Mike Dettinger

A national assmt of Chinese rivers finds streamflow declined in >70% of gages (mostly in north) over the past six decades, due to land use & cover changes, exacerbated by water withdrawals, diversion & regulation. Climate change has tended to increase flows in south.

www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Researchers Are Resurrecting Billion-Dollar Disaster Tool Trump Killed Nonprofit Climate Central has hired the scientist behind a key database of costly weather disasters to rebuild it.

Adam Smith, the NOAA scientist behind the Billion Dollar Disaster database forced out by the Trump coup in April, is now working on rebuilding the database for @climatecentral.org.

National Academy is stepping up…

Apology for deleting an add-on remark about this post. I meant it to be a text to chair of Natnl Acad committee that reviewed NCA5 draft a while back, following up on convo we had recently re misuse of NCAs. Misuse is one thing; rewriting them is many steps worse. Deleted post was private communs.

Do we, the authors of past NCAs, get to take our names off of our words, at least? I do not consent to ANY post-facto changes to my massively peer-and public-reviewed contributions to (water chapter) of 2013 NCA.

California is pushing the limits of crowdsourced energy The state’s biggest-ever test of ‘virtual power plants’ was a success.

Last Tuesday Pacific Gas & Electric drew on residential batteries in >100k homes, during peak demand, to power the statewide grid in test to determine power availability therein w/o grid failure. The amount was 535MW, equiv to a large hydro dam or ½ a nuclear plant.

www.semafor.com/article/08/0...

Like so many other things, with climate change or regarding climate change, history is not a reliable guide. Climate change changes everything!

Food banks have long prevented emissions. Now they're getting into the carbon credit business. To stay afloat, food banks in the Global South are considering selling controversial offsets for revenue.

Strikes me that, with EXISTING services & systems reducing food waste under MASSIVE attack, arguments whether GHG reduxns by food banks are “new or enhanced” are out of date. We need to reward NEW support cuz US sure won’t & they’ll go away w/o NEW investments/contribs.

grist.org/food-and-agr...

And here's a webinar from @AGU.org's strateguc communications team re: how to write impactful op-eds, choose the appropriate outlets and more.

email.agu.org/OTg3LUlHVC01... (password Zug4s^Mc )

@AGU.org’s policy team breaks down what this summer's Congressional bills affecting federal funding for science do, how they relate to each other, and how you can take action this August in this webinar from last week.

email.agu.org/OTg3LUlHVC01... (password Y8rZ7$S. )

Golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos by Marcel Burkhardt

Combining high-resolution atmospheric analysis and global positioning system tracking data, @matthiastschumi.bsky.social and his team explored the role of gravity waves in soaring golden eagles, with results supporting the regular use of these waves. Read more here: doi.org/10.1098/rsif...

Imagine we all drove EVs and then someone came along and proposed an ICE vehicle…

Video credit: Nic Cruz Patane (link in Alt text)

Yosemite employees worked for weeks with no pay before the government hired them Seasonal employees counting on housing at Yosemite were asked to volunteer for the park while the government was unable to onboard them at the start of the summer.

www.npr.org/2025/08/04/n...

Omg…I have been trying to wrap my head around frightening conversations w some crazily complacent colleagues in recent months…bright people who shd know better. THIS is what I’ve been encountering! “The curse of preventative measures”. Okay, now to come up w a more strategic rxn than a dropped jaw.

The bottom line on EPA's effort to overturn the #endangerment finding?
It's purely a political argument cloaked in false, misleading, dishonest scientific language, because actual #climate science unambiguously supports the conclusion greenhouse gases are dangerous to the climate and society.

Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees.

The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees.

NEW: Extraordinary footage has emerged of the huge tsunami that hit Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake on July 30th.

(🎥 Doni Nikz)

“Visibility hovered around or below 1 km in Fort McMurray, Alberta for most of the day Sunday, with the airport reporting exceptionally low visibility of just 200 metres at 5:00 p.m. local time.” The AQI hit 2242: 10x higher than the “hazardous” level. www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weat...

