Most popular posts by Climate and Energy Professionals community members over the last 24 hours. Updated hourly.
There are very few people staying in MacArthur Park right now, so this does seem like it's just for show. But there's a summer camp at the rec center, one of the few affordable childcare options for LA families. Glad they could make their little propaganda video while traumatizing local kids
This is what they were saying in the 70 & 80s. Then Bill Clinton, taking them at face value, eviscerated the US social safety net, to the point that it is the weakest & most tattered among developed nations. And they're still saying it. It never had anything to do with reality.
Another day has passed and nothing from the acting head of FEMA in a disaster that killed 100+ people and I havenât seen any journalists ask the administration where he isâŠ??? Knowing who is currently leading FEMA strikes me as something the public has a vital interest inâŠ
100 years of June sea surface temperature anomalies updated through 2025. Note the long-term warming (climate change) and other patterns of variability (e.g., El Niño/La Niña). Our oceans are accumulating a lot of excess heat! Data from NOAA ERSSTv5 at psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded...
I thought when Musk transformed Twitter into a playground for overt nazis & race scientists, it might prompt some kind of backlash from the US establishment. Instead it hasn't even prompted much comment! They didn't leave Twitter, Musk is still welcome in elite circles ... nothing. Amazing.
âAccording to sources within FEMA, âbarely any staffâ have been deployed, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson âis nowhere to be found.â Per one source, âif this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked.â
It's a small thing, but a conservative relative who's been consistently climate dismissive just told me the Texas floods must be due to climate change, because heavy rain and flooding have clearly been worsening. I don't know why it took this to change their mind - I was too shocked to pry.
Please welcome @brittwray.bsky.social to Bluesky. She studies the rise of climate distress and how to channel it for action and resilience - and is the newest addition to my starter pack of folks who study, write and speak on the intersection of mental health and the climate crisis! More here:
This (nearly 2 hour long!) livestream discussing the meteorology and broader context surrounding the Texas flood disaster was recorded live, and is now available in its entirety at link below. Journalists: as always, please feel free to pull any audio/video content from this recorded broadcast.
âEveryone wants more warning time, and thatâs why weâre working to upgrade the technology thatâs been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,â Noem said. The reality: Closing NOAA labs like NSSL, critical for flash flood forecasts & research.
Michigan utility DTE Energy was, it turns out, involved in the GOP-coordinated campaign to end Gov. Whitmer's Covid policies. After repeatedly & explicitly denying it supported the effort, records reveal a $100K donation to a dark superpac that subsequently referred to it as the "DTE donation."
Doomer Post Alert! Like most public-facing doomers, I get the question all the time, followed by "where's the best place to live?" In the US, we are lucky we live in a neo-fascist kakistocracy. Because it's going to get a whole lot worse. www.the-sentinel-intelligence.com/p/when-is-th...
Proposed NOAA cuts would destroy the basic infrastructure for weather researchâincluding hurricane and flash flood forecastingâand take decades to recover from. âItâs like blowing up a dam and trying to rebuild it by gluing the pieces back together. It wonât work. You have to start from scratch.â
A look a trends in July temperatures over land areas for the last 50 years... note that there are much greater regional differences when only evaluating one month at a time. Find the US warming hole (our paper on this feature doi.org/10.1175/JCLI...). Data from www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/lan...
One more day: Mon flood risk just upgraded in central TX. NOAA/WPC: âAny storms that move across this extremely vulnerable region will rapidly cause flash flooding, some of which could be significant if cells repeat or stall over the already hard-hit regions.â www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/...
