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May 8, 2025
China’s AI Strategy: Adoption Over AGI
Last week, the Center for a New American Security held an event on “The Stakes of Sino-American AI Competition.” Near the end, audience member Harry Krejsa of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology posed the most important question of the session, asking: “Why hasn’t this already been more destabilizing in the US-China relationship?…
May 7, 2025
Ice Surprises
Earlier this week the New York Post asked me to help its readers make sense of some surprising new research on ice dynamics at both poles. The new research appears in a new peer-reviewed paper and a preprint that was just posted. At the South Pole, Wang et al. 2025 find a record accumulation of ice on the Antarctic…
May 7, 2025
The Underappreciated Importance of Climate Variability
One of the most pervasive misunderstandings of climate — even among some who publish on climate — is the belief that any long-term trend in a measured climate variable indicates a change in climate, as defined by the IPCC. In practice, “long-term” is often defined to be only a few decades worth of observations. Some…
May 7, 2025
Surprise! Ice is Rebounding at BOTH Poles — Climate is More Complex Than We Know
When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so. Two new studies show that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic…
May 7, 2025
The DOJ’s Google Remedy Will Kill, Not Spur, Competition
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has won its case against Google Search. Now it’s proposing remedies that will hinder competition. But isn’t antitrust supposed to do the opposite? One remedy the DOJ is pursuing is to force Google to hand over key parts of its search infrastructure—its index of the web, troves of user search…
May 6, 2025
Policing News, Policing DEI: The FCC’s Shifting Priorities Erode Its Credibility
My colleague Mark Jamison recently observed that “[f]or decades, well-functioning independent regulatory agencies have been a stabilizing force.” Though primarily addressing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) following President Donald Trump’s firing of two Democratic commissioners, Jamison highlights four “core principles of stability, predictability, legitimacy, and credibility” for the FTC’s success that also could apply to…
May 2, 2025
So, Are We Gonna Ban TikTok, Or…?
It has been 373 days since Congress enacted the TikTok divest-or-ban law, 105 days since the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law as constitutional, and over three months since the ban was scheduled to take effect. Yet except for a brief Inauguration Day interruption, the Chinese-controlled app has been, and remains, readily available in the…
May 1, 2025
The Iberian Blackout
I’ve spent some time this week looking into the massive blackout that struck Spain and Portugal a few days ago, and today I share some of what I’ve learned. I start with a short primer on grid operations and follow that with some initial thoughts on the significance of the Iberian blackout. The Financial Times explains what…
April 30, 2025
Redrawing the Map: How Legal Decisions and Trade Policies Are Transforming Our Tech Ecosystem
The battle between national interests and technology’s inherently borderless nature is escalating, threatening to reshape the very technologies and services central to our daily lives. Global dynamics are redefining the tech ecosystem through regulatory shifts, trade policies, and legal rulings. As Europe cracks down on American tech companies and China races to challenge US dominance,…
April 29, 2025
Constructing Climate Catastrophism
Today kicks off a new series here at THB — Making Sense of Climate Scenarios. I have three motivations for this series: This series is an exercise in transparency, with a goal to open up discussion about what sorts of scenarios should sit at the center of climate science and policy. Sometime in the coming weeks…