@drshort
PhD Earth sciences, climate literacy educator, located near Tiohti:áke/Montreal, Quebec, Canada https://drheathershort.com/ Backstory here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/first-person-climate-change-education-support-young-people-1.6186611
Vermont has been on the left for a long time, even when it voted in Republicans. It has nothing to do with the resort areas, which are isolated pockets of rich people with 2nd homes. archive.nytimes.com/fivethirtyei...
🚨 Techno-optimism reduces willingness to address climate change 🚨
In a new preprint, @maiensachis.bsky.social, @fdabl.bsky.social, and I examined the causal effect of techno-optimist beliefs on the willingness to contribute to addressing climate change.
🔗 Read the paper: lnkd.in/eE847_jK
Good news: Scientists were wrong about how bad sea level rise is.
Bad news: It’s even worse than we thought.
that’s asteroid-impact fast
(and wouldn’t it suck if, geologically, humans were just a social version of an asteroid? yes it would. end fossil fuels!)
New from Picketty's lab: The world can raise incomes toward global equity & stabilize the climate under "under very strict conditions"
—reduction of work hours
—consumption shift toward immaterial sectors
—major change in food habits
—a fast energy transition requiring massive low-carbon investment
Bernie Sander’s 2028 litmus test would strangle America’s golden goose
Surprise! The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is against my 5% billionaire wealth tax. I wonder why?
If enacted, Bezos would owe $12 billion in taxes, and an average family of 4 would receive a $12,000 direct payment.
Poor Jeff would be left with just $224 billion to survive.
"The Arithmetic Of Climate Failure". my response to a series of questions posed by Alma Asfalto & published last week.
A link to the publication (with abridged answers) and including my full answers is at: climateuncensored.com/the-arithmet...
Latest from me: The missing piece in Canada’s economic resistance to Trump and climate mobilization – new public enterprises open.substack.com/pub/sethdkle...
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
For climate science people looking for community in dealing with what we deal with I'd highly recommend. climateemotionalresilience.org/thegrove
There are problems with a geoengineering techno-fix for the climate crisis | Mike Hulme
An infographic from Our World in Data titled "Global land use for food production" uses a series of stacked horizontal bar charts to visualize the distribution of Earth's surface and the disproportionate land requirements of livestock. The first bar shows Earth's surface is 71% ocean and 29% land (141 million km²); the land surface is then broken down into 76% habitable land, 10% glaciers, and 14% barren land. Of the habitable land, 45% (48 million km²) is used for agriculture, while 38% is forests and 13% is shrubland. The agricultural land bar reveals a major disparity: 80% (38 million km²) is dedicated to livestock (meat, dairy, and textiles) including grazing land and cropland for feed, while only 16% is used for crops for direct human consumption and 4% for non-food crops. Finally, two smaller bars at the bottom contrast this land use with nutritional output, showing that while livestock uses 80% of agricultural land, it only provides 17% of global calories and 38% of global protein, whereas plant-based foods provide 83% of calories and 62% of protein.
80% of agricultural land is used for livestock (and textiles), yet this huge land use provides only 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein.
16% of the land used for crops provides 83% of our calories and 62% of our protein. It's past time we rethink what we eat.
At a time of massive income & wealth inequality Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gave a $1 trillion tax break to the 1% while taking healthcare away from 15 million Americans. Working families will die so that the very rich get even richer.
Yes. We need a wealth tax on billionaires.
Our interview with @jksteinberger.bsky.social is out now!
www.sufficiencywellbeing.com/p/living-wel...
If you are wondering what words the all-male Congress found so "blasphemous" that they felt compelled to literally scrape them off the monument, they were: ''Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''
There is a tendency to act as if climate change adaptation is a ‘get out of jail free’ card
Adapting to ongoing climate change will involve huge disruption to our systems
It would be so much simpler to act to stop further climate change
Yes it's necessary to prepare, but there's no adapting to a 3C world
This is such a dangerous message
There's an direct analogy to be drawn here with the civic planners of the 60s, 70s & 80s who sought to reassure the public that their government had plans to reboot society in the aftermath of a nuclear war... sociologists label them "Fantasy documents"!
As discussed in this podcast...
Claims that #AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing
- Most claims refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools
#climatecrisis
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
We can't fall into right-wing populism’s lie that the most vulnerable in society are to blame for wealth inequality in our countries. We need to build movements that tell the truth: the story of wealth inequality is not a cultural one, but a class one.
Antarctica isn’t one big tipping point.
New research maps 18 separate ice basins, each with its own threshold. Some in West Antarctica may tip at just ~1–2C warming (i.e close to today’s levels).
Cross the line, and you commit to m’s of sea-level rise over centuries
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Guardian just published a story on our paper "The Risk of a Hothouse Earth Trajectory" regarding a potential point of no return. You can read it for free here: www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Its a cycle. Actions-> Results-> Beliefs -> Actions
We need more stories that help people learn from what’s working.
Not just what’s going wrong.
Not just what “has to happen by 2050.”
Real examples of action that others can see, understand & build on.
Here's a 🧵on advice & tips for sharing #climate stories that actually inspire action.
"What they fear most is these mass movements leading eventually to some kind of accountability.”
@mehdirhasan.bsky.social and @naomiaklein.bsky.social discuss how Trump and Epstein’s elite circle fear mass movements that could bring them down.
Watch the full episode: zeteo.com/p/naomi-klei...
Map showing tens of thousands of protests across the US between Trump's inauguration last year and January 31, 2026.
The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.
NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis says socialism, defined by bold public solutions, not managerial caution, can rebuild the party after historic losses.
He’s betting it can unite a majority across divided regions and broaden the party’s coalition.
A great article by @jasonhickel.bsky.social and @yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social. But I do wish we could all stop using the wolf as a metaphor for the worst kinds of human behaviour. Wolves are wonderful creatures, endlessly maligned - and also victims of capitalism.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much as a wolf cares about a lamb’s. But democratise our economy and a better world is within our grasp | Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis www.theguardian.com/environment/...
