A lot of the debates about whether to bring politics into science, teaching, or other spheres of public life would be easily avoided if people remembered that being political is not the same as being partisan. Politics involves how decisions are made, how power is structured, and how resources are allocated within and among groups.

Partisanship is an allegiance to a specific faction, party, or politician.

The two concepts are related, but they are not the same.

Over a month after the vote, the think pieces on the "rejected" Anthropocene are still coming strong, so I wanted to take a moment to (finally!) offer some background and thoughts about the vote, the process, and what it all means. Geologists define different intervals in Earth's past so we can share a common language. Earth's 4.5 billion year history is divided into a series of eons (longest), eras, periods, epochs, and ages (shortest), based on visible changes in rock layers and fossil ecosystems.

Last December, a @DukeU Magazine article explored the "uncertain future" of the Duke Herbarium.

The scientific community is now learning that Duke has decided that this facility will be closed. This is bad, and here's why.dukemag.duke.edu/stories/nowher… A herbarium is basically a collection of plant specimens that are preserved for research and teaching. They're a vital resource to help scientists identify species, understand changes in biodiversity patterns, or even changes in flowering time or other climate change impacts.

If you say humanity is doomed to extinction and that nothing we can do can prevent total climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, I need you to know's just as unscientific as saying there's no climate crisis.

I don't platform disinformation. I don't care what kind it is. Sadly, I've learned that just as there's no convincing the dismissives the climate crisis is real, there's no convicing defeatists that this isn't pass-fail, and that our work will always matter. I only have so much time and energy. It needs to go where it can be of the most use.

I woke up this morning full of pain at so much violence, to each other and to the planet. I wrote a short message to my lab, and it helped me see a clearer path. I'm sharing it here in case it helps you, too. Witnessing trauma is its own kind of trauma, especially in a society that wants us to suppress that trauma so we can continue to function as well-oiled cogs. We don't have a lot of good tools for how to bear witness without becoming numb. And we cannot become numb.

Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group has been trying to decide whether geologists should revise the geologic timeline to include a new epoch defined by human impacts, and if so, when. 🧵 If you're not familiar with this project or the debates about when the Anthropocene would start, here's a thread I did on exactly that:

https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/1105632441505591296?s=20

Milloy’s opinion gets an F in accuracy, but is a master-class in denialist propaganda. It employs the classic tactic of discrediting experts with what seem to be reasonable, obvious statements. They’re superficial and easy to discredit, but the point is to hijack the narrative.

https://twitter.com/jamieclimate/status/1678012931122790401

He first tries to lay blame with the media's use of Climate Reanalyzer, a tool developed by my colleagues here at UMaine, claiming it exaggerates temperature anomalies (aka, warmer or colder than average) relative to a different website, temperature [dot] global.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into what is today the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The impact was so forceful that it kicked a tremendous amount of debris out of the atmosphere, which then rained back down, blanketing the Earth's surface with a layer of dust. All that debris re-entering the atmosphere created a pulse of heat so strong that it set the world on fire. As @Laelaps describes so vividly in her book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, this heat -- which only lasted a few hours--was lethal to most animals on the Earth's surface.

Until the last year, @Cigna never denied a single one of my claims. Recently, this has happened 10-12 times, all for things that my providers deem medically necessary, but Cigna doesn't. Did I mention @propublica recently found that Cigna's rejections aren't even being reviewed? Here's ProPublica's article about how @Cigna is saving itself millions by having doctors reject claims without actually reading them. propublica.org/article/cigna-…

Acadia National Park is home to several low-elevation ⛰️ with alpine or subalpine 🌸, thought to be remnants of tundra that tracked the melting glaciers northward some 13,000 years ago. What does their long history of persistence mean for these plants in a warming world? #BEASTLab undergraduate Cas Carroll (they/them) wanted to find out! They worked with former postdoc @CaitlinInMaine (she/her) on a sediment core from Sargent Mountain Pond to identify plant macrofossils—fragments of leaves, needles, and seeds from plants growing around the pond.

