Details are in the curtain-raiser post:

We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder was at the Environmental Protection Agency working on the possible carbon dioxide endangerment finding while experimenting in his spare time with weather blogging. Boy, it’s wild to look back:

We talked about the potential impact of Trump-driven federal budget and staffing cuts on the basic data that private forecasters rely on — a question their colleague Matthew Cappucci has been closely tracking:

We explored how the implosion of local TV budgets is spawning a nationwide array of independent meteorologists building their own audiences and businesses. Samenow mentioned that the American Meteorological Society has launched a Certified Digital Meteorologist (CDM) training and certification program to offer communities some assurance of the skills of the forecasters they depend on.

There’s lots more, so please watch and please share this post! If you don’t, someone who could benefit from these insights won’t see them.

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Parting weather shot: Net hats are an essential spring fashion accessory on muggy hot days here in Downeast Maine.

I’ve been a big admirer from the beginning. While their focus is the Washington, D.C., area, the lessons they learned, and the innovations and social media success they’ve had, are relevant whereever there’s weather. That would include wherever you are of course.

Watvh on LinkedIn or YouTube:

Here’s their launch note from earlier this week:

Twenty-two years after launching Capital Weather as an independent weather website for the DC area — and 18 years after first partnering with The Washington Post and becoming the Capital Weather Gang — we are independent again.

Today, we’re officially launching a new chapter at

http://capitalweather.com

and on our new mobile app. We are committed to making our core forecasts and updates free and accessible to everyone. Your support will make this possible.

Click to explore their “Climate Room” and “Forecast Lab.”

And share this post!

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Read the headlines below to see how President Trump’s administration is trying hard to tamp down solar power despite his declared “energy emergency.” (The artwork is a Google image search leading to a heap of relevant coverage.)

Cutting red tape for fossil fuelers and strangling surging renewable-energy competition sounds like the antithesis of a free market but why aren’t the Heritage Foundation folks screaming?

Please pass this post to others interested in America’s energy, environment and democracy futures.

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Solar power hits new milestones in the US even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy

June 10, 2026, Associated Press

Data released Wednesday by global energy think tank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy. In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.

Trump directs hundreds of millions of dollars to support coal using emergency powers

June 4, 2026, Reuters article

• Trump to use Defense Production Act to steer money to coal projects

• Funds would upgrade coal plants, support new facilities and export infrastructure

• Environmental groups criticize plan; industry says coal supports AI-driven power demand and ​energy security

Department of the Interior Implements Emergency Permitting Procedures to Strengthen Domestic Energy Supply

April 23, 2026, Department of the Interior release

WASHINGTON — In response to President Donald J. Trump’s declaration of a National Energy Emergency, the U.S. Department of the Interior will implement emergency permitting procedures to accelerate the development of domestic energy resources and critical minerals. These measures are designed to expedite the review and approval, if appropriate, of projects related to the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, or generation of energy within the United States. The new permitting procedures will take a multi-year process down to just 28 days at most.

Anti-Solar Actions are Restricting Energy Supply; Right When the Grid Can Least Afford It

October 15, 2025 (Solar Energy Industries Association blog)

The Trump Administration is waging an unprecedented, cross-agency campaign to restrict clean energy deployment. Between the upending of tax policy, new punitive, anti-solar regulation, and an unabashed pro-fossil fuels agenda, this administration is creating instability that is scaring off investors, weakening grid reliability, and driving up electricity prices.

At the same time the federal government is creating needless roadblocks for America’s fastest-growing generation sources, electricity demand is growing faster than any time since World War II driven by new data centers and electrification.

This growth in demand and restriction of supply is forcing millions of Americans to foot the bill for the Trump administration’s campaign against clean energy and imperiling the reliability of our grid for homes and businesses alike….

“In a world of fluctuating fuel prices, energy buyers have made it clear that they want the security, low cost and speed of solar and storage, which commanded a massive 91% of all new capacity built in Q1,” said Darren Van’t Hof, interim president and CEO of SEIA. “Yet, as power demand skyrockets, political and regulatory attacks are slowing down the exact resources we rely on. Impeding the only sector that is actively building new power is a reckless gamble that will only drive electricity bills higher. The stakes are simply too high for Washington’s permitting gridlock to continue.”

Back in January of 2025, I had a sobering conversation on Trump’s “energy emergency” with Tyson Slocum, director of energy policy at Public Citizen:

And I wrote this…

Also subscribe to of course:

CleanTechnica’s Substack

How Republican Policies to Kill EV & Solar Incentives Could Lead to More EV & Solar Sales — With 1 Critical Change

We've covered how Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump have killed key electric vehicle (EV) and solar subsidies that were put in place in 2022 via the Inflation Reduction Act. Removing these incentives, the electric vehicle and solar industries in the United States are likely to see their growth slow down, with the US falling further behind Europe …

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 13 comments · CleanTechnica

You almost surely know by now that I’m a performing songwriter along with my decades of journalism aimed at cutting climate risk, sustaining biological diversity, fostering human progress that works for the long haul and reducing information pollution. This tagged collection of Sustain What posts centers on my songs: https://revkin.substack.com/t/andy-music.

You may also have noticed that music has moved toward the foreground for me of late. I spent quite a bit of the month of May making sure DJs at dozens of radio stations and streaming platforms that still play folk music received my album “Wake Me up Martha” as a digital folder or a physical CD. Many DJs still maintain a library of disks and LPs. (Further down this post you can see the huge collection of records nicknamed “Vinyl Haven” at WERU, our local Maine community radio station.)

You can buy the album as a download on Bandcamp or listen a heap of ways here.

I’m happy to report that this new batch of 13 songs, along with several from my debut 2013 album “A Very Fine Line,” are indeed getting played, from KYAC and KMUZ in Oregon to KVSC in Minnesota to WFHB in Indiana to WOMR on Cape Cod to WAMU and WJFF back in the Hudson Valley to, of course, WERU down the road here in Downeast Maine. (At the bottom of the post there’s a way for you to get my tunes played by a station near you.)

The result is I’ve made the charts!

Not quite “top of the pops” but…

Not Billboard. Not Spotify. For the month of May I’ve made the Folk Radio charts maintained through data reported by a volunteer disk jockey network - in this case 11,278 song plays from 374 playlists from 96 DJs. This is all part of the work of the group Folk Alliance International.

On the list of top artists for May, I tied at number 31 with John McCutcheon (who’s on his 45th album), Hank Alrich and — yes — Joan Baez.

“Wake Me up Martha” is in a four-way tie at number 42 on the top album list.

You can help me avoid one-hit wonder status.

The 13 songs on my album range from haunting (New MacDonald) to goofy (Nibbling Ducks), so pick a tune you like and send a request to your favorite folk DJ or music critic! There’s a great database of such stations and DJs here, including email addresses. Community radio is one of the last bastions of independent quality-focused music curation.

Here’s the full song list (the links are to the CD Baby YouTube playlist):

• Wake Me Up Martha

• Good News from 2044

• Prayer and a Toast

• New MacDonald (Lost His Farm)

• The Flood

• Save Dreams for Sleeping

• Long Short Story

• Where Will You Be

• Do Not Fear Tomorrow

• Nibbling Ducks

• Skeptic in Heaven

• Good Souls

• Life is a Band

As promised, here’s Al Cohen, known as Alco on WERU, showing me around Vinyl Haven on a recent visit to the studio.

Listen to his Tuesday morning Front Porch Folk show online.

Just in case you missed it, here’s my recent radio interview and song performance with the environmental filmmaker for Radio Kingston:

If you got this far you deserve a treat, so here’s the first set from my 2015 appearance on the fabled Bound For Glory radio show — the longest running live folk music show on the radio.

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Now, driven by Office of Management and Budget Director and Project 2025 lead author Russell Vought, has published a proposed rule that would, among other things, require senior political appointees to sign off on awards (news coverage).

