A large group of scientists has collaborated to produce the "2023 State of the Climate" report. And guess what, it's not pretty...
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Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.

For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.

In the present report, we display a diverse set of vital signs of the planet and the potential drivers of climate change and climate-related responses. The trends reveal new all-time climate-related records and deeply concerning patterns of climate-related disasters. At the same time, we report minimal progress by humanity in combating climate change.

Given these distressing developments, our goal is to communicate climate facts and policy recommendations to scientists, policymakers, and the public. It is the moral duty of scientists and our institutions to clearly alert humanity of any potential existential threat and to show leadership in taking action.

The effects of global warming are progressively more severe, and possibilities such as a worldwide societal breakdown are feasible and dangerously underexplored. By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change.

Big problems need big solutions. Therefore, we must shift our perspective on the climate emergency from being just an isolated environmental issue to a systemic, existential threat. Although global heating is devastating, it represents only one aspect of the escalating and interconnected environmental crisis that we are facing (e.g., biodiversity loss, fresh water scarcity, pandemics). We need policies that target the underlying issues of ecological overshoot where the human demand on Earth's resources results in overexploitation of our planet and biodiversity decline.

To address the overexploitation of our planet, we challenge the prevailing notion of endless growth and overconsumption by rich countries and individuals as unsustainable and unjust. Instead, we advocate for reducing resource overconsumption; reducing, reusing, and recycling waste in a more circular economy; and prioritizing human flourishing and sustainability. We emphasize climate justice and fair distribution of the costs and benefits of climate action, particularly for vulnerable communities. We call for a transformation of the global economy to prioritize human well-being and to provide for a more equitable distribution of resources.
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It's wonderful to see these scientists boldly calling for system change in the face of a planetary overshoot emergency. Now if only someone will listen...

FULL REPORT -- academic.oup.com/bioscience/ad…

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Degrowth

Be ungovernable, like birds who make nests OUT OF ANTI-BIRD SPIKES. A new study describes resourceful Dutch & Belgian corvids besting evil architecture by stealing metal anti-bird strips and using them like thorny twigs, to construct their homes.

Like thorns, the spikes may protect their nests from predators.

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra wrote an epic 🧵 about his research that's worth a read: twitter.com/AukeFlorian/status…

Paper: hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/organis…

#science #SciComm #birds #netherlands

At a meeting in Germany that attracts dozens of Nobel prize winners, one of them objected to its focus on diversity, saying “as a male scientist, I have a feeling of discrimination when I am here, in the climate that this meeting is being held.” Science magazine reports that a visibly nervous early-career researcher stood up to respond….

science.org/content/article/no…

Link to video, her response is at 46:39
mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/r…

#stem #science #Nobels #womeninstem #womeninscience #lindaunobel

"The Illusion of Moral Decline"

I'm appreciating this study by Adam Mastroianni today. The next time someone waxes poetic about "the good old days" and how people were so much kinder and more virtuous in the past, I think I'll send them this link. 😁

experimental-history.com/p/the…

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#morality #science #history

The illusion of moral decline

The short version of the paper I just published

^{Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)}

Explore the extraordinary eons-old details of the moon’s surface in an astounding 1.3-gigapixel composite #photography #science #space

thisiscolossal.com/2023/05/and…

Not long ago, the enormous Haast's eagle soared over New Zealand.

Weighing almost 40lbs (18kg) with a wingspan up to ~10ft (3m), they likely feasted on the gigantic moa birds I described in an earlier post. Maori oral tradition also suggests they may have attacked human children.

So what happened to this fierce apex predator? Once the moa disappeared due to excess hunting after the arrival of people, Haast’s eagle followed around 1400. nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/h…. #SharedPlanet #science #nature

Open letter from Scihub and Library Genesis:

custodians.online/

Fuck copyright, and fuck the capitalist vultures that hoard knowledge at the world's expense.

#copyright #OpenAccess #science #knowledge

In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-hub

Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup.

^{http://custodians.online}

Physicist John Tyndall is often credited with discovering the greenhouse effect, which he wrote about in 1859.

But female scientist Eunice Foote published a paper - 3 years earlier - demonstrating how atmospheric water vapor & CO2 affected solar heating. She theorized that heat trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere warm its #climate.

