Peter Brannen

i know science is currently getting its ass kicked by lies but it also really bothers me that the bullshit is so much more boring than the truth

Peter’s book also introduced me to a theory about the origin of life on earth that really blew my skull

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Haha, was going to say be careful, whoever that was was an imposter, I’m in Massachusetts!

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything How carbon dioxide made planet Earth, shaped human history, and now holds our future in the balance Every year, we are dangerously warping the climate by pu...

And buy Peter's latest book. The writing in here as as impressive as anything I've ever read. www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

🧪📡 Fantastic piece, and feeds into #SETI #technosignature ideas too

These are the pressing issues that matter in these trying times

Other candidates: Mississippi River delta BUT that whole area eroded away when sea level plummeted last ice age and we'll prob drop into another glacial at some point (maybe ~400,000 years). East African Rift Valley BUT could open into new ocean and get destroyed by subduction in 200 million years.

Could a Time Capsule Outlast Plate Tectonics? A ridiculous but instructive thought experiment involving deep time, plate tectonics, erosion and the slow death of the sun

Wrote strange a story for @sciam.bsky.social about where on Earth you'd put a time capsule if you wanted to find it as far in future as possible. Maybe bury a laser-etched zircon in Namibia and hope it erodes out of central mountain range of Pangaea Ultima? www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-...

The gorgeous 🇬🇧 cover in the wild!

It would be so sad if it was just diagenesis, I refuse to believe it.

About to hop on a podcast to talk about something I like thinking about much more than depressing climate change stuff: the Late Neoproterozoic Shuram-Wonoka carbon isotope excursion

archive.is/cs8U1

This is the paper www.nature.com/articles/s41..., and this is a quote from the author of the paper Ben Black when I interviewed him about it

One of the creepier geology papers I've read was about how in the end-Permian mass extinction (which is characterized by extreme volcanic CO2 outgassing and warming) the actual kill mechanism might have been when pulses of sulfur aerosols masking the warming rained out and the temperature spiked

Our Almost-Apocalyptic Climate Future By shooting for 3 degrees Celsius of warming, the world could slide toward a more cataclysmic 4 degrees.

Gift link www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

“In the United States, just 3 degrees Celsius of warming conditions in simulations tend to be hotter—when humidity is factored in—than heat waves in North Africa today,” the Purdue climate scientist Matthew Huber wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “These heat waves of the future could devastate US livestock yields, if they don’t kill the animals outright.” Humans, being animals, would also be killed by the heat. One recent study showed that in a 3 degree–warmer world, deaths resulting from a week-long exceptional heat wave, like the one that struck Europe in 2003, would rival peak-COVID mortality rates, killing 32,000 people in Europe.

"The entire financial system, including government bonds and mortgages, is premised on the idea that tomorrow will look something like today. In a world that’s 3 degrees warmer, it assuredly will not"

@peterbrannen.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com -->>

www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

Climate Realism Is a Delusion By shooting for 3 degrees Celsius of warming, the world could slide toward a more cataclysmic 4 degrees.

Wrote about how climate change is bad www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

A Battle with My Blood When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.

Apart from being a heartbreaking meditation on death, the fury Tatiana Schlossberg feels towards her shithead cousin RFK Jr. radiates off this piece www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Sneakers

“If we drive the carbon cycle far enough from equilibrium, it will respond in kind, no matter how hard we try to subordinate it to the market, or tame it with panicked legislation.” - @peterbrannen.bsky.social (quote from Peter’s excellent new book)

Nice explainer about CO2 - wiyh some nice examples from the geological record. @peterbrannen.bsky.social

Climate effects aside, just the sheer scale of our emissions are astounding. Humanity makes more CO2 every year than all other materials we produce combined

The hardening Beltway conventional wisdom about the tolerability of 3°C of warming (leaving aside the possibility of carbon cycle feedbacks kicking that up to around 4°C) is crazy. thebulletin.org/2022/07/extr...

It's the time of year when I think people are posting maps of isostatic rebound again.

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Over 3 billion years before this

Climate extremes likely to drive land mammal extinction during next supercontinent assembly - Nature Geoscience The Earth may become inhospitable to land mammals in about 250 Myr owing to climate warming and drying associated with the assembly of the next supercontinent, Pangaea-Ultima, according to combined te...

(From www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

The arc of history is long but it bends towards a lethally hot supercontinent 250 million years from now

Just began @peterbrannen.bsky.social's new book and already came across this gem 🤌 „If you really wanna have good fun, be a geologist. Geologists often know 2 or 3 languages and they always know the best places to drink.“ followed by a shout-out to IODP, the JR, and Exp399. Promising start!
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