sunstein nudging: ew spectral nudging: yes

This is a quick summary of the latest CMIP process. It is a complex beast and a consensus project so there are always things that you’ll agree with and those that you might not. 1/

This is fucking insanity www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

just checked on a failure to adapt climate lawsuit against Shell I found interesting that was filed in 2017... 9 years in we are on a denial of defendants' motion for reconsideration of the denial of their motion for partial summary judgment 🫠

Opinion: “As we plummet toward a loss of data, expertise, and innovation, we face a future that would not only further damage the United States' reputation for scientific excellence and transparency but also cripple the global sea level research community.” eos.org/opinions/the...

other scientists recognize that adaptation science is a thing challenge

If you're a reviewer or an editor for a scientific journal, I urge you to not hop on the "RCP8.5 is dead" train. There are now editors that reject RCP8.5 but are ok with 1pctCO2. 🤯 Both are what-if scenarios, useful to science. Don't let politics influence what we can research and publish! 1/3

really can't imagine what this faculty meeting was like

Also no investor can sue anyway but SpaceX formally waives the right to claim corporate opportunities. Meaning, nothing stops him from setting up another private company and building things there. Like, when he said Tesla was all about AI and then built AI in a separate private company.

Walmart warns of petrol rationing as Iran war hits customers’ wallets ft.trib.al/CCKe6Zz

Yes we can all laugh at SpaceX's incentive plan which requires Musk to establish a human colony on Mars to earn shares, but he gets them now, and can vote them now. They just don't "vest" until he establishes the colony. He gets dividends and can pledge them for loans, w/ "board approval"

People have asked me what I think, so... Scenarios, schmenarios… www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...

Fresh preprint from @savannahcox.bsky.social @johnhoganmorris.bsky.social @zacjtaylor.bsky.social on how "no, you *really* need to convince Moody's" is a climate adaptation strategy, due to their influence across bonds and muni finance, central banking, and insurance and real estate markets.

Did not expect to see this at oilprice.com but the economics are very clear at this point. "But where do renewables fit in? They are doing to gas what gas did to coal: they provide the same product (electricity) at a much cheaper price (and obviously in a more environmentally benign fashion)."

@sarahinscience.bsky.social on undermining CSIRO's ACCESS(AustralianCommunity Climate& Earth System Simulator) model "To put it as bluntly as I can, this is serious shit. If we don't hv an Australian climate model, we are shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to adapting to climate change."

I’m all in favor of scientists making grounded criticisms of one another’s work, but everyone involved in this debate needs to ask themselves: am I sharing my views in a way that undermines external confidence in my field, and is that necessary to make my technical point?

man if you are a scientist whose thing is working with averages I would just really love it if you talked to an adaptation scientist colleague before you call a certain scenario "irrelevant" to the press

If you've ever thought to yourself, "I wish there were a theorist of ecological communism who also made great wallpaper," then I have an article just for you. doi.org/10.1177/1474...

Here's a hill I will die on. RCP 8.5 is incredibly useful. RCP 8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) is a high-emissions climate scenario used by the IPCC to model the most extreme potential futures. It is currently considered unlikely, but that doesn't matter. A thread 1/

A great illustration of this from a new paper by Emanuele Bevacqua et al. in Nature: worst-case model projections at 2°C warming are often more severe than the *average* projection at 3°C or 4°C. Worth a read via @carbonbrief.bsky.social 👇 www.carbonbrief.org/limiting-glo... 6/6

Still thinking about this (from @ferrisjabr.bsky.social 's Becoming Earth): "a single gallon of gasoline represents 100 tonnes of ancient life, roughly equivalent to 20 adult elephants". I knew it was big, but never worked it out. A tank of petrol is a LOT of ancient life. +1 reason to electrify!