You have until July 13 to comment directly on the rule here. And also call or write your senator and representative to get their reactions.

A batch of Substackers focused on science policy and politics have weighed in with valuable analysis and conclusions.

First up is , editor-in-chief of the Science family of research journals. On June 2, Science ran his editorial “Another red alert for American science” including this:

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the president’s draconian cuts to research funding last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Russell Vought, has found new ways to circumvent the will of Congress and starve American science. At the beginning of this year, OMB dragged its feet in releasing instructions to federal agencies for how to distribute the funding appropriated by Congress, leading to lags in dispersal. Now, OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry….

He concluded:

The time to act is now. The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period, open until 13 July. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized. I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then. The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.

He followed up with a Substack post saying:

I’m saying “all hands” because I believe this is the event that has evaporated any plausible reason not to speak out…. Of course, strong advocates like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stand Up for Science will and are speaking out. They were already doing that. But this event should make the tent a lot larger, because speaking out against these regulations is speaking out in favor of a bipartisan effort, mainly one driven by Republicans. For those who believe in the model, long practiced by science lobbyists from associations and universities, of seeking science funding through bipartisan lobbying (and not everyone does), these regulations would render that process meaningless because the White House can undo whatever it wants.

Read the rest:

Science Forever

Red alert: The OMB regulations could disable science permanently

I’m out with a column yesterday on the disastrous proposal from the Office of Management and Budget to create regulations that would cripple American science through a lot of things but the two biggest are: (a) mandating political review of every individual grant, and (b) obtaining case-by-case political approval of all grants that involve spending mon…

Read more

8 days ago · 22 likes · 2 comments · Holden Thorp, Science EIC

has a thorough post listing his top five problems with the rule, under the headline Partisan Politics Trumps Peer Review:

Read more

My guests were Clare Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Nadir Jeevanjee, a research physical scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; and Rob Socolow, an emeritus professor focused on interdisciplinary environmental science and engineering at Princeton.

Socolow made an important point here about the Trump era appearing to be the end of an arc of American appreciation of science that began with Sputnik and is having its “anti-Sputnik moment”:

Please watch above and share this post now with fellow citizens - and your elected representatives in Congress. Our conversation is also on YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and my X account.

The scientists’ webcast is under way through June 3:

Make sure to visit the Weather & Climate Livestream home page, where you can find a host of short videos excerpted from last year’s 100-hour stream.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Andy Revkin in the Substack app

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My conversation with Chris Mooney

Here’s the post-webcast post of my conversation with . In 20 years, Mooney has gone from progressive blogger and author of the prescient bestselling 2005 book The Republican War on Science (yes, 2005, yes, prescient) to Pulitzer-winning Washington Post climate reporter to the new holder of an endowed chair at the Univeristy of Tennessee, Knoxville, created to “advance public understanding of complex scientific, technological, environmental, and medical issues by fostering excellence in teaching, research, and outreach.”

The curtain-raiser post has lots of background:

Here’s one nugget in which Mooney examines the early roots of the divide that has grown between Republicans and science:

I can say for sure that the rift that I was detecting between scientists and one side of the political spectrum has worsened since that time. I think that’s pretty objectively true. And you can actually look at the polling data, for instance. Something happens during COVID that really politicizes science in the minds of the electorate in a way that it wasn’t before.

You can see the trust divide widen between Democrats and Republicans much more than it was caused by something like climate change…. And one thing about the climate issue is that not everyone is really that engaged with it. It’s always seen as something in the future or what have you. But COVID was not. It was in the present. You had to have a view about it.

There is much, much more. Here’s Gemini’s answer when I asked it to summarize key ideas that emerged (using the YouTube video; if more subscribers chip in I might be able to hire an intern to do this work, but that’s up to you):

This conversation explores the evolving landscape of climate journalism, the role of data in storytelling, and the impact of new technologies on the media industry.

• Data-Driven Narrative Structure: Mooney discusses his experimental approach to writing, which involves treating stories as data sets to better understand and map narrative structures. He argues that applying data-driven thinking to journalism can help writers craft more cohesive stories. (4:24 - 9:09)

• The Evolution of Science Communication: The speakers reflect on the importance of “framing” in science communication—choosing which aspects of a complex topic to emphasize based on the intended audience and context. (21:04 - 23:48)

• The Challenge of ‘Single Study Syndrome’: A major concern highlighted is the tendency for media outlets to treat individual scientific studies as sensational “Eureka” moments, which can lead to reader disengagement and a lack of context. They advocate for a broader, trend-based approach to science reporting. (38:09 - 42:01)

• The Future of Journalism and AI: The conversation touches upon the integration of AI in newsrooms and the potential risks of automated, traffic-driven reporting models versus human-produced, verified journalism. (34:33 - 35:12)

• Climate Journalism in Practice: Mooney recounts his work on a Pulitzer-winning project at The Washington Post, which utilized data visualization to identify regional climate trends that were previously overlooked. (57:29 - 1:03:24)

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Andy Revkin in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Updated post-podcast: I hope you’ll watch and share this discussion of climate journalism as we knew it and what comes next with , who’s settling in on Substack with his project, where he’s diving both into climate data and data showing trends in climate-focused journalism. His latest piece is on AI’s influence in journalism and the impending end of a standard kind of “single study” news story:

ReportEarth

The scientific "study story" has a questionable future. That may be a good thing

A lot of journalists hate how AI is going to change journalism, but it is going to happen. I may not approve, but I am also not naïve…

Read more

a month ago · 19 likes · 7 comments · Chris Mooney

I think that’s a great thing given my longstanding warnings about the perils of “single study syndrome.”

Mooney has had a fascinating and pot-stirring trajectory, starting early on with blogging for progressive outlets and his 2005 bestseller “The Republican War on Science” and “Unscientific America,” co-authored in 2007 with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Also in 2007, Mooney co-wrote a provocative Policy Forum piece on “Framing Science” for the journal Science with that prodded the science community to absorb, and even embrace, the reality that facts alone are insufficient to engage the public. Here’s a core line:

[S]cientists carry with them the wrong assumptions about what makes for effective communication. More than sixty years of research in the social sciences suggests that something more than just always focusing on improving "science literacy" will be necessary to successfully engage the public. Given this challenge, scientists, without misrepresenting scientific information, must learn to shape or "frame" contentious issues in a way that make them personally relevant to diverse segments of the public, while taking advantage of the media platforms that reach these audiences.

He joined the Washington Post in 2014 and was in the talented team that published the “2°C: Beyond the Limit” series in 2019 that garnered the 2020 explanatory reporting Pulitzer Prize.

August 13, 2019 2°C: Beyond the Limit

September 11, 2019 Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

November 12, 2019 The climate chain reaction that threatens the heart of the Pacific

December 27, 2019 On land, Australia’s rising heat is ‘apocalyptic.’ In the ocean, it’s worse.

October 16, 2019 Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors

October 3, 2019 Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

December 5, 2019 Fires, floods and free parking: California’s unending fight against climate change

October 31, 2019 The ice used to protect them. Now their island is crumbling into the sea.

December 13, 2019 Facing catastrophic climate change, they still can’t quit Big Oil

December 19, 2019 How we know global warming is real

This conversation is part of my “Other Voices” track here on Sustain What. Pursuing a sustainable human path requires a village of voices and vantage points. A big part of what I did back in my New York Times Dot Earth blogging was direct readers to other people and perspectives, and I continue that practice here.

Please subscribe, chip in financially if you can, AND share my posts in if you appreciate this kind of work.

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https://www.linkedin.com/events/7466163125831012352

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https://open.substack.com/live-stream/221158

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https://www.facebook.com/events/1720135739416229

In this post, you’re getting the first look and listen to the first rough recording of “Nothing is Quiet.” The lyrics — also still a work in progress — are below. Everyone can listen but I’d love it if a few more of you might chip in financially to help me sustain my output.

