The winter that is ... is no more than a winter that was.

In the wintertime our house (gas heat) loses air through the exhaust vent and pulls in outdoor fresh air. CO2 stays near 700 ppm. In the summer (ac on) it seals up too tight and without opening windows CO2 hits 1500+ ppm within a few hours.

In case we thought that ecological disasters were a special talent of modernity, let’s talk about how the 13th-century peat trade of Norfolk made it permanently vulnerable to flooding, including 3 catastrophic floods just since 2013. #medievalstorytime

Echoes of when winter was Winter: www.chesapeakebaymagazine.com/ice-heroes-a...

A little perspective on the "public aspect of this". It was practice for all DOE Orders and Guides to be processed through systems that were publicly accessible (this was also how contractors officially got to see them).

The US government lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs last year, according to an analysis by Science of newly released OPM data, with 11 departures for every hire. And many OPM calls "voluntary" separations were probably pushed. www.science.org/content/arti...

Brand new suburban developments are still laying new gas lines based on spreading the network's cost over an endless horizon of use. If we don't put a solid date on the end it's hard to make the case to stop on the *easiest* part of the transition (new build).

A couple things from this badly needed effort: These are the California-standard 4-hr batteries and not that ridiculous and costly attempt by PJM to mandate 10-hr batteries Mandates are driving this and they are working better than PJM's "market forces" Batteries will make room for more solar

Current admin's posture on carbon capture: If you love CO2, set it free. If it comes back, then you can make carbon black.

We posted some amazing @noaa.gov #GOES17/#GOESWest and JMA Himawari-8 imagery of the #HungaTonga eruption on the CIMSS Satellite Blog: cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-bl...

Good thing the Chemical Safety Board has a full series of their excellent videos on Refinery Safety to help organizations learn from other's mistakes. Err .. had? Ah. What will happen to all that work if the agency gets defunded and closed? www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

The ocean is the dog steadily climbing the hill, the atmosphere is the dog's tail swinging to and fro, but climbing nonetheless.

🚨 Publication alert! Very happy to see our paper "Unlocking the benefits of transparent and reusable science for climate risk management" out in PNAS today. With @crispapoll.bsky.social @jdossgollin.bsky.social @bobkopp.net and many others. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I remember a neighbor talking about how expensive a new tunnel under a highway ramp for pedestrians was. My reply was that, yes, highways are very expensive. In the moment I was being flippant, but it actually seemed to land. Being able to get places without cars *is* the equitable baseline.

Scoop: The EPA will no longer estimate the lives saved by reducing air pollution when writing clean-air regulations, according to documents reviewed by @nytimes.com. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/c...

Nullschool has been amazing for years. Great if you want to just be in the flow and see connections ... but literally.

Oh, just get vaccinated (part 5,000) "Many shots seem to have “off-target” benefits, such as lowering the risk of dementia, studies have found." (gift article)

For no reason: Of the Danger of trusting banished Men. "as for the empty promises and delusive hopes they set before you, so extreme is their desire to return home that they naturally believe many things which are untrue and designedly misrepresent" www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/...

Happy new year! Exciting news: There's new transit coming in 2026—including metro, light rail, commuter rail, aerial tram, & BRT lines across North America. Overall, the US, Canada, & Mexico will add 150 miles of fixed-guideway transit. It's all on The Transport Politic in my annual roundup ⏬

Most of the people in this scene would be unable to enter the US under current policy. Madeleine Lebeau pretty much just crossed the border, stayed, and shot the greatest scene in history.

I hear everyone is talking about utility bills being too damn high. But @clicabedu.bsky.social is like, *really* talking about it. And we have ideas to help fix it. New report, friends, hot off the presses!

I'm basically never not thinking about Wolf Hall so when I saw the Holbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell it was like worlds colliding defector.com/the-eyes-hav...

Tired: all this anti-vax activity and policy Wired: vaccines cause adults Inspired: also recognizing that neurodiversity is good, and building a more inclusive and accepting society with accommodations and opportunities for all

Funding support for these analyses has been insufficient for more than 30 years. When I was a summer intern at NOAA in the 90's getting projects done for major update efforts like California, SW US, or Puerto Rico were budget limited and updates were decades behind. It's beyond time to fix this.

One company is about to electrify the heating for 190 of Maryland's largest buildings. I had no idea how large Maryland's existing district heating and cooling system is and how much it is about to change demarcoadvocacy.substack.com/p/electrifyi...