when you have a healthy relationship with a representative concentration pathway

i just think that the right wing attack is on *impacts* papers using RCP8.5 so acknowledging that RCP8.5 *impacts* are still very plausible isn't like a minor aside it's the entire messaging confusion

lol the RCP 8.5 fight is both extremely niche and wonky and also has made it into a letters to the editor fight in the daily newspaper of Chico, CA

the last thing i'll say about this whole RCP 8.5 thing before I go outside and enjoy the weather: it really does *matter.* For a whole lot of things! lawsuits against pension funds for underestimating climate costs; questions about how high to design seawalls; adaptation planning; insurance!

confusing when you and your five nerd friends are really mad about a very niche thing and then the president takes the other side

This is why the scenarios need to be kept idealized. It does not matter that the IAM run for RCP 8.5 "burned too much coal." Given the missing mechanisms, our goal is force the models to produce temperature responses and then we can figure out what outcomes are relevant for a particular application.

I need him to follow up with a tweet about anthropogenic aerosol emissions being overestimated in most scenarios (I really don’t but can you imagine him being “TOO LOW!! SOx emissions are NOT TRACKING in most scenarios because the WOKE MIND VIRUS mainly cares about GHGs and not SLCFs!!!!”

Trump tweet about climate model biases in the tropical Pacific warming pattern incoming

🥱

Bangkok is at serious risk of being underwater within a few decades. Maybe instead of worrying about guessing Thailand’s population in 200 years by projecting current trends under the assumption nothing changes we should worry about whether anyone in Thailand will have a place to live in 40.

some people should be embarrassed by their role leading us to this point

Jens Beckert has a whole book about this that at first read I was like this is sort of obvious and since has burrowed deep into my brain and I think about a lot www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Print out this graph, laminate it, and use it to slap the face the next person you meet who claims "Texas is kicking California's ass at building clean energy."

I love seeing people encountering the Colorado river problem for the first time and being like just don’t grow crops duh

don't think this shift can be understood without also understanding the move to asset managers instead of pension funds... why don't large shareholders push back against Elson Musk taking their rights away? because Blackrock and Vanguard control all our money and they dgaf

The Delaware "Billionaire's Bill" SB21 is one of the more outrageous pro-oligarchy things that have happened in recent years and more people should know about it!

for my masters degree in 2011(!) we were supposed to pick and analyze one country's climate policy and I picked Pakistan. From my final paper: "The government announced that it aims to have at least 5% of grid-connected capacity met through alternative and renewable energy by 2030..."

The article misses a key point which is that, now that the identity of these designer particles is public, it's clear they don't make much sense as an SAI material.

Indeed, the “prediction by any means” vibes have led to some navel gazing at the enabling technologies and carefully selected skill scores, less attention on the underlying mechanisms and infrastructure.

omg Coase joke in McSweeney's

And to me this applies, again, more to the low end of the spectrum than to the high one. Ppl will read “very low” scenarios with lots of CDR as implications of need for it directly and plausibility of those scales (“the IPCC says we need this much CDR”) rather than as “we wanted such a scenario”…

This will be made more complicated this time around by the fact scenarios have names that imply normative judgment. “High” is just “higher than Medium”, not “as high as it can go” - and what if for some parts of the assessment we need to use CMIP6 scenarios, where the high ones were much higher?

i mean just look at someone's feed on X and tell me the ratio of men to women they are interacting with (retweets, replies, etc.). I just did it for a few climate people and it's literally all men!

weather modeling good, climate modeling bad

"China's figured it out. That's why they're cleaning our clock on clean energy."

Worth a read for climate risk nerds: actuaries.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/12/f...

On NSF’s postdoc page, the biology and earth science fields have been completely eliminated; the only remaining fellowships are in math, astronomy, engineering, and “entrepreneurship.” Weird choice not to support research on the life support system for 8 billion people. www.nsf.gov/funding/post...

the response to stuff like that 'new orleans will be for gone for sure' article always confuses me cause im over here thinking we all already knew that

Very cool version of this monthly global average surface temperature anomaly chart showing both El Niño and La Niña years