Onward and spillward
‘The Lunacy Of Rebuilding In Disaster-Prone Areas’, Noema, April 25, 2024: In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans proposed a flood control program unlike any other in U.S. history. Develo…
climate change
36 posts
Does science have trouble seeing governments?
From ‘Energy megaproject in Chile threatens the world’s largest telescopes’, Science, January 10, 2025: The AES project would occupy several sites totaling 3000 hectares, and the plants making hydrog…
Tamil Nadu's lukewarm heatwave policy
The policy is only for heatwaves, and if it doesn't expand in future to include the state's own responsibility, Tamil Nadu will miss the forest for the trees.…
Did we see the conspiracies coming?
Tweets like this seem on point… … but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actuall…
A tale of two myopias, climate change and the present participle
The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them…
Some comments on India's heat
Responses to a few questions from BBC World reporters about the temperature crisis in India's centre and north.…
Climate change, like quantum physics, will strain language
One of the defining features of quantum mechanics is that it shows up human language, and thought supported by that language, to be insufficient and limited. Many of the most popular languages of the…
The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change
The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates: * Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹 * Chemist…
On the NASEM report on solar geoengineering
A top scientific body in the US has asked the government to fund solar geoengineering research in a bid to help researchers and policymakers know the fullest extent of their options to help the US dea…
Christopher Nolan's explosion
In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding pl…
Time and the pandemic
There is this idea in physics that the fundamental laws of nature apply the same way for processes moving both forwards and backwards in time. So you can't actually measure the passage of time by…
The potential energy of being entertained
Netflix just published a report drafted by its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, estimating – among other things – its environmental footprint for operations during the year 2019. According t…