Drew Pendergrass

Die Brecht-Tage erkunden Brechts Verhältnis zur Natur War Bertolt Brecht, Bewunderer sowjetischer Naturbeherrschung, ökologisch auf dem Holzweg oder taugt er doch als Verbündeter in der Krise? Die Brecht-Tage in Berlin wollten es wissen.

Nice coverage of the Brecht days in the FAZ: www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

A photo of a harvester, with the text: Brecht-Tage 2026 - Die Erde, »die große Nährerin«. Brechts grüne Revolution

I'll be in Berlin next week celebrating Bertolt Brecht. The sessions look amazing! I'll be on some panels covering (1) resonances between Brecht and scientific modeling, and (2) Brecht on "being useless" (but in a good way).

love the wild mix of people and topics at the Brecht Tage next week, centering around the Brecht's 'green revolution' and featuring Thomas Turnbull, Hanna Hamel, @simschaupp.bsky.social, Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

lfbrecht.de/projekte/bre...

Yes

I called all my reps -- it's hard to overstate how important NCAR is to global weather and climate research

Wintertime Trends of Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) in South Korea, 2012–2022: Response of Nitrate and Organic Components to Decreasing NOx Emissions Nighttime nitrate radical chemistry in Seoul has accelerated as nitrogen oxide emissions have decreased, increasing nitrate PM2.5 A NOx emission threshold is now being crossed in Seoul where furt...

📰 The upshot is that we predict that South Korea is reaching a threshold where further emissions cuts will rapidly reduce PM2.5. You can read the paper in full here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... (4/4)

A strange situation where cutting pollution made pollution worse And why the best policy for South Korea is still to keep cutting pollution!

🧪🚗The answer is pretty complicated, involving nighttime nitrate radical chemistry (an alkene's worst nightmare)! To explain it visually and intuitively for a general audience, I wrote a post for my newsletter walking through all the details: drewpendergrass.beehiiv.com/p/a-strange-... (3/4)

🤔🕵️‍♀️ What was especially strange is that PM2.5 only got worse in the winter, only over the 2015-2019 period, and the worst air quality degradation happened at night and on the weekends. Intuitively, this doesn’t make much sense. More emissions happen during the week! It's a chemistry mystery! (2/4)

🧵 New paper thread! 🧵 We considered a strange case in South Korea where a major air pollutant — fine particulate matter, or PM2.5 — got worse, even as the pollutant emissions which drive PM2.5 formation fell substantially due to new regulations. (1/4)

Love to see the start of a Verso to city administration pipeline

Trends and seasonality of 2019–2023 global methane emissions inferred from a localized ensemble transform Kalman filter (CHEEREIO v1.3.1) applied to TROPOMI satellite observations Abstract. We use 2019–2023 TROPOMI satellite observations of atmospheric methane to quantify global methane emissions at monthly 2° × 2.5° resolution with a localized ensemble transform Kalman filter ...

📰 Read the paper for free! And stay tuned for more research using CHEEREIO coming soon, including from a team at U. Toronto working to track carbon monoxide from global wildfires and from a group at Tsinghua U. assessing China's performance on its methane goals. acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/...

🔥💧The record fires in Australia in 2020 were, in effect, a climate twin of the record flooding in Africa. This kind of anomaly is expected to increase with warming — an unexpected climate feedback, because it leads to more climate-warming methane to release from newly flooded wetlands.

🌏 This flooding in eastern Africa is associated with a positive anomaly in a climate pattern called the Indian Ocean Dipole, which leads water to be transported west across the Indian Ocean, away from Australia and Indonesia and towards eastern Africa.

🌍 In the paper, we apply CHEEREIO to calculate 2019-2023 global methane emissions using satellite methane observations from the TROPOMI instrument. We attribute the 2020-2021 methane surge to wetland activity from flooding in eastern Africa, especially in the river-fed wetlands of South Sudan.

