Tanja Schlemm (she/her)

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

Spot on, as usual, from @doctorvive.bsky.social...

"We need to correct a false narrative that the #climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human & ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation"

"python code" generated with virtual utopia

"python code" generated with Stable core

"python code" generated with Recraft

"python code" generated with dall-e

Since I've spend the whole day looking at python code, here's different ai models interpretations of the prompt "python code"

I like experimenting with very short prompts!

#aiart #synthart #promptshare

Line graph time series of 2025's daily Arctic sea ice extent compared to decadal averages from the 1980s to the 2010s. The decadal averages are shown with different colored lines with purple for the 1980s, blue for the 1990s, green for the 2000s, and white for the 2010s. Thin white lines are also shown for each year from 2000 to 2024. 2025 is shown with a thick gold line. There is a long-term decreasing trend in ice extent for every day of the year shown on this graph between May and August by looking at the decadal average line positions.

🚨 Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the *lowest* on record (JAXA data)

• about 350,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 1,010,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,590,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 2,150,000 km² below the 1980s mean

More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

We talk a lot about the level of climate warming, have we passed a given threshold, and less about the rate. The rate is the core problem: we are changing climate faster than society or the environment can adapt. If it took 10,000 years to warm by 2 C, this would be a different conversation.

"Instead, talk about why you care about climate change. How is it affecting the people, places, or things you love? Share the small victories—yours and others’—and celebrate them. Use your voice to advocate for change where you live, work, study, or worship."

Great summary of our recent paper about Antarctic Ice Sheet tipping points 👇

Explainer: How human-caused aerosols are ‘masking’ global warming - Carbon Brief Carbon Brief unpacks the climate effects of aerosols, how their emissions have changed over time and how they could impact the pace of future warming

Most future‑emissions pathways project continued aerosol declines. Unless methane and other short-lived GHGs fall at the same time, the rate of warming could accelerate in coming decades even if CO2 emissions plateau.

For more details, check out the full Carbon Brief piece: www.carbonbrief.org/...

U.S. military trims access to its critical sea ice measurements Data gaps come as Arctic sea ice shrinks to near-record lows

Continued coverage of the plight of US climate science from @science.org here:

The US military has now halted operational data delivery of sea ice extent observations to @nsidc.bsky.social, blinding key eyes on climate change.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Earth Is Barreling Toward a Second Year Above the 1.5°C Threshold Last year was the warning — this year is the reckoning: welcome to the Age of Overshoot.

A harrowing summary of the future we are heading to

open.substack.com/pub/rickylan...

Antarctic Ice Sheet tipping in the last 800,000 years warns of future ice loss - Communications Earth & Environment The Antarctic Ice Sheet exhibits hysteresis and irreversible ice loss, with West Antarctic collapse contributing over 4 m of sea-level rise even under minimal additional warming, according to 800,000-...

Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be triggered with very little ocean warming above present-day, leading to a devastating four metres of global sea level rise to play out over hundreds of years

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Ein historischer (& paradoxer) Erfolg für Klimagerechtigkeit! Laut dem OLG Hamm können dreckige Konzerne wie RWE für Klimarisiken haftbar gemacht werden. Zwar wurde die konkrete Klage von Saul aus Peru abgewiesen, aber dabei dieser bahnbrechende Grundsatz etabliert. #SaulvsRWE

The world could experience a year above 2°C of warming by 2029 2024 was the first single year to surpass the 1.5°C global warming threshold – now scientists predict that a year above 2°C is possible in the near future

Can't quite believe I'm writing this, but a 2C year is now possible this decade*

New @wmo-global.bsky.social report is clear: world is warming at an alarming rate & we are in for near record temperatures for the rest of the decade

www.newscientist.com/article/2481...

*Albeit still very unlikely

In between all this bashing of people still on Twitter, I recently learned that many people in South America and probably Africa and Asia too, have mobile phone contracts where x and Facebook are priced in, but all the rest of the internet costs extra - they cannot easily leave x!

Title card for my article, "Antarctica is Gaining Ice, Right?: Misrepresenting glaciolgy to death."

"The claim climate skeptics make about how the slight precipitation-induced increase in Antarctica nullifies melt in other key sectors of the ice sheet is a claim based on lazy data analysis, lack of expertise, and hasty conclusions. Five or more years of a mass balance trend reversal does not confirm the reversal of the processes that threaten the structural stability of the ice sheet."

A new article is now live on Glaciers & Whatnot! We're breaking down the slight increase in total mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet and exploring how climate change deniers abuse authentic data 🥼❄️ ⚒️

open.substack.com/pub/glaciers...

Chasing a submarine under Antarctic ice Testing the limits of AI image generators

"Because this region is so remote and difficult to access, there are very few photos of what it actually looks like. And since AI is trained with existing images, it really struggles to imagine something only from a description."

open.substack.com/pub/jadzania...

"As humanity, we are not all in the same boat, but are divided according to ethnicity, gender and class into those who will be sacrificed and those who can still save themselves for a while."

jadzania.substack.com/p/climate-co...

Disentangling the oceanic drivers behind the post-2000 retreat of Sermeq Kujalleq, Greenland (Jakobshavn Isbræ) Abstract. Ocean temperatures have warmed in the fjords surrounding the Greenland Ice Sheet, causing increased melt along their ice fronts and rapid glacier retreat and contributing to rising global se...

🚨🧊🚨🧊 New paper led by PhD student Ziad Rashed on the oceanic drivers of Sermeq Kujalleq’s retreat since 2000 and why some models predict it will be unstoppable for decades to come (and may be wrong!) doi.org/10.5194/tc-1...

This is a hell of a fascinating thread. Remember, real science and history is was weirder and cooler then any conspiracy theory.

High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide - Nature Climate Change While climate injustice is widely recognized, a quantification of how emissions inequality translates into unequal accountability is still lacking. Here researchers examine how affluent groups disprop...

Nature paper finds that 2/3rds of warming since 1990 is attributable to the wealthiest 10%, with 1/5th caused by top 1%, and 8% of attributable to top 0.1%.

A reminder that policy must address the outsized impact of the world's wealthiest.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧪

🧵🧪🌊 Further to my post yesterday about the lack of new sea ice formation in the Bellingshausen Sea (lower left in maps here), the region has now been almost ice free for more than three months. Map on left shows sea ice concentration on 1st Feb. Map on right shows concentration on 1st May.

blocks of ice and warm colored clouds in Antarctica

I took this image in Antarctica — a place of harsh beauty, sometimes colorful, and always deeper than expected. Share if you like it.

#Photography #Antarctica #Fieldwork
#PolarScience #GlacierLife #BlueIce #SciencePhotography
#VisualScience #IceStories #Earth #Expedition

Climate scientists at work "A climate scientist working at her computer" - that was the prompt I started with for one of my very first experiments with AI generated images

My very first experiment with AI generated images now as a substack article: illustrate what kind of research climate scientist do at their desk - featuring ice sheets and vegetation.

jadzania.substack.com/p/climate-sc...

#aiart #climate #climate-change #science #icesheet #vegetation

Long-awaited spring rain. When the clouds approached, they looked ominously green. #photography

But drought remains a serious issue in Germany this year. Check the latest data on soil moisture & drought at the UFZ Dürremonitor: www.ufz.de/index.php?de...

#drought #climate-change

ABSOLUTE INSANITY
Unbelievable hot nights in CENTRAL ASIA
Thousands of records of April hottest nights brutalized with the hugest margins ever seen in world climatic history (locally 10C+ above monthly records !)

Anything happened anywhere is nothing to what it's happening now

The Landscape Exposed The aftermath of fire

A moving and sobering photo essay of the Australian Grampians after wildfire

"The blackened landscape I see today is a precursor of the world of the future – laid bare, exposed, vulnerable. A rethinking of the future is required."

jameshider.substack.com/p/the-landsc...

On March 1, Antarctic sea ice reached its smallest coverage of the year. This year’s minimum extent tied 2022 and 2024 for the second-lowest summer sea ice area observed since satellite records began in 1979. Learn more: www.climate.gov/news-feature...

<lora:GlitchFoilFlux:1.0> <lora:Abstract Reality:1.0> A woman in a futuristic, neon-lit, green landscape, wearing comfortable pants and a wide sweatshirt with her hair in a loose ponytail, wrangling a massive anaconda composed of glowing, swirling lines of code, its body a mesmerizing dance of 1s and 0s, in a style reminiscent of Syd Mead's futuristic landscapes, the vibrant colors and sharp lines evoking the aesthetic of Ash Thorp's digital art, with a hint of H.R. Giger's biomechanical intricacy. Flux + loras

Anaconda is a package managment system for #python and other #programming languages and I'm kind of going crazy this week trying to wrangle Anaconda and all the dependencies and am constantly getting errors that I try to fix that lead to new errors... Argh!

#aiart #synthart #promptshare

Guest post: Exploring the risks of ‘cascading’ tipping points in a warming world - Carbon Brief Recent research suggests triggering one tipping element within the Earth system could cause subsequent changes in others, leading to a “tipping cascade”.

Good overview over tipping elements in the earth climate and the state of research on them:
www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-e...

Interesting thread!
"Public understanding of science isn’t in such a terrible state just because scientists haven’t been organised in our communications and told appealing enough stories..."

A wonderful article from phd students in our group and the Karthaus summer school: Where do we want the glaciological community to be in 2073? Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion challenges and visions from the 2023 Karthaus Summer School

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

#glaciology #diversity