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dmwatkins.bsky.social
Climate scientist at Brown University, ok guitarist, collage artist and photographer Providence, RI USA
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More from the #StandUpForScience protest, Providence, March 7, 2015. Black and white photo on film.

This is going to sound obscure/esoteric but it is not: NSF Unidata announced it is furloughing "nearly all" of its staff today because of the NSF funding freeze. They provide weather forecasting infrastructure/server hosting/and more that NOAA as well as academia and companies use.

Keep funding the NOAA Great Lakes Research Lab! Unless you like the idea of millions of people drinking poison algae water of course www.propublica.org/article/noaa...

Short and sweet messaging from the #StandUpForScience rally, March 7, 2025. Black and white film photo shot by yours truly on an old Pentax K1000. #filmphotography

Periodic reminder that generative AI is essentially a bullshitting machine: it’s great at learning patterns to mimic the way humans communicate, but truly terrible as a source of information. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/t...

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Upset about federal funding cuts in the US? Want some ideas of what to do? I wrote a long-ish blog post about it here ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com summarizing things I learned meeting with Senate & House aides this week with the @aibsbiology.bsky.social Congressional Visits Day event.

I keep saying this... both operationally and in research, the situation is still much worse than most people seem to realize or want to accept.

We are choosing ignorance and poverty www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Part 2 is out as well - very much worth a listen

Oh no! Several of the Regional Climate Centers have had their funding lapse through DOC/NOAA. These institutes are critical for connecting weather and climate data and services to local communities across the United States. Spread the word to drive attention and support!

"To envision the disastrous impact of this plan, one only needs to see what NOAA research has provided to the U.S. taxpayer and imagine where we would be without it." "Now is the time to reach out to your elected representatives." "Stand Up for NOAA Research" - @nwas.org and @ametsoc.org statement

We already have shamefully poor support for existing food inspectors. The backlogs are too high already. Food safety is (obviously) so important!

Abrego Garcia's wife: "I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn't forgotten about you. Our children are asking when you will come home ... they miss their dad so much."

Glad to see Brown on the list as well!

In extremely niche news, the Teenage Engineering EP-133 got a software update with just about everything addressed that was causing me problems for live performance. I’m very excited to dig in and get some new tracks together!

It’s @NOAA.gov research that protects communities from severe weather It’s @NOAA.gov labs that models the effects of climate change. It’s @NOAA.gov science that keeps Americans safe. They’re trying to break government to privatize it. We won’t be silent.

"It isn’t just sticking our collective head in the sand, it’s sticking our collective head in the sand and then sawing it off at the neck and leaving it down there."

With the combination of all the anti-science, anti-everyone actions of the US government, and it being held in Louisiana this year, I suspect that there are goin to be very few people attending AGU this year. I’ve been talking with colleagues about the call for sessions, we’re all no’s or maybe’s.

My first paper, from a national lab internship in the mid-2010s, was published in a journal called Homeland Security Affairs. I was checking links for my CV today and found this: (1/3)

My thoughts on why announced cuts to weather balloon launches are bad for weather forecasting. I tried to do some meteorology 101 too www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

"The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally." www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/o...

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New paper out today led by Ashfaq Ahmed, a PhD student in our group! We show that satellite data from the Landsat satellites can be used to investigate decades scale changes in surface temperature in Narragansett Bay. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sites where balloons are launched aren’t just random places. Cutting staffing randomly is leading to the predictable effect that we’re losing observation capability. Loss of observations degrades forecast quality.

See you at the protest. #standupforscience

One of the greatest wins corporate PR pulled off in the U.S. is convincing the vast majority of journalists that an activist is biased and agenda-driven and thus an unreliable source, but a CEO must be quoted in every story in order to lend it credibility and "balance."

yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/03/noaa...