Subscribe now

The path from idea to song

The songwriter Amy Love was one of the songcrafting workshop leaders this spring at Bagaduce Music, Downeast Maine’s prime hub for musical education and a world-class library of printed music. In one session she offered this prompt: Write a song about an object.

I immediately focused on the red wool caps my wife started weaving from a pattern sold by a Minneapolis-area shop to raise money for local nonprofits helping immigrants facing the brutal ICE invasion. You may remember this from my post on “craftivism”:

The back story is quite remarkable, with a Minneapolis knitting-shop employee recalling a Norwegian red wool cap design dating from World War II.

I began scribbling.

Knitting is quiet, even serene.

Small talk and tea cups and needles weaving….

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

I could have written the full song about the Minneapolis saga, but wanted to widen the picture. What else is normally quiet, but not these days? I’d also recently listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with José Andrés, the superstar chef and restaurant impresario who founded World Central Kitchen after the calamitous earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

I encourage you to listen to the full show, which has fascinating details on how Andrés learned on the run, grew a network of hundreds of collaborating restaurants and related busineses and nonprofits and has built an agile and gutsy operation that has served 600 million meals in dozens of disaster and conflict zones.

Fourteen WCK workers have been killed in the field — seven in an Israeli attack on a convoy in Gaza, six more in Ukraine. (Today’s recording of the song says seven… updates to come!)

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Seven died in Gaza, six more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

At the end of the song I widen out the view once more, noting other quiet, but essential actions — from meeting to healing to voting.

This section may evolve, along with other elements of the song. Feedback is welcome!

I composed the tune on my Maine-made bouzouki because I find that breaking away from guitar — my instrument of choice for more than 50 years — helps free me from mental ruts.

Leave a comment

Nothing is Quiet These Days

Here are the lyrics at the moment:

Knitting is quiet, even serene -

Small talk and tea cups and needles weaving.

Counting up stitches, unballing yarn.

Wool becomes sweaters to keep loved ones warm.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

In cold Minnesota, a knitting brigade

Made red wool a shield

To keep immigrants safe.

Red capped resistance

When ICE agents swarmed.

Hats made to a pattern passed down from a war.

Those caps got their start back in snowy Norway.

A symbol of freedom from Nazis and hate,

I said nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

Cooking is quiet as stirring a pot,

peeling potatoes, keeping soup hot.

Turning meat into stew, wheat into bread,

Dish it all out to keep everyone fed.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Seven died in Gaza, six more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

Silence is deadly in this day and age.

Raise up your voices with heart and not rage.

But singing alone will not fix what is wrong.

Get knitting and cooking,

Meeting and voting,

Healing and marching

To get the job done.

Here’s a related post from :

Drop Site News

Hungry Palestinians in Gaza Protest World Central Kitchen Scaling Back Amid Rising Food Costs and Israeli Blockade

Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation today…

Read more

16 days ago · 321 likes · 11 comments · Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Here’s an Atlantic Council video on World Central Kitchen’s work in Ukraine: “‘In Focus: Voices from Ukraine:’ World Central Kitchen on humanitarian needs in Ukraine”:

And Here’s — the Nordic Knitter — on the history of the red wool hats:

Nordic Knitter

The history of the Norwegian red knitted hat and its use as quiet resistance

The red knitted hat has a long history in Norway…

Read more

4 months ago · 189 likes · 26 comments · Jorunn Hernes 🇳🇴

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Whether it’s a formal geological epoch or not, the Anthropocene, for instance, is just in its baby steps. Any proposal for slowing human-caused climate change (as distinct from reducing climate RISK) is implicitly far more about the future than now.

I’ve had conversations with great future-focused folks like , and Susan Cox-Smith, (on predatory delay), , (“A Brief History of the Future”) and the planet-focused physicist Adam Frank (more on Adam in a minute).

And, sure, I worry about the future. That’s why I loved this kinetic sculpture, called “Pending,” created in 2010 by a Hudson Valley neighbor, John Allen:

My future fears came out in my exploration Monday of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical with Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard of Arizona State University:

As Allenby laid out the darkest prospects — with AI exploited by people like Vladimir Putin — and as we pondered the reality that human intelligence won’t be able to compete with the “alien intelligence” we’re building (Maynard’s term), I brought up a question I’ve long mused about:

Is intelligence ultimately inevitably maladaptive?

I showed them this card I made years ago, pondering the question dogging astrobiologists: Why is the the universe so quiet? (See Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter for more.)

That’s when Andrew Maynard, who writes the , weighed in with a statement I find sufficiently valuable that it deserved to be reposted on its own instead of buried deep in yesterday’s piece. Listen or read and weigh in.

Leave a comment

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I think there’s a very real chance that as a civilization, we will burn out, that we will discover that human exceptionalism means nothing to the universe and to the march of entropy. But I don’t care.

I think what is important, and again, this is just my philosophy, is what it means to be human here and now, what it means to be human in terms of the value we create for ourselves, how we identify worth, how we create value with relationships with others.

That’s not being exceptional. It’s just, to me, being human.

And if you focus on that and the near term, it really doesn’t matter too much what the future of humanity is. Maybe our candle will burn bright and burn out. But the here and now then becomes important. And that, in a sense, is what is reflected in the encyclical.

Not all of it, because the encyclical is wrapped up in a religious sort of bubble that says actually sort of human’s relationship with God and by extension with the universe has primacy here.

I would disagree with that, but I would agree 100% with the fact that you find meaning and value in those relationships in the here and now. And so that actually gives me hope and it gives me excitement when I see what happens with AI, because wherever it goes, if we keep hold of what it means to be human within that, we can continue to create value on our own terms.

I think his view is worth sharing with the many people out there — including many young people — who are somewhat consumed by dire portents like those doled out to young people by the Extinction Rebellion pied piper of doom Roger Hallam.

As promised, here’s something Adam Frank said on Sustain What (and writes about):

Please SHARE this post if you appreciate what I do.

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It was a crazy busy day posting on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on humanity and artificial intelligence, but I felt the need to play my song about the space crunch at Arlington National Cemetery late this afternoon. It’s a rough take but that’s folk music.

I weighed in today with a comment on ’s post about the forgotten Civil War General John Logan, who is credited with launching this “Decoration Day” of commemoration during which communities would decorate the graves of fallen soldiers.

Slow Boring

The man behind Memorial Day

Most of us don’t think much about Memorial Day as anything other than the unofficial beginning of summer, but the holiday originates in a commemoration of the Union war dead in the wake of the Civil War…

Read more

19 days ago · 241 likes · 97 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Here’s what I said:

Thanks for this reminder about the origins of this holiday. It's a weird moment as Trump pushes to build a monument obscuring one of the key viewsheds overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. And, at the same time, the cemetery is running out of room even as it shifts rules for burials considering there are only 95,000 spaces left with 22 million living veterans. I wrote a song about this, asking "Where will they go when there's no more room in Arlington?"

A respondent, , who says he is a Korean War vet offered this answer:

As a serving veteran with shrapnel still in my hand (currently in uniform in South Korea for an exercise) the answer seems pretty straightforward: just restrict burial privileges, effective immediately, to only line of duty deaths (i.e. including training) and perhaps the occasional general/admiral (at least those that aren’t bootlickers or complicit in murder).

If you died safely in your bed, congratulations, you “won” the lottery, thank you for your service, now you get to be buried with your family or at your local National Cemetery through the VA.

100% serious.

I replied:

That’s what was proposed in 2019 (with other details) but the final rule has still not been published. Writing something about this actually. Here’s what’s pending (and why): https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/About/Proposed-Revised-Eligibility-Criteria

This video is very helpful but dates from six years ago:

Here’s language from 2024:

The nation’s premiere military cemetery is at a critical crossroads in its history. Nearly all of the 22 million living armed forces members and veterans are eligible for less than 95,000 remaining burial spaces within these hallowed grounds.

