Opinion | Harvard Derangement Syndrome

The best defense of the university I've ever read, by Steven Pinker:

Harvard Derangement Syndrome www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/o...

MicroPaleoWorks | micropaleoslides MicroPaleoWorks, a Foraminarium company. Supplier of micropaleoslides for foraminifera and other microfossils or small samples

Need micropaleontology slides? I started a company! MicroPaleoWorks.com. If you need slides, hit me up. Prices range from 1.50 to 2.20 each depending on the variety. We can customize with numbering for a fee. We are a #smallbusiness #womenowned #madeintheUSA using #canadianaluminum & #recycledpaper

Cover of Elements Issue entitled Biomineral Geochemistry: Windows into Past Climates and Calcification. The picture shows amorphous calcium carbonate particles - the precursors to many biominerals

Very pleased to have co-edited the latest version of Elements Magazine (www.elementsmagazine.org) "Biomineral Geochemistry" with @amoeba-lab.bsky.social and Ros Rickaby. Topics range from controls on CaCO3 polymorph to the role of amorphous intermediate phases and "vital effects". 🧪🌊🪸⚒️

Polling of my global warming class @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social for the 20 years I have taught it.

Results:

Sense of alarm hit a low in 2012 ("Climategate" era), peaked in 2019 (protest era), declined slightly since.

But 2025 "at end" of class was back up.

Why? Fires in LA (Jan), or new admin?

🧵 I'd like to share some of the recent and ongoing collaborative projects I’m most proud of from my time at NOAA. Some will continue on in one form or another, but others will not - a direct result of the cuts hitting science across the board.

Three panels: On top is a face on view of a large Tomopteris polychaete, with orange pigment spots along its long anterior antennae. Lower left shows the yellow bioluminescent emission typical of the genus Tomopteris. Lower right shows the blue bioluminescent emission of a Tomopteris species. This color is typical for marine animals, but atypical for Tomopteris, which is the odd-species-out for luminescent emission spectra. Blue-emitting Tomopteris were independently discovered by our lab in the Pacific and by Anaïd Gouveneaux working in Jerôme Mallefet's lab in Belgium. Warren determined that the chemical which gives the yellow color seems to be aloe-emodin, but the function of using yellow light rather than blue remains unknown. See the two manuscripts linked in the main text, and references therein, for more detailed info.

A fun case of usual-unusual: Most luminescence in the sea is blue-green, but Tomopteris worms emit yellow light.

With Warren Francis, we found a species that emits blue light — unusual but usual. 🦑🧪
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-016-3028-2
doi.org/10.1002/bio.2671

This is a big deal, mainly because it is a very thorough piece of work, but also because the sensitivity of ice sheet models are still highly dependent on important details of the topography and conditions at the bottom of the ice sheet that remain highly uncertain.

Worth noting that the Princeton GFDL lab @voosen.me highlights was where Nobel prize winner Syukuro Manabe did his pioneering work developing the first climate model used to test the theory of global warming.

February 2025 was the third warmest February on record after 2024 and 2016, at 1.59C above preindustrial level.

This is the first time a month has not been the warmest or second warmest on record since June 2023.

Global temperatures fell sharply in the first half of the month, but have been rising in the past week.

This may be a sign that the short-term cooling effect of La Nina is at long last kicking in, though it it too early to know for sure.

ECMWF ensemble average accumulated precipitation forecast for next 10 days. It depends heavy rainfall across portions of Northern CA, especially northern Sierra.

A shift back toward much wetter conditions in NorCal now appears likely by this weekend, with a pretty strong warm/wet #AtmosphericRiver potentially bringing heavy rain somewhere between SF Bay Area and Oregon border (likely heaviest northern/central Sierra). #CAwx #CAwater

🚨 🚀🌍 Today, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law is launching three online tools – the Climate Backtracker, the Inflation Reduction Act Tracker & the Silencing Science Tracker – to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks & anti-science actions: https://buff.ly/4jsf5HJ
🧵⤵️

Global map showing the year that each location recorded its hottest annual average from among the available years 1850-2024.

More than 20% of the Earth's surface recorded its locally hottest annual average temperature last year.

40% of the Earth had its hottest recorded year since 2020, and 85% since the year 2000.

🧪

Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements – The White House By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1.

If you're looking for the text of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (which takes a yr. to be in effect, but the U.S. is treating as immediate): it is here. Also cuts off US funding to the UNFCCC and US int'l climate finance. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Global temperatures have started 2025 at record-setting levels – above where they were in January 2024 despite the emergence of modest La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific.

After becoming increasingly enmeshed in the wildfire world, you start to notice things about the way we've systematically altered our relationship with the natural environment in a way that has increased the risk of destructive fires. And then you stop being able to unsee them.

