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Reposted by Andrew MacDougall

𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 3d

So at the university football game I sat next to a cheerful student from Japan who was telling me how much she liked the "colorful traditional costumes" and the "old folk music" and asking about the "dances," and I realized she was talking about the marching band and that she was, well, spot-on.

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Reposted by Andrew MacDougall

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 4d

Excel spreadsheets that suggest the type of graph you might want to make are not alive. Thank’s

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 8d

Only really makes sense for a world drowning in cheap renewable energy, but with some small lingering CO2 emissions sources.

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 8d

Well that’s not good.

Colin Schultz @colinschultz.bsky.social · 8d

Trump returns to ’51st state’ rhetoric in speech to U.S. military officials

Somehow this bit didn't make it into the US stories I read...

www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

Trump returns to ’51st state’ rhetoric in speech to U.S. military officials

U.S. President Donald Trump returned to his “51st state” rhetoric about Canada while giving an unprecedented speech to top military leaders today.

www.ctvnews.ca

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 10d

The NPC thing will be these calculator worshiping cultist’s downfall. Not believing that other people are real is a fatal blind spot.

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 10d

A fantastic guide to the current terminology & thinking of the Silicon Valley bros, who are riding high at the moment.

(I really can not exaggerate how aesthetically & morally repulsive I find every bit of this.)

are you high-agency or an NPC?

AI anxiety and the new language of silicon valley

jasmi.news

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 13d

#NovaScotia we she keep an eye on this.

Jeff Berardelli @weatherprof.bsky.social · 13d

One of the best examples of a #Fujiwhara I’ve ever seen on today’s Canadian model!! Storms doing a 360 dance!🕺
Not to say it’s correct, but this is right out of a text book!
#Humberto #Imelda #Hurricane

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Reposted by Andrew MacDougall

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social · 15d

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong".

Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 16d

I got a full scholarship out of high school from the university that I now work at. My HS average would not get me into any of our selective programs today.

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 17d

There is no algorithm for truth.

Prof Mike Yearworth @mikeyearworth.bsky.social · 17d

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com

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Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social · 19d

Also, while it's a bit tangential to the main issue here, I will point out that this represents a formal White House Press Office statement regarding a single individual's personal political contributions over more than a decade that cumulative amount to less than $1,000. 👀

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 22d

Interesting article. A few impressions:
1) This guy seems like a nightmare supervisor.
2)The cultural revolution caused a the kind break in Chinese society that allowed the kid of a shop keeper to become a leading scientist.
3) GTFO in 2020 was an amazing decision
www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China

In 2020, after spending half his life in the US, Song-Chun Zhu took a one-way ticket to China. Now he might hold the key to who wins the global AI race

www.theguardian.com

Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 23d

I have a feeling it will all be sane-washed. Like how many histories of WWI start with:
‘The Kaiser was a very dumb man, everyone knew this including the Kaiser but for some reason no could do anything about it’

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 23d

"Surely, even if their reasons were wrong, or misinformed, they *had* reasons. Surely there was some theory of the case."

Nope. Richest country in history, just fucked itself because it was bored, tired of peace & prosperity.

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 23d

After years of hype, Chinese investors are convinced that solid-state batteries are here, ready to revolutionize the market.

Another huge, world-changing technology that China is kicking our ass on.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

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Jenny Chase @solarchase.bsky.social · 23d

Is there a hell of a lot of work to do to keep the planet habitable? Yes. Is there at least a believable pathway for doing this now? Yes, and I'm not sure there was 20 years ago, when I would not have believed accurate forecasts on the rise of solar and electric vehicles.

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Reposted by Andrew MacDougall

Peter Sinclair @peterwsinclair.bsky.social · 24d

If Solar keeps growing as it has, you can throw a whole lot of conventional wisdom out the window.
thinc.blog/2025/09/14/t...

The Solar Revolution is Here

For a long time, although the stats on solar energy growth have been spectacular, I have not allowed myself to hope the momentum would continue, or even grow.It does seem, however. like this is hap…

thinc.blog

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 24d

The last of the generation that was actually alive in the 1920s and 30s is passing away. I fear we will have to relearn this every 90 years.

Just a reminder it IS the 20s.

Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 25d

A reminder that an LLM is just a statistical model of language. And like all statistical models cannot be used outside the data it is tuned to.

Language is itself a model of reality, so an LLM is two levels of approximation from reality. Symbols all the way down.

Kameron Hurley @kameronhurley.com · 25d

Watching doc about scientist who came up with how to calculate distance of stars after spending years manually tracking stars. Thought about how GPT can't come to conclusions/generate ideas that haven't been conceived of by humans. When we focus on output and not work, what happens to new ideas?

AI is fundamentally constrained to operating within patterns and solutions derived from existing data and programming, meaning it cannot reliably create entirely new problem-solving approaches that no human has ever conceived; it adapts, combines, or extrapolates from prior human knowledge rather than truly innovating independently. While AI can generate creative-seeming outputs and offer novel combinations or optimizations, these are rooted in the information it has been trained on and the parameters set by its developers, rather than original acts of invention or unprecedented insight.

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · 29d

Well that’s horrifying.

The number of people who forget that writing is a technology, and is non-native to human physiology is shocking.

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Reposted by Andrew MacDougall

Ben Sanderson @benmsanderson.bsky.social · Sep 8

Our finalised paper on flat10MIP is finally up in GMD! This is the experimental protocol which allows for a simple, emissions-driven evaluation of TCRE, ZEC and climate reversibility in CMIP7. Thanks so much to all who ran these simulations as a proof of concept! gmd.copernicus.org/articles/18/...

flat10MIP: an emissions-driven experiment to diagnose the climate response to positive, zero and negative CO2 emissions

Abstract. The proportionality between global mean temperature and cumulative emissions of CO2 predicted in Earth system models (ESMs) is the foundation of carbon budgeting frameworks. Deviations from ...

gmd.copernicus.org

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 6

ZEC simulations will branch from flat-10. Other details haven’t been worked out but there are a lot of ideas.

More branch points, more ensemble members, longer post cessation simulations for ESMs.

Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 5

Yes, there is an effort to move towards Emissions driven simulations for CMIP7. ZEC runs will be being done with from flat-10 experiments.

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 5

Yeah that would be computationally expensive. I did PPEs with UVic ESCM for my postdoc and even a few parameters got expensive fast.

Still mostly in the realm of EMICs.

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 5

www.longrunmip.org

LongRunMIP

www.longrunmip.org

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Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 5

That is why we have EMICs. On the new Digital Alliance of Canada clusters UVic ESCM 2.10 runs at 1500 years/day. (Up from 500/day on the old cluster).

Andrew MacDougall @ahmacdougall.bsky.social · Sep 5

Good post from Zeke. One thing to note is simple climate emulators like Fair don’t account for carbonate dissolution from the ocean floor, so over 1000 years the CO2 uptake will probably be a bit stronger and you might start to see some cooling.

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social · Sep 4

I'm not sure many folks realize just how persistent the warming from CO2 is.

Here is a set of 1000-year climate model runs (using FaIR) simulating one year of CO2 emissions (40 gigatons in 2020); a millennia later the world has not cooled back down!

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