Host of Climate Chat | Plain climate science & DATAVIZ | Mission: To Understand and Protect the Home Planet

Joined September 2010
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I posted this 2 years ago. After which we experienced 2 years of 1.6Β°C above the Paris' pre-industrial (1850-1900) baseline. We expected a big jump in global warming because greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing, aerosols decreased and Earth's Energy Imbalance had doubled.
This might be the year everything changes, as those who don't count joules and radiative fluxes are too starting to feel the heat from reducing air-pollution. Many great scientists have tried to inform on this in the past decades (e.g. James Hansen, James Lovelock, Paul Crutzen and Veerabhadran Ramanathan). Policy makers and media have paid very little attention so far. This was the reason for me to start using my largely dormant Twitter account 3.5 years ago. To create awareness about rapid warming from rapidly reducing air pollution. There's mainly been a small crowd of 'climate doomers' and slightly anoyed climate scientists to interact with. In the past months this changed, as the additional accumulating heat is starting to surface. My amount of followers has tripled, the graphs we make receive millions of views and media around the world are paying attention. This is bigger than any one of us. We need specialized scientists to assess what this means for changes to monsoon systems, others that look at how ocean and atmospheric currents (might) change and how that could impact melting ice and sea level rise. We need politicians, legal experts and social scientists to learn what is at stake and debate the effects of unintentional and intentional emissions on climate, not just health and the environment. There are no easy choices in this. How much warming will the world except? And how fast can the rate of warming be until we are unable to adapt? When will we learn how high our dikes really need to be? How extreme will droughts get? How many people will lose their homes and need to move to greener pastures? Be it a locally overflowing refugee camp or to another country? Will we have the stability of global governance to face these accumulating challenges? Uncertainties are very large, which might be the main problem. We don't know how bad it will get, and anyone who tells you one way or another is lying. The precautionary principle tells us we have the duty to act. For ourselves, for our children and for strangers we will never meet. We are the most adaptable species known to ever have existed. I believe that with a more thorough understanding of our planet, humanity could become a beneficial force to life on Earth. If we soon aquire collective will to do so.
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Good memories. Here we were using the power of the sun to cook food in Lalibela, Ethiopia
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We can't have our cake and eat it too. The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed. β€” Gandhi What's more dumb than degrowth, is the belief in infinite growth on a finite planet.
Degrowth is dumb. We can have an abundant and equitable future by (largely) replacing digging fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them with clean energy technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc.
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
"This indicates that high climate sensitivity models potentially simulate more realistic cloud climate feedbacks than low climate sensitivity models"
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
We didn't just look at the LGM, but also at other paleo evidence, the past 275 years, recent NASA CERES data and more to determine ECS. As is clearly presented in the Hansen et al. update and in our paper. The NASA satellite data is the smoking gun: x.com/i/status/2065431581687…
Yes, we project that 2026 will be the warmest year. If others will provide the physical basis for their projections, we have an opportunity to learn something from this natural β€œexperiment.” See 2026 Experiment – tinyurl.com/3x9e6w3z Also available on Substack: tinyurl.com/2d7uv77e
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Global warming has been limited by (unintended) sulphur emissions from fossil fuel burning. @hausfath has updated this IPCC figure showing frocings and temp change resulting from emissions. 6 more years could've increased the relative cooling, even with decreasing emissions
Replying to @hausfath
My contribution to it included two updated pieces of analysis. First, an update to Figure 6.12 of the IPCC AR6 breaking down the contribution of different emissions to both effective radiative forcing and global temperatures since 1750:
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Sunday 6/14 at 10am PT on Climate Chat: Students Fighting To Force Polluters to Pay: Carbon Fee & Dividend with Katharine Gage. How a student movement is forming around carbon pricing. On youTube & LinkedIn. Links in 🧡 @LeonSimons8 @drivingmzstacey @radsci @citizensclimate
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Yes, we project that 2026 will be the warmest year. If others will provide the physical basis for their projections, we have an opportunity to learn something from this natural β€œexperiment.” See 2026 Experiment – tinyurl.com/3x9e6w3z Also available on Substack: tinyurl.com/2d7uv77e
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
"the carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5Β°C could already be exhausted without rigorous methane emission reductions" To be sure: Methane emissions are not being rigorously reduced!
