Willem Huiskamp
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willemh.bsky.social
Willem Huiskamp
@willemh.bsky.social
Oceanography and paleoclimate scientist @pik-potsdam.bsky.social, formerly @ccrc.bsky.social.
Pinned
I've created a starterpack for my colleagues here at PIK. If you want to follow us and hear about the work we do, look no further!

If I've missed anyone, let me know and I'll add them!
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.
November 25, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
November 25, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
This paper did not get that much attention when it came out, but it deserves more. Welcome to "Climate Nowcasting" as a new term in the lexicon...

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
November 24, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
November 25, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
"ETH researchers estimate the cost of removing 1 tonne of CO2 from the air in the year 2050 to be between 230 and 540 US dollars. This is twice as high as previous estimates"
"The cost of removing large quantities of CO2 from the air will fall in the medium term, but not as much as previously hoped.

This is the conclusion reached by @ethz.ch researchers on the basis of new calculations. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions should therefore continue at pace"
Cost of direct air carbon capture to remain higher than hoped
The cost of removing large quantities of CO2 from the air will fall in the medium term, but not as much as previously hoped. This is the conclusion reached by ETH researchers on the basis of new calcu...
ethz.ch
November 25, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand”

Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.
November 23, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
“Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target…major changes in how food is produced [and consumed] are needed…”
November 22, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
'Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain'

#Iran 🇮🇷
Iran president says capital move now a necessity as water crisis deepens
Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has mad...
www.iranintl.com
November 21, 2025 at 4:52 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 12:49 PM
The purpose of a system is what it does.
November 21, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
Exactly this. Stop normalizing that site and its features. If you're there, you're normalizing it. Full stop. There is no defensible use, except maybe researching or monitoring hate groups. The algorithm is against any goals you have.
November 21, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
Sorry to be obnoxious about this but all the criticisms of Grok's blatant pro-Musk tuning ring just absurdly hollow if no one is actually willing to give up directly contributing to Elon Musk's website and in doing so, creating the conditions that make millions of people use the fucking chatbot
November 21, 2025 at 8:21 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
I really hate it when scientists keep saying that “we need to rebuild trust in science,” because it implies that scientists are to blame for the mistrust rather than the millions of dollars of dark money that have funded political attacks on science in order to advance a far right agenda.
November 19, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor
November 20, 2025 at 12:58 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
"My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the 🌎, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect w my own humanity thru nature. I also bike to & from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown.."
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person
I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my j...
www.mcsweeneys.net
November 20, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
The warmest water on the entire planet is sitting ~160E in the Equatorial Pacific & a prolonged Westerly Wind Burst event is about to occur here

This will trigger a downwelling oceanic kelvin wave that should destroy La Niña ~3 months from now & begin moving the ocean towards El Niño conditions
November 19, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
This is why for a long time I've found the Prime Minister's Prizes for Science a rather insulting propaganda exercise

www.abc.net.au/news/science...

CSIRO funding as a percentage of GDP:

1982-83 = 0.17

2024-25 = 0.03

...

Scientific extinction event imminent?
The CSIRO cuts are just the tip of the iceberg for Australia's science funding
Australia is known as a country of innovators, but with a combination of brain drain, continuous cuts, and a loss of critical science projects, is Australia losing its edge?
www.abc.net.au
November 19, 2025 at 7:01 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
📈🚨NEW: Extreme heat events are increasingly threatening to become mass mortality events. In @natclimate.nature.com today, we project tens of thousands of deaths in a single week across Europe if extreme heat domes coincide with rising global temperatures.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Increasing risk of mass human heat mortality if historical weather patterns recur - Nature Climate Change
The authors couple calculations of historical heatwave intensity at present and future global temperatures with exposure–response functions to quantify mortality from extreme heat events in Europe. Th...
www.nature.com
November 18, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
why is COP still a thing?
Revealed: >300 Big Agriculture lobbyists have participated at this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation, a new investigation by me and @rachelsherrington.bsky.social has found.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
More than 300 big agriculture lobbyists have taken part in Cop30, investigation finds
Lobbyists representing industry responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions participated in key talks at the UN climate summit
www.theguardian.com
November 18, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
Pretty remarkable how high Australia sits on the scale for lifestyle carbon emissions globally - and how little this gets mentioned in domestic climate discourse.

hotorcool.org/publications...
November 18, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
"‘In fact, what’s really surprising is that higher AI literacy brings more overconfidence...We would expect people who are AI literate to not only be a bit better at interacting with AI systems, but also at judging their performance with those systems – but this was not the case.’"
AI use makes us overestimate our cognitive performance
A study led by Aalto University reveals that when it comes to AI, specifically, LLMs, the Dunning-Kruger Effect doesn’t hold. All users show a significant inability to assess their performance a...
www.eurekalert.org
November 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
That's more than 1,100 jobs lost at the CSIRO over the last two years.

"Combined, the staff association estimates that equates to cutting the agency’s size by a third."

This is more cuts to the CSIRO than was attempted by the Abbott government.

www.smh.com.au/national/csi...
CSIRO to slash hundreds of jobs in cost-saving drive
The staff association at the nation’s leading scientific research organisation says the latest round of cuts marks “a sad day for publicly funded science”.
www.smh.com.au
November 18, 2025 at 4:53 AM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
In the latest Global Carbon Budget, the estimate of the ocean carbon sink was increased by 0.8 Gt of CO₂ due to methodological changes.

Each mCDR deployment aims to remove a tiny fraction of that, so if people think we have the methodology to do proper MRV for mCDR right now, they're delusional. 🌊
November 13, 2025 at 12:03 PM
Reposted by Willem Huiskamp
The AI bubble may be about to bust.

Peter Thiel has sold all of his Nvidia stock.

We all need to say this very clearly:

NO BAILOUTS FOR THEFT-TECH!

Expropriate their asses instead.

They stole from all of us and fully plan to burn the planet.

They owe us - not the other way around. 1/3
November 17, 2025 at 6:37 AM