It's easy to mock the Ancient Rome Wasn't Real/Ancient Aliens/Lost Ancient Civilization conspiracy theorists, but I'm deeply alarmed at how quickly disinformation about the past is being spread by people whose entire arguments essentially rest on a rejection of authority. By "authority" here, I mean expertise, but the people making these arguments act as though experts are part of some greater monolith -- that academics are not only working together to suppress the truth for reasons, but they are doing so at the behest of some shadowy world order.

Many Twitter archaeologists are pointing out problems with the #AncientApocalypse Netflix series, so I also wanted to remind folks that the central premise of the show-- a global comet impact event 13,000 years ago-- has been widely discredited by the Quaternary paleo community.

https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/1063413053633503232

The Younger Dryas impact theory is popular with a lot of apocalypse preppers, conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience peddlers, and climate deniers, though.

I know it can be frustrating to see polls that indicate that Americans rank climate lower than things like the economy when it comes to the elections. Instead of being angry that climate isn't the top priority, we should be using this as a motivation for climate collaboration. 🧵 Where I live in Maine, the rising price of food and oil are huge concerns, and one of the biggest election motivators. A recent Maine Public story quoted several people who have said climate "ranks well below those." But remember: the economy is a climate issue!

The British monarchy has only existed for 0.0000000922298041% of Earth's history. Cyanobacteria, on the other hand, have been around for 78% of that time. I did the math.

Ten utterly random catastrophes in Earth history that we have to thank for life as we know it (a 🧵):

1) The formation of the 🌕 some 4.5 billion years ago, thiught to be the outcome of a Mars-sized planet smashing into Earth in the early years of our solar system. 2) After over a billion years of experimenting, a bunch of cyanobacteria randomly figured out how to photosynthesize ~2.3 billion years ago, releasing the first oxygen, which was toxic to a lot of early life at the time (whoops).

Stop doom-scrolling and have a nature break. Here are some highlights from today’s field lab.

Behold these tiny baby mushrooms growing on the remnants of an older, rotting fungus. Oak shoots sprouting from a beaver-chewed stump.

Put a finger down if you are fascinated by Earth history and you wish you understood it better.

Put a finger down if your feed has become so negative that it's wearing on your mental health, and you could use more wonder. Put a finger down if you you're anxious about the state of the climate and biodiversity crises and you'd like to understand the science better.

Put a finger down if you love Earth history, geoscience, and paleontology but you've never seen yourself represented in those fields.

Eleven days to go, and not yet halfway to our goal for @MakeAPlanetPod. We’ll be doing a final countdown starting tomorrow, after giving things a rest for the normal “middle slump” of crowd-funding. I’m hoping we can still make this happen, but I’ll be honest: I’m discouraged. Some of it seems to be what I can only interpret as Twitter suppressing links to crowdfunding sites. That’s frustrating, because it takes away our primary method of getting the word out there. Is that all of it? I dunno. Maybe @MakeAPlanetPod is too niche?

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, the ozone hole was an urgent environmental issue. Thanks to a 1987 international agreement to stop using ozone-depleting chemicals, we’re halfway to recovery. It a powerful reminder that things can change for the better. research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID… The story is remarkable: in the 70's scientists first warned about the possibility that certain chemicals could deplete atmospheric ozone, which protects life from the sun's harmful UV rays. They warned of crop losses, skin cancer, cataracts, and impaired immune systems.

We've got three weeks left to raise $26,131, or @MakeAPlanetPod doesn't happen.

This translates to just $0.25 for each of my followers, but we're fighting changes to the algorithms on social media that down-weight links and fundraising and make these kinds of efforts hard. These kinds of campaigns take a ton of time and energy under the best of circumstances, but I was not prepared for how much of an uphill battle it's been to fight Twitter and Facebook for visibility. It doesn't seem to be an enthusiasm gap; it's just a matter of getting views.

I naively thought "learning to live with covid" meant that we would continue to track cases and flexibly adapt masking policies while keeping up vaccination for new variants. I never thought it would mean just ignoring the fact that 500-1000 people are dying every day in the US. Thanks to my union, faculty at UMaine are able to require masks in our classrooms through December. But most of my colleagues (biologists!) are no longer masking, despite the risks of (re)infection (which increase your odds of complications and Long COVID every time).