When I get my annual budget from the university

Andrew Curry@andrewcurry.com · 2d ago

The man's skeletal injuries looked like a train hit him, but he died in 1304 CE. At #ppa26Berlin last week, @uniofbradford.bsky.social scientist Jo Buckberry concluded he was likely whacked by a flying boulder, making him the first confirmed trebuchet death in the archaeological record. @science.org

Editorial about Supporting Information at @agu.org's GRL. Long story short: it's the function, not the quantity. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Apropos of 1930s vs. 2026 temperatures in the USA, @dustybowl.bsky.social (ahem) showed that the land-atmosphere feedbacks caused by land use, crop failure, and dust emissions gave rise to the observed spatial pattern of drought and the hot temperatures www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

New classes of climate model emulators to improve paleoclimate reconstructions gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/... '... particularly well suited for integration into Particle Filters and Ensemble Kalman Filter PDA frameworks'

New classes of climate model emulators to improve paleoclimate reconstructions

Abstract. Reconstructing spatial climate variability from proxy records requires forward models “emulators” that capture the dynamical structure of the climate system while remaining computationally e...

gmd.copernicus.org

The dismantling of science/education is up there with the erosion of international trust as long-lasting disaster legacies of the Trump administration that will not be reversed any time soon.

Mark Histed@markhisted.org · 4d ago

Trump 2.0 has blown up US scientific research in a way that will take decades to roll back. Labs that took years to build have closed, young people have left science. NYT Mag published a long report on Dismantling Cancer Research. Why does Ross Douthat lie like this?

Realizing that much of what I understand about leadership comes from this 2012 Dahlia Lithwick piece in Slate 'Think about your basic Muppet workplaces ... it’s always crucial to get the ratio of Order-to-Chaos exactly right.' slate.com/life/2012/06...

Every Last One of Us Is a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet

Every once in a while, an idea comes along that changes the way we all look at ourselves forever. Before Descartes, nobody knew they were thinking....

slate.com

Certain traditions evoke a deep reverence for the everyday geoscientist

AGU (American Geophysical Union)@agu.org · last wk.

The abstract submission website for #AGU26 is experiencing intermittent log in and slow response times. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

North Atlantic Oscillation reconstructions, observations, and simulations of the last millennium ... one of these things is not like the other (from our 2019 paper reconstructing the NAO with European and Mediterranean tree-ring chronologies, doi.org/10.1007/s003...)

Live view of my office after a monsoon storm knocked out power overnight and the HVAC still isn't fixed

In the southwestern US, there is no clear signal of ENSO on summer/monsoon precipitation. Plot shows El Nino and La Nina years (columns) for 3 time periods (rows) from 1896 to 2022 for 5 regions. From Woodhouse et al. 2025 rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

This is an important point. While some hard limits (cannot be overcome by any means) to adaptation might be identified through biophysical research, identifying most hard limits and all soft limits (we hit because we choose not to do things that are needed) requires actually trying to adapt.

Meade Krosby@meadekrosby.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is also, tangentially, a response to those saying we’re already seeing the limits of adaptation. No, we’re not. We’ve barely begun to adapt. And that’s being generous. Adaptation has limits - and they’ll vary by system - but we won’t reach them until we genuinely mobilize to reduce risk.

RFK Jr is conspiracy-laden doofus, and it will take a long time to repair the damage he's done to public understanding of science and medicine www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-ly...

August as an academic

I am pleased to announce that we are inviting applications for a Lead Laboratory Coordinator at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. Review of applications will begin on September 15, 2026. For details and to apply, visit arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Research on the fossil record of mammals in Mexico suggests that the geographic region acted as a biodiversity “holding pen” for 10 million years. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4xhNmQ9

Water Limits Radial Tree Growth More Than Light in an Everwet Subtropical Forest onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Water Limits Radial Tree Growth More Than Light in an Everwet Subtropical Forest

We deployed automated point dendrometers on 35 trees representing three life history strategies in an everwet subtropical forest with 3500 mm rain annually and no pronounced dry season. Contrary to t....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

In North America and Europe there are also “human fingerprints” on the more extreme fires dominating the news, but that is from climate change apnews.com/article/wild...

