Jeremy Bassis

My experience is that the climate folks don't know what the finance guys want and the finance guys have no idea what a "climate modeler" does, but are pretty sure it must involve spreadsheets. Maybe some R.

And they both swim in separate seas of incomprehensible acronyms.

I'm willing to bet they don't hire an actual climate person. I've seen so many talented climate folks not even get considered for jobs they are clearly qualified that I wonder if climate folks have a hard time selling themselves to this crowd? Or these places don't actually want a climate person?

When it comes to projections of sea level rise, they just shrug and literally say “We should know in a decade or so whether that prediction has legs.” Not that models are bad or anything, just 🤷. It kinda feels like they aren’t even trying and I'm a bit insulted by the lack of effort. 4/

You won't get any disagreement from me that what people care about and respond to isn’t global sea level, but local sea level, but the authors seem blithely unaware that ice sheet mass loss has a gravitational fingerprint that affects local sea level. 3/

The authors don’t care and don’t want you to know that we have global sea level from altimetry, which clearly shows accelerating patterns of sea level rise consistent with observed ice sheet mass loss. 2/

The sea level rise chapter is silly. You can’t infer global sea level rise from a handful of tide gauges in the US because global sea level is *global*. 1/

Columbia now has a vice provost for authoritarian compliance.

I have never used AI nor do I ever intend to because if I actually wanted to be more productive I can stop procrastinating, but where is the fun in that.

The easiest framing of climate is as conflict. Something that needs to be defeated or vanquished. The conflict can be between scientists, solutions, communities or even between people and climate. Our language is primed for conflict. We build coastal defenses and sea walls. 2/

I talked to a journalist today about glacial geo-engineering and the thing that stuck to me was how much of the interview kept coming back to the “debate” in the community. Not everything is or should be a debate. 1/

But the overshoot scenario is a thought exercise in "what if I had a magic wand and used it badly", which doesn't seem that informative or interesting.

Carbon capture might be able to eventually help with hard to abate emissions, but *none* of the proposed methods that I've seen are even close to being able to scale up to the extent that would be needed to suck out CO2 in an overshoot scenario.

Folks, the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is centuries and overshoot scenarios involve CO2 emissions shooting above the threshold and then dropping below again *this* century.

Lots of talk about overshoot scenarios where we zip past temperature thresholds before coming down and stabilizing. We all agree that there is no remotely plausible technology or mechanism that would suck out enough CO2 to allow our emissions pathway to come back down right?

Pundits don't want to talk about this because they would never consider sending their kids to these non-selective educational workhorses and become very upset about when flagship public and elite private universities become slightly less hostile to a wider sector of society.

Once again, I'm begging people to recognize that nearly 84% of students attend "non selective" colleges and universities.

And this is what makes the tech dudes attacks on "accessibility" of higher education so galling. They don't want accessible higher education. What they want is higher education to serve as the gatekeeper and finishing school for mediocre white dudes.

City College of New York was also free until 1976. Cooper Union, in lower Manhattan, was founded as a free University. Free (or cheap) education had a long tradition here. What we see now is the culmination and acceleration of Regan's cuts to education in the 80s.

About 84% of students attend colleges that are considered “non selective”. If these dudes really wanted to improve access they would push to make public universities free. These dudes don't want more students attending public colleges. They want universities to keep certain people out.

Tipping culture in the US is out of control. Way too early this morning my dog jumped into bed and offered me a dollar to feed her breakfast.

I hear folks bemoan climate inaction relative to ozone depletion. But I think the better analogy is the battle with Big Tobacco and skirmishes over teaching evolution. The lobbyist and dark money groups learned from those battles and have been furiously applying them to fight climate action.

I often tell people that over 30 years—a typical mortgage—there is about a 3% chance of a 1000 year flood and a 26% change of a 100 year flood. What climate change is doing turning the 1000 year flood into a 100 year flood and that means a pretty high risk of catastrophic happening flooding to you.

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Warming from whom? I think it is pretty well established that the NWS did provide warnings, but last time this region had catastrophic flooding they had dam breaks and the spillway collapsed. I'm waiting to hear more from locals, but NWS doesn't monitor or warn about these failures.

Again, this a question for the local experts, but this is a region with heavily managed flood water. Did rainfall rates, maybe combined with drought, exceed the capacity of the infrastructure? Infrastructure failed should be planned for, but events can be harder to predict than just the weather.

The blog below gives a good sense of the meteorological part of the problem.

And I really don’t want to speculate, but the magnitude and speed of the water surge is something that I usually associate with some type of water infrastructure failure, like a dam or something.

Realizing that the longer I'm in academia the more unhinged my papers are becoming.

A nerdy science 🧵 to give you a break from the news: the first lead-authored paper by @gtsciences.bsky.social PhD candidate Aminat Ambelorun about “The Integrated Ice Sheet Response to Stochastic Calving”, now published in ‪the @igsoc.bsky.social‬ Journal of Glaciology doi.org/10.1017/jog....

Challenges are only going to get worse, but policies that require some combination of air conditioning, cooling centers and building code changes to increase insulation have been successful.

Gonna point out again that heat kills more people than flooding, but we spend way more money mitigating flood risk than heat.