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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There are possibilities for multiple hires, either through this call or through future openings.

ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Calling all Exoplanets folk! MIT has an opening for a new tenure track assistant professorship in planetary sciences. This is a unique opportunity to help build a new future of exoplanet research at MIT. Applications close Oct 15. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32450

academicjobsonline.org

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences

Job #AJO32450, Faculty Position in Planetary Science, Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If there's anything I can do to help fight this hotel, please do let me know. I have passed through Inari on the postiauto, and stayed at the little matkailuhotelli there. That's all it needs, and if you need more, there's the tent.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Inarinjärvi is a holy place. I remember it well. It must be preserved from this kind of desecration. There is also a great 1950's song about the lake. Here it is performed by the great Tapio Rautavaara www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmea...

youtube.com

Tapio Rautavaara - Inarinjärvi

YouTube video by 1212Igor1

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

deceptive, because that's not 30% of the current atmospheric CO2, but includes atmospheric CO2 from the past, that has made its way into the ocean.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But note that the ocean is only absorbing this much because we have driven the system out of equilibrium. Once we reach net Zero emissions of CO2, the ocean uptake will go way down. That is why temperature stays roughly flat in the 1000 years after achieving net Zero. And the 30% figure is a bi

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yeah, and as an American in Oxford, it kind of rattles me when people greet me with "Are you well?" Makes me wonder if I look like I've caught some horrid disease.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I own a parking space as part of the leasehold for my flat, and I don't have a car to put in it. But I am not allowed to put one of these bike hangar's there because "only licensed vehicles can be parked in the space." This has to change.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That was because trout had a habitabillity refuge in lower latitudes, from which they could (happily) recolonize Finnish trout streams. How they actually made their way to Finland after the end of the last ice age is no doubt an interesting story, which I myself don't know.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If it's any comfort, most of the accumulated complexity in the biosphere collapsed during the End Permian mass extinction, but it did bounce back after some tens of millions of years.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

the scramble for time on HWO will almost certainly be a lot like what is going on with JWST, with a lot of excellent science being left on the table because of insufficient telescope time.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

no longer exist. What we need is a new approach to get JWST-like capability, but faster and cheaper. I'm not the one to figure out how. Daniel has some good ideas in that direction, but they still wouldn't do what JWST does in the infrared. HWO is far off, and has important new capabiities, but

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yes, a lot more science would get done if there were more JWST's. But Daniel Apai pointed out to me that even if we wanted to build a second JWST now, we couldn't because it took so long to build the first one that the engineers have mostly retired and a lot of the fab lines that made the parts

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

rocky habitable zone planets have atmospheres.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

most places. So, I wouldn't be too surprised if we are the first in the Galaxy to attain sentience, or at least one of a very few places scattered at large distances. But we just don't have the numbers to assign any reliable probability at the moment. We don't even know how many G star

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

that most actually habitable planets are around G stars; lower mass stars tend to strip atmospheres, and higher mass stars have too short a lifetime. Guessing from history of life on Earth, prokaryotic life should be common, but the leap to multicellularity may be rare and could take too long in

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What will that capability do to humanity? And how would that interact with predictions of a shrinking population (again, based on current trends, so unreliable). But we have to get through the next 100 years without making Earth uninhabitable first. Returning to the Fermi paradox, my own guess is

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

population predicted for sometime in the 2020's, based on fits to population growth done in the 1960's. Things change fast. But it is worth wondering what would happen if photovoltaics "solve" global warming, and then controlled fusion comes along providing essentially infinite energy.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

eventually halt further warming (though perhaps not until we've made it unbearably hot, though short of fatal). So it's a cautionary tale being extrapolated in papers like the one you linked, but not one that you could put much confidence in. As an example, see the recent thread about infinite

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Physical aspects of habitability are hard enough, but predictions from mathematical sociology are even more unreliable. It's true that the runaway consumption in present society raises questions about long term viability, but there is also evidence that technology (esp. photovoltaics) will

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This prediction is a simple consequence of dx/dt = a(1+x/b)x whih exhibits finite-time blow-up for a and b positive. In 1960, evidently someboy thought b to be positive, but it actually seems to be negative. Will this result in a stable population? That depends on what happens to the value of a.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Got it, and I'm with you. I'd call that "academic politics," but I know what you mean.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What do you mean by "politics free?" With the Trump, and many state legislatures, asserting control over Universities, it is not possible for an academic leader to avoid politics.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Princeton is far too lacking in any sense of shared community spirit. I high point on the other end of the spectrum, though, was the successful effort to preserve Community Park North from development. I had a small role in that, but the Johnson family provided most of the funds.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I lived in Princeton for far too long, and this completely accords with my view of the place. Other great Princeton battles: The years-long lawsuit on whether a rooster is a "pet" or "livestock." The dog leash laws, resulting in a schism between Township and borough

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yes exactly, a thermonuclear Zamboni

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"AI will emit six times as much CO2 in 2030 as in 2025, according to a study by a group of experts. " So where are all these revolutionary solutions to the climate crisis AI is supposed to bring us? So far as I can tell, they're not even trying.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Here's a hint: 1 megatonne = 4.2 e 15 Joules. Latent heat of melting of water ice = 3.3e5 J/kg . If you assume as an (unrealistic) upper bound that all the energy of the airburst goes into melting, you just divide to get the kg. melted. Compare that to mass of Greenland ice sheet, 3e18kg.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I really don't think this "moment of doom" framing is particularly helpful. It just adds to a sense of despair. We need to be realistic about what is happening to climate, but though you may think your framing is cheeky, it just is a way of encouraging people to give up. Do you want that?