Wildfires are more extreme in Europe and North America, but global burning is oddly decreasing

Experts say the world is experiencing two opposing fire trends because of human impact. Wildfires in Europe, Canada and the U.S. are high, and flirting with record levels in Europe.

apnews.com

This is important - Honest Brokers (TM) and their echo chamber will often point to the decreasing global wildfire, but that reflects changing human land use practices. In temperate and boreal forests, climate's role is more clear. See this paper by Cunningham et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Analysis of fire radiative power derived from satellite data finds that the frequency of extreme fire events increased 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023 and that these increases were mostly driven by extreme...

nature.com

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 2w ago

Experts say the world is experiencing two opposing fire trends because of human impact.

Another day as a “professional water detective” with @science.nature.org . Today’s flavor- lost ciénegas near the (flowing!) San Pedro River in Arizona #WaterConservation 🕵🏼‍♀️💧🐕

High temperatures and low precipitation in the American West last winter led to record-low snowpack. A study finds that such a snow drought is 4.4 times more likely in the current climate than it would have been in the pre-industrial climate. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/LKKh50ZtquX

🥵 Heat domes! What exactly are they? In this timely new paper led by Paul Loikith, we provide a quantitative definition based on circulation and surface temperatures and present their climatology. Figure ⬇️ shows proportion of extreme heat events associated with a heat dome doi.org/10.1016/j.wa...

'Historical trends (1950–2023) ... reveal statistically significant increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme fire weather in regions such as the Iberian Peninsula ...' esd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

Was curious how ENSO forecasts did during the 2023-2024 El Nino event. The model plume bracketed the eventual NINO3.4 trajectory fairly well, with some outliers in both directions (e.g. AUS-ACCESS, MetFrance, BCC, CPC Markov) - data from IRI: iri.columbia.edu/our-expertis...

High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds

High-resolution simulations reveal that direct carbon dioxide effects nonlinearly amplify positive low-cloud feedbacks.

science.org

A week late but excited to share @nationalacademies.org report on Attribution of Extreme Events and their Impacts. Had the opportunity to work with amazing colleagues to reflect on the incredible progress in EEA and review the breadth of applications @climate-done.bsky.social @jmarlon.bsky.social

Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts

Decades of data and research indicate that human-caused climate change is altering the frequency and intensity of several types of extreme events, such as heat waves and extreme rainfall events. Even...

nationalacademies.org

Once you understand that this is a model of science written by non-scientists who hate universities but love venture capital and redirecting money to political allies, everything makes a lot more sense. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/u...

Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities

Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.

nytimes.com

NSF physical sciences, geosciences, engineering, social sciences on track for a 33% budget cut, never mind Congressional intent.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 3w ago

And here's the spending breakdown across directorates, relative to the average from FY21–25 at this point in the year: NSF avg. - 74% BIO - 79% CISE - 110% ENG - 65% GEO - 65% MPS - 67% EDU - 26% SBE - 69% TIP - 105% O/D - 131%

NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship applications are now open! cpaess.ucar.edu/cgc/annual-r... I was one about 350 years ago, and cannot not speakly highly enough of this program. Applications due October 16, 2026

And here's the second story, about an important--but underreported--ruling by a federal judge knocking out the notorious clause the Trump administration has used to terminate grants that, after the fact, don't "effectuate agency priorities." www.science.org/content/arti...

U.S. judge rejects Trump’s justification for terminating thousands of grants

States hail decision, but White House may try other ways to end funding

science.org

New paper out in @pnas.org: this year’s western U.S. snow conditions were pretty dismal, but to what extent was this snow drought due to climate change?  Paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (with Marianne Cowherd, Stefan Rahimi, Yuhong Ye) Thread:👇