I have a new paper in Dialogues on Climate Change exploring climate outcomes under current policies. I find that we are likely headed toward 2.7C by 2100 (with uncertainties from 1.9C to 3.7C), and that high end emissions scenarios have become much less likely.

journals.sagepub.com...

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios I have a new commentary in Dialogues on Climate Change exploring climate outcomes in current policy scenarios

New post on The Climate Brink from Zeke @hausfath.bsky.social about our climate future. With current policies, we’re on track for a bit less than 3C, with 2030 NDCs we’re on track for about 2.5C, and with net zero pledges we’re on track for a bit less than 2C.
www.theclimatebrink.com/p/moving-awa...

Hydroclimate volatility on a warming Earth Nature Reviews Earth & Environment - Rapid transitions between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions — ‘hydroclimate whiplash’ — have marked environmental and societal...

Our recent review on "Hydroclimate Volatility on a warming Earth" will be in front of the journal paywall for all to read/download freely for 14 days (until 1/23). Thereafter, this specific (ReadCube) link will grant read-only access to all: https://rdcu.be/d6ceH

Climate Change A Factor In Unprecedented LA Fires As a series of historic fires continue to blaze in Los Angeles, UCLA scholars offer insight into the causes, fallout and future mitigation.

In a new report, we explore the weather and climate factors that allowed the Los Angeles fires to become so large and destructive. #PalisadesFire #EatonFire
Full report: sustainablela.ucla.edu/2025lawildfi...
Summary: www.ioes.ucla.edu/article/clim...

Following historic wildfire disasters in Southern California, a statewide dry spell intensifies and extreme fire weather conditions persist in the south - Weather West Remarkable wet-to-dry transition combined with extreme downslope wind event yields dual wildfire catastrophes in SoCal It's never good feeling when a dire weather or disaster risk prognostication comes to fruition; that "pit in your stomach" sensation has been described by many meteorologists, climate scientists, emergency managers, and disaster-focused researchers over the years. It certainly encapsulates

New Weather West post out now: "Following historic wildfire disasters in Southern California, a statewide dry spell intensifies and extreme fire weather conditions persist in the south." #CAwx #CAfire #PalisadesFire #EatonFire #LAfires
weatherwest.com/arch...

Scientists developed the first climate models in the late 1960s (for which the Nobel Prize in physics was recently awarded!).

How have these models held up against what happened in the real world after they were published? Surprisingly well, it turns out:

Is there a link between #ClimateChange & increasing risk/severity of #wildfire in California--including the still-unfolding disaster? Yes. Is climate change the only factor at play? No, of course not. So what's really going on? [Thread] #CAfire #CAwx #LAfires iopscience.iop.org/a...

Map showing warming patterns in 2024 relative to the 1951-1980 average

🚨 Global Temperature Report for 2024

2024 was the hottest year since instrumental measurements began.

3.3 billion people had their locally warmest year.

The warming rate appears to have increased, likely due to reductions in aerosol pollution & cloud cover.

berkeleyearth.org/global-tempe...

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five time series of global mean surface temperature changes starting low and noisy in the 1850s - rising clearly since the 1960s - and showing 2024 was clearly the warmest.

All surface temperature products for 2024 are now live.

All show 2024 is the warmest year (very clearly).

The estimates of the change since the pre-industrial (1850-1900) are more uncertain but range from 1.46 to 1.62ºC.

It is therefore *likely* this was the first year that exceeded 1.5ºC.

Chart showing 2024 temperatures across various temperature monitoring groups.

Now that everyone has their annual temperature data out, here is a quick summary across groups.

In addition to record warmth in every dataset, it's the first year where most estimates are at least 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) warmer than the 1850-1900 baseline.

berkeleyearth.org/global-tempe...

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Its pretty stark just how much warmer 2023 and 2024 were globally than any prior year on record. For more details, see our Berkeley Earth global temperature report here: berkeleyearth.org/gl...

Global surface temperatures set a new record in 2024, exceeding 1.5C above preindustrial levels in the majority of datasets.

It was more than 0.1C warmer than the prior record set in 2023, and more than 0.25C warmer than any year prior to that: www.carbonbrief.org/...

Rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 marked the end of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age - Nature Geoscience A pronounced increase in atmospheric CO2 coincided with warming at the end of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age, according to an 80-million-year-long boron isotope CO2 proxy record.

Super excited to share our latest on CO2’s role in geological climate change! Using boron isotopes in ~300 million year old brachiopod shells, we show that rising CO2 from volcanic emissions drove a profound change in climate that ended the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age ⚒️🧪🌊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...