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

for various other things in the table. But using so-called empirical mass-radius relations is singularly ill-justified, especially for subNeptunes which have a vast degree of compositional diversity.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I do find the Composite Data useful. Some of the things you compute are pretty reasonable, since they are based on firm physical assumptions. For example, if a data source report stellar radius and effective temperature, it's perfectly reasonable to fill in luminosity from that. Similarly

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

environmentally benign, but i wonder if that is still happening.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Ah, I remember a canoe trip on Kolovesi, with the canoe rented from Kolovesi Retkeily Oy. What a fantastic place, and so many autiotuvat to stay in. This used to be one of the few places logs were still floated to mills by jätkäpojat (or is it tukkijätkat?) It wasn't so terribly

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

missing data this way. If people want to fill in missing mass or radius, they should just use their own judgement as to what a reasonable relation would be.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I really wish the Exoplanet Archive didn't use highly questionable mass-radius fits to fill in missing mass or radius data. It's true they can be filtered out by looking at the Provenance column, but it's a real nuisance. It's a trap for the unwary, and I don't see any value in filling

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

of reasons to consider Israeli actions in Gaza (and government-supported Israeli settler actions in the West Bank) an attempt to eliminate Palestinian identity, and perhaps even Palestinians altogether. Genocide or not, Israel is morally culpable.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Atlantic is equating opposition to Israel's activities with anti-semitism. It's typical for The Atlantics generally Zionist position. I won't pass judgement on the way Shawn expressed himself, and when judging great evils, it is hard to make sense of comparisons, but there are plenty

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

how untethered venture capital has become from reality. It's ridiculous that the country of launch has the only say on whether something like Reflect Orbital can deploy in space. That really needs to change.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Not just potentially bad, but an intrusion on the sovreign territory of countries that would be affected by illumination beamed at the ground PLUS rank stupidity in their business model, which ignores basic principles of optics and orbital mechanics. That venture capital has paid into this shows

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

envelope, maybe CO2. Could have a very deep ocean, which would bring down the density. But we have no idea what is in the atmosphere at this point, apart from enough He to be escaping.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

thick envelope (unless is was born with anomalously little iron). The planet receives Marslike illumination, so it would need a lot of GHG in its atmosphere to support liquid water. Unless there are thick hazes, it's not either H2 or He dominated, so presumably a high molecular weight

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

When they say "remotely" Earthlike, the emphasis is on the "remotely." Mainly, they mean that this is too small and too high density to be a mainly gaseous planet. However, it is underdense relative to what one would expect for an Earthlike rocky planet of this mass, so it probably has a very

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

displacing fossil fuels. The compost bucket we all have also gives us a visual guide to how much food we are wasting. Not everybody has this option, but they should.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is true about food waste and methane, but there is really no excuse for whatever food waste there is to go into landfills. In Oxford, there is municipal composting, and food waste goes into anaerobic digesters to produce methane in a controlled environment, which is burned to make electricity,

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Please do. PRI Museum of the Earth (Ithaca) is one of the finest small(ish) natural history museums I know. They went through a rough patch financially, but seem to have survived. But institutions like this shouldn't have such a hard time getting funding to stay afloat.

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Reposted by ClimateBook

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 29/09/2026

In Texas, the State is removing climate change courses from the core curriculum. They have decided that climate change is just too dangerous to teach the students. This is indoctrination. I wrote an oped about it in the SA Express-News. Gift link: www.expressnews.com/opinion/comm...

expressnews.com

Texas can’t hide from climate change by stopping students from learning about it

Texas has removed climate change courses from core curriculum at public universities. Ignoring climate change will not serve the state.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And there is still a very long haul to going beyond LEO for Starship. Cryogenic orbital refueling is a crucial step, and very little progress has been made on that so far.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Starship exploded on landing. So, not really as successful as all that, including engine failure and aborted orbital stay. news.sky.com/story/spacex... It would be easier to root for success if Musk weren't going to use this to squat on low earth orbit even more than he has.

news.sky.com

SpaceX latest: Starship makes explosive landing in Pacific after ending mission early

Elon Musk's Starship rocket - the world's most powerful - entered into orbit on its 14th test flight. But after the failure of one of its engines, it splashed down shortly before 5pm UK time. Watch an...

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I had been wondering about the van exemption, worried that some people would just buy a van to drive into the city. What actually counts as a "van" and do you have to have a business associated with it to qualify for the van permit? I'm also a 9 & 10 hack person.

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ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

is pretty onerous. Parliament passed a major new leasehold reform some years back, but is taking years to actually implement it, and it strangely doesn't seem to be a priority for the current Labour government.

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