Climate freak-out update: So after an extraordinary 35 days -- five whole weeks -- in which every day was hotter than every day on record in any previous year, the record global-air temperature streak is over.
https://t.co/gSWWcW6GRUclimatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
Having broken the previous record temperature (16.92ºC, set on August 13th 2016) on July 3rd, and set a new record on July 7th (17.23ºC), the temperature as given by the NCEP reanalysis fell back below the 2016 record on August 8th (just: the temperature was 16.91ºC)

Last week's @TheEconomist climate coverage in one handy thread (with extracts for non subscribers)
The data team looked at the extraordinary low in winter sea ice around Antarctica.
https://t.co/Q8AuU6Dg9Neconomist.com/graphic-detail…
As they point out

So this is freaking me out.
The squiggly line son this chart are average sea surface temperatures over the course of the year going back about 40 years.
Up until March this year, the highest value on this map was 21ºC, a record set in 2016 This March this year's temperature beat that record, going above 21ºC. (Peaks are in march because most of the ocean is in the southern hemisphere, and March is late southern summer)
Note-worthy but unsurprising: in a warming world, sea surface temperatures rise.

A few non-spoiler world-building thoughts about #AvatarTheWayOfWater
The General tells us the Earth is dying. At the same time the Earth, or maybe just some American-led faction of it, is capable of launching fleets of very big near-light-speed interstellar vessels. So it's a future of ecological collapse and amazingly high tech on a mega-industrial scale (those starships must represent thousands of terawatt-years of energy in launch costs alone @anderssandberg @robert_zubrin ?)

Third, final and shortest year in review thread: Essays

https://twitter.com/Eaterofsun/status/1605917579519746050

Of my various responsibilities the essay strand, invented by @tomstandage is both my shame and my delight.
Shame because it always comes in last in terms of priority and so we end up doing far too few of them.
Delight because they are ace, and a bit different.

So here is a little more of "what I did this year", which is basically "thanks to all the cool people I worked with this year"
First part here

https://twitter.com/Eaterofsun/status/1605605874805792773

Most of my job this year was running the briefings @TheEconomist, and far and away the biggest thing there wast the Ukraine coverage, especially the first six months of it. You can get a lot of that from this thread of @shashj's

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1603672684428247043

Having had a lovely time at @TheEconomist Christmas party last night, I thought it would be good to thread together some of what I have done there this year. Here are the five biggest projects I worked on; I'll thread some of the shorter stuff later on January brought this study of military hide and seek by @shashj, about whom it is impossible to say too many good things
economist.com/technology-qua…

For #AsteroidDay, some thoughts about the threat and the history of addressing it.
tl;dr Don't worry about the asteroids; worry a bit about the way science works. So: there was a time in the early/mid 1980s when a very few people had begun to worry about the threat of asteroid impacts, but no-one has started to do anything about it.

So about that muon story. I have two issues.
Almost everyone has gone for the "crack in the standard model/possible new force of nature" version of the story. I understand why that is. But 1) it completely downplays the fact that, on the very same day, a new calculation of the number in question suggested that there was in fact more or less no disagreement between theory and experiment. nature.com/articles/s4158…

This New Yorker piece on solar #geoengineering by Bill McKibben really irritated me, not because I disagree with it (although I do) but because of the fatuous way it expresses itself.
newyorker.com/news/annals-of… His argument is that the Scopex experiment looking at stratospheric aerosol injection should not go ahead now, because over the next decade all of humankind's effort needs to go into emissions reduction and Scopex would be a distraction which bad actors would exploit.

A geeky sidebar on #Wandavision, and the fact that the TV signal from Westview is encoded in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) I wonder if this is at some level a reference to the fact that some of the CMBR is indeed on old broadcast TV wavelengths. I think it was dear @cgseife who first told me that about 1% of the noise seen as static on old TVs was in fact the long-wavelength tail of the CMBR

So, there was a 10-minute discussion on @BBCRadio4 #TheWorldThisWeekend between three eminent foreign policy commentators & Ed Stourton on Biden and the world, and unless it was very brief and coincided with a moment of distraction there was no mention at all of #climate change This seems a serious omission on the part of Mr Stourton and his producers, what with climate change being a critical issue and one in which the USA has fallen profoundly out of step.

The #IPCC #SR15 report says very little about solar #geoengineering, which is the main, but not only subject, of my book #ThePlanetRemade beyond saying that there is high agreement that a particular form of it could keep temperatures below 1.5C (Cross chapter box 10 in Chapter 4) If the IPCC not going into this more seems an odd omission, given the topic, I think it is because a) the scientific understanding on solar #geoengineering, which obviously will never be complete, is still pretty sketchy in many respects (though not as sketchy as some may think)

carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-bri…
Today @carbonbrief has a big interview with @BillHareClimate of climateanalytics.org It covers many topics, some fascinatingly. But I want to take issue with some things he says about solar #geoengineering, aka #SRM or #SolarRadiationManagement 1/ Dr Hare tells @LeoHickman that, “along with...most physicists who have looked at” solar geoengineering, he thinks it is “a very dangerous technology”. There are forms of solar #geoengineering which could indeed be very dangerous. Two points to make about this: 2/