@jby@ecoevo.socialA new paper projecting Joshua tree habitat under future climate based on incredibly high-resolution distribution data, from Joshua Tree Genome Project collaborators at USGS. They estimate up to 80% loss of suitable habitat by 2100 under the worst-case climate scenario.
#JoshuaTree #science
@atthenius@fediscience.org#gsa #nyc #columbia #climate
The original Charney Report that says doubling CO2 will yield 1.5-4.5 degrees C temperature change (
#NOAA 's #GFDL and #NASA 's #GISS - incidentally, gfdl was also in the news yesterday
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-noaa-budget-cuts-climate-change-modeling-princeton-gfdl
" The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. ... NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%…
most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.”
@arXiv_statAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageInvestigating Resiliency of Transportation Network Under Targeted and Potential Climate Change Disruptions
Maedeh Rahimitouranposhti, Bharat Sharma, Mustafa Can Camur, Olufemi A. Omitaomu, Xueping Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19102
@carbonwoman@norden.socialGestern war #ShowYourStripes Tag. Inzwischen wissen bestimmt auch viele, dass die berühmte Version von @… von der University of Reading stammt.
Was vermutlich kaum jemand weiß: sie gehen zurück auf die Häkelarbeit, die e…
@servelan@newsie.socialClimate Change Linked to Rising Cancer Cases in Kenya
https://web.archive.org/web/20250615200903/https://thekenyatimes.com/health/health-science/how-climate-change-is-fueling-a-cancer-epidemic-in-kenya/
@muz4now@mastodon.worldTop Ocean Experts Sound the Alarm Over Growing Marine Crisis Due To Climate Change https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04062025/one-ocean-science-congress…
@richardtol@mastodon.socialClimate attention is associated with green innovation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988325005080 @…
@primonatura@mstdn.social"Top Ocean Experts Sound the Alarm Over Growing Marine Crisis Due To Climate Change"
#Oceans #Climate #ClimateChange
@arXiv_physicsoptics_bot@mastoxiv.pageFINCH EYE: The Optical and Optomechanical Design of a GRISM-based SWIR Hyperspectral Imaging Payload for a 3U CubeSat
Iliya Shofman, Mario Ghio Neto, Theaswanth Ganesh, Kenya He, Aidan Armstrong, Ksenya Narkevich
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17480
@joshmoore@fediscience.orgHow climate change triggered a landslide tsunami
#FederatedMemory
@cellfourteen@social.petertoushkov.eu"We are facing a hard battle against the clear enemy. Its name is greed. Greed that sows doubt, denies science, distorts truth, rewards corruption and destroys life for profit."
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKuFyh7Rbg7
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialWhy AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.
@memeorandum@universeodon.comEU science advisers slam Brussels' weakened 2040 climate plans (Zia Weise/Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-science-adviser-slam-brussels-weakened-2040-climate-goal-hoekstra-carbon-credits/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p19#a250602p19
@cdarwin@c.imThe Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change
amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising risks of a warming world.
The move will cut off what’s likely to amount to tens of millions of dollars for studies that were previously approved and, in most cases, already in the works.
Affected projects include efforts to develop cleaner …
@Dragofix@veganism.socialGlobal carbon emissions on track to exhaust 1.5°C budget in three years, study warns #environment
@atthenius@fediscience.orgSome reporting on #nasa getting the #doge in #nyc
https://www.fastcompany.com/91333946/this-iconic-nasa-office-changed-climate-science-forever-doge-plans-to-kill-it
I put up some history here in happier times.
https://fediscience.org/@atthenius/110991531387943903
@primonatura@mstdn.social"Nigel Farage to Headline Tufton Street Climate Denial Event"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate #ClimateChange
@cdarwin@c.imIt was obvious, if you thought about it, that the second Trump administration would be hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general.
After all, look at some key elements of the MAGA coalition.
Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change.
Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine.
(And partisan orientation became a key factor determinin…
@servelan@newsie.social#GiftLink
The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to ‘Correct’ Research. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/climate/executive-order-gold-standard-science.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME8.0Uio.9uHcPhd4AThq&smid=url-share
@richardtol@mastodon.socialClimate targets stimulate innovation on energy supply, but not on energy demand https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988325003858 @…
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to"The destruction of the climate by industrial processes is a real-world problem. If programming language selection has no impact on it, then maybe we’re all just wasting our time, creating shiny consumer distractions to make the last few years of humanity that little more palatable for the richest 1% of the world’s human population."
@primonatura@mstdn.social"Climate change could bring insect-borne tropical diseases to UK, scientists warn"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate #ClimateChange
@pixelcode@social.tchncs.deToday, I learned that the founder of the #SimpleX messenger is a #ClimateChange-denying #Covid conspiracy-theorist, anti-vaxxer and
@primonatura@mstdn.social
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.org(And now @… are less than €19,000 away from their stretch target of € 75,000 to provide @… services to all. Amazing work folks and fedizens 🤩)
#Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @peertube is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/
@arXiv_mathAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageThis https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20198 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…
@arXiv_statAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageMonitoring of Drift Patterns in Image Data
Subhasish Basak, Anik Roy, Partha Sarathi Mukherjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14260 https://
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgBlimey. That's gone fast.
I guess I'd better start editing some videos then... 😁
#fediverse
If we get to the €35000 target this week, I promise to post a couple of new #Greenland #science vids on my @tilvids channel. @icesheets_climate
Who else is in? 8 days to go.
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgSuper well done fediverse! Will post my next Greenland video this evening ...
Onwards to the next goal then ...
#fediverse
If we get to the €35000 target this week, I promise to post a couple of new #Greenland #science vids on my @tilvids channel. @icesheets_climate
Who else is in? 8 days to go.
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgThe #Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @… is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/