🛰️ Satellites and ground-based monitors can measure pollutants in the air but cannot infer their sources directly; pollutants may have blown downwind or reacted away. During my PhD, I developed CHEEREIO (cheere.io), free software which tracks pollution back to its source using Bayesian optimization.

Trends and seasonality of 2019–2023 global methane emissions inferred from a localized ensemble transform Kalman filter (CHEEREIO v1.3.1) applied to TROPOMI satellite observations Abstract. We use 2019–2023 TROPOMI satellite observations of atmospheric methane to quantify global methane emissions at monthly 2° × 2.5° resolution with a localized ensemble transform Kalman filter ...

🧵 New paper thread! 🧵 We use satellite data to assess global methane emissions trends and seasonality. A greenhouse gas second only to CO2 in impact, methane concentrations surged in 2020 and 2021 for unclear reasons. We investigate in our paper. acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/...

Half-Earth Socialism, by @drewpendergrass.bsky.social and Troy Vettese, is now out in Italian thanks to Mimesis.

Here one of the authors answered our questions about ecosocialism, planning, vegetarian and vegan diets, social and environmental justice. Thanks to @jacobinitalia.bsky.social!

River or sankey diagram showing the allocation of profits from global oil and gas companies to quantiles of the US wealth size distribution via financial system intermediaries, such as asset managers, and categories of ultimate beneficiaries, such as business owners, pension funds and shareholders in listed companies. The scale is hundreds of billions of US dollars, and ultimately 50.4% of profits reaching the US personal wealth distribution go to the richest 1% of households.

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Israel has just arrested Greta Thunberg and many others.

Statement from the Global Sumud Flotilla:

“People of conscience have been abducted. The flotilla broke no laws. What is illegal is Israel’s genocide, Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, and Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon.”
1/3

Nice paper, but disagree a bit on framing. “Our estimate of 96.9 Gt carbon sequestration potential…amounts to 17.6% of the 640 Gt of carbon emissions since 1750.” This may be smaller than other estimates but that’s still a lot of carbon!!! Much more than I’d expect from DAC this century!

La traduzione italiana mia e di @virginiamagnaghi.bsky.social di Half-Earth Socialism è uscita ieri! @drewpendergrass.bsky.social @versobooks.bsky.social

Candle drooping dramatically after it partially melted in a heat wave

Our candles post Boston heat wave lol; so dramatic

WORKSHOP | Historical Epistemologies of Planetary Modelling III - Unive seminario/lezione

VENICE: Exciting event happening on Monday and Tuesday 23-24th of June: www.unive.it/data/33113/2...

3rd HEPM workshop with a great line up of speakers including @drewpendergrass.bsky.social @beatricecointe.bsky.social @edouardmorena.bsky.social @geoffmann.bsky.social @julianordblad.bsky.social

Folks in Hamburg: I'll be giving a talk on the economist János Kornai at the New Institute on Tuesday 18 June at 12pm. All are welcome! thenew.institute/en/media/a-c...

Based on some quick math, this alone could fund the NSF Plant Genome Research Program for ~4 years; the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, which was totally axed in the NSF budget request, for ~9 years; and ~ half the total NSF GRFP budget

I'll be doing a mini book tour for our Swedish translation, starting in Stockholm tomorrow with @holgersen.bsky.social! Will be in Umeå on 13 June (www.facebook.com/events/68492...) to do my northernmost event yet (sun rises at 2:20am). All are welcome to talk green left politics!

Hur bygger vi en ekonomi som tillgodoser människors behov inom ekologiska gränser?
Missa inte samtalet imorgon med @holgersen.bsky.social och Drew Pendergrass.
facebook.com/events/s/sa-...

Please share and amplify #FreedomFlotilla #ShipToGaza

A screenshot from the proposed NSF budget request showing the number of people involved in NSF activities dropping from 330,100 in FY2024 to 90,000 in FY2026.

I need to actually get to my gate in time, but am stuck processing this particular table: