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ahmacdougall.bsky.social
Canadian Climate Scientist from Nova Scotia, specializing in Zero Emissions Commitment, carbon budgets, permafrost carbon, and biogeochemical feedbacks to climate change.
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“We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of societal improvement. There are many reasons …but a key contributor has been the corporatization of academic institutions.” 🧪

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Two rules to bear in mind during the coming four years: 1️⃣ It's always worse behind the scenes than you know, or can even imagine. 2️⃣ The stupidest possible explanation is the most likely to be correct (AKA Trump's Razor).

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

The Magnetic Shield myth has been appearing on my timeline again. Not my field of study, but those who do have reached a consensus that the presence of a planetary magnetic field does not decrease the rate of atmosphere escape, but probably increases it slightly. www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

March update

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Water Damage xkcd.com/3059

submitted 4 days ago • 43 comments

China having almost no oil or gas reserves may end up being one of the luckiest breaks in human history.

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

It’s a great read for understanding how we got to this point. Long story short Little House on the Prairie set the United States on a pathway to its doom.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Presidential republics inevitably degrade into dictatorships. We are seeing this happen before our eyes south of the boarder. So how about no. Even parliamentary republicans with ceremonial presidents are not immune, modern Turkey and the Weimar Republic being relevant examples.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

The turkeys were never going to vote for Christmas. Even if they wanted to renewables are too different from O&G to make the transition. Companies cannot transition from rentiers back to real capitalists. They are simply no longer able to handle competition.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Assuming that solar would substitute fossil fuels one for one looks like it was a big mistake. However solar improving the lives of the global lower middle class is still a big win for humanity. Is kind of funny to see the green-anarchist vision of solar manifesting.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

I think the simple truth is that there is no such thing as general intelligence. All intelligence is specialized. So most people are very good at a few things, pretty good at things they do everyday and terrible at everything else.

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

The rise of solar pastoralism. Would be interesting to look at the climate impact.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Apropos of nothing at all, what exactly did the Nahua (peoples of central Mexico or "Aztecs") call the Gulf of Mexico/America? (via @magnuspharao.bsky.social )

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

While a comforting sentiment, worth pointing out that the Nazis were idiots thugs. They destroyed their society utterly and completely but it took 13 years and got ~50,000,000 people killed.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Well Charles De Gaulle is definitely having the best few days any dead man has had in a while.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

We all live better than the kings of old, but still we are not happy.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

There almost nothing you could do to the Earth to dethrone it as the most habitable place in the solar system. Even in a full runaway greenhouse state with a 300 bar atm of pure steam and a lava ocean, the upper atm might still be more habitable than Mars or the upper atm of Venus.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

We might yearn for paradise, temporal or spiritual. But to our descendents our habitable planet will look like an almost unimaginable paradise. No tech fantasy, no space station or controlled environment will ever compare. Fight for what we have. This is our heaven, and there can be no other.

submitted 27 days ago • 45 comments

Bush officials bragged that they could impose their “reality” on the world. They were wrong. But with the extraordinary level of control and manipulation their tech billionaire allies can exercise, Trumpists are much closer to that goal. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

submitted 29 days ago • 53 comments

This makes the death of American science much more real feeling.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

The threat of an American take over was the only thing that has ever unified Canadians. Negative nationalism, despite the name, can be a beautiful thing. If your nation is defined by what you are not, there is lots of room to be many different things at once. www.thestar.com/politics/pol...

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

When I covered MMA, I spent a lot of time thinking about aggression and how to deal with it. The correct answer is always to stand your ground and punch back when a bully tries to walk you down. Bullies are always fragile in some profound way, and it doesn’t take much to crack the facade.

submitted 34 days ago • 16 comments

Doing this every month for 4 years is going to be deeply exhausting.

submitted 34 days ago • 1 comment