@marcusmarcusrc.bsky.social
Climate scientist, ex-EPA. Writing climate science & policy at The Saraph Report. Saraph, my name's root, means fire, which is appropriate for climate work. Interested in books, food, and contra dancing when not obsessing over carbon.
You might be interested in this study that found relationships between speech & musical rhythm when comparing Irish, Scottish, and Kentucky musicians: online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-a...
In this post, I address a subset of Environmental Justice issues and the recent Trump actions regarding them open.substack.com/pub/thesarap...
Today I learned that women often couldn't own businesses by themselves until 1988 (www.forbes.com/sites/debora...). I already knew that they couldn't have a credit card without a male co-signer until 1974.
For my nature communications piece, the editors had us use RC models to distinguish from regional models
E.g., green is less than 0.1, blue is about -0.5, so the sum should be -0.4 (or even a bit more negative), but grey minus yellow looks like less the 0.3.
Based on eyeballing, it looks to me like naively adding the grey (GHGs) to the green (natural) to the blue (aerosols) would actually yield a # below the yellow (total). Is my eyeball just wrong, or are there some non-linearities involved? (or is there another missing positive forcer?)
Interested in how peer review works? I reviewed a GMD paper on RCMIP3 (egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...). Open discussion journals let you see "under the hood." A very good paper means modest comments, but this can still show some of the value of peer review. Also, yay model intercomparison!
Listening to Sean Donahue present on the EF on an ABA webinar… realizing that he is not the Sean Donahue who is EPA general counsel… reading the wiki on the latter… seeing damning analysis of his qualifications during confirmation… does this help explain the low quality of EPA legal actions?
Andy Dessler points out that reliance on fossil fuels is bad, not only for climate and for air pollution and mining waste, but also for energy security and military spending.
open.substack.com/pub/theclima...
Apologies for the Facebook link, but this is a cute video about anthropomorphized agencies talking about the Endangerment Finding www.facebook.com/share/r/1AXj...
Another lawsuit victory. Though it is sad that it is necessary to sue to government to get access to data that taxpayers have already paid for. www.govexec.com/management/2...
NYC congestion pricing wins in court - everything I've read about the program suggests that it is a huge success, so of course Trump hated it: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/n...
Happy 1 month (plus a bit) birthday to my substack: open.substack.com/pub/thesarap...
I certainly know that some people who have left government are able to get better pay in the private sector, and sometimes even at NGOs. I do worry that the perceived loss of job security will make government less appealing... and it would not surprise me if DOGE was a net cost.
Yes! Making this particularly important: hiring was slow and almost broken even before the Trump Administration, and given all the loss of HR staff and expertise, I imagine it will be even worse in a new administration.
2nd opinion, longer term: in the next administration, OPM should, as quickly as possible, make it as easy as possible for any former government employee who left service in the 5 years previous to rejoin government.
In my opinion, Congress should step in to deal with the problem of what to do about the tariff revenue, using it as a lump sum tax rebate for all Americans, and foreclosing any other lawsuits.
My concern is that AI might choke off the pipeline of specialists: sure, I can outperform AI in my areas of speciality, but can a fresh college grad? And if a fresh college grad can't, then how are they going to get hired to get the experience that they need to be able to use AI properly?
Yes! My wife and I were just talking about this! I was summing up bars to estimate the median…
I made one more post on Endangerment to address the week's news and the de minimis argument in more depth. Starting next week, I hope to begin posting on non-Endangerment subjects! thesaraphreport.substack.com/p/through-th...
Progress Quest was free back in the day. Just sayin’
While I went with Alice in Wonderland, Joe Goffman went with Back to the Future: open.substack.com/pub/joegoffm...
In which I dismantle the EPA's Endangerment rollback with many references to Alice in Wonderland. open.substack.com/pub/thesarap...
Multi-member districts with ranked choice voting is also a thing that could help with minority representation.
I'd also be happy with more widespread use of the Alaska system with open primaries and ranked choice voting for a limited number of top candidates (though I might prefer 5 instead of Alaska's 4).
An alternative to proportional representation is the "efficiency gap" from Nick Stephanopoulos, which might be more consistent with historical US electoral practice while also solving the key problems. Sadly, the Supremes found the concept too complicated. chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/public_law_a...
I have thoughts about gerrymandering that will be the focus of a future substack post, but in the short run democrats need to gerrymander the heck out of everything so that republicans drop their opposition to national regulation.
I wrote about the glaring flaws (legal and scientific) in the EPA’s Endangerment proposal here: substack.com/home/post/p-.... I doubt that the final reg will be much better though rumor is they gave up on the science. (I helped write and defend the original Finding)
