Republicans know they are about to lose the House and are trying to give Big Oil its holy grail: legal immunity from any futures actions that would hold the industry responsible for the climate crisis it knowingly caused and is making worse every day.
climateintegrity.org/news/view/br...
in the American West, we've got totally nonsensical 174-year-old legal structures about water rights colliding with climate change-fueled drought, with the federal government AWOL prospect.org/2026/04/17/w...
A grapevine that survived a late first
Just a little frost damage on the Concord grape leaves, but ok so far. Interestingly, the tall ironweed and haory plantain elsewhere had more damage.
A grapevine leafing out and getting ready to bloom, along the fence of a large bottomland vegetable garden in southern Indiana
Spring gardening in the Midwest: we shall see if the grape leaves and (not yet open) blossoms survive what will likely be a few frosty nights 🌱
Nope, absolutely definitely not adopting this nomenclature
Two model estimates of an observed time series. One model overpredicts and the other underpredicts, but both have "perfect correlation" with the observations. Source: Willmott, C. J. (1981). On the validation of models. Physical geography, 2(2), 184-194.
Still referring students and collaborators to this figure from 1981 that illustrates why correlation is not that useful for evaluating model performance. These two models both have R² = 1. 🧪
For the solutions, I highlighted that lotteries actually have more potential with grants and fellowships than things like college admissions. In a 3 year pilot of partial randomization, the UK funded more racially and institutionally diverse projects. 3/
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/partial...
That’s safe. They don’t do much growing until then anyway.
Dude, these were recently transplanted and will be overlapping in a couple of weeks.
Yep, I get that although many people that I talk to have started to downgrade work done in some of these higher volume fast turnaround journals.
Photo of spring greens in a veggie garden with one bed in the background housed in row cover.
Yeah, hope this doesn't lead to one of those late advection-driven frosts. In any case, I'll keep the row covers handy for a while yet!
Huh, people are still MDPI-ing...
WORLD VIEW 15 April 2026 Why more fossil fuels won’t fix the Iran energy crisis Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time. By Gernot Wagner Spend any time discussing solar and wind power as a solution to climate change, and you are sure to encounter someone who asks about reliability. The Sun does not shine at night and the wind does not always blow, so fossil fuels will be needed forever as a back-up, they argue. But how reliable are fossil fuels? In the past two months, conflict in Iran has created an energy crisis — the latest in a series. Oil prices spiked within days of the start of US, Israeli and Iranian bombing in the Gulf region on 28 February. Fuel prices remain high and volatile, and the ripple effects are set to increase inflation in the coming months. Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, memorably named this effect fossilflation in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There was, and is, one clear winner: renewables and other low-carbon technologies, from batteries to electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps. That is what distinguishes this Middle East oil and gas crisis from the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s. Then, renewables were mostly unavailable, and industrial decarbonization was on few people’s radars. Solar power cost at least 500 times more than it does today, and EVs, heat pumps and induction stoves were a pipe dream. Ditching fossil fuels is not all smooth sailing. In 2022, European natural-gas prices spiked to ten times their levels before the Ukraine invasion, resulting in long waiting times for solar panels and heat pumps. Prices for these rose as demand outpaced supply, an effect Schnabel dubbed greenflation. She used a third term, climateflation, to describe the economic effects of climate-induced weather extremes, such as food-price rises from crop failures (M. Kotz et al. Commun. Earth Environ. 5; 2024).
The Iran War has once again led to a bout of what @isabelschnabel.bsky.social memorably dubbed 'fossilflation'.
It's en vouge to talk about the solution as some massively complex undertaking. It really isn't. Get off fossil fuels faster.
My latest just out @nature.com
rdcu.be/fdxig
Map of forecast 2-meter air temperature for the north-central US for the morning of 20 Apr 2026, showing temperatures could be in the mid-30s F (1 to 2 C).
Explaining to new colleagues who like to garden that it's not advisable to plant tomatoes and peppers yet even though the local garden centers are enticing people to do exactly that. 🌱
Many of the criticisms in this report are true or partially true, but the biggest problem that's brought down U.S. colleges is indeed the 50-year crusade by the right to wipe away any notion that higher ed is a public good, massively cut funding for publics, and create the student debt crisis
A boom in rooftop solar is far more likely than a return to coal, with the LNG drought pushing up electricity prices and photovoltaics providing a cheaper, easier alternative. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Thread of how Trump's illegal and immoral war is driving an energy transition.
We should be doing this without murdering thousands of people.
Yes and that’s a lot! I do this with my PhD students, but usually only on a couple per year as a co-reviewer (of the 12 to 15 per year that I do).
For decades, cross-border efforts to recover grizzly bears in the North Cascades region have been hindered by government funding cuts. But a First Nations-led effort has kept moving forward — and later this year, they plan to reintroduce grizzlies to their territories. thenarwhal.ca/north-cascad...
Similarly, "how to get a grant" panels should address the current funding landscape instead of repeating some variation of "innovate harder"
And it makes me use two bookmarks!
This weekend I gave a presentation to a group of mostly college-aged folks and had a little line at the beginning of my slides that described it as an "AI-free presentation made by a human, for humans" and I had to pause for clapping at that part
you love to see it
There's something just so brilliant about coal mines being directly replaced with solar farms
www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/07/g...
Location of the 50 datasets from tropical and subtropical regions. These datasets were used to examine the effects of the surrounding landscape on avian SARs. Birds were surveyed in forest remnants created by either river damming (aquatic matrix) or clear-cut deforestation (terrestrial matrix). The overall sampling effort included data obtained from 1,005 forest remnants, comprising 336 forest islands and 669 forest fragments.
One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “High-quality surrounding landscapes mitigate avian extirpations from forest remnants.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/bHrj50YGHM3
For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/jPBV50YGHLX
Usually, the El Niño event gets stronger after September, but occasionally the peak intensity is during that month.
Time series of Nino3.4 anomalies with September values during El Nino events indicated.
And here's the full time series with September El Nino events indicated (sort of -- this is all the Septembers when the anomaly is > 0.5 C).
Here's how that forecast for El Niño conditions in September compares to historical September values -- the estimate is at the very upper limit of the historical record (max of 2.21 °C). #climate