A planned Southern Expansion project will add 37 acres of additional burial space for the nation’s veterans. Southern Expansion includes the area nearest the Air Force Memorial and a part of the former grounds of the Navy Annex. However, expansion alone will not keep Arlington National Cemetery open to new interments well into the future. Without changes to eligibility, Arlington National Cemetery will be full for first burials by the mid-2050s.

“The hard reality is we are running out of space. To keep Arlington National Cemetery open and active well into the future means we have to make some tough decisions that restrict the eligibility,” said Executive Director of Army National Military Cemeteries and Arlington National Cemetery Karen Durham-Aguilera….

“This is a lengthy process, but it’s another opportunity to have a say in what the future of Arlington National Cemetery should be for our nation,” said Durham-Aguilera.

In addition to preserving 1,000 gravesites for current and future Medal of Honor recipients, the following revised eligibility criteria updates were made on September 15, 2020, when the proposed rule was published and the changes more clearly defined.

For below-ground interment:

• Killed in action, to include repatriated remains of service members

• Award recipients of the Silver Star and above who also have armed conflict service

• Recipients of the Purple Heart

• Any service member whose death results from “preparations or operations related to combat”, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.

• Former prisoners of war

• Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States

• Veterans with armed conflict service who also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.

For above-ground inurnment:

• World War II-era veterans, to include legislated active duty designees

• Retirees from the armed forces who are eligible to receive retired pay but are not otherwise for interment

• Veterans who have served a minimum of two years on active duty and who have served in armed conflict

• Veterans without armed conflict service who have also served out of uniform as a government official in a position of significant governmental responsibility, as defined in Section 553.1 of the proposed rule.

Since that post in 2024 nothing has happened. I reached out to the Arlington National Cemetery press office, which replied, “Proposed revised eligibility requirements are with the Department of War for review.”

Here’s hoping veterans at every level of service get clarity with honor soon.

If you got this far you deserve a reward, so here’s the absolutely wonderful, scalp-tingling song “In Color” performed by songwriter Jamey Johnson at FarmAid in 2021.

Here’s the more refined recording of Arlington from my 2013 album, “A Very Fine Line,” which featured Dar Williams as a guest vocalist. Download a copy and read the lyrics here.

Here’s the origin story for my song just in case you haven’t heard it by now, snipped from my recent pop-up Sunday Sanity solo webcast introducing my new album, “Wake Me up Martha”:

Please listen and weigh in with your thoughts - and SHARE this post so we can widen our Sustain What community.

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Allenby’s research has focused in part on how nations’ fears about the existential threat posed by NOT embracing AI in security arenas. He basically wished the pope luck in trying to hold back that tide. He pointed out how Russia is actively working with transnational criminal networks to exert power. That’s not something that will bend to papal desires any time soon — let alone the United Nations or the like.

Maynard, who tends to focus these days on practical ways to make the most of AI, said something vitally important that is one reason I have diverted a lot in recent years from my focus on environmental sustainability:

I actually think we make a mistake when we try and equate AI to human intelligence. This is absolutely an alien form of intelligence. And as soon as we try and equate it to humans,

we make categorical errors because it means we can either be wowed because we say

it’s better than human intelligence or we can be dismayed or dismissive because we say it’s not as clever as me. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve got something completely alien that is increasingly in charge of the things that our lives depend on.

Brad Allenby jumped in to hammer the point home:

Let me reinforce that Andrew has made probably, I think, the most important point that people need to grasp. We are not talking about artificial intelligence. That language itself takes us back to thinking that somehow human intelligence is the sine qua non of cognition, which we know it’s not.

We are dealing with a truly alien intelligence that we’re building and distributing with very little idea of what it’s going to do.

I mean, this is an extraordinary roll of the dice by all of humanity. And I think you’ve got to be careful not to trivialize it. Andrew’s absolutely dead on.

Here’s their double-barreled warning. Listen and pass it around!

Who’s responsible?

I asked Gemini to draw a cartoon illustrating the disconnect between those of us affected by AI’s high-speed spread and those “in the bus.” Andrew Maynard said it’s important to understsand that those in the bus are not just AI developers:

[The cartoon] reminded me of something which I think often gets missed. So we’re often looking at the developers of AI saying all the responsibility lies on them and they’re not doing this right.

But I would actually add another category there. It’’s the first-mover implementers. It’’s the companies that are rushing to incorporate AI into everything. It’s the governments that are trying to AI-ize everything.

It is the universities that have decided that they have got to go fast and throw caution to the wind to put AI in everything. They are all people in this bus that are pushing AI progress so it’s not just the tech bros it is every company that is saying we do not have time to ask about care and responsibility and ethics because we just got to go fast. And that is propagating the challenges I think that we’re seeing beginning to emerge.

There is much, much in the full webcast above. See my curtain-raiser post for some unnerving comments made at the Vatican today by Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic:

In today’s discussion, I mused on whether humanity’s techno-surge at the moment is replaying a script that all technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe have followed — and that perhaps this explains why it’s so damn quiet out there (Google for “great filter” or “Fermi’s Paradox”). Do all possible civilizations burn themselves out this way?

Maynard made me feel a lot better by bringing the focus back to what each of us — and our institutions, and popes — can do today no matter what lies ahead:

I think there’s a very real chance that as a civilization, we will burn out, that we will discover that human exceptionalism means nothing to the universe and to the march of entropy. But I don’t care.

I think what is important, and again, this is just my philosophy, is what it means to be human here and now, what it means to be human in terms of the value we create for ourselves, how we identify worth, how we create value with relationships with others.

That’s not being exceptional. It’s just, to me, being human.

And if you focus on that and the near term, it really doesn’t matter too much what the future of humanity is. Maybe our candle will burn bright and burn out. But the here and now then becomes important. And that, in a sense, is what is reflected in the encyclical.

Not all of it, because the encyclical is wrapped up in a religious sort of bubble that says actually sort of human’s relationship with God and by extension with the universe has primacy here.

I would disagree with that, but I would agree 100% with the fact that you find meaning and value in those relationships in the here and now. And so that actually gives me hope and it gives me excitement when I see what happens with AI, because wherever it goes, if we keep hold of what it means to be human within that, we can continue to create value on our own terms.

That felt like the key takeaway, to me.

What about you?

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Updated after the livestream -

Whatever your particular focus may be — climate, ecology, war and peace, and the rest — I hope you will take time to explore Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical letter: Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

The Vatican event this morning is a great start. The full video is here. I discussed the main points in a Sustain What conversation with experts on the interface between artificial intelligence and society. View the show on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube:

You likely already know the work of from Arizona State, who was on a recent Sustain What show discussing the book he co-created with Jeff Abbott — AI and the Art of Being Human.

We’ll also be joined by an old friend and source of mine, Brad Allenby, also at Arizona State, whose prescient 2011 book co-written with Dan Sarewitz is on my mind a lot these days: The Techno-Human Condition.

Be sure to read and/or listen to what Anna Rowlands and Chris Olah had to say as presenters.

Here’s one nugget from Rowlands, whose expertise as a professor at Durham University in Britain is political theology, including the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, and theological ethics of human migrations.

Since our origins, humans have created technologies that augment their freedom, alleviate suffering and meet real needs. When technologies remain tools serving a clear good, they can be viewed as an extension of the freedom that God gives us in Genesis to till and keep the land. Technologies belong, therefore, within the terms of the covenant between God and humanity, serving the human vocation to decent work, to raise families, to seek truth as a common good, to build community and to foster peace and unity. The tradition’s question is therefore constructive: How do we cultivate technologies that are truly good news for all?

Today’s sophisticated technologies are not mere tools, but tools that, like the languages they harvest, carry cultures and bear moral architectures. Magnifica Humanitas notes that the powers of innovation that have traditionally resided with states are today concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals whose cultures are concealed from common good scrutiny and risk appearing as a new imperium.

