There's a huge gap between what climate scientists are willing to say privately and what we're willing to say publicly, in terms of how dire a situation we're in. Colleagues, integrity demands we close this gap.

To "The Sky Is Falling" Idiots

Read this thread 👇🏾

The proof is ALL OVER THE INTERWEB 🧐

GLOBAL WARMING (as described by the Left) IS A HOAX and Being Used Against You As A Money Making Machine 🧐

I Have Posted this Many Times Before, but here YOU ALL go again INVESTIGATE IT

What were the big energy and climate surprises of the Trump era? Four years ago, I described the most plausible arc for US climate policy under Trump (it was a boring, safe bet) but expected there'd be unexpected developments too. So how about a look back? https://t.co/1Valz4eTEg

1) The pandemic was a huge surprise, obviously, though maybe it's too early to say how that will affect the energy/climate landscape. So far, it’s put a brake on U.S. fracking and induced Europe to pledge staggering sums on hydrogen. Maybe global CO2 emissions have peaked, idk.

2) The growth of battery storage on the US grid has, I think, been a surprise. This interview with @jburwen does a nice job of laying out the truly staggering changes in the storage landscape since 2015, driven by falling costs and some key policy changes.

3) The impact of the IPCC report on 1.5°C was surprising to me. I often wondered what'd happen once it became clear that the world was unlikely to stay below 2°C. Instead, the climate community and world leaders rallied around an even more aggressive, harder to hit target!

4) It was not obvious that Trump's retreat from climate action would spur states, cities, companies, other nations to make even more aggressive net zero pledges of their own. But that’s what happened—those pledges have really proliferated at a scale that’s been surprising to me.

Long thread here... from Keith, on tree guards:

I really don’t want to spread 120,000 plastic tree guards across the side of our lovely hill, the hill where I grew up and now farm, on the eastern edge of the Black Mountains. So, I’ve taken a good look at the pros,... 1/25

the cons and the alternatives, to try and decide rationally, which is the best approach for our plant on the Bryn Arw.

It has become the accepted norm in the UK that to plant a tree, you need to put your sapling in the ground and then wrap a plastic tree guard around it.

This is simply ‘how it’s done’ now. This practice uses a huge amount of plastic; worse still, it disperses plastic extremely efficiently around the countryside. In some rural places, un-retrieved tree guards are by far the biggest source of plastic pollution.

And yet the first commercial plastic tree guards only came on the market 38 years ago. There are many perfectly healthy woodlands and trees that are older than this, and which became established without plastic – which begs the question: do we really need guards?

Plastic tree guards have several uses, some of which did revolutionise tree planting when they first came out. In particular, they:
•protect your saplings from things that want to eat them;
•provide a microclimate, which enhances tree growth, according to the manufacturers;

It's #FigureFriday, so let's chat about my favorite subject: color palettes 🎨 for climate science visualization! (1/12)

First, why is it important? Put simply: a beautiful figure can communicate your results more effectively than text. It can make a figure more understandable to a public audience. So it is worth it to put care into your figure design. (2/12)

First, if you're plotting up climate model data, especially anomalies, I highly recommend Cynthia Brewer's palettes on ColorBrewer. BrBG is my go-to for precip anomalies, and RdBu is a natural for temperature. (3/12)

The sequential palettes are also great if you've got data going in one direction. Here's the Brewer "blues" at work for a figure showing LGM T change. (4/12)

But what about line graphs? If you are paleoclimatologist like me, you are probably plotting a bunch of squiggly lines. For this, I suggest designing a palette for your *entire paper* ahead on time, and then plot stuff in this palette in every figure. (5/12)