Spent a day in jury selection in TX & was reminded of the core values of my neighbors. Presented with Blackstone's ratio, asked to rate agreement from 1 to 5, most said "2". Asked why: "Well, sometimes you *have* to hurt innocent people to get to the bad ones." Sapped my faith in humanity. đą
"Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism." youtu.be/cFM4GVl-WqI
imagine being an adaptation planner in the UK and you are told, "well, the most likely thing that will happen is your country will get way hotter with a sharp increase in extreme temps... BUT there's a chance the AMOC could break in which case you'll get way way colder" So, prepare for that
Re-upping this piece by my colleague @megha.bsky.social "We live in the era of information; we can get weather alerts from Twitter, our smartphones and television. But it isnât enough; as severe weather becomes more common, everyone in the U.S... should consider getting a ... weather radio." đ§Ș
Apparently, according to IFA on Morning Ireland just now, itâs an âArmageddon scenarioâ for agri sector if its licence to pollute, aka the Nitrates Derogation, is withdrawn. This is despite fact that EVERY other country in EU has scrapped this hugely damaging derogation.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on how the Israeli army has been systematically murdering, abducting, torturing, and raping health care workers in order to break Palestinian society. Yet more *blatant* war crimes. An absolute must-watch, now free on YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv3w...
So much of the media reporting on energy is unhelpful or misleading. Take the debate around coal in the UK - for years parts of the media reported a coal comeback which was due to seasonal fluctuations only. In September 2024 the last coal power plant went offline. Clear case for more nuance.
A new report: "Uncertainty and upward bias are inherent in data center electricity demand projections" Explores various reasons data centers won't grow as fast as predicted; among other things, there's no way global semiconductor-chip production can keep up with the inflated forecasts.
This is not odd. Grok is a text generation engine that produces human-like sentences with zero coherence or sense, just the probabilistic outputs based on training data. It isn't "posting", it isn't "doubling down", in the same way Excel's random number formula isn't "backtracking" on a refresh
I was lucky* to get a bed in the ER pretty quickly after my arrival but I can still remember the feeling of pure relief the morning after my 11pm arrival at the ER when they finally were putting me to sleep in the OR to fix a bleed. *because my vitals were so unstable www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
The massive measles outbreak and other growing health crises aren't just a result of the last six months of RFK Jr. and MAGAs. They're the result of decades of RFK Jr. and MAGAs sowing doubts about science, vaccines and medicine, and the role of government. www.seattletimes.com/nation-world...
6 day loop leading up to the Texas flood. You can see the moisture remnants of TS Barry merging w/ a developing meso low over W. Texas, stalling with pulsing convection over the Hill Country. A worst case scenario with a meteorological explanation. Not unprecedented but certainly a very rare event.
Let me once again remind everyone that emergency managers and disaster researchers warned Congress that FEMA would not be effective if it was moved under DHS and then within two years they spectacularly fucked up the Katrina response and then Congress still left FEMA in DHS.
Hope "doesnât mean denying hard truths â it means holding them in one hand and doing the work with the other." Love this new definition by RAI Energy's Kristina Jansen wrote (on LI, so sharing here) after reflecting on what I write and say about this in my newsletter :)
an aside: about 15 years ago, I took an expert witness training course, and our final exercise was a mock trial. the case we argued was a city suing a cloud seeding company for causing a destructive flood. I remember thinking it was BS at time, and nothing's changed my view in the years since.
Your 'moment of doom' for July 8, 2025 ~ Feedback loop alert! "sustained eruptions would pump significant greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. This would further heat the planet and potentially create a vicious circle..." www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Smith, Ford's Pipeline Pact a National Betrayal I'm planting my flag on this hill, folks: the evidence says there is not enough global demand for AB's heavy crude to justify ONE pipeline, let alone more. Taxpayers are about to be fleeced. #ableg youtu.be/TWsUZAPpfC8
A reminder that Trump/GOP have stopped updating the NOAA billion-dollar disaster dataset. Is it possible for someone else to adopt the NOAA methods and continue to update this? For example, is the Texas flooding a billion-dollar disaster? www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billi...
"A review of... communications from a real-time messaging system operated by the NWS showed that no emergency manager from Kerr County was sending messages or interacting with NWS staff on the platform, even as emergency officials from other counties were doing so." www.cnn.com/2025/07/07/u...
As more bodies are found and identified, Senate Republicans will push forward this week to gut climate science, install oil-industry lobbyists in key positions at the EPA and Department of Energy, and put Taylor âThe Greatest Hoaxâ Jordan in charge of privatizing the National Weather Service.