Brian Groenke
bgroenke.bsky.social
Brian Groenke
@bgroenke.bsky.social
Scientist, (Bayesian) data nerd, software engineer, and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research @pik-potsdam.bsky.social working at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and computational geoscience. Opinions my own.
I sometime wonder how bad is the replication crisis in top AI conferences. I bet >50% of results cannot be reproduced and >80% will not withstand the slightest change in input data.
People give psychologists the shit about their shitty research, but at least they cared enough to actually check.
December 20, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Based on what I have been hearing about the NCAR situation, no one knew anything until the USA Today article came out. That means there isn’t much actual organization inside the administration to pull this off and a chance to fight back. Call your congresspeople today! Especially republicans.
December 17, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Attacking NCAR is enormously self-destructive for America. NCAR is the leading centre in weather and climate research in the world. We Europeans often travel to NCAR to collaborate, discuss and learn. Hurting the centre will cause damage that is irreversible for years to decades with global impact.
eos.org Eos @eos.org · 8d
To help #SaveNCAR, read our update below and visit this @aguscipolicy.bsky.social page, where you can find email text and a call script to share with your representatives. agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...
December 18, 2025 at 8:23 AM
This news is nothing short of a tragedy and an outrage. I urge my American friends and colleagues to call your congressional representatives and resist this blatant attack on science and academic freedom!

www.rmpbs.org/blogs/scienc...
Trump administration vows to break up National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder | Rocky Mountain PBS
Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s budget chief, called NCAR “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
www.rmpbs.org
December 18, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
PIK at #IPCC: Nine PIK scientists joined the first Lead Authors’ Meeting for the 7th Assessment Report on the state of climate science in Paris last week. The meeting marked the start of drafting the 3 Working Group reports: www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/late... @ipcc.bsky.social @wflamb.bsky.social
December 8, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Back by popular demand: At #EGU26 we'll organize another BUGS session: Blunders, Unexpected Glitches, and Surprises!

Submit abstracts on ideas that seemed great but didn't work, errors and bugs that led to new insights (or funny stories), or any other unexpected results.

www.egu26.eu/session/56997
December 3, 2025 at 1:58 PM
CO making me proud ♥️⛰️
NEW: Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) is the latest state election leader to reject a request from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to share private, unredacted voter data with the federal government. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
Colorado Tells DOJ ‘Take a Hike’ as It Rejects Demand for Statewide Voter Data
Read more here.
www.democracydocket.com
December 4, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“We need to start, now, to reduce CO2 emissions from fossil-fuels, by at least 5% per year. This must happen in order to have a chance to avoid unmanageable & extremely costly climate impacts affecting all people in the world.” PIKs J. Rockström @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Cop30: Scientists warn countries must act decisively to protect people and life or risk ‘suffering for billions’ – as it happened
As president Lula tries to find common ground between negotiating countries, planetary scientists say emissions must be urgently cut
www.theguardian.com
November 20, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
"Matlab is the Visual Basic 6 of technical computing." #HeardAtJuliaCon #JuliaCon #JuliaLang
October 3, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.

Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.”

Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris
Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.
Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.
www.washingtonpost.com
August 29, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Breaking News!
Code Yikes!

Yesterday, Antarctic sea-ice extent reached 4 standard deviations below the 1991-2020 daily mean. The only other years on record where this has happened are 2023 and 2024.

In a normal distribution, 4 SD's represents a 1-in-31,600 event. These are not normal times.
July 21, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“It would be a huge mistake to deviate from 1.5.” PIK Director Johan Rockström and other leading scientists spoke to @newyorker.com about the realities of delayed emissions reductions and the dire consequences of giving up hope.
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?
Scientists have long insisted that we can and must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees—and some still do, even as that grim milestone nears.
www.newyorker.com
July 11, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
"Auch ohne Klimawandel gibt es Extreme. Aber in einer Welt mit #Klimawandel häufen sich diese Extreme und das ist der Punkt", so PIK-Meteorologe Peter Hoffmann. Im Gespräch mit rbb24 spricht er über den Potsdamer Dürre-Rekord, Ursache & Folgen der Extreme:

➡️ www.ardmediathek.de/video/Y3JpZD...
July 2, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
This plot from NYTimes is getting a lot of play today. Let me just note that calculating a 15 year trend ending w/ an El Nino-boosted interval is the sort of thing that would make Dick Lindzen blush (excerpt from "The Hockey Stick & the Climate Wars" (www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hockey...)
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Sustainable development needs strong climate protection, says PIK scientist Jessica Strefler at #SB62. Current policies still lead to costly damages, esp. in poorer countries. Stronger emission cuts are crucial & can help to reduce inequality.
More info: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
June 19, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Good Science

xkcd.com/3101/
June 12, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Europe's economic woes have nothing to do with #ClimatePolicy, says PIK Director Ottmar #Edenhofer in an interview with @ftm.eu. “Climate damage is going to be a fundamental threat to our #Economy and prosperity.”
www.ftm.eu/articles/ott... (€)
Europe's economic woes have nothing to do with climate policy, says ex-Merkel advisor
European industry is wrong to blame the Green Deal for its own failures, according to Ottmar Edenhofer, a leading climate economist. To remain economically competitive, the EU must stick to its ambiti...
www.ftm.eu
June 4, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Looked at the report to see how they evaluated model performance and what a surprise - the reported accuracy metrics are based on randomly sampled datapoints. Spatial data is not i.i.d., and model evaluation is the hardest part of any ML project (but not as fun as trying a dozen model architectures)
So this week in the world of farm/environment/land management/ mapping has been “interesting”

And by “interesting” I mean “verging on the utterly bonkers”

Why? Well this week started with Natural England launching a new map

naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2025/05/12/a...
A new peat map for England
By Dr Ruth Waters, Director for Evidence, Natural England, and David Jones, Senior Responsible Officer for the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment, Defra England’s peat deposits are one of our mo...
naturalengland.blog.gov.uk
May 19, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Scientists show that +1.5 °C is far too warm for Earth's ice sheets and will result in several metres of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and will challenge the implementation of adaptation measures

www.nature.com/articles/s43...
Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets - Communications Earth & Environment
Warming of +1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is too high for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and even the current climate forcing of +1.2 °C is likely to lead to several meters of sea-level ...
www.nature.com
May 20, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
New article about AI/LLMs capabilities to summarised scientific research

TL;DR: It's bad, and the new ones are performing worse
Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research | Royal Society Open Science
Artificial intelligence chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to increase public science literacy and support scientific research, as they can quickly summarize complex sc...
royalsocietypublishing.org
May 14, 2025 at 5:49 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
This is horrible. I don't even know what to say. Some of our most key polar data.

"As a result, the level of services for affected products below will be reduced to Basic—meaning they will remain accessible but may not be actively maintained, updated, or fully supported."

nsidc.org/data/user-re...
May 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
If you, like us, think that these kinds of community activity are needed, we warmly invite you to get involved in AgML. So far, we've created benchmark datasets, organised a workshop, Kaggle competition and there's so much more we'd like to do - join our mailing list: mail.agml.org/mailman/list...
AgML Info Page
mail.agml.org
April 28, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“If everything goes right, none of you will be able to afford food, housing, or retirement ever again.” theonion.com/trump-says-r...
Trump Says Recession Unfortunate But Necessary Step To Get To Depression
WASHINGTON—Warning that Americans should brace themselves for an economic “period of transition,” President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that a recession would be an unfortunate but necessary st...
theonion.com
March 11, 2025 at 12:32 AM