Tom Rooney
@tomrooney.bsky.social
Conservation professional with interests in forestry, prescribed fire, and wildlife ecology. Author, The Vanishing Present (Univ. Chicago Press, 2008) Views are mine, all mine, and not my employer's.
18 U.S.C. §597 “...whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5d agoTrump: "We're making a fortune. So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump Dividend. Congratulations."
More broadly, the findings show why protecting ecosystems, traditional ecological knowledge, and science is crucial as climate impacts grow. All three are under threat.
Mongabay@mongabay.com · 4d agoIn Australia's Kimberley region, Bardi Jawi Indigenous rangers and scientists paired traditional knowledge with research to trace fish migrations between reefs and mangroves. The findings show why protecting both ecosystems is crucial as climate impacts grow. Anthony Ham reports for #Mongabay.
If you're Catholic & believe in church-defined sin, there are a lot of new official sinners now, including fossil-fuel company execs, climate deniers, & billionaire eco-destroyers. "Vatican theological commission defines ‘sin against creation & the Creator’ www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09...
Vatican theological commission defines ‘sin against creation and the Creator’ in new document
The more than 29,000 word text calls for ecological conversion due to “sin against creation and the Creator.”
americamagazine.org
To be fair, university administrators routinely plow money into initiatives that neither professors nor students want. I believe it must be written into the job description.
David Roberts@volts.wtf · 3w agoWild that this shit is still going on -- university administrators just plowing money into AI, with no particular vision or goal, against the wishes of most professors & students, even as money is desperately needed for other things.
Remember when Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil was a dystopian sci-fi comedy? It's arrived, with two underscore fus_ _ro_dah starring as cobbler Archibald Buttle, and fus_ro_dah starring as terrorist Archibald Tuttle. www.wired.com/story/a-typo...
A Typo Landed an Innocent Gamer in Prison for 18 Months
How much could a single underscore in a username really matter? Just ask Brandon Klayme, who served 18 months in prison before realizing how authorities arrested, charged, and convicted the wrong man.
wired.com
Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.
It is an irony of the U.S. legal system that the exact qualities that would make me an objective and fair jurist are the same qualities that make trial attorneys reject me during jury selection. 🤷 🤷
We suggest key questions that institutions need to ask themselves
Martin McKee@martinmckee.bsky.social · 2mo agoEurope must learn from America’s assault on science @chrischirp.bsky.social @tiagocorreia.bsky.social & I warn in Eur J Public Health that what is happening there could happen here, with catastrophic consequences @eupha.bsky.social academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic...
When we say these people are just repeating the segregationist playbook, we mean it literally
Right Wing Watch @rightwingwatch.bsky.social · 2mo agoPreaching that God has assigned black people to "a civilizational station of subordination and dependence" due to the Curse of Ham, Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge calls for a "return to European Christian colonization of African nations." www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...
My not-so-hot take is that what Mamdani is doing *IS* incrementalism, and the bar is so deeply in hell that a politician just doing *anything* good consistently is a total anomaly for people. And I think for now that is good and fine, because it is restoring people’s faith that better is possible.
June 25 marks the 150th anniversary of Custer's death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. No matter how you think about it, you're probably wrong. I received a Pulitzer for "Custer's Trials," yet no one's asking my opinion. That should tell me something. Still, here's how to understand it. 1/🧵
As well as being just, this is also clever, as North Korean troops will recognise the new route to defection, NK leadership and loyal officials will recognise the risk, and the fighting efficiency of those sent there will be reduced by the effort of trying to guard against defection.
The Kyiv Independent@kyivindependent.com · 3mo ago⚡️ South Korea to accept all North Korean POWs from Ukraine at their request, ministry says. The ministry said it opposes any forced transfer of North Korean POWs to Russia or North Korea and has communicated this position to Ukrainian authorities.
Improved conservation helps, but not emitting in the first place is 4x more effective than removals or avoided habitat conversions.
Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com · 3mo agoSo we can say that approximately 78% of the avoided increase in atmospheric CO2 was from slower fossil fuel growth, and 22% from falling land use emissions:
Solar and farming do not have to compete 😎 🌱 . A new agrivoltaics pilot shows how combining them can boost productivity, support ecosystems, and diversify farm income, while pointing to what is needed to scale this approach for people and nature. https://nature.ly/4f60xOd
Regenerative agrivoltaics: Challenges and opportunities in Southern California’s Inland Empire region
“Regenerative agrivoltaics” involves the co-location of regenerative agriculture (RA) and solar development. While RA focuses on promoting environment…
nature.ly
Read this to my 3yo this morning and she’s now stomping around the apartment pumping her fist and chanting “Strike! Strike!”
I mean, due to scientific international cooperation, the virus was sequenced and the vaccine was in production in the U.S. before the first case of Covid in the U.S.
Andy Masley@andymasley.bsky.social · 3mo agoGetting the first covid vax felt like the waters parting. Can't imagine feeling any other way about it. Wild that so many people now feel otherwise
If the 60 Minutes thing is proving anything it’s that a lot of people in positions of power think there is no crime greater, no injustice more profound, than being called out for being incompetent when you’re clearly fucking incompetent
Every time data centers are brought up, I'm reminded of a recent meeting I had with a person working in that sector who mentioned how important power demand modeling was, because they projected if the grid were to go down in Phoenix during peak summer, 30,000 people would die in the first 24 hours
They say the door to Hell is locked from the inside. And the same is true of reactionary politics. The solution to the Male Loneliness Epidemic <dismissive wanking gesture> is and has always been feminism. Simple as. Men, go clean your rooms and learn feminism.
if you're cis and you are asked by your management to police bathrooms, "can you confirm in writing that you are ordering me to approach customers to discuss their sex?" is an email no manager wants to reply to
Weird Alex@jackalpants.bsky.social · 4mo agoFor business owners, the important part of the new ECHR advice is this: 13.179: There is no type of official record or document in the UK which provides reliable evidence of sex. [...] Therefore, it is unlikely to be proportionate or practical to ask for further evidence of a person’s sex.
When the writer of my favorite TV series meets my favorite Regional Sewer District.
People have asked me what I think, so... Scenarios, schmenarios… www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...
RealClimate: Scenarios, schmenarios…
RealClimate: The fantasy version of the normal updating of scenarios for a new round of CMIP simulations doing the rounds is bad faith BS. As climate folk will know, the community is currently embarki...
realclimate.org
Apparently we were vibing yesterday with our posts on RCP 8.5. and now I'm following another smart person on Bluesky.
Madison Condon@madisoncondon.bsky.social · 4mo agoman if you are a scientist whose thing is working with averages I would just really love it if you talked to an adaptation scientist colleague before you call a certain scenario "irrelevant" to the press
Here's a hill I will die on. RCP 8.5 is incredibly useful. RCP 8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) is a high-emissions climate scenario used by the IPCC to model the most extreme potential futures. It is currently considered unlikely, but that doesn't matter. A thread 1/
"What went wrong"? This is many, many, many, many, many, many, many words to avoid saying "Brexit" Quite literally, a word that doesn't appear in the entire essay
Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 4mo agoOnce the model of stable government, Britain has had six PMs in the past 10 years — and is in the grip of yet another leadership crisis. Anthony Seldon asks what went wrong. Read The Weekend Essay in full here: ft.trib.al/5CLV8Ht
After an obscure defense vendor won a $12 million no-bid contract w/ ICE, I noticed something odd on its website: The firm was using a (still watermarked!) stock photo for the chief of its “development team.” Things only got more bizarre from there…
Alabama Legislature is meeting on redistricting; we are under a tornado watch, and it’s flooding in the building. These metaphors are too on the nose.
I do frequently wonder what the average citizen of the U.S. knows about Reconstruction. As Du Bois would later point out, the backlash of lost cause propaganda didn’t just create mass disinformation about the civil war itself, but about the opening for actual democracy that briefly came after it.
