Flavio Lehner
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climateflavors.bsky.social
Flavio Lehner
@climateflavors.bsky.social

Climate Scientist
Assistant Professor @ Cornell University
Chief Climate Scientist @ Polar Bears International
https://flaviolehner.eas.cornell.edu/

Environmental science 55%
Geography 18%
Additionally, it appears that all of EPA's previously extensive "indicators of climate change" pages have been scrubbed entirely. The pages no longer exist; there are numerous dead links on the current/live EPA site, and no indication they have been moved to a new URL.

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

Fall (Sep-Nov) 2025 was the warmest on record for the combined U.S and Canada region.

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

New on SHIFT KEY:

2025 has been a wild and wacky year for climate policy. What did @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social and @jessedjenkins.com get right about what to expect — and what did they get wrong?

Listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts:

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
The Biggest Lessons of a Not-So-Great Year for Climate Policy
Podcast Episode · Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins · 12/03/2025 · 1h 1m
podcasts.apple.com

Hudson Bay is finally starting to freeze over in earnest.

2025 will likely go down as the 2nd-longest ice-free period for the Western Hudson Bay polar bear population, continuing the long-term trend (now >1 month longer than in the 1980s).

Great blog post and visuals! Are you adding this combined "Eastern Canada Sea Ice" region to the regular plots on your website? (sorry if I missed it) Would love to use an up-to-date version in a presentation this Friday. No worries if not.

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

Kelly's point is why I think the merits of Zillow removing climate risk scores (www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...) is fairly nuanced. To make it clear: Zillow clearly did not do this for the right reasons, and the realty and developer lobbies have long been opponents of better climate information.
October 2025 was the warmest October on record for the #Arctic. Arctic sea-ice extent is currently the lowest on record for late November. My newest 'climate viz of the month' summarizes some of this latest data: zacklabe.com/climate-viz-...

#ClimateChange #SciComm #OpenScience #OpenData #DataViz
Climate Viz of the Month
October 2025 Hi everyone! Instead of designing a new special feature visualization, this next ‘climate viz of the month’ blog will focus on briefly summarizing the recent extremes in th…
zacklabe.com
Tehran is having an historic drought due to a combination of factors, including climate change.

The ocean is not helping.

1/3
My latest for @science.org: A remarkable set of high-resolution climate model runs, computed over 900 (!) days of supercomputing time, are revealing how warming-induced changes to Earth's wind patterns due can prime huge spikes in extreme rainfall.

But the MESACLIP runs also do much more than that.
High-resolution climate model forecasts a wet, turbulent future
With details as fine as short-term weather forecasts, model achieves newfound accuracy
www.science.org

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

A new record of Arctic sea-ice coverage—informed by the slow and steady sedimentation of cosmic dust on the sea floor—reveals that ancient ice waxed and waned with atmospheric warming, not ocean heat, over the last 300,000 years.

Learn more in Science: https://scim.ag/4hRUjks
Cosmic dust reveals dynamic shifts in central Arctic sea-ice coverage over the past 30,000 years
Arctic sea-ice loss affects biological productivity, sustenance in coastal communities, and geopolitics. Forecasting these impacts requires mechanistic understanding of how Arctic sea ice responds to ...
scim.ag

The 50th Anniversary of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: A New Perspective on an Old Storm: cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-bl...
The 50th Anniversary of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: A New Perspective on an Old Storm: cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-bl...

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

As part of #PolarBearWeek (Nov. 2-8), a new AI-based system from @polarbearsinternational.org, tested in the Far North for several years, officially launched to alert locales of animals nearby to deter human-wildlife conflicts. @vfennalvarado.bsky.social www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/natu...
Bear-dar looks to prevent human-wildlife conflicts in the North - The Weather Network
As part of Polar Bear Week (Nov. 2-8), a new artificial intelligence-based system, which has been in a testing phase in the Far North for several years, has been officially launched to alert communiti...
www.theweathernetwork.com

Next level!