BTW the author of this excellent piece is

@yvonnerc.bsky.social

who is—judging from her recent posts and reposts—is a really worthwhile follow! Treat yourself.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress: A federal court’s message to engineers on climate accountability The recent decision in Save the Colorado v. Semonite sends a clear signal to design professional firms about the growing expectations for their role in addressing environmental and climate concerns.

Court finds that, while it’s true design pros/engineers are not climatologists, they MUST use available climate data & foresight in projects. Ignoring how weather/climate conditions might evolve over project lifespans may expose firms to claims of negligence.

www.victorinsurance.com/us/policyhol...

Democrats decry extra US scrutiny of solar, wind projects on public lands Four Democratic U.S. senators on Friday slammed last month's directive by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum requiring his office to review decisions on every wind and solar power project on federal lands, saying it will lead to delays and discourage private investment as power demand rises.

…all while …

www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

BLM Calls New Oil and Gas Rules ‘Noncontroversial,’ Exempts Them From Public Comment - Inside Climate News Environmentalists say the lack of public comment shows the administration’s disregard for maintaining public lands.

US Bureau of Land Management implemented 4 new rules to increase oil-gas drilling on public lands (adding extra yr of “life” to unused leases, preventing updated stipulations to leases & 18-month turnaround on offering leases) WITH NO PUBLIC COMMENT INPUT.

insideclimatenews.org/news/0108202...

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research

This article speaks for itself. But I will note that there’s been more than the usual discussion of this travesty by the USEPA among my circle of climate science colleagues. The EPA & DOE seals of approval are meaningless now.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Scientific Babel English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Thou...

A suggestion: To get yr head around this loss of US science leadership, check out this book...a history of how science was communicated internationally before WWII, that is, before the US achieved 70yrs of science dominance...only to give it all away this year.

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

There are now 2x more beaver ponds on tundra south of Brooks Rg & North Slope than in 2003. New study forecasts that, with warming, beavers will spread onto North Slope, adding to transformation of tundra & permafrost.

www.science.org/content/arti...

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Quantifying effects of solar power adoption on CO2 emissions reduction Analyzing the impact of solar power adoption on CO2 reduction targets provides key insights for policymakers and stakeholders.

A 15% increase in US solar-power generation is associated with a reduction of 8.54M metric tons/yr in CO2 emissions, >12% of the yearly target of 69 MMT CO2 reductions needed to cut CO2 emissions by 1380 MMT in 20 years.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Revealing European-wide ecosystem strategies to drought from space Drought strategies monitored from space show divergent regulation sequences and magnitudes across European ecosystems.

High-res remote sensing can now be used to track/map physiological drought responses in European ecosystems via sensing of ET, H2O content, & C-regulation responses. Different ecosystems are showing divergent responses suggesting different physiological strategies.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Abrupt Climate Shifts Likely as Global Temperatures Keep Rising - Eos A computer vision technique modified to scan climate model data is helping scientists predict where and when rapid climatic shifts will happen in the future.

Computer vision method of "canny edge detection" deployed identify abrupt climate shifts in CMIP6 climate projections. Always a difficult needle-in-haystack problem, but increasingly likely on our warming planet.

eos.org/research-spo...

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Five Lessons for Closing the Last Mile: How to Make Climate Decision Support Actionable As weather shocks become more frequent and severe, building trust, honing collaborations, and refining decision support tools are crucial Increasingly sophisticated models predict weather and cro...

Making climate science more agri-actionable: Expressing forecasts in impact terms (via co-production), respecting decision calendars, addressing user priorities/concerns, designing to accomodate user capacities, planning for when the info is wrong.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Europe is breaking its reliance on American science European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews.

European governments are breaking their dependence on scientific data the United States used to make freely available, ramping up their data collection systems to monitor climate change & weather extremes. Now we’re just giving away our leadership positions.

www.reuters.com/sustainabili...