Howdy Aggies (and friends of Aggies)! The Texas A&M Department of Atmospheric Sciences will be marking the 60th anniversary of its establishment at the 7pm Tuesday (Jan. 27) reception during the AMS Annual Meeting in Hilton Americas-Houston. Come join us!

"The term [overshoot] emerged in the climate modelling literature and countries are now seamlessly importing it into political discussions to ensure that the 1.5-degree target remains perpetually alive, at least on paper if not in reality." thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy…

New blog post from our group! Do you create dashboards / HTML pages with lots of AI-generate texts, and get frustrated (like us) about how they're hard to read? Check out our tips here (and, send them to your coding agents)!!

🌶️ Quotes of the Day from Michael Cembalest, keynoting the @AndlingerCenter Annual Meeting today: "SMRs are the Metaverse of the energy sector. I don't think a single one of these is going to operate." "One of the highest ratios in the world is the number of academic papers on carbon capture divided by the actual amount of carbon captured in the world." "When we started writing about hydrogen, we started calling it 'why-drogen' because thermodynamically, it makes no sense." We're underway with a packed agenda today @Princeton discussing Energy Security in an Era of Recurring Geopolitical Schocks. Sessions are recorded and will be shared later. Full agenda here acee.princeton.edu/2026-annu…

Lots of debate this week on whether journals should ban AI in peer review. We actually tested this in our new preprint, and the results were pretty clear to me. For context, I've reviewed for most of the big journals and evaluated 1,000 human reviews as an editor. I love to read and evaluate science. TLDR: From now on I won't do any peer review without AI. For clinical trials, I'd even call human-only review dangerous 🧵

I want to use this to illustrate a market failure here. I want to read this nationally relevant Atlanta newspaper article, and I'd be willing to pay a little. But there's zero chance I am going to subscribe. I would click for one small payment, I'm not filling out forms.

This is such a sloppy and misleading argument. Uses very outdated data. Falsely blends residential and industrial rates to mislead (for example Norway). Leaves out regional grids such as Texas, which would disprove the argument as Texas has high wind and solar and very low rates.

. @solar_chase has posted her annual thoughts on solar here: bsky.app/profile/solarchase.… The headline is: It’s the end of the beginning of the age of cheap solar as it runs into saturation effects, but batteries are here to help.

Too many shallow hot-takes on AI models' performance with Isaias. As a community, we need to be diving deeper and asking the question, _why_ is the AI model out-performing NWP - and why is NWP under-performing. That's how we continue to improve these tools. They're not oracles.

I'm in an airport, 1 hr before 🛫, the worst time to do this, but here is a thread on permitting/transmission reform bill: First, if you don't know me, I worked for Greenpeace for 8 yrs campaigning against fossil fuels (esp coal), & have lead a utility watchdog for past 10...

If you're in the Weslaco area on Oct. 8-9, check out the South Texas Grazing Lands workshop and hear John Nielsen-Gammon, Ph.D. talk on Climate Trends for South Texas! agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/event…

🎉 Congratulations to John Mitchell, recipient of the 2027 Syukuro Manabe Climate Research Award! Recognized for the groundbreaking development and use of climate models to assess the role of greenhouse gases and aerosols in human-caused climate change. Congratulations from CVC!

The Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences (@scdlds_ashoka), part of the Vachani School of Advanced Computing at Ashoka University, organised ‘Future of Climate: AI, Science and Society’ on 18 September 2026. The event featured a keynote address by Tapio Schneider, Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech (@Caltech), followed by a panel discussion featuring Dr M. Mohapatra, Director General of the India Meteorological Department (@Indiametdept); Anjali Bansal, Partner at Avaana Capital (@avaanacapital); William Boos (@BillBoos), Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley (@UCBerkeley); and Gautam Menon (@MenonBioPhysics), Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University. Professor Tapio Schneider noted that while AI has already transformed short-term weather forecasting, spanning days to weeks, predicting climate patterns several years or decades into the future remains a far greater scientific challenge. The panel discussion emphasised that India’s expanding data infrastructure and dynamic startup ecosystem could position the country to take a leading role in developing effective climate adaptation strategies. #AshokaUniversity

It's really vibes(doom)

I'm going to throw up a question about the investigation of the Hugging Face incident. When you do an investigation of any dangerous incident, one key element to examine is human error. But the Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) institution didn't do that. They seemed only interested in what the agents were doing. That is, they anthromorphized the agents, while turning the humans into non-player characters. Did OpenAI researchers and executives know the risks they were taking and take steps to manage them? What kinds of human discussions were happening internally around these models? How did they mitigate these risks internally? Did they discuss legal liability? Was the board or were executives involved? These are the kinds of questions to ask if you are a real regulator. I don't see where or if METR asked them. Mostly they footnoted that these questions are 'out of scope.' They saw this project as a technical inquiry into the capabilities of intelligent models, not as an analysis of a dangerous accident. They interviewed eight researchers. Any executives? Any board members or lawyers? From the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco to the Space Shuttle explosion to the 737 Max, we've always realize that human behavior is the foundation of how complex systems behave. That is true here too. I don't see any analysis of the actual people at OpenAI making decisions about the tools used for hacking. Am I missing something?

Beyond two weeks: How AI is transforming Indian monsoon forecasting ‘AI can complement conventional meteorology by combining global model output with observations and historical data. Its value lies in extracting additional predictive information and translating it into clearer extended-range guidance,’ write Sandeep Juneja (@sandeepjuneja66), Director, Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences, Ashoka University and Manmeet Singh, Academic Visitor, Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences, Ashoka University. Read More: theweek.in/news/sci-tech/202… (@TheWeekLive, @scdlds_ashoka) #AshokaUniversity

We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/

I’ve built DNA synthesizers and sequencers by hand. I used the engineer viruses for a living. I used to engineer human immune evasion for therapeutic constructs. Who the fuck are you people? Have you ever so much as held a pipette before? You can spaghetti blast an ensemble of DNA sequences at some shitty provider but 1) you still have to assemble it and bootstrap a system for making virions 2) you are not single shotting a viable, virulent viral design without a ton of experimental selection and development. Viral fitness is deeply dependent on codons and cotranslational kinetics - you’re not just gonna obfuscate away from wild type and get something good by magic. You keep treating AI like some kinda god, but molecular physics has computational complexity that scales exponentially in particle number which just crushes the abilities of any classical computer to do end-to-end design of biological functions ab initio. Grabbing a bunch of bacteriophage phi174 hits from a mass ensemble screen in lab microbes is not evidence of some magical AGI bio design ability - it's just a classic spray and pray selection. This is just nothing like building something viable in humans. Goddamn it read some books before you waltz into biomedicine and lecture us on protecting human life.

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands. And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.

Wrote a short post on why Google's WeatherNext forecasting models are so good. TLDR: it's probably not the architecture, but how they train their models (though there's an interesting analogy to singular vectors in what they're doing) notesonclimate.substack.com/…