shane loeffler

Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date (Gift Article) Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted, because of Earth’s wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign.

I wrote about how Earth's wobble causes our view of the skies to shift over time. Here's a paywall-free gift link. With @fparis.bsky.social and @iamrumz.bsky.social

“Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

Nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries that a recent study has identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — signaling enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

By @abrahm.bsky.social, w/ graphics by @lucaswaldron.bsky.social

Offsets are no free lunch – CarbonPlan Offsets provide few climate benefits and cost California hundreds of millions of dollars each year. When lawmakers reauthorize the state’s cap and trade program this fall, they should eliminate the us...

California’s offset program is not only deeply flawed, it also costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. We dive into the details in a new commentary. carbonplan.org/research/off... (1/7)

A relief map showing the landforms of Madison, WI. Elevations are showin in a pink-to-pale yellow gradient, and the whole thing has a semi-watercolor effect.

A detail of the downtown part of the map, with a handful of features labeled.

An abandoned project from last year. I planned on a "Landforms of #Madison" map, but got stuck at the labeling stage because almost none of these features have names I could find. Maybe a 15–20 across the whole map. The state capitol sits on a big unnamed hill. This has downstream effects… (1/2)

YouTube video by Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum [CNG 2025] Visualizing GeoParquet in the Browser – Raphael Hagen and Shane Loeffler

🆕 #CNG2025 session recording
Raphael Hagen & @shaneloeffler.com from @carbonplan.org share how they went about visualizing GeoParquet data directly in the web browser.
▶️ youtu.be/SsjNPFv5dgI

How did I not know about this???? It works amazingly well - select 'transactions' and then just whack in a company name. Massively under-used resource here

We spent an entire paddling season researching and paddling across the Twin Cities to create this guide. The Star Tribune has never put out a guide this comprehensive. Get out on the water, people. It's really the best thing you can do this summer.

www.startribune.com/canoe-kayak-...

Oofda

Effective immediately, the PGC is no longer accepting new NSF-supported requests due to a lack of renewal funding. Current work is wrapping up. Please contact your NSF program officer if impacted. We’re grateful to have supported your polar research. Read our full statement at www.pgc.umn.edu

Raphael and Shane @carbonplan.org on visualizing GeoParguet in the browser, along with some nerdy details like partitioning and spatial indexing @cloudnativegeo.org #cngconference

Last week I was playing around with a new "tree ring plot" to visualize daily global temperature anomalies from ERA5.

I thought it would be neat to make a version of the plot for daily global absolute temperatures (rather than anomalies):

Want to know how fossil fuel companies use carbon offsets to claim they’re fighting climate change?

We've updated OffsetsDB — our offsets database — to allow you to search by carbon credit user. Search "Shell" and see what offsets they're using and when. (1/4) carbonplan.org/research/off...

A slightly stylized screenshot of the survey.

The Alliance of Freelance Cartographers needs your help! By taking our short annual survey, you strengthen your #cartography community. This survey is for anyone (globally) who did any amount of freelance mapping last year (even a little). forms.gle/VaZqPpxeB8Qu...

Please help spread this widely!

How Transit App is removing the mysteries of Twin Cities transit use The Metro Transit “user experience” is improving, especially for those who keep up with technology like mobile apps.

My latest is on the quiet good news of having free "Royale" access to the Transit App. www.minnpost.com/cityscape/20...

I'm gonna try to make this!

nice work!!

Fly Me to the Poles - Going Global with NASA Airborne Data — Development Seed The earth is round. Our screens are flat. Therein lies the problem.

Working link is: ds.io/globe-viz

When our community burned where was the satellite information? Video of our home burned down taken by a neighbor after the Palisades Fire. I am writing this as a follow-up to my brief post last week showing a video of our home destroyed by the Palisades fire.

When my house and community burned - where was the satellite information? A very raw blog post I am putting up so folks in the satellite, geospatial and tech fields can listen firsthand why I think we are failing the situations that need us the most.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-o...

Illustration source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adapen.2024.100202

🌍✨ What if your computing jobs could chase the sun and the wind, reducing your carbon footprint as they go?
1/8

How does 2024’s weather compare with your childhood? See if 2024 was anything like what you remember from growing up.

Last year, Bde Maka Ska was ice-free 26 days earlier than usual when I was a kid.

My latest:
www.startribune.com/how-does-202...

Mapping the efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement – CarbonPlan This new dataset and tool make it easier to see how the efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement varies around the world. Developed in collaboration with [C]Worthy.

There is a handy tool that @davidho.bsky.social helped build to see just that. TLDR is that it’s pretty fast in most places, but there are some bad spots one could do it: carbonplan.org/research/oae...

Let me tell you a story – one of the more haunting I’ve seen in 20 years of journalism. It’s about greed, death and denial. It took two years to unravel one doctor’s myth, a hospital’s complicity in creating it, and a documented trail of suspicious deaths…🧵

A Hospital Helped a Beloved Doctor’s Practice Flourish Even as It Suspected He Was Hurting Patients Hailed as a savior upon his arrival in Helena, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and his hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did…

NEW: “Eat What You Kill”

Hailed as a savior upon his arrival in Helena, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and his hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths. @davidmcswane.bsky.social

I missed the #30DayMapChallenge, but wanted to share something I worked on during those 30 days for a story in my friend's zine about a backpacking trip I did several years back in the Rincon Mountains of southern Arizona.

Ethanol carbon capture and storage isn’t carbon removal COMMENTARY(9) by Freya Chay +Kata Martin Dec 04 2023 The voluntary carbon market is lurching toward buying and selling credits from corn ethanol carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. As recent indications, NextGen CDR and an ethanol CCS project in the midwest made a $30 million purchase agreement, and the offset registries Gold Standard and Verra have released draft methodologies under which such projects could be credited. All signs indicate the intention to credit corn ethanol CCS as carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The problem is, corn ethanol CCS doesn't actually remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Activities labeled as carbon removal must yield the physical climate service they claim to provide. The role of carbon removal in global temperature stabilization plans is to “undo” unavoidable or historic CO₂ emissions. For an activity to be called carbon removal today, it must therefore have the capacity to reduce absolute atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

HomeCarbon CreditsFirst Ethanol Facility to Issue Carbon Removal Credits March 9, 2024 Updated: March 9, 2024 First Ethanol Facility to Issue Carbon Removal Credits By Jennifer L

To make all of this even worse: ethanol CCS is being falsely sold as a carbon removal offset. This @carbonplan.org post is a fantastic, readable breakdown of why ethanol CCS simply avoids extra carbon being released - rather than sucking carbon from the air.

carbonplan.org/research/eth...

An animated hachure #terrain doodle I made last night/today, varying the line density parameter in my script across 30 frames.

Crediting challenges when carbon removal comes with avoided emissions – CarbonPlan Some carbon removal projects also result in avoided emissions. This is good for the climate, but can pose challenges for individual projects that are trying to earn carbon removal credits.

Projects that aim to remove carbon by tweaking existing industrial processes can end up avoiding some emissions as well. That’s a good thing for the climate — but it can pose challenges when trying to support these projects through the sale of carbon removal credits.
carbonplan.org/research/cdr... 🧪

I had a lot of fun working on this tool!