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 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 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…
April 28, 2025
Why the AI Revolution Will Require Massive Energy Resources
The rapid rise of generative AI has triggered a sharp escalation in data center electricity consumption, with profound implications for national energy use, system planning, and climate goals. Data centers have long been critical infrastructure for digital services, but their energy demand is now accelerating due to the emergence of compute-intensive AI workloads. Data center…
April 21, 2025
Trump Comes for Climate Research
Last week Politico published a scoop related to climate research under the Trump Administration: The Trump administration is canceling funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the entity that produces the federal government’s signature climate change study, according to three federal officials familiar with the move. The move, which had been widely expected, is a potentially fatal…
April 17, 2025
The Rigidity Cycle and the Pacing Problem
I was listening to Tyler Cowen’s Conversations With Tyler podcast with Jennifer Pahlka, rich and full of detail relevant to my previous post on the pacing problem. In addition to recommending this good conversation, I echo Tyler’s recommendation of Jen’s book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better….
April 17, 2025
The New Rules for Experts
My friend and AEI colleague Tony Mills — director of the AEI Center for Technology, Science, and Energy — has been on a tear lately. Today, I share four of Tony’s essays published in the past month on public trust in science, reform of NIH, COVID’s long-term costs, and how virologists lost the gain-of-function debate. Enjoy, and see you…
April 15, 2025
Censorship is Anti-American
On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University — “a Fulbright scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa” — was detained by six plain clothes government officials as she walked down a Boston street. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that a State Department memo, prepared…
April 10, 2025
The Apocalypse Machine Rolls On
Climate scenarios are fundamental to climate research and policy. For more than a decade, one scenario dominated research informing discussions of climate among scientists and decision makers. Called RCP8.5, today that scenario is widely recognized as implausible, leading to apocalyptic portrayals of future climate change and providing an unreliable basis for policy analyses for adaptation and…
April 7, 2025
Behind the Curtain
Last month, climate scientist Kate Marvel, of NASA, shared “something I have really struggled with” about extreme event attribution. She was speaking as an invited expert in a public information-gathering session of the U.S. National Academy committee1 on extreme event attribution. Marvel, who also served at the lead author on the chapter on “Climate Trends” in the 2023 U.S. National…