Tim Garrett
@nephologue
Atmospheric Sciences professor at U. Utah. Believer that it really is turtles all the way down. Opinions predetermined and not my employer's.
Thread: New paper in @EGU_ESD with @ProfSteveKeen and @prof_grasselli shows a 50-year fixed relationship between world economic "wealth" - not the GDP - and global primary energy consumption. Implication? Our future is tied to even our quite distant past esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/10…
When will we draw a link between an accelerating rise in CO2 emissions and the surge in renewables? Renewables do not replace, they do not simply add, but by catalyzing the construction of a hungry civilization, they spur
Jaw dropping: "Not just a little record, but 25% higher than the previous record."
Big graupel and water totals at Alta today. Peak hourly water equivalent so far is 0.41" The record at that site is 0.54" from 10-11 UTC 5 Jan 2008. Radar image below. Snowfall generated over the Alpine Ridge in a southwesterly atmospheric river just ahead of a cold front.
This could be better framed as asking “what will the OBBB bill do for the global economy?”. The global economy is stably carbon based. So, if it hurts the economy through idiocy then it reduces CO2 emissions
Compared to what Trump can do via executive action alone, if the Senate-passed #OBBB becomes law: 1. US greenhouse gas emissions would increase by ~190 million metric tons per year in 2030 & 470 million tons in 2035
And there is this in case @RnaudBertrand is interested: x.com/nephologue/sta…
Latest news: We need to return to 353 ppm CO2 to restore the energy balance and stop global warming essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/20… That requires rewinding civilization energy demands back to 1960. tinyurl.com/y6ht39tj Good times ahead.
CO2/GHG are the waste products of a combustion-driven & interconnected civilisation and must be addressed globally. UK emission cuts are irrelevant amid rising global CO2 levels.what Arnaud as a China Lobbyists is defending is the growth paradigm. x.com/nephologue/sta…
We're collectively growing at an extraordinary pace of about 2.4% per year, fast enough to add as much to our daily resource demands in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. If you feel it's hard to keep up, there's a reason... 🧵
"A potentially more concerning explanation for the drop in cloud cover is an emerging low-cloud feedback, whereby low cloud cover decreases with rising temperature, which...could lead to more future warming than currently anticipated"
March editorial: Temperature rising - on the recent period of exceptional warmth nature.com/articles/s4156…
The neoliberal dream of fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch was always the destruction of US democracy and the elimination of government (except for its repressive organs police, courts, prisons, military ofc), and now he has won. What now? A short 🧵. 1/ theguardian.com/us-news/2025/f…
Wasatch Weather Weenies: Why the National Science Foundation Matters: wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/2025/02/why-na…
In 2017 at a small meeting in Switzerland on energy and the economy, experts scolded me that the economy would collapse from resource depletion and debt, certainly by 2025. I argued inertia would keep it growing longer (not forever). Here we are. Physics actually works! Always.
So it turns out snowflake settling is full of surprises. Not just size, not just shape, not just density, not just turbulence, but perhaps more than anything it is the mean wind horizontal winds speeds that controls how fast snowflakes fall essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22…
Humanity's energy demands are constantly increasing, relying on a growing supply of fossil fuels and the so-called "renewable" energy sources. Civilization grows by efficiently using an energy surplus to transform the earth's crust into the stuff of us" x.com/nephologue/sta…
Civilization grows by efficiently using an energy surplus to transform the earth's crust into the stuff of us. However, growth has limits. Resource depletion and internal decay will tip us towards collapse. A new video: youtube.com/watch?v=hOdo6J…
The major problem that humanity faces is the persistent failure to understand that we’re fundamentally no different than any other system in the universe
the major problem that humanity faces is that we are really bad at foreseeing and, if necessary, correcting the emergent collective trends of individual actions in the context of the systems we have created for our interactions
There will be intensifying constraints on growth, and deepening uncertainty. Ultimately, you cannot make an unsustainable system resilient -by definition.
Low growth and higher uncertainty pose new challenges for monetary policy in the euro area, says ECB Vice-President Luis de Guindos. And in this environment, preserving the strength and resilience of euro area banks is crucial.
I’ve argued for some time that a kid with a ruler would do as well as complicated climate/societal models predicting rates of temperature rise. Turns out I was wrong. No wait! The models didn’t predict it either… hey kid, got a moment?
Both 2023 and 2024 were significantly warmer than we'd expect based on the approximately linear rate of warming (and variations around that trend) the world has experienced since 1970. It is further evidence that the rate of warming may be accelerating.
Wrote a paper a while back about how climate change should cause inflation. Poopooed for sure. Admittedly it was very big picture without a specific mechanism, but we're certainly seeing how now with increased insurance rates driven by e.g. the LA fires esd.copernicus.org/articles/3/1/2…