NEW POST! 🪨🌈 A new, colorful map from the USGS synthesizes decades of state and federal geologic surveys to create the most detailed visualization of the geology of the contiguous United States to date. www.beautifulpublicdata.com/usgs-coopera...

October 2025 was the warmest October on record for the #Arctic. Arctic sea-ice extent is currently the lowest on record for late November. My newest 'climate viz of the month' summarizes some of this latest data: zacklabe.com/climate-viz-... #ClimateChange #SciComm #OpenScience #OpenData #DataViz

Today’s xkcd made me cry. In a good way. xkcd.com/3172/

Over the weekend, @planet.com captured almost perfect satellite imagery of the 4 November 2025 landslide at Mae Moh Mine in Thailand. eos.org/thelandslide...

Worth a read for the underlying concepts, historical background, and "how we got here" on the current nuclear safety model. Plus the VC/Silicon Valley led effort to bring "move fast and break things" to nuclear power. This push is poisoning the well for any real reform in nuclear safety.

Opened my dissertation with a quote from Larry Summers arguing that the Global North should just offshore all industrial waste dumping to Africa. Yes he is and always has been a piece of shit, weird that he's been taken seriously only until his name has been attached to Epst*in.

Shameless plug: For a year, I've been working on a series about the vast systems that underlie life in most of the world. Built up over generations, these systems are the cathedrals of our time--but all too few of us know anything about them, and they're all at risk of failing. Here's the latest:

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Hey, so we have a bunch of open positions right now, working on cement, chemicals, clean energy (gosh, do we need a lot to electrify industry), and leading our Michigan work. These jobs will take you from the Central Valley in California to green cement plants in Tanzania, and beyond. Know anyone?

ICYMI: another federal contract cancelation looks to mean the loss of weather observations from dozens of airport sites, mainly in NC and MD. As of this evening, observations from 15 of the 58 sites listed in an NWS notice of termination were no longer available. More: tinyurl.com/yp57f2ck

There is a direct pipeline from the mommy bloggers who got information about autism on Google to the autism mommy wars of the 2000s to Robert F. Kennedy becoming HHS Secretary. For the 25th anniversary of @talkingpointsmemo.com, I chronicle this rise. talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/anti-...

12 hours of Hurricane #Melissa, one frame every minute. 🛰️🗺️

A nice mix of the hyper-specific details and statutes on authorizations and appropriations with plain english explanations of the ongoing decisions and illegalities.

The real reason energy prices are going up is PJM's corruption and mismanagement If you want a play by play of their biggest, most expensive boondoggle, this episode is for you demarcoadvocacy.substack.com/p/the-coal-p...

I'm really simplifying things here, but you should listen with the caveat that this was recorded in September. I'm not positioning this as a blueprint and he doesn't either. Another thing he said was that's sustained protest is esp useful

1. To opinions! Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity in many countries, and the quickest to deploy, and now you couldn't stop it being built if you wanted to. The limits to PV build in most places are grid access, permitting, and sometimes installation labour.

New York mass flooding inevitable by 2080. 1.4 million will have to 'retreat'. #ActOnClimate Gift article. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Post climate wins

I don't know how many Gastropod folks are on here, but we're looking for questions for our upcoming Ask Gastropod ep! Do you have a question that you haven't been able to figure out, a food science and/or history conundrum that's left you perplexed? We're here for you - email [email protected]!

This seems like a rather uniform collection of sticks in the water (1/5)

GOP candidate for NJ Gov complains about suburban “overdevelopment.” Reality: suburban NJ cities & towns are developing at a very slow pace www.urban.org/urban-wire/w... In the NYC region, wealthy suburban cities like those in NJ continue to exclude subsidized housing www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

This is now live at www.gridstatus.io/insights The blogs will continue until morale improves, but we wanted to lean in on more timely notes on the markets. Check it out and let us know what you’d like to see! 🔌💡 Couple other notes below

I'd love to get 35 new free subscribers (then 200 more, but start small) to Gravity Is Gone, with my independent reporting and writing on science, politics, and policy. I got laid off a month ago, trying to build this, lfg! www.gravityisgone.com I published two things just yesterday; the first:

As we await news from Interior and DOE on their latest attempt to boost the coal sector, take a look at my deep dive into the market realities, complete with some amazeballs charts and whatnot: www.eenews.net/articles/tru...