Neelima Vallangi

Looking for books to get for #climate curious friends & family this Christmas🎄?

Here are 6 of my favourites reads this year.

First up, Yale University historian Sunil Amrith's relentlessly edifying 'The Burning Earth'. A staggeringly comprehensive account of how we got to where we are! 🧵

To Get a Man’s Attention, Meow Harder

New research reports that cats meow more frequently when greeting male owners. It’s hypothesized that men “require more explicit vocalizations to notice and respond to the needs of their cats.” In other words, the researchers are suggesting that many cats have concluded that men don’t always listen

DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now Contrary to popular reports, DOGE has “burrowed into the agencies like ticks,” government sources tell WIRED.

NEW: DOGE is far from dead, contrary to recent reporting. Instead, its operatives have “burrowed into” federal agencies “like ticks.”

Here’s what the DOGE crew is up to now:

From @makenakelly.bsky.social @telliotter.bsky.social

A Jurassic river and eroded embankment, in pencil (Doug Henderson)

We talked about this in my class. People (& lenders!) need to have credible information about climate risk to their homes. However the way it is done right now, if at all, has lots of uncertainty. A home could be categorized as low-risk when it’s high risk, & vice versa! NOAA should do this service.

Terrible news coming out of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, both hit by powerful cyclones! Seems so unusual for these places. :(

Death toll passes 900 in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka floods Officials in Indonesia say more than 442 people have died, while Sri Lanka suffers worst natural disaster since 2004 tsunami

Much of southern Asia is currently reeling from extreme flooding. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines are the hardest hit by recent monsoonal rains and tropical cyclones. Please donate to a local Red Cross if you can.

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

Lol, Zillow tried to rate the climate risks facing individual properties. The real estate industry *hated* it, precisely because it worked -- it made selling risky properties more difficult. So they rebelled & Zillow caved.

Don't look up!

Can the Manhattan Project avoid building the nuclear bomb?

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

COP30 showed who’s really steering climate policy: not the EU, not the US — but a coalition of fossil states on one side and a solar-powered China on the other

Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out A new Gmail update may allow Google to use your private messages and attachments for AI training. Here's how to turn it off.

Gmail users!!

They've turned on AI scraping by default now...Here's how to turn it off.

Pass it on!!

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.

A very good article about one fake freelancer and the grim state of journalism/the world: thelocal.to/investigatin...

Press conference room absolutely packed at #COP30 as 20+ ministers gather to call for a roadmap away from fossil fuels to be a key outcome of this summit

(Many more countries have expressed their support behind the scenes)

I wish to know less about Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi was doing journalism the right way.

by Ezra Klein

Climate Diplomacy Brief - COP30 day 8 As Do Lago cranks up the heat, signs of rebellion within the ranks

"Wind lashed the tents. Fences tipped. Water flooded into the venue...Pope Leo, possibly sensing this was his moment, issued a statement warning “creation is crying out in floods, droughts, storms and relentless heat”. Welcome to Belem. He’s not wrong"😂 climatediplobrief.substack.com/p/climate-di...

Finally thank god

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Whole thing is just this tweet but instead of shelter cats it's the daughters and nieces of english nobility

this! thank you!

Hey so “underage girls” are…children. The word you’re looking for is children. They’re not like, women-in-waiting or women-lite or whatever. They’re children. I think some of you are very uncomfortable with what that means for you but it is still true.

“Did women ruin the workplace”

In light of current reminders about how powerful rich men exploit and assault young women under the safety and guise of various forms of “employment,“ just wanna give a shout out to NYT for this gem last week where we learned about how #metoo *actually* ended harming the workplace. 🙄

To recap: Jeffrey Epstein offered a NY Times reporter photos taken in Epstein's kitchen of Donald Trump and girls in bikinis *and* implored the NYT reporter to put this information in the public discourse in 2015

What did the NY Times editors know about this offer?

Today is a good day to remember, and to say, that the #MeToo movement was right, and was righteous, and has been vindicated over and over again. There was no overreach. There was no excess. There was no they-went-too-far.

So much work remains to be done.

The fact that rich people are buying up the media and politicians, and using up the remaining carbon budget is very bad for everyone.

It’s one thing to have different environmental/health priorities for your foundation, it’s quite another to have been bankrolling one of the primary sources of bullshit on the topic.

End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled Mohammed bin Salman’s utopian city was undone by the laws of physics and finance

NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives.
ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Wonderful. Thank you!

Thank you, just DMed.