Graphic for the AMS webinar title "E Pluribus Praevisio: Collaboration and the Rise of the Planetary Commons" featuring moderator and panelists on the right with headshots, names, and affiliations.

Weather doesn’t stop at borders, and neither does our research 🌐🔬

Join us for a special webinar as panelists discuss how global collaborations in the second half of the twentieth century built our modern weather prediction infrastructure & data-sharing blueprint.

Register: https://bit.ly/4c0y7TN

COVID's old takeover pattern is breaking: BA.3.2 hits children more often while global variant replacement stalls The WHO declared the global health emergency associated with the COVID-19 pandemic to be over in 2023, as most individuals had developed immune protection against the virus through vaccination and/or ...

COVID's old takeover pattern is breaking: BA.3.2 hits children more often while global variant replacement stalls
medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04...

Gift article.

This unbearably sad story makes clear what glib eugenicist talk like “cleaning up the risk pool” means for actual individuals and families, in this case a child who died years after measles infection in pre-vaccination infancy. Devastating.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

We Need to Prepare for the Mammoth Task of De-Trumpification The damage he and his cronies have wrought could take decades to repair, particularly when it comes to science and public health.

The task of de-Trumpification of science and public health will take a generation and a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild. Without a bold, expansive vision to guide us, there is no coming back. Small-bore, poll-tested versions of the future will not help us. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

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Comic. [Person and person with white hat facing two boxes stacked with $80 price tag and sale tag on each box.] PERSON 1: They want $80 for this? I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour of work to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.

Make It Myself

xkcd.com/3233/

Happy Friday with incoming coming fog and dog!

"Earned" - Impact Trust A provocation for The Inequality Emergency: From Report to Redesign. A Wax and Gold Open Dialogue taking place on April 22nd at 2pm UK Image: Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857). When unveiled a...

“Earned”/What it means to earn impacttrust.org/earned/

FML

The curriculum is still under development, but Khan said it will be guided by corporate partners that include Google, Microsoft, Accenture, Bain, McKinsey, and Replit. These are “corporations that I think a lot of people aspire to work at,” he said, “and they’re on the cutting edge of how work is evolving.”

Article in SF Chronicle about Khan Academy’s attempt to create a $10,000 degree in AI with the help of blue-chip companies.

I don’t know how well it will work but I do know this: Google et al. will never hire a graduate. They’ll be hiring as usual at Stanford.

sfstandard.com/2026/04/14/s...

Whistleblower says Trump officials thought USAID did 'just abortions,' asked for 'Barney-style' slides before gutting agency, per new book Read an exclusive excerpt from Nicholas Enrich's "Into the Wood Chipper"

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health.

'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here:

How many people does heat actually kill? It depends on how you count it

“If you read ten papers on heat mortality, you may be seeing estimates from ten different methods. Getting them standardized and clearly defined matters for accurately reporting the impacts of heat to the public and policymakers.”

open.substack.com/pub/theclima...

How many people does heat actually kill? It depends on how you count it

On The Climate Brink, I write about different ways of counting heat-related mortality.

I think this is important info for everyone who wants to talk about climate impacts.

open.substack.com/pub/theclima...

Time series plot showing the regional mean of TMAX in the Western USA for the hottest March day of each year 1940 to 2026. Data from ERA5. Historical statistical estimates of the evolving probability distributions are also shown. The warmth in 2026 and the relative cold in 2023 appear as stark outliers

A chart like this, with its suggestion towards increased variability, is the kind of thing that can keep climate scientists up at night.

Complex & unexpected shifts in dynamics can be deeply troubling, as they may give rise to extreme events beyond what anyone anticipated.

28/28

Three panel image from the IPCC showing examples of how climate distributions can shift due to changes in mean, in variance, or both.

In more concrete terms, sometimes global warming brings with it not just a change in the local mean, but also a change in the variance.

When weather patterns shift in ways that alter the variance, the frequency of extremes can change in ways that are hard to predict.

23/

As extreme as it was, we are somewhat lucky that this heatwave occurred in March rather than June or July.

Water and ecological disruptions are unfortunate, but a similar heatwave in summer would have brought a significant body count.

19/

Time series from 1925 to 2026 showing the fraction of active us weather stations that set a new monthly record for the warmest daily max temperature. Only stations with at least 30 years of prior observations at the time being considered are included.

The scale of the heatwave was so extreme that almost 1/3 of active US weather stations set a new record for their locally warmest day in March.

The only other time such a large fraction of stations simultaneously set new monthly records was during the Dust Bowl.

10/

Time series of daily TMAX for each year in Sedan, KS from 1893 to 2026. The year 2026 is highlighted, showing extraordinary warmth.

In March, ten stations were so warm that they would not only beat their April record but would also beat or tie their record for the warmest day ever observed in May.

In Sedan, Kansas, the 100 °F (37.8 °C) on March 22, 2026 was two months before the previous earliest 100 °F.

8/

GFS map of temperature anomalies over the contiguous USA for March 21, 2026.

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA.

This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event.

A thread looking at some of the numbers.

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Status quo or not, this is a terrible design. The amount of paved pathways, dedicated to pedestrians, could accommodate the 1865 Grand Review of the Armies.

Agreed, but the picture still shows an area with 70-80% hard surface cover.

My husband, repeatedly: “How can they do this? How can it be so precise??”

SCIENCE. Publicly funded science.

A Kovacs ice measurement gaugue

Anyone have any clue where I can get a measuring tape for sea ice in Europe? The only supplier I have found is the very lovely and friendly Kovacs, but they are US based and the cost and time for delivery are crazy.
I mean one like this
#glaciology #seaice #Hivemind

As a fire scientist, I am devastated for my many good friends and colleagues who will be affected by the mass closure of so many research stations and offices. Many will leave the agency.

USFS has pioneered so much foundational fire science. The consequences of this will be catastrophic.

A thread on the history of some notable Catholic church people that feels like the old twitter...

The U.S. and Russia Are Running a Joint Operation to Save Orbán in Hungary Days before Hungary’s April 12 election, the Vice President of the United States flew to Budapest to campaign for Viktor Orbán.

"He did it while walking into an election already being shaped by a Russian influence operation meant to keep Orbán in power, turning Hungary’s vote into something far more dangerous than an ugly domestic campaign and into a joint operation between Washington and Moscow."

‘Non-survivable’: heatwaves are already breaching human limits, with worse to come, study finds Analysis of six extreme heatwaves found that when temperature and humidity were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people

Heat, like other disasters, is often most dangerous for the elderly: “When scientists accounted for the body’s ability to function and stay cool depending on age, they found all 6 events had seen non-survivable periods for older people who could not find shade.”

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In less than 10 days 💫
Chicago listen up! 🥳

Mapped: The Reform-Orbán Network “Viktor Orbán is the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare.” These were the words posted on Twitter by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage about the prime minister of Hungary in April 20...

Mapped: The Reform-Orbán Network www.desmog.com/2026/04/08/m...

Things that help calm the nervous system, quickly:

- Box breathing (in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4, repeat)
- Immerse your face in cold water (activates mammalian dive reflex)
- Humming (stimulates vagus nerve)
- Exercise (anything helps, outside even better)
- Impeachment and removal