Some climate & earth system insights: 1. Carbon sinks may become less effective as the climate warms 2. The carbon budget is getting smaller 3. Climate overshoot has risks 4. Don't forget to reduce non-CO2 emissions constrain-eu.org/news/policy…
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Every word of the title on the front page of de @volkskrant newspaper was wrong! Q: Are you the UN climate panel (@IPCC_CH)?: A: "No, not at all, the journalist got this wrong" And somewhat lower emissions can still lead to very high warming and a "disaster scenario":
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
New Anthropocene paper. Earth still operates in "Holocene logic", buffering heat imbalance. Anthropocene = Pressure. But, BAU, reaching 3Β°C in 2100 & we get "stuck" in a Hothouse trajectory for 1000 years. Anthropocene risks turning into a state. No Good. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.…
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Replying to @PNASNews
Please note that this study misrepresents our (@DrJamesEHansen et al. 2023) and other work and that the lead author uses this misrepresentation to refer to us (citation 36) as "clowns" to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers. A rectification is in order @PNASNews
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Both the traditional and relative El NiΓ±o indices are poised to break records for several months in a row according to the new NMME. El NiΓ±o could linger longer into 2027, perhaps because of a lack of cooler subsurface waters, with a slow rate of weakening currently predicted.
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Cherry-picking periods to show a pause is misleading. Some know this better than most. Providing people with a false sense of security is dangerous. The rate of heat uptake, COβ‚‚ increase AND global warming have accelerated.
You and @claudeai even have the airborne fraction graph.. Which shows that the 9-year running mean is record high. You cherry-picked the "recent" period. Therefore, faux pause.
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Faux pause... You don't show the atmospheric growth rate in your post. Or provide evidence for COP meetings being responsible for the somewhat stabilizing emissions (rather than e.g. wars and energy prices), merely the 'doomer graph' strawman. x.com/i/status/1949066429694…
"The findings could also mean that the land carbon sink – which normally removes billions of tonnes of COβ‚‚ from the atmosphere each year and is essential for meeting climate targets – is weakening decades earlier than expected"
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
It often amazes me how similar heat flows look in different systems at different scales. Heat flowing through my morning cup of coffee, made visible with an infrared camera. Anomaly of the North Atlantic Ocean Sea Surface Temperature. And the sun.
On Sunday I traveled to the middle of the desert to capture this: The ISS against our sun. What I didn't expect: the sun producing a magnificent flare at the same time A once-in-a-lifetime shot I'm thrilled to share with you. See the uncropped shot or get the print in the reply
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What subjects would you like us to cover today on Climate Chat? Please post your questions below or in the live chat on YouTube later today.
Sunday 6/7 at 10am PT on Climate Chat: Ask Us Anything #3 with hosts Dan Miller & @LeonSimons8 Leave your questions or requested subjects in the thread below, or ask questions in the YouTube Live chat. On YouTube & LinkedIn. Links in 🧡 #Climate #GlobalWarming #AMA
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Leon Simons 🌍 retweeted
Sunday 6/7 at 10am PT on Climate Chat: Ask Us Anything #3 with hosts Dan Miller & @LeonSimons8 Leave your questions or requested subjects in the thread below, or ask questions in the YouTube Live chat. On YouTube & LinkedIn. Links in 🧡 #Climate #GlobalWarming #AMA
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Another Super El NiΓ±o y-axis extension..
Will we get a "Super-duper" El NiΓ±o this year? Maybe!
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This Relative Super-duper El NiΓ±o doesn't look much better..
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