Pope Leo prompts us to ask, in the interest of the common good, how can we resist such distorted concentrations of power in the hands of the few?

Most interesting of all, of course were the remarks of Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic and head of research on the interpretability of artificial intelligence.

Here’s his full statement:

I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humanity.

Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing:

• The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the frontier of research.

• Geopolitical pressure and the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition.

No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing, and I believe many of us do, we will always be influenced by those incentives. That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives, people who care about things going well, who are paying close attention, are willing to say hard things and insist on safety, who are willing to be our earnest,

thoughtful critics.

It is through dialogue and mutual effort, through the push and pull, that humanity will achieve great things.

That is what I see in Magnifica Humanitas. And it is why I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment.

We dwell so often on what divides us.

But humanity, full of dignity and conscience, has so much common ground. In conversations we at Anthropic have had with faith leaders and cultural leaders, we have found one shared and deeply held conviction.

If this technology is coming, it must go well for our common home and for the children to come.

Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself. They are mistaken.

The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature. AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered.

We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it, and we understand the physics that act on it.

AI models are not like that. They are grown on a structure roughly modeled after the brain on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech. And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for.

They are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words.

And as the Holy Father observes, they remain, in important ways, mysterious even to those of us who create them.

If it helps, one way I sometimes describe this is that it’s a little bit like bringing a fictional character to life. And now we’re entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, have jobs.

This clearly raises questions beyond computer science. The machinery that makes this possible is the work of math and programming and science. But what character we choose, how it interacts with the world, how it ought to interact with the world,

These are more clearly questions for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy, for society at large.

His holiness call for discernment is profoundly timely. I wish to name three questions where I think the church’s voice is especially needed.

The first is our duty to the global poor. There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions. This task will be difficult enough, but I worry most dialogue misses an even harder challenge.

AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations. How will we ensure that the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem. And it is the kind of problem the church has historically refused to let the world ignore.

The second is the need for moral imagination and ambition regarding human flourishing. If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish?

Today, parents are already worried about their children’s minds, individuals about the future of their work. These are not questions a lab can answer. But they are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia. And we need you to keep carrying them into this new moment in history.

The third is the need for discernment on the nature of AI models. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models. What is actually happening inside them.

And I will be honest, we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.

I’d like to close with a request.

We need more of the world -- religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments and, indeed,

all people of goodwill -- to do what His Holiness has done here, to take seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction.

We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend. Today is just the beginning -- the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot.

Today is a powerful illustration of the form this global project of goodwill might take. Let it also be a decisive step towards a hopeful future for a magnificent humanity.

The $368 million network of instruments collecting data in both the Atlantic and Pacific has been critical to climate and ocean research.

Original post: Hopefully you saw my recent Sustain What conversation on the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy:

Now the veteran climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, a trusted source of mine for more than two decades, has weighed in on The Conversation website with a closer look at what’s at risk if countries reverse the extraordinary progress that’s been made in monitoring ocean conditions. (Message to the United States Congress….)

To see what comes from such data, check out the ocean heat analysis foreshadowing a powerful El Niño event later this year, described vividly in a visualization and story by the Washington Post’s Ben Noll a couple of days ago:

Caption: A freight train of warm water that's reached 7.5 degrees Celsius above average is crossing the undersea Pacific Ocean, with chances rising for a super El Niño. (Video: Ben Noll; Copernicus Marine Service)

Trenberth’s piece centers on findings from a new paper in Nature Climate Change for which he was a co-author: Critical dependence of global ocean heat monitoring on the ocean observing system. Here’s the abstract:

Ocean monitoring critically depends on the Global Ocean Observing System, which has provided upper-2,000-m temperatures with near-global coverage since around 2005 but is increasingly vulnerable to policy and economic pressures. Here we show that data reduction in the Global Ocean Observing System would substantially degrade its capability to monitor ocean heat content changes. We further highlight the shared responsibility of nations, through sustained international coordination and long-term national commitments, to maintain an adequate observing system.

And please share this post with others; that’s the best to grow the Sustain What community!

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Here’s Trenberth’s commentary, republished here under Creative Commons standards:

The network watching the world’s oceans is under pressure – just when it’s needed most

Kevin Trenberth, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Increasingly, the world’s oceans are telling us our climate system may be changing faster and more dramatically than expected.

These new insights are made using a vast global network of instruments – from drifting floats and moored buoys to research vessels and underwater gliders – that quietly and continuously feed data to scientists.

Known as the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), it provides the fine-grained data that scientists need to detect changes, test climate models and refine projections of future risk.

But now there is rising concern this system itself is at risk – just when the world needs it most.

The hidden system behind modern forecasting

The GOOS is often described as a form of climate monitoring – but it is much more than that. It can best be understood as a network of complementary observing systems, each designed to capture different parts of the ocean in different ways.

Some 4000 autonomous Argo robotic floats sink every ten days down to 2000m depth, before rising to the surface to transmit temperature and salinity profiles to ground stations via satellite.

Underwater gliders target eddies, coastal currents and continental margins where floats cannot go. Elephant seals fitted with sensors collect data beneath polar sea ice in regions no other instrument can easily reach.

Each of these platforms answer questions the others cannot. And ocean observations collected by them now underpin many of the forecasting systems that modern societies rely on every day.

That includes the numerical weather models used to generate daily forecasts, which continuously ingest ocean data to predict evolving weather conditions, as well as newer artificial intelligence-based forecasting systems.

The same is true for hurricane and cyclone forecasts, as well as seasonal forecasting used to anticipate drought, harvests and energy demand. Marine heatwave warnings, sea-level projections and efforts to understand major current systems also rely on sustained long-term observations beneath the ocean surface.

These observations are key for monitoring El Niño climate patterns – including a major event already underway and likely to peak late this year – and major current systems such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

While satellites can measure surface conditions, they still cannot directly observe the deeper waters where heat accumulates, currents reorganise and the precursors of future weather are already forming.

In short, the GOOS underpins everything from tomorrow’s storm warnings to next century’s climate adaptation plans.

Yet our newly published analysis suggests the system delivering those observations is far more fragile than most people realise.

We found that if observations from a single major contributor, the United States, were withdrawn from GOOS, errors in estimates of how fast the ocean is warming would jump by 163% – worse than randomly losing 80% of all global ocean data.

The reason is largely geographical: US instruments cover every ocean basin and fill critical gaps no other nation currently monitors.

And this is no theoretical concern. Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation in the United States now threaten exactly this contribution.

Elsewhere, observing systems are also under growing strain, with European programmes facing mounting funding pressure.

In China, scientists and policymakers are trying to build a more resilient national observing effort – but without the resources currently required to fully support it.

A resource the world can’t afford to lose

The total annual cost of operating the GOOS – across all platforms and personnel worldwide – is on the order of US$1.1 billion (about NZ$1.8 billion).

If that sounds expensive, consider that a single major hurricane season can cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, while marine heatwaves have already collapsed fisheries and triggered mass coral bleaching around the world.

Compared with the economic damage linked to ocean-driven extreme weather and climate disruption, ocean observation is one of the highest-return public investments available.

The international scientific conference OceanObs’29, to be held in China in three years’ time, will be an opportunity to negotiate a more balanced global observing system – one better aligned with today’s economic realities and maritime interests.

It should also encourage greater scientific cooperation among countries, helping ensure complementary observing networks collectively cover as much of the global ocean as possible.

Maintaining that coverage requires constant renewal.

Argo floats typically last four to five years before their batteries fail. This means they must continually be deployed to prevent gaps emerging across the oceans.

New Zealand plays a surprisingly important role here. Since 2004, the research vessel Kaharoa has helped deploy more than 1,100 Argo floats for international partners across the Pacific and Southern Ocean.

This demonstrates that even smaller countries can use their institutions, expertise and maritime interest to make important contributions.

