Gavin Schmidt
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climateofgavin.bsky.social
Gavin Schmidt
@climateofgavin.bsky.social

Climate scientist, juggler. Bikes etc. Blogging at https://www.realclimate.org - data visualization, explainers, and debunking.

Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the climate science blog RealClimate. .. more

Environmental science 50%
Geology 21%

I loved this guy’s stuff. From playing the Real Inspector Hound at school, Arcadia when I was studying dynamical systems, R&G are dead, and, lastly, Leopoldstadt (which really did a number on me). 😢

Pentium chip would like to have a word…
The legal, media, and academic institutions capitulating to an authoritarian ordering payments for favorable treatment are damning themselves to irrelevance. They are destroying their institutions. They will be — and should be — shunned for failing in their most basic purposes for existing.
BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university

Full statement from NU below:
BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university

Full statement from NU below:

Goes for substacks as well...
It is unfathomable that the USG lawyers would sign off on a no-survivors boat strike (no get of jail free card).

There's clear precedent dating back to World War II trial of Germans for that very act, which lawyers know well.

The Peleus World War II War Crimes Trial

www.usni.org/magazines/na...
Imagine if all the hundreds of billions of dollars being pumped into AI was given instead to artists, writers, musicians. If/when the AI bubble bursts, everything will get crappier, but you give that money to artists: no bubble, just a world more humane and human in a million little ways.
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
www.rawstory.com/alternet-pos...
Alarm as Tennessee libraries shut down for Republican 'book purge'
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.For Popular Information, Rebecca...
www.rawstory.com

What approach are you taking to the code? OpenACC, or translation to a DSL or Julia or Jax or something else?
Wow. BBC journalists are now not even allowed to report the censored line from my Reith Lecture, that Trump is “the most openly corrupt president in American history.”

You can hear how carefully they’re forced to tiptoe around it. So chilling...

There are already impressive efforts in AI/ML for climate change (oops, I said the words!) and I would be shocked (maybe not surprised) if this doesn't get included in this effort in some way.

www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...
RealClimate: ¡AI Caramba!
RealClimate: Rapid progress in the use of machine learning for weather and climate models is evident almost everywhere, but can we distinguish between real advances and vaporware? First off, let's def...
www.realclimate.org

The use of AI to describe everything from LLMs to regression on big data sets is a bit problematic. It's used by the folks creating AI slop to claim credit for ML successes based on totally different architectures & we are now at the point where normal people hear AI & think chatbot (argggh!).

Nonetheless, if the budget is there, this mission could be useful because some of the biggest roadblocks to big ML efforts is really bringing the training data onto one accessible system. Note that this will really be ML, and not based on GenAI efforts such as ChatGPT etc.

There are some downsides. The DOE is a very expensive place to do 'normal' (not national security related) science. Overhead rates that pay for the security at national labs are ~300 to 400% which means that doing something within their firewall is roughly 3 times as expensive as doing it outside.

While earth science is specifically not mentioned in the EO, my expectation that there will be an earth science thrust - based likely on the successes of ML weather forecasting (FourCastNet, DeepCast, NeuralGCM etc.) and building on the E3SM infrastructure that DOE has already developed.

DOE has resources for this - and some very impressive high-performance computing resources already. These are developed mostly for nuclear weapons testing simulations, but have been used for other applications - protein folding, earth system models etc.

It's not obvious to me that creating a single platform for genomics, pharmaceuticals, earth science, materials science etc. is really a good idea since you'd need a big increase in scale for not much benefit. My guess is that they will spin off specific topics to mostly separate systems.

This is something that people have been advocating for in the US for some time, but the scale of such an effort is greater than any one of the science agencies could really do on it's own. The Genesis Mission seems to be even more ambitious - bringing multiple scientific areas together.

First off, this 'mission' is not something totally out of the blue. In Europe, a main pillar of the Destination Earth project is a 'data lake' that would bring all Earth science data sets together (satellite data, models, reanalyses, in situ) to provide a foundation for machine learning.
DestinationEarth DataLake
data.destination-earth.eu

Bob has interesting thoughts on the 'Genesis Mission'. But is there a useful path for Earth Science (writ large) here? Possibly yes.
“Genesis Mission” thoughts:

1. Wacky name, makes me think some transhumanist Silicon Valley type named it (Chris Wright probably counts, even though he’s not actually SV)

2. Publicly accessible data centers at national labs and open large deep learning models could be really valuable for science

Reposted by Gavin A. Schmidt

“Genesis Mission” thoughts:

1. Wacky name, makes me think some transhumanist Silicon Valley type named it (Chris Wright probably counts, even though he’s not actually SV)

2. Publicly accessible data centers at national labs and open large deep learning models could be really valuable for science

Reposted by Gavin A. Schmidt

Peter Hotez: For all practical purposes measles is back, now whooping cough on the rise, next domino to fall. What’s next? Hib meningitis? Polio? All to benefit a corrupt wellness influencer industry and phony MAHA ideologies. Congress, the White House asleep. Americans should be outraged.
Is the US at risk of losing its measles elimination status?
More than 1,700 measles cases have been confirmed so far in the U.S. this year.
www.yahoo.com
Scientists: have you been the target of an online harassment campaign, doxxing, or weaponized FOIA requests? I'd like to talk to you about steps you had to take to protect your digital security for an upcoming Nature story. (You can be anonymous if necessary.)

RTs appreciated.

Reposted by Gavin A. Schmidt

Away with the dotard, to the jail with him!

We got a Charlie earlier this year - game changing. Even Kate comes over to watch me boil water and bake at the same time!

Reposted by Gavin A. Schmidt

Breaking News: The CDC quietly appointed Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, who has been critical of vaccines, as its second in command. During the Covid pandemic, he promoted discredited treatments like ivermectin and, as Louisiana’s surgeon general, halted the state’s mass vaccination campaign.
C.D.C. Quietly Appoints Doctor Critical of Vaccines as Second in Command
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham promoted discredited treatments like ivermectin and, as Louisiana’s surgeon general, halted the state’s mass vaccination campaign.
trib.al
1/ ⚠️ Breaking: At CDC, we've been told the US Government will not officially commemorate World AIDS Day this year. No explanation given.
Gender-affirming care saves lives
1. A landmark study was just published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

It found a 68% reduction in suicidality for trans youth getting HRT.

It also found only 7 of more than 400 stopped taking HRT... and of those that did, 4 still identified as gender-diverse.

Transgender care saves lives.
Study In The Journal Of Pediatrics Finds Trans Youth Care Lowers Suicidality, Few Detransition
The groundbreaking study found that suicidality dropped for transgender youth receiving hormone therapy by nearly 70%, with only 7 patients of 432 discontinuing treatment.
www.erininthemorning.com
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1