I think we need more observational monitoring of the sheep albedo feedback.

Well, Project 2025 is certainly a set of goals…

Some simple truths about methane vs. CO2. I've said this before, in various ways, in various peer reviewed papers, but I keep repeating it with variations hoping the message will get through somehow.

(1) CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere. If you introduce a new CO2 emission source into the system

I think you're right about the mistake being data starting in Mar rather than Jan...

3/ Isaac Held had a post on some caution for thoughts along these lines, as OLR can increase even as atmospheric opacity goes up www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog_held/46...

In any case, Willis' "greenhouse efficiency" is weird. It's better to look at upwelling sfc minus OLR, that's the absorption.

2/ There's an intelligent but weird brand of "ASR looks like it's warming the system," e.g. from Donohoe et al., but I don't really like this framing since OLR drifts to zero anomaly (or positive, which is an energy loss mechanism, if SW feedbacks are positive) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25385628/

This is off topic from the albedo error Gavin mentioned, but there's no a priori reason absorbed shortwave needs to go up (it just happens it's likely) and LW emission needs to go up from reduced clouds (a negative feedback, but that's probably wrong). 1/

It’s not there’s no method, it just counts different sets of issues (acute vs. spikes in response to extremes). Most of the “cold deaths” are at very moderate temperatures due to things like the flu and other diseases, and more days of the year are typically counted as “cold.”

Indeed, almost all of this discussion (and skeptic talking points) is disconnected from the “spikes” of heat and cold stress, and dominated by seasonal signals at moderate temperatures (increased flu, etc), as well as just having more days below the “optimum”

Indeed, it’s a very cool sweet spot where both total and annular eclipses occur. In the future, only annular, in the past, more frequent deep total (although seeing a much larger moon would be cool, though the tides get intense).

Opinion | NASA Flew by the Moon, but Behind the Scenes, Its Science Is a Chaotic Mess

Former NASA climate scientist, now Senior Scientist at Project Drawdown, Dr. Kate Marvel, has a fantastic piece in the New York Times today.

This is a must-read if you care about science, the planet, and the future.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...

I'm with Katie, Artemis isn't very scientifically interesting, but if it can boost interest & support for NASA science (which is just a fraction of the budget) I'm all for lots of pictures of eclipses. Maybe if DOGE came around after Artemis, funds wouldn't be spent on an empty building in NYC...

El Niño always helps with temperature records, but even though it warms the atmosphere via ocean heat discharge, it’s also a venting pathway that cools the ocean (at depth) and increases infrared to space via cloud changes.

Ah, I think it saturated at 10% @ 30 yrs, but I need to find that part (and on the audio book). Yes, not sure how to get that much CH4 (and doubt the simple forcing equations valid out to these levels, would need to test, and need to include CH4 solar absorption)

3/ But ocean heat release would buy a bit of time. Even with no Sun the planet wouldn’t freeze over *immediately* (it would be catastrophic nonetheless for many other reasons) but you can work with a 10% luminosity reduction for a short window.

2/ CO2 isn’t going to be a good option, eventually you’d need concentrations toxic to humans while acidifying the oceans, and eventually it would condense out like water vapor.

In PHM the radiative forcing in the next few decades is some -20 W/m2 (not sure how long the Sun keeps dimming). think you’d need to devote lots of resources to manufacture some sort of lab GHG that plugged up atmospheric windows while you try to figure out astrophage. 1/

No thick atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1 b and c from JWST thermal phase curves

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

2/2 Earth has gotten “darker” (lower albedo) due to this, & some small cloud changes, but the difference wouldn’t be perceptible in viewing reflected light. It’s good to reduce aerosol emissions, for many health reasons, although that does boost the greenhouse temperature signal.

1/2 These comparison photos have been pretty popular over the last few days, I think to imply something about the dirtiness of the planet. Putting aside that the difference is due to photographic reasons and nightside viewing, etc, the Earth has less air pollution now and this is a good thing.

I was happy for the Southern-Hemisphere folks fo a minute that they finally had their moment of triumph, only for it to be grabbed again.

It must be amazing to be one of the few humans to see a solar eclipse, except with Earth doing the obscuring (from Orion spacecraft's window). I'm no photographer, but it seems impressive to grab the moon-lit nightside of Earth of this quality.

I love these views. It's hidden how fast they accelerate by the cameras tracking them, but they're going 10,000 mph only 5 and a half minutes after launch.

And it still takes 6 days to get the moon.

Space is big.

Don’t know what that molecule is but I wonder if ²H₂O (D₂O) or HDO can shed light on an ancient lunar magma ocean, and even speculative very early thin lunar atmospheres (e.g. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). Some NASA GISS work explored this agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Odyssey, MAVEN, etc is a mission to Mars, Magellan to Venus, Juno to Jupiter, so it counts to the Moon

Data centers' heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around where they're built A terrible paper and even worse interpretation is threatening to become common wisdom

There has already been this response

blog.andymasley.com/p/data-cente...

I’ve wondered how easy/hard it is to get rid of a dense CO2 atmosphere around an M dwarf for rocky planets. I have hope everything isn’t just a bare rock.

not sure where that link came from...

I imagine this will always be the case. CH4 work is a lot of pipe tightening, leak fixing, landfill capping, and bovine digestive optimization. CO2 work is replacing the machinery of modern life without crashing the economy. Hard to do everything w mixed incentives & metrics that mix their effects.

I’m too removed from policy but it seems self-evident this will be the case. In a world w mixed incentives, different emission sources, & abusable targets, there won’t be a Hallelujah equilibrium of fixing everything. That’s why the gases should be treated separate.