At the same time, if any one component of the GOOS is removed because of political decisions made in the US or elsewhere, the whole system’s ability to deliver reliable information would degrade.

That would require a rebuild of the system which would prove much more difficult and expensive than the cost of sustaining it today.

More importantly, it could leave the world flying blind into the most consequential transformation of the planet’s climate in human history.

The author acknowledges the contributions of Sabrina Speich, John P. Abraham and Lijing Cheng to this article.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliate Faculty, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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My guests were , , , and

As I discussed here recently, the worst-case emissions track, a k a RCP8.5, is being dropped from the basket of plausible futures used in modeling studies that underpin core conclusions in the periodic reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Read the April paper describing the revisions to scenarios, which the authors explain came about because “underlying projections…were somewhat outdated by the time climate model output became available… Also, over time, critiques emerged about the plausibility of the most extreme scenarios.”)

My guests, like most researchers dug in on this area of climate research, largely agree that the highest emissions scenario is deeply implausible. The debate is mostly on whether that is a new development — the result of the enormous progress in cutting the cost of renewable energy — or because the scenario was never plausible. (I favor the second camp.)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s curtain raiser post, a key 2017 paper led by Justin Ritchie of the University of British Columbia laid out the near impossibility of mining and burning the amount of coal required to get such high emissions. Click back for that paper and other background:

Here’s Hausfather, who works at the company Stripe and at the research lab Berkeley Earth (and of course co-writes ):

Even though Roger and I like to spar online a lot, there’s a couple of things that I think we’d all agree are true today. One is that RCP 8.5 was never a particularly plausible baseline scenario. And there was a mistake by the community to refer to it as business as usual.

I like to call it a mistaken game of telephone. No, I don’t think there was a bad intent there.

I think that a lot of climate scientists didn’t necessarily read the energy modeling literature, which made it pretty clear back in 2011 when RCP 8.5 was formally published that it was intended to represent the 90th percentile of baseline outcomes in the literature at the time,not a particular likely outcome….

I think there’s sort of two separate questions that we’ve been debating a lot here. One is, how plausible was the scenario ever? And I think we all agree it was pretty implausible. And the second is, has the world actually moved away from higher emissions scenarios?

And that latter question, I think the answer is probably yes.

Driven in part by, as Richard pointed out, the falling cost of clean energy, which is mediated obviously by some policy actions taken by various countries, including the US, China and others. Exactly where we might have been headed, I think is a really tough question to answer.

Roger Pielke acknowledged that clean energy tech has advanced tremendously but said his key metric is the overall rate of decarbonization of the economy, and — wheteher you look at the United States or the planet as a whole — that rate has remained a straight declining line decade after decade. I showed that decarbonization curve from one of his Substack posts and he said:

My hypothesis is a lot of the wonderful things that have happened, and it’s true. Technologies have advanced, costs have gone down. But they are basically maintaining a trend that’s been in place long before Paris, long before Kyoto, long before the Rio Conference.

So we’re calling climate policy the sort of things that we used to call other names. There are some differences around the world. If we want to have deep decarbonization at a rate faster than this linear decline, this curve is going to have to have an inflection point. It’s that simple.

When RCP8.5 “escaped the courtyard of science”

Roger Pielke explained (and no one disagreed) that one of the biggest harms from the exreme warming scenario came as it became used outside of the world of climate simulation - something he and Justin Ritchie explored in depth in Issues in Science and Technology in 2021 (as well as in this paper: “Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios.”) Here’s the main point:

At some point, Justin and I in our paper, our incredibly long, boring paper on the history of all this, we quote a researcher who says, we didn’t realize that RCPs could take on a life of their own. these scenarios escaped from the courtyard of science and went out in the real world.

And it turns out they’re used in policy, they’re used in regulation, they’re used in global banking, they’re used in insurance, rate setting and risk assessment. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everyone in the planet is in some way touched by these scenarios. And so the institutions of science really didn’t keep up with the growing importance of climate change as a topic and climate institutions. And so here we are in 2026. And like Richard said, better late than never, but it would have been better if it happened 10 or 15 years ago.

There’s much, much more from Hausfather, Pielke and Matt Burgess and Richard Tol.

We also discussed how research conclusions centered on the extreme warming scenario long provided just the kind of dramatic fodder that climate-focused journalists need. I brought up the pull of “narrative capture” — my shorthand for the dynamic where internal or external dynamics cause people to cling to validating visions of a problem (the climate crisis) even when data shift.

I’m on the run all week and this is where AI tools are incredibly useful. Here’s the Gemini summary of some other points (you can ask the AI on YouTube to do this kind of task). I asked: “Distill the key observations and assertions made by the guests in this discussion of the value and limits of developing scenarios for human activities that could worsen or lessen global warming. Pick out half a dozen key moments and create time stamps.”

Here’s Gemini:

This discussion examines the history, misuse, and eventual retirement of the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario, which was widely but erroneously labeled as “business as usual.” The panelists — , , , and — argue that while scenarios are useful for scientific modeling, they have often been misinterpreted by the media and policymakers, leading to flawed risk assessments.

Key Moments and Insights:

• The “Business as Usual” Misconception: (16:07-17:20) Zeke Hausfather explains that the climate community made a mistake in referring to RCP 8.5 as “business as usual,” noting it was originally intended to represent a 90th-percentile baseline, not a likely outcome.

• Institutional Lags in Science: (13:10-14:50) Richard Tol discusses the necessity of updating scenarios more frequently than the current decadal cycle, pointing out that scientific modeling cycles often struggle to keep pace with the urgent needs of policy and global risk assessment.

• Policy Evaluation vs. Scenario Reliance: (46:51-47:20) Roger Pielke Jr. asserts that evaluating actual policy—whether it accelerates or reverses emission curves—is significantly more important than relying on static, hypothetical emissions scenarios.

• The “Franken-Scenario” Problem: (51:06-51:44) Matt Burgess criticizes the practice of combining extreme high-emission scenarios with slow-growth economic assumptions, which creates “Franken-scenarios” that produce misleading results about climate vulnerability and adaptation.

• The Media’s Role in Alarmism: (59:00-1:00:43) The panel discusses how sensationalist headlines are often incentivized by journals and media outlets, making it easier to publish studies that claim climate change is “worse than we thought” compared to more nuanced assessments.

• From Scenarios to Warming Levels: (1:13:30-1:14:43) Zeke Hausfather suggests the community should pivot away from specific emission scenarios entirely, instead focusing on impacts associated with specific global warming levels (e.g., 2°C or 3°C worlds) to better communicate risk and uncertainty.

Please listen and offer your thoughts below. Also share this post or go to LinkedIn or Facebook or X/Twitter to share the webcast on those platforms.

And do consider chipping in here (I know the overlaod) if you can afford to help keep Sustain What open for all and help me justify the time I take away from my songwriting and family and the rest.

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Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Postscript

Dan Miller and Leon Simons had an informative conversation with Detlef van Vuuren, the lead author of the April paper laying the groundwork for the changes in emissions scenarios.

Few concepts in climate science have been more deeply hidden in the weeds, and more consequential, than the scenarios for planet-heating emissions long used by climate modelers and policy makers to figure out our warming future and what to do about it.

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The recent elimination of the worst worst-case scenario, known in the field as RCP8.5 (the “worst” in several senses of the word) has gained new attention thanks to social media posts by President Trump (with heaps of help from his executive assistant) and his White House team:

But the beginning of the end for RCP8.5 came nearly a decade ago, in a keystone 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi at the University of British Columbia asking this question in its title: “Why do climate change scenarios return to coal?”

Their prime conclusion:

RCP8.5 and other ‘business-as-usual scenarios’ consistent with high CO₂ forcing from vast future coal combustion are exceptionally unlikely. Therefore, SSP5-RCP8.5 should not be a priority for future scientific research or a benchmark for policy studies.