Tyndall was widely read. And Foote, being a woman, wasn't even permitted to present her own work. climate.gov/news-features/feat… #history #science #ClimateChange

Fission is in the news, but few recognize that a woman physicist was behind the discovery.

Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry w/o her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. aps.org/publications/apsnews/2… #women #history #science #energy

Starfish walk using hundreds of tiny tube feet on the underside of their arms, as seen in this fascinating timelapse by Juliette Horn at the Frost Museum of Science.

#animals #science #starfish #feet

There is a certain beauty in when this happens. The geometry of the mutual event, eclipse, conjunction, whatever you want to call it. It's just... 🤷 😭

Images:
NASA/JSC/Artemis 1
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

#Space #Science

Hello #Mastodon, if you know a Black woman student (HS/College/Graduate School) or early career, I am going need you to lend me your ears.

The Sadie Collective, a nonprofit bringing resources and community to Black women in quantitive and social science fields, is award $6000 AWARDS and all expense paid trips to their annual conference.

As someone who participated in this inaugural program, PLEASE PLEASE share widely. #econtwitter #economics #sociology #science #academia #academic

Hi, fellow #journalists ... in an attempt to make the Twitter diaspora a little easier, I'm compiling a list of #journalism types on mastodon. Currently it's biased toward #science / #scicomm types, but there are others in there.

I'll post the names, but the ongoing project is available on Github here: github.com/cgseife/mastodonpeo…

From the top:
Jason Abbruzzese
@JasonAbbruzzese

Hilda Bastian
@hildabast

Alan Boyle
@alanboyle

Bethany Brookshire
@beebrookshire

Siri Carpenter
@SiriCarpenter (+)

GitHub - cgseife/mastodonpeople

Contribute to cgseife/mastodonpeople development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

> The ecology of fear, the idea that the presence of a predator causes a cascade of ecological effects across a landscape, is a fundamental concept in wildlife ecology. In recent years, ecologists have come to appreciate how much animals, even apex predators, fear humans, with myriad effects on animal behaviors and, in turn, ecosystems.

Ecologist Asia Murphy writes about humans' role in the "ecology of fear" and the implications for wildlife management & conservation: americanscientist.org/article/…

#SciComm #ecology #biology #science #anthropocene 🐘

#introduction
Hi! I'm a scientist working with large maps of galaxies (real and simulated).

I'm interested in science and how to make it more inclusive and open, and in diversity in a broader sense. #science #diversityandinclusion

Also: I'm a Mexican living in Poland, so, you can expect a few pictures of nature, lakes, forests, etc.

🔬Bonnie L. Bassler
Molecular biologist. She researched chemical communication between bacteria, also called ‘quorum sensing’.

#microbiology #science #womeninscience #art #mastoart #ciencia #digitalart #portrait

🧬Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing precise DNA-editing technology, CRISPR.

#genetics #science #scientists #womeninscience #illustration #mastoart #art #portrait #ciencia #divulgacion #digitalart

I’m doing a project featuring little-known women of science as a part of my studies as a lab technician.
I’ll be drawing some portraits and illustrating the research and discoveries of some interesting scientists✨

Let’s start!

🧬Nettie Stevens. American geneticist who discovered chromosomes X/Y by studying Mealworms (Tenebrio molitor)

#science #womeninstem #womeninscience #molecularbiology #genetics #mastoart #portrait #research #art #ciencia

Did you see the news that all of the #JWST instruments are aligned now?

Check out this comparison of one of the newly released calibration images from the MIRI instrument compared to images taken of the same region of space by the WISE and Spitzer space telescopes! Look at that resolution! So many newly resolved stars and structures! 🤩

I can't wait for all the new discoveries we'll make with JWST! #Science data starts in only a couple months!

(Image from @/AndrasGasper on birdapp)

Because it launched folded up, #JWST spent the first several weeks verrryyy carefully unfolding itself in space as it traveled to its orbit.

The scariest part was the sunshield tensioning! The sunshield is the pink/grey part and is used to keep the mirrors and instruments nice and cold so we can see the very faint heat from the early universe!

#Science #SciComm

Do people like threads here? I guess we'll find out!

Between meetings today I thought I'd talk about #NASA #JWST and all the exciting #science we can expect from it starting in a few months!

(Yes, I made this travel mug ❤️)

#SciComm #Exoplanets #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Telescope #MastodonNewbie