Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Andrew Dessler

@andrewdessler.com

26K followers 1.3K following 9.3K posts

Prof of Atmospheric Sciences & climate scientist @ Texas A&M; AGU and AAAS Fellow; Native Texan; find out what I think at https://www.theclimatebrink.com/

Videos

Environmental science 46%

Geology 17%

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · Nov 2

profile picture pupdate: strong consensus for: dog, but more professional.

Introducing my new profile pic:

22 14 270

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 12h

also, I can't imagine the security issues with having your laptop connected directly to a node in a super computer. I seriously doubt any system operators would let someone do that.

1 3

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 18h

If you're at Indiana Univ. Bloomington next Monday, I'll be there for an event with Heterodox Conversations talking about climate and energy.

heterodoxacademy.org/events/energ...

1 7

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 18h

ughhh, I just realized I already posted about this (albeit in 2015)
bsky.app/profile/andr...

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · Oct 28

Another problem with the Martian. Jeff Daniels says he's the Director of NASA. But NASA has an Administrator. https://t.co/SdBCELwGBB

1 7

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 18h

Great new video about the DOE report by Reel Peel. You should definitely watch it and subscribe.

The DOE Actually Published This?

*** Download the full 85-scientist response to the DOE report here: https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175745244.41950365/v2 ** Download the original DOE report here: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf C

youtu.be

4 10

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 19h

the computer message should actually be: "Calculations Correct, but Reviewer #2 will not like it"

2 1 28

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 19h

yes, I'm watching the Martian, which is a fantastic movie (despite the scene above).

also, gives me the chance to pause the movie to point out to my wife the little errors (e.g., NASA has an administrator, not a director). She LOVES it when I do that.

3 23

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 19h

***this is what science looks like.*** sitting in the supercomputer room that seems to be at around 40F, staring into the distance pensively, when the message pops up "calculations correct".

now, time to write a GRL paper!

4 5 46

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 1d

where are the robot umps when you need them? in the future, terrible calls like this will occur much less frequently.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 1d

the problem is that you need to give AI access to your calendar, which would make me a bit worried

Reposted by A. E. Dessler

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 1d

nothing says academics like a 50-email exchange to figure out when a group of four people can meet on zoom. "I'm out of town, but I can meet the following week." "no, that won't work for me." "I have a meeting, but could meet at 5 pm ET." "I teach, so that's out."

7 2 43

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 1d

"widely derided"

from: A Chart Climate Denialists Can’t Ignore
cc: @hausfath.bsky.social

paywall: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

1 3 10

Reposted by A. E. Dessler

Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 1d

Sent Steve a letter:

Dear Steve,

I hope you are well.

In your Monday WSJ column, you criticize the National Academies for not reviewing your DOE Climate Working Group report. To my knowledge, the Academies have never offered an unrequested review of a government scientific report. I am sure they would have been happy to review your report if DOE had asked them to. Though DOE chose not to do so, under Information Quality Act guidelines, an independent peer review (like that the Academies often conducts for the federal government) is required for it to be legal to use the report in rule making. (See Section III in 70 FR 2664)

In your Monday column, you do not mention that — seeing no evidence that your report had been the subject of any meaningful independent peer review — more than 85 experts volunteered our time in the month of August to review your report. The approximately 450-page compendium of comments, co-edited by Andrew Dessler and me, evaluates each portion of your report. In case you have not seen it, you can find the expert review here: https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175745244.41950365/v2

Your column recapitulates a number of the errors and misrepresentations in the DOE report, which are evaluated in detail in the expert review.

For example, you state that US heat waves “aren’t more common in recent decades than they were in the decades around 1900”.

As we write in the expert review, the DOE report “highlights the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s as a time of unusually hot temperatures in the United States.” However, “over such a small area [as the contiguous US], natural variability can play a large but temporary role. The Dust Bowl was indeed an exceptional event, although unrelated to greenhouse-gas forcing, and the decadal climate conditions that drove the Dust Bowl are not occurring today…. If you take out the 1930s, there are clear trends [in the contiguous US] towards more extreme temperatures due almost certainly to radiative forcing.”

Further, “if one examines a larger region, where the Dust Bowl’s influence is diluted, then there is an obvious, strong trend towards more extreme temperatures.”

You also introduce in your column some errors that are not in the DOE report. For example, the DOE report addresses global-mean sea-level rise only in passing, focusing instead on specific US tide-gauge records. In your column, you claim that a global sea-level acceleration comparable to the current one occurred in the 1930s, a claim we discussed before about eight years ago.

