When the planet won’t follow your models, model a new planet.

Our new paper published in WIRES Climate Change questions the logic and the opportunity costs of building a digital replica of the planet — inclusive of its human population. These-much hyped projects — such as Destination Earth in Europe (DestinE), and similar initiatives in the US and elsewhere — are rapidly being implemented with no serious discussion or debate of how these efforts look through the lenses of system ecology, sociology and political sciences. Better and more equitable use can be made of scarce research resources.[…]

Models exist in a state of exception, having appropriated the academic prestige of mathematics and physics while at the same time escaping the critical gaze of philosophers and social scientists, including to some extent that of the sociologists of quantification. We reached this conclusion by comparing work on mathematical models with what sociologists say about quantification in statistics, economics, algorithms and artificial intelligence.

According to our analysis, modellers have acquired a central position at the heart of the climate change discussion, and make use of this privileged state to increase their political standing and funding, putting themselves at the helm of the climate change narratives and making climate change itself into an all-encompassing meta-narrative, subsuming all ailments of humans and their planet, inclusive of wars, authoritarianism, migrations, and various forms of aggression to planetary ecosystems.

The project of digital twins represents the pinnacle of this movement.

There’s an old joke about weaning the dog off food by reducing his ration by a kibble each day, until one day, he didn’t need food at all.

As summer heat strikes, the US grid increasingly relies on a kind of invisible weapon — the “virtual power plant” — to prevent blackouts.

Each VPP brings together large numbers of homes and businesses whose owners have agreed to use less electricity when needed — or even send some of their own back to the grid — in exchange for a financial incentive.

Participants just have to let the operators take control of their usage to balance supply and demand when the system’s under stress, usually by setting the thermostat a few degrees higher or tapping electric vehicles and on-site batteries.

Pool enough customers, and it makes a big difference. Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie says the VPPs already deployed or under development in the US will be able to save as much juice as 33 nuclear reactors can produce.

No Tricks Zone;

Per a new study, more than 2200 historical aerial photos of a 2000 km stretch of ice in East Antarctica have been recently uncovered. The rare images reveal what the glaciers in this region looked like in 1937.

Interestingly, the photos show all these East Antarctic glaciers have remained stable, thickened, gained mass, and/or increased in elevation over the last 85 years, with much of the growth and mass gains occurring since 1985.

There has been no warming in this region since the 1950s. This suggests that “global warming” plays a minimal role in ice thickness changes.

Chris Martz;

This is perhaps the most glorious chart you will ever see. Green energy scammers are losing the support of the youth more than any other age demographic, the very demographic of people they appeal to the most since it requires their investment to continue the grift.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that the percentage of young Americans ages 18-34 who view climate change as a “serious problem” dropped from 67% in both their 2018 and 2021 poll to 50% in the latest poll. Support for government action dropped a whopping 18 percentage points, from 80% in 2021 to 62% in 2024. There was also a notable drop among those ages 35-54, but those 55+ remain unchanged.