This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
In 2023, I sought to explain to a parliamentary committee what a structural collapse of the global food system would look like, and why this this is plausible - even likely. I think the likelihood has just ratcheted up a notch. I beg you to read and understand. Thanks
www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/t...
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
via @qwant.bsky.social
Excellent thread on the side effects of efficiency. So often is efficiency touted as a solution to solve resource issues, without explicitly mentioning the main intent, which more often than not is more growth.
You may’ve seen coverage of a new report on the threat to national security from environmental collapse.
A common response that’s got my goat is: “Look, it’s not just tree-hugging enviros saying this, it’s hard-nosed spooks!”
A short thread on why this framing is bad history & bad politics🧵😡😉
10/ Politicians igored them because warnings alone do not compel action in the face of organised vested interests.
Fossil capital.
Extractive industries.
Short-term political incentives.
Institutional inertia.
These were always the real obstacles, not a lack of credibility.
The heat energy we added to the ocean LAST YEAR is the equivalent of:
- Detonating ten hydrogen bombs every minute
- operating over a hundred large power plants continuously for all of written human history
- Five times all the electricity human beings have ever used
Hit me up if you'd like to apply to a Data-driven postdoc fellowship with me in Sweden. 2 year salary, excellent community. Deadline March 31. I have a project idea on reference bias vs pangenome, but keen on hearing ideas. Please share broadly.
www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/...
"Efter mer än ett decennium i den här branschen är det uppenbart att bara min blotta existens i samtal alltid har väckt starka känslor. Manliga motdebattörer är inte så här oförskämda mot vita män." @somar.bsky.social om den famösa debatten i söndagens "Godmorgon världen".
We recently published a report that serves as a warning to humanity that we are hurtling towards climate chaos. More info here: doi.org/10.1093/bios...
Bra artikel av @peteralestig.bsky.social som tar upp problemen med ekonomisk tillväxtteori och effektivisering. Dessa ämnen berörs alltför lite i dagens media.
www.dn.se/ekonomi/pete...
Impact of flights on global warming severely underestimated by many carbon calculators & offset schemes that don’t properly account for taxiing, sub-optimal routing or non-CO2 climate effects which are larger component:
www.newscientist.com/article/2502...
Research paper:
doi.org/10.1038/s432...
"You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it" | My commentary on Bill Gates' flawed new climate missive for @thebulletin.org: thebulletin.org/2025/10/you-...
I strongly agree with this thread, with one clarification: Whether civilization will survive 3C is in my view at least an open question. Human survival is different from survival of civilization. The former is likely, even for the worst expected climate impacts, but the latter is not assured
I keep having the experience of people in this world relating to me their shock upon hearing my (pretty "mainstream") climate science perspective on these kinds of issues. So many influential people still believe a +3C warmer world is just "the exact weather from the 20th century, but 3C warmer."
In a 2024 paper criticizing the 'billion-dollar-disasters' database, Roger Pielke Jr. published analysis that is best described as a Russian-doll of errors.
Here's my in-depth take down of his appallingly bad work.
economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/10/26/r...
This well-made documentary series is asking the questions we should all be.
Given that it's FREE to view, it would make an excellent starting point for discussions in schools, universities, and community centres.
Highly recommended.
Globally averaged CO2 concentration (a) and its growth rate (b) from 1984 to 2024. Increases in successive annual means are shown as the shaded columns in (b). The red line in (a) is the monthly mean with the seasonal variation removed; the blue dots and blue line in (a) depict the monthly averages. Observations from 179 stations were used for this analysis.
Holy wow, +3.5 ppm CO₂ last year, up from +2.4 ppm average the past decade, and +0.6 ppm in the 1960s.
It gets scarier the closer you look at it. All this is a stress test for the planet, and it's buckling.
Two big reasons for the massive increase: wildfires, and the ocean sinks are shutting down.
I was honoured to be invited to give a talk on AviList, the new unified global checklist of birds, at the Delta Birding Festival 2+ weeks ago, and the organizers just sent me a link to a YouTube video of my talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5x... #birds #ornithology #taxonomy
Speaking of voices under attack…can we be just as loud about Black journalists and comedians who are silenced, even by our so-called liberal outlets.
• Joy Reid
• Don Lemon
• Melissa Harris-Perry
• Tiffany Cross
• Jemele Hill
• Marc Lamont Hill
• Karen Attiah
• Amber Ruffin
In the first seven days since I launched this new game, almost ten thousand people from 82 countries have played it. (Top cities so far: New York City, Zurich, Toronto, Chicago, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm)
What topics would you like me to add next?
dataguessr.com
SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online:
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...
De tre mest profilerade skolorna/förskolorna med den allt mer kritiserade engelska profileringen har alla tydliga kopplingar till regeringspartierna. Varför säger vi inte rätt ut att det här är stört?
Such an exciting diversity and quality of presentations related to the evolution of vision and opsins at #ESEB2025! I regret we did not organize an associated symposium on these topics. To make up for it, please pop by my poster today (035) and we can have a mini symposium right here!
Also check out poster Hues of blues (P01.035) on krill opsins by PI Andreas Wallberg!
Want to know more about ecological adaption in krill? Come listen to me talk about population genomics of the Northern krill. Session Evolutionary genomics (S23.02). #eseb2025