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

Good morning from the tundra 💙

For our department Halloween party, I went as scary Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) - mostly to tease @danvisioni.bsky.social
Multi-panel view of the last few days of Hurricane Melissa:

↖️ GOES-19 infrared brightness temp
↗️ GOES-19 visible satellite
↙️ Hurricane hunter planes & flight paths
↘️ Recon-derived flight level wind swath
⬇️ Estimated minimum pressure from recon dropsondes
this is a very impressive analysis of some of the statistical "oddities" in Pielke Jr's analysis that normalized climate impacts are declining. Everyone should read this.
economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/10/26/r...
Roger Pielke Jr.’s Appallingly Bad Analysis of Billion Dollar Disasters – Economics from the Top Down
In a recent paper called Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”, Roger Pielke Jr. published a chart that's so bad I've devoted a whole essay to debunking it.
economicsfromthetopdown.com
For understanding climate change impacts to tropical cyclones in near-real time, explore our new attribution pages unique to each storm from @climatecentral.org: www.climatecentral.org/tropical-cyc...

"Climate change made the ocean temperatures along Melissa's path 500 to 700 times more likely."
Really important paper led by my @iiasa.ac.at colleague Alex Nauels www.nature.com/articles/s41...
“The difference between decisive climate action today and continued high emissions is not just measured in degrees of warming but also in meters of sea-level rise” 👏👏👏
Multi-century global and regional sea-level rise commitments from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades - Nature Climate Change
It is important to understand how much long-term sea-level rise is already committed due to historical and near-term emissions. Here the authors use a modelling framework to show how decisions on glob...
www.nature.com
The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset is back and now at @climatecentral.org!

Through the first half of 2025, there were 14 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States, costing $101.4 billion. 1/2
www.climatecentral.org/climate-serv...

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

With the Arctic sea ice maintaining its trend of declining, average extent since the 1980s, there is another side to the story with a unique, slightly more positive statistic. @polarbearsinternational.org @climateflavors.bsky.social www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/clim...
'Remarkable' trend happening in the Arctic, despite warming, since 2012 - The Weather Network
Despite the Arctic's worsening, ongoing warming, an unexpected trend has been uncovered: A 13-year streak of no new records for sea ice minimum. A climate scientist dives into the possible reasons why
www.theweathernetwork.com
A request for weather interested volunteers!

Met Eireann would like to rescue millions of weather observations taken in Ireland over many decades that are still stuck on paper. #WeatherRescue

Anyone can help: www.zooniverse.org/projects/met...
The attack on @frediotto.bsky.social was seeded years ago by Roger Pielke Jr, who started arguing that this table from a recent @ipcc.bsky.social report proved that climate science cannot attribute extreme weather to climate change.

But Roger is of course lying. And we know this for 2 reasons.

🧵

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

It seems there are two main reasons things haven’t gone completely to shit in the US: 1. Lawyers and the courts; 2. Journalists and the media. Most of us can’t do anything about the first, but we can support journalism. Stop complaining about paywalls and subscribe to news & donate to public media.

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

Thanks to @climateflavors.bsky.social of @polarbearsinternational.org for the assist. Study says billions of tonnes of defrosted carbon could get released into the atmosphere by 2100 due to melting permafrost, further adding to Earth's warming from more GHG. www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/clim...
Melting permafrost could unload billions of tonnes of carbon by 2100 - The Weather Network
A new study says billions of tonnes of defrosted carbon could end up getting released into the atmosphere by 2100 as a result of melting permafrost, further adding to the planet's warming from more gr...
www.theweathernetwork.com
Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.
sites.stat.columbia.edu

Fyi, you can have global entry with only a greencard.

Fingers crossed you don’t have to have any such discussion.

Reposted by Flavio Lehner

If there is one piece of good news regarding our planet's future, it's our ozone layer and ongoing shrinking of its hole. New @wmo-global.bsky.social report said Earth's protective ozone layer is healing and the hole in 2024 was smaller than in recent years. www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/clim...
Smaller ozone hole in 2024 pushes Earth closer to seeing it vanish - The Weather Network
A new World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report offers good news about Earth's ozone layer, which is on the road to a recovery to 1980 values in the coming decades--a positive sign for the health...
www.theweathernetwork.com