A thread on Felix Klein, Emmy Noether, and credit where credit is due.

Felix Klein gave a lecture at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. The title was “On Hilbert’s first note on the foundations of physics." 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬

I am heartily sick of getting invitations to important meetings with strategic implications with only two or three weeks warning. It’s like people think we are sitting with empty diaries desperate to prioritise their meeting!

NERC, UKSA I’m looking at you!

I cancelled mine for your country last year, so I too regret I can do nothing useful this time!

Pre-emptive obedience everywhere ... I am curious to know if even Hitler or Putin had a ride this easy? (Serious question, and I don't know the answer). What happened to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_of... ?

This is a very important issue. The success rate of proposals is so low that people spend all their time, writing proposals and not doing actual science. Another way science is broken.

“Scenarios are not forecasts because they are not aiming to be accurate, but to be useful”

My one foray into the epidemiological literature ended up in our paper being rejected precisely because the reviewers (and the editor) did not understand the distinction between a scenario and a forecast!

I really don't think this is a great narrative to promote. It's not as if climate scientists haven't been very vocal about the risks associated with climate change/global warming and just because it *might* be faster than some kind of best estimate doesn't imply "confused".

Ooohhhh, climate change is real when a golf course is involved but not when 8 billion lives are.

Got it.

Climate scientists be like..

"A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science" | My new article with Peter Hotez in #SkepticalInquirer: skepticalinquirer.org/2024/12/a-tr...

I see that a lot of people still need to look at this infographic about the difference between carbon removal (CDR) and carbon capture (CCS).

carbon180.org/blog/the-dif...

72% of polio cases are asymptomatic.
24% get a sore throat or fever.
1-5% headache and neck stiffness (meningitis).
0.1–0.5% paralysis.

Can you imagine the internet with a polio epidemic where >99.5% of people are totally fine?

The psychological challenge of climate change - our brains are hard-wired to respond to immediate threats, not a slow-motion disaster happening at a global scale (and that's not even considering the tsunami of misinformation hitting us every day).

This one wins

Come work at He Pou A Rangi, New Zealand's Climate Change Commission, as General Manager, Evidence and Advice. This leadership role will steer the Commission's multi-year work programme providing independent advice and monitoring of climate action.

centralagenciesjobs.cass.govt.nz/jobdetails/a...

“Farmers are driven to poor practice by the pressure to increase short-term yields.”

Add soil salinity to the long list of reasons why our food system is teetering on collapse.

Building this system around shareholder profit, rather than feeding people, may well be humanity’s greatest mistake.

Anyone interested in #climatepolicy out there?

Take 2 min to watch/read below how we're building the next generation of #EarthSystemModels and Integrated Assessment Models tailored to inform mitigation strategies in support of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.👇https://bit.ly/ESM2025video

Kudos to Australia for having an Earth System Science plan … which is in part about prediction, which is good, since they seem to have launched it next year

(Sorry, the alt text is truncated, but suffice to say there is a long list of stuff which is all very nice, but doesn’t fit my definition of sustainability.). Reinforces my already low impression of the value of these things!

Another set of bogus university rankings came out today (I think). They have sustainability ratings. Great, I think. Then I look at them, and I go, “What? Huh?” Then I look up the weightings. Their definition of sustainable is not mine!

Then of course there’s are DSLs!

I’m not sure that’s true! Some vendors are hand in glove with some modelling groups trying to address this sort of thing.

"it's an older meme, sir, but it checks out..."

A shameless plug for my study with a similar recommendation. Considering the full ensemble spread is important for sub-selecting models for dynamical downscaling. Climate sensitivity-based selection doesn't necessarily work well (CMIP5-based, so pre hot-model). journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal...