Because you wanted to see a squirrel taking a nap in my plum tree. Splooting.
Climate, water, birds, bluegrass mandolin. Member US National Academy of Sciences, MacArthur Fellow, Carl Sagan Prize, author of The Three Ages of Water (2023). Also on Mastodon. @petergleick@fediscience.org. Email me at pgleick (at) gmail.
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Because you wanted to see a squirrel taking a nap in my plum tree. Splooting.
Along the northern California coast. [Giant Green Anemone Anthopleura xanthogrammica]
![[Giant Green Anemone Anthopleura xanthogrammica] in a tidepool, lots of frilly green tentacles, with nearby mussels](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:frsgwnofwno2huewodkaeez2/bafkreihin7fsnuqn5oz4w5pzfzu6akh55i2ijqp7oix3idon5exzvtsypq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Adolf Hitler awarded the War Merit Cross to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust. Just saying, awards don't mean sh** if the person awarding them is a fascist. www.foxnews.com/politics/tru...
Your climate-changed future is here. mainichi.jp/english/arti...
I'm certainly not in favor of killing them, but I know for a fact the Cape Town baboons are seriously ass****s.
🙄
Your climate-changed future is here. mainichi.jp/english/arti...
Yes, the ICC is doing its job.
Joseph Goebbels praises Josef Mengele.
#CDC directors going back to 1977 tell the truth about #RFKJr: he is endangering the health of every American. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
The case brought by South Africa v. Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is “arguably the strongest case of genocide that has ever come before the Court.” www.populismstudies.org/professor-sc...
So that pile of paper maps in my car isn't such a bad idea after all? www.cnn.com/2025/09/01/w...
Donald Trump trying to confirm that he's still alive. It's the funniest thing happening today.
Good ICE: glaciers, Antarctica, cocktails. Bad ICE: Trump's gestapo; internal combustion engines.
Have you seen this? www.gleick.com/blog/water-a...
By the light of the silvery moon...
Look up "Harvard beats Yale 29-29"
Reading Daphne du Maurier. What a fascinating look into early sci-fi/horror writing. Hitchcock adapted her short story, The Birds, into his movie.🪶😱🐦⬛📖
Has no one told Trump that if he starts a war with Venezuela he can kiss his Nobel prize good-bye? Or maybe he's dead and Stephen Miller is calling the shots?
Good ICE: glaciers, Antarctica, cocktails. Bad ICE: Trump's gestapo; internal combustion engines.
Pink naked ladies. Amaryllis belladonna.
US Women Rugby beat Australia 31-31. www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-...
My moment of zen. Yours too if you want it.
Why the Trump/MAGA/GOP assault on facts? Because facts contradict every ideological policy they're trying to impose. Yes, #climate change is real. #Vaccines are effective and safe. It's the #guns. Trump economics is destroying jobs and the economy. Facts are powerful weapons against fascism.
RFK Jr. must be fired.
Here is the official statement from the American Meteorological Society on the "foundational flaws" of the Department of Energy’s recent attempt to deny the reality of #climate change. www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-am...
Apparently this is called "butt snorkeling"
Bill Kristol: "Gen. Ben Hodges noted, 'in the Army we called this Butt-snorkeling.'”
Welcome!
RFK Jr. must be fired.
Did AI write this post?
Democrats shouldn't vote for a CR unless the following conditions are met: 1. NG out of DC and PD returned to locals. 2. RFK et al out at HHS. 3. Hegseth out at DOD. 4. No face coverings for fed. police. 5. Renounce Cook's fake firing. 6. Revoke the tariffs. Shut down the government otherwise.
Absolutely no deviations from the strict party line of Trump and RFK Jr. will be allowed, science-be-damned. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...
Once again, the reality is that new reservoirs are far, far more expensive than water conservation, recycling, expanding groundwater recharge, and improving efficiency. www.mercurynews.com/2025/08/26/p...
Ok. My physical inactivity and mental health put me in the vulnerable category.
Hello? If the financial stability of the AI industry rests entirely on stealing the work of writers, artists, and others, it deserves to be financially ruined.
This claim is 100% bull****. Either RFK Jr. actually believes this, in which case he's insane, or he doesn't and he's saying it to suck up to Trump, in which case he's an a**-kissing quisling.
Climate scientists, heads up! There's 12 hours left to submit publications etc to the National Academies committee doing the fast-track update on evidence that has emerged since 2009 on the dangers stemming from GHG emissions.
Help me out here. Isn't the form of government that takes over management of private companies and takes financial stakes in corporations called... communism or socialism? apnews.com/article/trum...
Thank you, John Roberts.
Trump is now hiding his hands to pretend he's not sick, just like he's hiding climate data to pretend climate change isn't real, job data to pretend he's not destroying the US economy, and health data to pretend he's not crippling medical care.
Archaeologists have uncovered a dam built in Jerusalem for the Siloam Pool around 805–795 BCE to collect #water from the Gihon Spring as well as floodwaters. www.ynetnews.com/environment/...
Trump's going to bolster the economy by getting people to buy sandwiches to throw, and now flags to burn.
Breaking. Trump signs Executive Order saying he can do things the Constitution and Supreme Court says he can't. Also an Executive Order saying people aren't allowed to do things the Constitution and the Supreme Court says we can. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...
I didn't know that #kayakMonday was a thing, but now that I do, here's my wife and our friend who together built these two beauties.
Trump's "Gold Standard Science" turns out to be a mixture of bull**** and pyrite.
Because like unicorns, commercial fusion doesn't exist.
Global, but also in California's Central Valley and the Ogallala Aquifer under the Great Plains.
If Sam Altman and the AI industry's vision for the future requires data centers everywhere operated by fusion power plants, it's not a vision. It's a hallucinatory fantasy. interestingengineering.com/culture/sam-...
Thank you. Kayak. Not for sale.
My moment of zen. Yours too if you want it.
I have all the military and intelligence documents related to climate and security (or know where the archived files are). But also, here's a summary. Part 1 of 3. www.gleick.com/blog/climate...
Another #water fact. This one isn't fun, however. As much as a third of all food production today comes from unsustainable groundwater extraction —where groundwater is being used faster than it's being replenished. That cannot continue, but where is the replacement water going to come from??
Mmmmm.
Trump. See no facts, hear no facts, speak no facts.
Here's another fact about #water you may not know. More than 97% of Earth's water is saltwater — too salty to drink or use for agriculture. Most of the rest, the freshwater, is locked up in ice caps on Antarctic and Greenland or in deep groundwater. Only a tiny fraction is available to us in ... 1/2
My family (and likely yours) alone paid more federal tax in 2023 than these corporations, each of which reported >>a billion dollars in income. Tesla, Airbnb, Aptiv, PG&E, Palo Alto Networks, FMC, Pfizer, Gen Digital, & certainly others. And Trump/the GOP raised your taxes and cut corporate #taxes.
Sure. Remember, she's in jail precisely because what she considers "appropriate sexual behavior" is illegal. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...
Yes, before I was here, actually.
Trump. See no facts, hear no facts, speak no facts.
My family (and likely yours) alone paid more federal tax in 2023 than these corporations, each of which reported >>a billion dollars in income. Tesla, Airbnb, Aptiv, PG&E, Palo Alto Networks, FMC, Pfizer, Gen Digital, & certainly others. And Trump/the GOP raised your taxes and cut corporate #taxes.
No dissenting voices, no upsetting facts or data or numbers or science, no different versions of truth can be allowed if they conflict with Dear Leader's distorted reality. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...
the rivers, lakes, accessible groundwater, and rain/snow. And that water is unevenly distributed in space and time, contributing to scarcity, #water poverty, and conflict. 2/2 bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
Here's another fact about #water you may not know. More than 97% of Earth's water is saltwater — too salty to drink or use for agriculture. Most of the rest, the freshwater, is locked up in ice caps on Antarctic and Greenland or in deep groundwater. Only a tiny fraction is available to us in ... 1/2
Here are the classified files found in Bolton's bathroom. Oh, wait. That's Trump's bathroom.
How bad is the Trump administration? So bad it's made me care even a little bit about what happens to John Bolton.
Want to learn something about #water and #climate change? A simple approximation is that for every degree C of warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more water. That's one factor behind the growing number of extreme flooding events.
Clausius-Clapeyron, in part
How bad is the Trump administration? So bad it's made me care even a little bit about what happens to John Bolton.
2/2 And #climate scientists have been predicting these impacts for literally a half century or more. The Trump administration's efforts to hide these kinds of basic scientific truths are just fossil-fuel industry propaganda.
Want to learn something about #water and #climate change? A simple approximation is that for every degree C of warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more water. That's one factor behind the growing number of extreme flooding events.
I'm happy to hear that. Caprimulgiformes seem to have disappeared completely from northern California and I'm sad about that. 🪶 #birds
Will anybody ever name their child Alexa again??
#Water people will understand. I met somebody named Mackenzie today and all I could think about was the river.
As for being screamed at on the street, I admit if I saw JD Vance (or any of these fascists) on the street there might be some screaming.
Screw you, Stephen Miller. Elderly white hippies helped end the Vietnam War and get another criminal president tossed out of office. www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
You remember him too?
Oh no. ‘A mighty redwood of a man has fallen.’ Remembering Malcolm Margolin, founder of Heyday books www.berkeleyside.org/2025/08/20/m...
The GOP governors of South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have all sent their states' National Guard troops to assist Trump's occupation of DC. All four of those states have cities with crime rates higher than DC. This was never about "fighting crime."
Where can I get my "Elderly White Hippie" t-shirt?
Back at you
Screw you, Stephen Miller. Elderly white hippies helped end the Vietnam War and get another criminal president tossed out of office. www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
Do not trust AI or ChatGPT-5 to do the most basic things like labeling a picture of the hydrologic cycle. Here's what it gave me. (Evaporation arrow pointing into the ground. Both surface water and the "ocean" labels underground. Transpiration arrow coming from the #water surface, not plants...]
Trump: the first president to bring both guilt and gilt to the White House.
Trump: the first president to bring both guilt and gilt to the White House.
Every new photo from the Oval Office redefines "sleazy," "gaudy," "tacky," and "garish."
The Confederate States always hoped they could occupy Washington D.C. Now Trump is making it happen. Also, Ohio (wtf). thehill.com/homenews/sta...
If Sam Altman and the AI industry's vision for the future requires data centers everywhere operated by fusion power plants, it's not a vision. It's a hallucinatory fantasy. interestingengineering.com/culture/sam-...
"Castle"
I hope it's clear to everyone that if Trump had been president in 1941, Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man in the High Tower" would be fact, not fiction, with the Nazis in control of the East Coast and the Japanese in control of the West Coast.
Ooof.
The White House is mobilizing red state military forces to occupy a Democratic stronghold and let me tell you: No one has ever pretended something isn't happening harder than Democratic leaders are pretending this isn't happening right now.
I found a quote from Abraham Lincoln but simply couldn't find where it was from. So I asked an AI for the attribution. It named a speech, but I looked and it wasn't there. Then 3 different Lincoln letters it wasn't in. Then an address to Congress it wasn't in. Turns out Lincoln never said it.
Hurricane Erin went from Category 1 to Category 4 in 15 hours Y'all. That's well beyond our definition of rapid intensification. My update on the hurricane. It may not be done strengthening yet. Where is it going and how strong will it get? www.forbes.com/sites/marsha... --
Trump and America got nothing from Putin. But the question is what did Putin get from Trump? Do we know?
Fossil fuel companies
I just don't understand the basic idea that Trump and Putin can EVER come to any kind of "peace" deal that doesn't include Ukraine's agreement. Why is the media acting as though this makes sense?
Do not trust AI or ChatGPT-5 to do the most basic things like labeling a picture of the hydrologic cycle. Here's what it gave me. (Evaporation arrow pointing into the ground. Both surface water and the "ocean" labels underground. Transpiration arrow coming from the #water surface, not plants...]
Tomorrow we should all buy #sandwiches as an act of rebellion.