ClimateFran

NEW ANALYSIS: China's CO2 has now been 'flat or falling' for 21 months

* Down in 2025
* Still below Mar 2024
* Clean energy wave a key factor

If this is China's peak (TBC) it's the climate story of the century so far…

www.carbonbrief.org/...

This is so egregious given the Administration has literally resorted to NOT COUNTING THE BENEFITS of GHG emissions reduction in order try and justify their repeal of climate regulations on cost-benefit grounds.
Thanks @washingtonpost.com for this sloppy and misleading editorial.

Today we’re launching Open Climate Risk, a fully open option for U.S. building-level climate risk data. It’s unique because it allows you to see not only risk scores, starting with wildfire, but also the complete underlying dataset, methods, and codebase. carbonplan.org/research/cli...

"The grid is decarbonizing" is not the same as "everyone benefits."

New EPRI analysis connects nodal power system modeling with community vulnerability data to track distributional air quality impacts. The who is the point.

Hi Neighbor! Also @sidersadapts.bsky.social @envpolicycenter.bsky.social @andrewdessler.com

Fascinating - COVID 19 lockdowns reduced NOx emissions (less car and plane traffic), limiting OH formation and slowing the rate of CH4 removal. This, plus elevated wetland emissions, accounts for the 2020-2022 methane spike.

Our paper “Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States” is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! We released a new, highly granular migration dataset. 1/9

With cold outbreaks sweeping parts of the US, some have argued that climate change is to blame. But the proposed mechanism remains quite controversial in the scientific community, and the number of extreme cold events have been decreasing almost everywhere: www.theclimatebrink....

This infographic from The White House, titled "U.S. STEEL PRODUCTION INCREASES," uses a bar chart to compare total production in 2024 versus 2025, but it employs a heavily truncated y-axis to exaggerate the appearance of growth. The vertical axis begins at 80.2 million tonnes (Mt) rather than zero, which makes the 2025 green bar (representing approximately 81.8 Mt) appear roughly five times taller than the 2024 red bar (representing approximately 80.9 Mt). In reality, this indicates a modest increase of approximately 1.1%, though the visual presentation suggests a massive, multi-fold surge in production.

I'd like to report a y-axis crime…

Shifting-baselines in action
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Also, h/t xkcd: xkcd.com/1321/

Sounds like a fun afternoon

A Secret Panel to Question Climate Science Was Unlawful, Judge Rules

Bad science, bad economics AND illeagal
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/c...

How well can we quantify when 1.5 °C of global warming has been exceeded? Abstract. Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement agreed to limit the long-term increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to keep temperatures below 1.5 °C relative to p...

New discussion paper just dropped that’s taken shall we say a little work to get this far … essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es... please be kind. Not on an at all sensitive topic in the slightest.

If/Then: Ignoring the Benefits of Air Pollution Regulations Will Lead to Worse Policy Decisions If the US Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t count the monetary benefits of regulations, then federal actions are likely to lead to worse policy outcomes for public health and welfare.

EPA's arguments for ignoring the benefits of air pollution regulation in a cost-benefit analysis of air pollution regulation don't hold up. Maybe obvious, but still bears repeating.
www.resources.org/common-resou...

Climate Data Scientist | Climate Central Climate Central is seeking a highly-skilled Climate Data Scientist to join our team. Reporting to the Vice President for Science, the scientist will be part of a new initiative in climate services to ...

Very exciting to share that @climatecentral.org is hiring a Climate Data Scientist to join a new climate services effort focused on advancing predictions of risks and hazards on seasonal-to-decadal timescales. The application closes on February 9, 2026 at 5pm ET, & the description can be found here:

Paleoclimate pattern effects help constrain climate sensitivity and 21st-century warming | PNAS Paleoclimates provide examples of past climate change that inform estimates of modern warming from greenhouse-gas emissions, known as Earth’s clima...

Really excited to see this paper out!! Led by @vtcoop.bsky.social we show that if you use cold and warm paleoclimates together, you can reduce uncertainty in Earth's climate sensitivity by quantifying the pattern effect and more precisely constrain future climate change www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Texas power buildout in one picture: wind (green) laid the foundation, solar (yellow) is the new wave, and energy storage (purple) is clustering around load. This is the grid transition, mapped.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Like the previous decision to ignore the costs of climate change in repealing power-plant rules, this decision makes a mockery of benefit-cost analysis. You cannot evaluate the net-benefits of regulation to society looking only at one side of the leger
www.epa.gov/system/files...

The majority benefits of most EPA regulations come in the form of improved health - if you don't value mortality benefits then you can't perform a benefit-cost analysis. EPA's value of ~$10 million is based on wage premiums for risky jobs, dates back decades and has been largely uncontroversial

Valuation of mortality risk reduction (lives saved!) is very well established. People make tradeoffs all the time between money and risk reduction - pay more for a safer car or require a higher wage to work a riskier job. This observational data forms the basis for the "Value of a Statistical Life"

Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars

How do you make rollback of clean air regulations pass a cost-benefit test? Don't count any of the benefits!

People value their health and don't like breathing poisonous air. But Trump's EPA doesn't care.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/c...

9th Annual LSE/Imperial Workshop on Environmental Economics Information about the LSE Department of Geography and Environment's Environmental Economics Workshop.

📢 Call for Papers! The 9th Annual LSE/Imperial Workshop on Environmental Econ. will be held in London June 8-9
✅ Submissions by Feb 1
📄 Full papers only (no abstracts)
🎤 Keynote: Prof. @rmetcalfe.bsky.social

🔗 more details here: www.lse.ac.uk/geography-an...

The Carney doctrine Open comment thread on the PM's Davos speech

Remarkable speech from Mark Carney today at Davos, worth reading in full. Thanks to Paul Wells for transcribing (and translating the French portion): paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...

How One Company Is Pushing a Private Takeover of Flood Insurance

Neptune Flood (subsidiary of NYSE:NP) is actively working to privatize the NFIP. Company leadership has communicated their work and this goal, in line with Project 2025, to the White House.

Privatization would have big implications for flood-prone communities.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/c...

Screenshot of a data visualization titled “The Cost of American Exceptionalism,” subtitled “What would change if the U.S. matched the OECD average?” The page explains that each card shows how outcomes would change if the U.S. matched the average of 31 peer democracies. Below, a section labeled “Economy & Inequality” displays eight cards comparing U.S. figures to OECD averages. Highlights include: +$19K per household per year in redistributed income and +$96K in redistributed wealth if the top 1% matched OECD shares; a 71% lower CEO-to-worker pay ratio (from 354× to 101×); 50 million more workers with union coverage; 26 million more people with health insurance; $2.1 trillion saved annually in healthcare spending; $691 less per person per year in prescription drug costs; and intergenerational economic mobility being twice as high. Each card shows the U.S. value alongside the OECD average.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this:

America's problems are solved problems. Just not here.

What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

I see a lot of econ/socsci Bluesky asking for AI starter advice. IMO the highest impact, low cost tweak to your workflow is training an AI to follow *your* coding/writing prefs & habits.

Literally, tell Claude: "Look at <XYZ dirs>. ID common themes, styles & conventions. Write them to a .md file."

Everyone likes a green energy subsidy, but taxing or regulation of fossil fuels needed to achieve ambitious decarbonization goals

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very cool stuff - applying AI weather modeling for decision-relevant seasonal information for Indian farmers. Predicting monsoon onset with a 4 week lead time

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm always confused why we have expectations of optimality in climate policy when we don't in most other policy domains