In 2017, I told you, based on our analysis in Hay et al. (2015), that the rate of global-mean sea-level rise in the 21st century was likely faster than during its previous high in the 1930s-1940s (notably, also a period of significant global-mean warming, preceding the slower sea level rise and lull of warming in the 1950s-1970s). At the time, global-mean sea-level acceleration had already been sustained for close to five decades, compared to about two decades in the 1920s and 1930s.

The evidence in the last eight years has only gotten stronger. We are now in an approximately 60-year period of nearly unbroken global-mean sea-level acceleration, and the current rate of rise revealed by both satellite data and tide-gauge analyses — exceeding 4 mm/yr — is unequivocally higher than at any previous time revealed by tide-gauge reconstructions or satellite data (see, for example, Dangendorf et al., 2024; Figure 8 therein reproduced below). (Note that this finding is supported by Frederikse et al., 2020, a key figure from which is reproduced in a simplified format in your book Unsettled.)

Further, combining tide-gauge and geological data shows that there has been a sustained acceleration in the long-term rates of rise since the mid-nineteenth century. Modern rates of 60-year-average global-mean sea level rise exceeded earlier Common Era rates by the 1860s, and the current rate of global-mean sea level rise virtually certain to be higher than any century-scale period in the last three millennia (Kemp et al 2018, Walker et al 2022; Figure 1 of the latter reproduced below).

Furthermore, I don’t think either of us contest the fact that global-mean surface temperature is substantially higher today than in the 1930s and 1940s. It would, indeed, then be quite physically surprising if the rate of global-mean sea level rise were also not substantially higher.

It would be tedious for both of us to respond further to the errors in your column, but I point you again to the expert review of your report: https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175745244.41950365/v2

I encourage you not to continue to recapitulate the errors in the DOE report while ignoring the readily available evaluations in the expert review.

Best,
Bob

P.S. I know from our past interactions that you view private correspondence sent to you as being publishable without notifying or attempting to get the consent of your correspondents. You have my permission to fairly quote from this letter, which I will also be posting publicly.

1 5 21

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 2d

E.g., Madison kept trying to have a deep conversation with Joe when he was beyond smashed drunk. It’s bad Joe got so drunk, but Madison is not going to get any answers. She needs to wait for him to sober up.

And the list goes on and on.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 2d

So many dysfunctional people besides Edmond on this LiB season.

I wonder if normal people look at this and think “there’s no way I’d ever do that.”

So, by process of elimination, you end up with these weirdos.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 6d

Watching new Love is Blind. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Edmond, but I know this: he’s going to leave “the experiment” unhappy.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 3d

are there any cases where "read receipts" on text messages is useful or is just an indicator that you're not tech savvy

1 5

Reposted by A. E. Dessler, Karen O’Leary

Simon Donner @simondonner.bsky.social · 3d

Most of the world has recently set all-time heat records - valuable analysis from @hausfath.bsky.social to show that climate change is real and global... even it was hotter in one town 80 years ago. www.theclimatebrink.com/p/most-of-th...

Most of the world has recently set all-time heat records

Regional exceptions like the 1930s in the continental US notwithstanding

www.theclimatebrink.com

18 31

Reposted by A. E. Dessler, Mark Lubell, Grant D. Stentiford

Mike Dettinger @mdettinger.bsky.social · 3d

Nope, no Environmental Protection for us today. Entrance to EPA in DC locked up tight this hot Monday morning.

7 36 110

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 4d

We had a good summer but this heat + lack of rain is getting to me.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 5d

Got my mug. Mmmmm, that coffee tastes good!

3 12 91

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 5d

inject that straight into my veins

Andrea Junker @strandjunker.com · 5d

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

250 8K 17K

Reposted by A. E. Dessler, Dean Baker

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 5d

the amount of time we spend trying to raise $$$ for our research is absolutely immense and results in a huge amount of wasted time. BUT there is a limited amount of money, so they have to have some method of distributing it. not sure what the best way to do it is.

5 2 23

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 6d

I hope he’s okay.

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 6d

He strikes me as mentally ill. They should not have cast him.

1 4

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 6d

Watching new Love is Blind. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Edmond, but I know this: he’s going to leave “the experiment” unhappy.

2 3

Reposted by A. E. Dessler

Glenn Branch @glennbranch.bsky.social · 6d

Andrew Dessler (@andrewdessler.com) asks, "Is this the most embarrassing error in the DOE Climate Working Group Report?" To be fair, there's a lot of competition.

Is this the most embarrassing error in the DOE Climate Working Group Report?

mistaking detection for emergence

www.theclimatebrink.com

1 4 12