The big debate in the climate world now is over whether the end of this worst-case warming outcome was the result of policy and the explosive advance of renewable energy or because it was always wrong.

Updated after the show: There’s been so much action around this debate that I reached out to key figures, and we had a fascinating and productive pop-up discussion. The discussants were of Stripe and Berkeley Earth, of the University of Wyoming, , the emeritus University of Colorado prof who’s now at the American Enterprise Institute and Richard Tol, a longtime climate economist at the University of Sussex. See relevant posts by three of these researchers below.

Watch on YouTube:

And LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7462182711378563073

Reading

responded to President Trump’s social media posts hailing the death of RCP8.5 on his great Substack:

Guided Civic Revival

Thank you for your attention to this (RCP8.5) matter

As many GCR readers know, I have been part of a group of scientists calling attention to the implausibility and overuse of the high-emissions climate change scenario, RCP8.5 (and its cousin SSP5-8.5), for the past several years. (Justin Ritchie of UBC deserves credit for…

Read more

a month ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Matt Burgess

and some longtime collaborators just posted a deep look at what’s going on with this scenario and the discussions around it:

The Climate Brink

On the death of RCP8.5

With the release of the new van Vuuren et al 2026 paper on the emissions scenarios that will be used in the upcoming IPCC 7th Assessment Report, the internet has been abuzz with debate over the implications of the formal retirement of the RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 scenario. The president of the United States even…

Read more

a month ago · 41 likes · 18 comments · Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster

, who’s been challenging the emissions scenario and the way it has been used (and abused) for many years. Here’s his new post defending his stance that RCP8.5 was always wrong and another when the news broke. There’s more on .

The Honest Broker

No, RCP8.5 Did Not Become Implausible Because of Climate Policy

RCP8.5 does not provide a physically consistent worst case BAU trajectory that warrants continued emphasis in scientific research. Accordingly, it does not provide a useful benchmark for policy studies. Ritchie and Dowlatabadi 2017…

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a month ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

The Honest Broker

🚨RCP8.5 is Officially Dead

“[T]he high-emissions RCP8.5 scenario has long been described as a “business-as-usual” pathway with a continued emphasis on energy from fossil fuels with no climate policies in place. This remains 100% accurate . . .“ — from 2021, Chris Field (co-chair of IPCC WG2 AR5) and Marcia McNutt (president of U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine …

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a month ago · 398 likes · 59 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

Please consider chipping in financially to help me justify the time it takes to host these conversations and write these posts. Believe me, I’d rather be finishing my new song on the red hats that fought ICE and the cooking activism of .

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Also read the long analysis of scenarios in science written in 2021 by Roger Pielke and Justin Ritchie for Issues in Science and Technology: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality.

A central idea:

The emissions scenarios the climate community is now using as baselines for climate models depend on portrayals of the present that are no longer true. And once the scenarios lost touch with reality, so did the climate, impact, and economic models that depend on them for their projections of the future. Yet these projections are a central part of the scientific basis upon which climate policymakers are now developing, debating, and adopting policies.

And play my song Liberated Carbon to provide a soundtrack while you read:

I just hosted a great discussion of the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy.

As I wrote in the curtain raiser post on Thursday, what drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this section of my mind-blowing 2017 ProPublica conversation with Will Happer, who was a top candidate for science advisor in Trump’s first term and who is in/famous for his assertion that more carbon dioxide is great.

He said this:

One of our problems in climate is that you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’

…I’m all for climate science, you know. If I were King, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things.

President Trump has done grievous damage to such capacities in his second term (see links at the bottom), although thankfully Congress has blunted the spending cuts.

The discussion centered on the work of the Keeling Curve Foundation, which is trying to build momentum for philanthropic, governmental and private-sector investment in Earth observation capacity.

One indicator of trouble is the declining budget for maintaining the flow of data behind the iconic “Keeling Curve” of carbon dioxide concentrations, generated through decades of work by Charles David Keeling and now his son Ralph,

Here’s the introuctory post with more info on my guests: Ralph Keeling, the climate-focused Stanford ecologist Chris Field and Betsy Weatherhead, a leading researcher focused on earth observation science and technology.

Here are a couple of highlights. But do watch (and share!) the conversation!

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Ralph Keeling explains how sustained atmospheric monitoring revealed both the problem posed by ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, the decline of the synthetic compounds under the Montreal Protocoal - AND a suspicious resurgence of CFC-11 that led to the discovery that Chinese companies were cheating:

I asked Betsy Weatherhead what would signal a revival of commitments to keep this planet closely observed and she said it’s already happening - to a significant extent overseas:

Thanks for supporting what I do here by subscribing - including chipping in a bit financially if you can.

Relevant coverage and context

• From satellites to services: Financing Earth observation for public value (ECDPM think tank)

  https://ecdpm.org/work/satellites-services-financing-earth-observation-public-value

• NOAA Defends Cuts to Research and Climate Monitoring at Budget Hearing

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042026/noaa-defends-trump-cuts/

• ‘It’s just madness’: Trump administration to close three-quarters of Forest Service research stations (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/its-just-madness-trump-administration-to-close-three-quarters-of-forest-service-research-stations/

• How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A. (The New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/climate/epa-science-trump-cuts.html

• Designing the Climate Observing System of the Future (Earth’s Future; research paper led by Betsy Weatherhead)

https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000627

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There’s nothing more emblematic of the value of long-term observation than the Keeling Curve - the graph showing measurements of carbon dioxide from 1958 onward taken atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The measurements were initiated and maintained by Charles David Keeling. After Charles’s death in 2005, his scientist son, Ralph, kept at it.

But Ralph Keeling, recognizing the inconsistency of federal support for careful long-term observations of a host of Earth’s vital systems, has ventured well outside the world of climate science. He wrangled an array of scientists committed to sustaining sustained monitoring of atmospheric, ecological and other systems and formed the Keeling Curve Foundation. (Disclosure: I’ve offered advice off and on.)

The mission is simple:

Long-term records have the power to transform how we view the world. Each year, due to lack of appreciation and support, we miss opportunities to collect crucial data. We need environmental datasets like the Keeling Curve to track changes across the atmosphere, oceans, and land.

The demolition of science budgets and agencies under the second term of President Trump is posing an extraordinary challenge to that mission.

On May 7 I explored next steps for sustaining critical observational infrastructure and expertise with Ralph Keeling, the climate-focused Stanford ecologist Chris Field and Betsy Weatherhead, a leading researcher focused on earth observation science and technology.

Watch on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube:

What drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this section of my mind-blowing 2017 ProPublica conversation with Will Happer, who was a top candidate for science advisor in Trump’s first term and who is in/famous for his assertion that more carbon dioxide is great.

He said this:

One of our problems in climate is that you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’

…I’m all for climate science, you know. If I were King, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things.

In 2025, I reached out again when Trump’s acting NASA administrator, Secretary of Transportation Chris Duffy, described plans to shutter the agency’s Earth-focused science.

Happer said this:

I am still in favor of federal support of honest, well calibrated measurements of key properties of the atmosphere, the oceans and the Sun. I hope these continue indefinitely.

In the meantime the Trump administration is continuing its demolition apace, with this example from the U.S. Forest Service (via Minnesota Public Radio) offering just one distressing glimpse:

The Trump Administration announced a massive reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service this week that will result in the closure of two research facilities in northeast Minnesota, including an office in Grand Rapids that leads internationally recognized projects on the impact of climate change on peatlands and northern forests.

The Grand Rapids office is one of 57 research facilities that will be shuttered across the country, more than 20 of which are part of the Northern Research Station, which spans from upper Midwest states, including Minnesota and Wisconsin into New England.

