (ESAS 2028) is underway! On a compressed 2-year timeline, the Call for Experts is now live: volunteer or nominate someone for the Steering Committee. Also, keep an eye out: an RFI for White Papers drops next week. 🔗 tinyurl.com/4afyw82e

Atmospheric CO₂ of 340 ppm

This hit me so hard this week.

This is going to be a classic example of a basically good idea that will victim to the total lack of trust in the folks implementing it & a hefty dose of conspiracy theorizing. The lesson is that politicians need to maintain trust to do anything useful, not the other way round.

At this point, solving climate change is cheaper than not solving it -- not only on some grand 50 year time horizon, but tomorrow, today, immediately. Soving climate change *is* affordability. Maybe Dems should tell voters about that.

Leaving aside campaigning in red states, the argument that Democrats should drop climate is wrong. 1) It is dumb to drop a platform that the majority support & that your opponent is absolutely terrible on. 2) We do need to get to net zero now in order to halt heating at a relatively safe level. 🧵

A web page just told me everything it learned about me without asking. It knew my city, my device, my GPU, and how long I hesitated before scrolling. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

Another incredible #climatejob opportunity with the best team in climate policy and politics! We are looking for a passionate, strategic Michigan State lead! Remote in MI with frequent travel to Lansing! Join us!

Last week the bioGraphic team learned that, owing to an ongoing financial deficit, the California Academy of Sciences—where we’ve made our home for the past decade—will no longer be able to provide us with financial support, including support we were expecting this year.

Spiralling global temperatures (1850-2026) It is exactly 10 years since I first put this animated graphic of changes in global temperature online. #ClimateSpiral It instantly went viral. People watched it over and over again. It still offers the power to shock a decade on.

Are high gas prices really the only reason to be anxious?

OK, so I was at the first court hearing over the NCAR lawsuit this morning in Denver. I, uh, am not a legal reporter so bear with me as I try to recap a few things. You can view all the court documents here: www.courtlistener.com/docket/72496...

Big news out of #EGU26 by @elisecutts.bsky.social for @science.org: Measures of the record-setting 1.2-million-year-old continuous ice core drilled by Beyond EPICA show that CO2 swings likely did help cause the mysterious transition to 100,000-year-long ice ages.

Texas Tech is starting to reveal which texts are banned under its new prohibition against "Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" research. Among them are six books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Galatians. 🧵 of other banned works. Yes, this is real.

I'm record saying that every economic bubble is terrible, but some bubbles *do* leave behind a salvageable productive residue while others leave behind nothing but ashes; indeed, this is the thesis of my next book, *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* us.macmillan.com/books/978037... 1/

Both the Nenana Ice Classic and the Yukon River at Dawson City are done for the year - May 4th and 5th respectively - a little later than trend would suggest (in line with very cold + snowy winter), but long term trends are still clear.

I have seen a bunch of media outlets level the playing field with this DV murder suicide. Four people found dead | four people lost | four people died. What did you say? How about three people were murdered and one person did the murdering. Why aren’t they naming that? 3/

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

The conservative justices on the Supreme Court arguing that you can separate race and partisanship got me thinking about these maps. starkeycomics.com/2021/06/11/h...

“The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote.” hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

Some folks are (purportedly) continually surprised that pretty much anywhere that people live is warming faster than the global mean. It's not that tricky, since we mostly don't live in the ocean.

Makary is blocking a treatment for incurable melanoma bc the multiple trials its undergone were not RCTs. The drug is intended for patients for whom other cancer therapies have not worked. An RCT would require a control group to continue to use chemotherapy that previously had not worked for them.

You can get to a high-warming world without high emissions . That's the part of this week's "RCP 8.5 is implausible" discussion that's getting missed. A short thread on why the relief is premature 🧵

The single most defining thing Elon Musk has ever done is killing untold numbers of people by having DOGE illegally raid and disband USAID. Not rickets, not cars, not even the CSAMbot on X. It’s this, and so many media pundits just choose to unsee it.

NASA just dropped more than 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. It'll take me a few days to go through them all, but so far it's one stunner after another. Link: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos... Credit: NASA/Artemis II Crew (h/t @jonostrower.com)

AI produces MORE editorial labor, not less. “[To weed out slop] the journal doubled its deputy editors from 6 to 11 & nearly doubled its sr editors from roughly 30 to 60. All of this is volunteer labor, unpaid academics donating time to maintain scientific quality.“ www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

We must stand in solidarity with Jews being attacked by antisemitic criminals and terrorists: no ifs or buts. We must stand in solidarity with Palestinians being murdered by the Israeli government: no ifs or buts. These are not contradictory positions. They are consistent ones. 🧵1/5

A good read on the hallmarks of pseudoscience 🚩Oversimplification of complex topics 🚩Science washing of ancient beliefs 🚩Biased handling of positive & negative results 🚩Vague claims using ambiguous language 🚩Logical fallacies, i.e., "it is natural therefore is safe" 🧪 www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

About to start the #GreatSaunter today in #nyc shorewalkers.org/great-saunter/ It’s a 32-mile hike along the shoreline of #Manhattan #ShoreWalkers It’s meant to highlight the triumphs — and holes — in our progress to give every community access to the waterfront. See you around town!

Comrade Trump continues his streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech: pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/p... 1/

"A broken world is not the same as a finished one. "The fact that you cannot do everything does not release you from the sacred work of doing something." -- Sharon McMahon's message to students. Her speech was canceled by Utah Valley Univ, site of the Kirk murder www.sltrib.com/opinion/comm...

Funny(ish) story. I saw Venter at an event at Popular Mechanics maybe 15 years ago? He was getting an award and was a complete dick about it. Everyone else was stupid, he was unique, and after the HGP he (alone) was going to revolutionize biology.

NEW – Traditional models still 'outperform AI' for extreme weather forecasts | @ayeshatandon.carbonbrief.org Read here: buff.ly/RXkbmGe

My university administrators censored a student who put “environmental justice” and “communities disproportionately affected by climate change” on an Earth Day flyer. I really have no words to express my anger and disappointment anymore

Hold on. We the taxpayers are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?

NEW: Falling fossil everywhere: For the first time in 2025, fossil electricity generation fell in EVERY OECD country, compared to its peak. Solar and wind are helping the power sector to transition away from fossil fuels #TAFF