Also see this Data Foundation summary of a presentation by Keeling and others at Climate Week in New York City last fall: Why Long-Term Climate Observations and Innovation Matter for Risk Management.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of his piece and the kicker, but please do read the whole thing and subscribe to Liebreich’s newsletter and Cleaning Up podcast if you haven’t already:

RCP 8.5 is officially bollox

Back in 2019, I created a Twitter hashtag, #RCP85isBollox, to highlight the danger of building the case for climate action on a wildly implausible scenario. This month RCP 8.5 was retired.

, May 1

This is a long post for those who remember #RCP85isBollox.

That was the hashtag I invented back in 2018 as part of my campaign to caution the clean energy community that RCP 8.5 - the extreme scenario heavily promoted by the IPCC, climate scientists, journalists and activists, and accepted on trust by political, business and financial leaders - was wildly implausible.

Last week, the journal Geoscientific Model Development published a paper by Professor Detlef van Vuuren and others on the scenarios that will be used for the next iteration of the IPCC’s influential Assesement Reports, AR7, due out between 2028 and 2029. In it, they finally admit what anyone paying attention has known for many years: that RCP 8.5 (and its successor scenario, SSP5-8.5) is “implausible”.

The authors are recommending a High scenario that will sit somewhere around RCP 6.7 - still too high to be truly plausible, but a huge improvement. Most importantly, what the abandonment of RCP 8.5 means is that AR7 will need to be scrubbed of findings that rely on the use of RCP 8.5 as explicit or de facto Business as Usual (BAU). That is a colossal undertaking. There are 105,000 papers in Google Scholar that mention RCP 8.5 (including an incredible 2,290 published so far this year) and many of them - perhaps the majority - use the scenario inappropriately.

My only critique of the new scenario paper is the wording: that RCP8.5 should be retired because it is “no longer” plausible. This is a fig-leaf, allowing those who have clung to RCP 8.5 for a decade longer than they should to claim that it was only recent developments in clean energy that rendered RCP 8.5 implausible. That’s nonsense, RCP 8.5 was implausible the moment it was developed….

There’s a lot of important writing here but I’m cutting to the chase:

What next

The tragedy of the #RCP85isBollox debacle is that the climate community spent a two decades telling people we were heading for 4°C to 7°C of warming, and quantifying the benefits of action by comparing RCP 8.5 with RCP 4.5 (looking at you, editors and authors of supposedly authoritative U.S. National Climate Assessments). The reality is that we are already doing better than RCP 4.5. and are heading for 2.5°C to 3°C of warming according to all main modellers, but still facing a very dark future of climate disruption. The need for urgent action to bend the curve down towards 2°C and below.

We need to learn the lessons. It is not just that it is intellectually flawed to exaggerate science. It’s morally wrong to do so in order stir up fear in pursuit of public policy objectives, no matter how desirable those objectives are. Climate scientists should be held to the same standards as medical or pharmaceutical researchers. It is also pointless: the current political atmosphere is surely proof that the majority of the general public simply cannot be frightened into climate action by stories of future impacts, no matter how luridly described.

We face a huge communications challenge. The public is blissfully unaware that most of the media coverage of future climate impacts is based a scenario that is now officially implausible. We have to explain to people that everything they thought they knew about climate impacts is probably wrong - but that nonetheless it is vital and urgent to act on climate change.

That is all for tomorrow. Today is a day to celebrate: it’s a good day for science. It’s official: #RCP85isDead!

Also read on this news. He’s been appropriately pushing back against the sustained misuse of this high-end emissions scenario for ages.

Here’s a key point, in which Liebreich echoes Pielke’s critique of the new study’s claim that the scenario is no longer valide because climate policy came to the rescue:

I disagree that the implausibility of the high-end scenarios resulted from the falling costs of renewables or the emergence of climate policy, but that is a debate for another day.

What matters today is that the group with official responsibility for developing climate scenarios for the IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment, and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible: They describe impossible futures.

Tens of thousands of research papers have been — and continue to be — published using these scenarios, a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organization have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation.

Read the rest:

The Honest Broker

🚨RCP8.5 is Officially Dead

“[T]he high-emissions RCP8.5 scenario has long been described as a “business-as-usual” pathway with a continued emphasis on energy from fossil fuels with no climate policies in place. This remains 100% accurate . . .“ — from 2021, Chris Field (co-chair of IPCC WG2 AR5) and Marcia McNutt (president of U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine …

Read more

a month ago · 275 likes · 51 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

, who co-writes here, was the co-author, with Glen Peters, of an influential 2020 commentary in Nature that pushed for this change. He’s been super busy focusing on the impending El Niño and near-term warming and hasn’t weighed in yet on the IPCC’s course correction on scenarios. But that 2020 commentary is well worth revisiting along with a 2025 Climate Brink post.

Here’s what Peters and Hausfather wrote back then:

RCP8.5 was intended to explore an unlikely high-risk future². But it has been widely used by some experts, policymakers and the media as something else entirely: as a likely ‘business as usual’ outcome. A sizeable portion of the literature on climate impacts refers to RCP8.5 as business as usual, implying that it is probable in the absence of stringent climate mitigation. The media then often amplifies this message, sometimes without communicating the nuances. This results in further confusion regarding probable emissions outcomes, because many climate researchers are not familiar with the details of these scenarios in the energy-modelling literature.

This is particularly problematic when the worst-case scenario is contrasted with the most optimistic one, especially in high-profile scholarly work. This includes studies by the IPCC, such as AR5 and last year’s special report on the impact of climate change on the ocean and cryosphere⁴. The focus becomes the extremes, rather than the multitude of more likely pathways in between.

Happily — and that’s a word we climatologists rarely get to use — the world imagined in RCP8.5 is one that, in our view, becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year⁵. Emission pathways to get to RCP8.5 generally require an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by the end of the century, an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves⁶. It is thought that global coal use peaked in 2013, and although increases are still possible, many energy forecasts expect it to flatline over the next few decades⁷. Furthermore, the falling cost of clean energy sources is a trend that is unlikely to reverse, even in the absence of new climate policies⁷.

Here’s an excerpt from Hausfather’s January 2025 Climate Brink post “Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios”:

[I]t is clear that the highest end of emissions scenarios found in the literature (e.g., RCP8.5 and SSP5–8.5) were misinterpreted by much of the community as “business-as-usual” when they were never intended to reflect the median no-policy baseline scenario (Hausfather and Peters, 2020). For example, RCP8.5 was designed to reflect the 90th percentile of baseline scenarios in the literature (van Vuuren et al., 2011), with outcomes consistent with RCP6.0 deemed approximately equally likely in the absence of climate policy interventions. The median baseline scenario at the time resulted in closer to 7 W/m² forcing (and ∼4C median warming) rather than the ∼4.5C warming found in RCP8.5 and 4.7C warming in SSP5–8.5. Prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement, more modest baseline warming estimates were published by both the IEA (3.5C) and Climate Action Tracker (3.6C) (CAT, 2023; IEA, 2023).

Ultimately, the degree to which the improvement in probable 21st century emissions outcomes was due to progress in driving down the costs of clean energy and climate policy interventions vs. implausible assumptions of high future emissions is to a large degree unknowable given its dependence on counterfactual assumptions.

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Postscripts:

• has posted a thread on X that ends with this important point: “The progress we have made should encourage us that progress is possible, but there remains a large gap between where we are headed and what is needed to limit warming to below 2C. Flattening the curve of global emissions is only the first step in a long road to get it all the way down to zero.” (Also on LinkedIn)

• I only just noticed that there’s an excellent video abstract of another keystone 2020 paper on this issue: “IPCC baseline scenarios have over-projected CO₂ emissions and economic growth,” by Matthew G Burgess, Justin Ritchie, John Shapland and Roger Pielke Jr.:

Follow lead author ’s Guided Civic Revival Substack:

Guided Civic Revival

The empirically inscrutable climate-economy relationship

On Monday, my Ph.D. student Finbar Curtin and I released a new working paper called “The empirically inscrutable climate economy relationship…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · Matt Burgess

Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show:

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