Bob Kopp

@bobkopp.net

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#Climate & sea level science + policy. Rutgers University. All views my own. www.bobkopp.net

President Trump has jumped into the fray over a hotly contested chapter on climate science in a reference manual for judges. Hours after attending the World Cup final on Sunday, the president took to Truth Social to attack the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine over the manual, which was released last year and has drawn criticism from Republican officials. The chapter in question provides an overview of climate science, including how carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in the atmosphere, and how human activity has disturbed that natural cycle. The authors noted that science is always evolving but characterized the United Nations's scientific body, which has said the burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change, as an authoritative source. The reference manual was partly funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the National Academies of Sciences, and the president wrote in his post that he was ordering officials to scrutinize the funding. "Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it," Mr. Trump wrote.
A screenshot from reported USGCRP director Matthew Wieliki's X feed, askiing "What do you want to see in the Sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA6)?"
From NYT: Language deficits in people with severe autism, Ms. Mukhopadhyay theorized, were a motor problem, not a cognitive one. Having a partner hold the letter board, she argued, provided motor support and steadied the dysregulation and sensory overload so common in people with autism, allowing them to communicate. Many autism experts dispute Ms. Mukhopadhyay's motor theory. They point to data estimating that more than a third of autistic children are considered intellectually disabled. And they question how nonspeakers, many of whom weren't taught to read and write at school, could know how to spell in the first place.
Crossbars on: When it comes to deciding which proposals for scientific research get federal funding, which of the following comes closer to your view, even if neither is exactly right? Decisions should be made by panels of scientists and experts based on scientific merit - research funding is too important to leave to political considerations. Decisions should be made by the president's team - elected leaders should direct how taxpayer money is spent on research.
From NYT: When Shatira Monique entered her 19th floor apartment in Jamaica on Wednesday afternoon, it was like opening a door to an oven. A wall of heat blasted her and her 4-year-old daughter, Journee. Ms. Monique, 31, who is not working, said she did not realize her central air bill was not included in her rent, and the utility had been shut off the day before. She gave Journee an ice pop.
The purpose of the stabilization wedges paper was narrow and simple - we wanted to stop the Bush administration from what we saw as a strategy to stall action on global warming by claiming that we lacked the technology to tackle it. The Secretary of Energy at the time used to give a speech saying that we needed a discovery as fundamental as the discovery of electricity by Faraday in the 19th century.
The McKinsey global greenhouse gas abatement cost curve, 2010 edition
The authors thank J. Greenblatt, R. Hotinski, and R. Williams at Princeton; K. Keller at Penn State; and C. Mottershead at BP. This paper is a product of the rbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) of the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University. CMI (www.princeton.edu/~cmi) is sponsored by BP and Ford.
Greenpeace 2008: Renewable energy could more than double its share of the world's energy supply - reaching up to 30% by 2030. All that is lacking is the political will to promote its large scale deployment in all sectors at a global level, coupled with far reaching energy efficiency measures. By 2030 about half of global electricity could come from renewable energies. The future of renewable energy development will strongly depend on political choices made by both individual governments and the international community. At the same time strict technical standards will ensure that only the most efficient fridges, heating systems, computers and vehicles will be on sale. Consumers have a right to buy products that don't increase their energy bills and won't destroy the climate. In this report we have also expanded the time horizon for the Energy [Revolution concept beyond 2050, to see when we could phase out fossil fuels entirely. Once the pathway of this scenario has been implemented, renewable energy could provide all global energy needs by 2090. A more radical scenario - which takes the advanced projections of the renewables industry into account - could even phase out coal by 2050. Dangerous climate change might force us to accelerate the development of renewables faster. We believe that this would be possible, but to achieve it more resources must go into research and development. Climate change and scarcity of fossil fuel resources puts our world as we know it at risk; we must start to think the unthinkable. To tap into the fast potential for renewables and to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible are amongst the most pressing tasks for the next generation of engineers and scientists.
Greenpeace’s 2008 reference and energy revolution scenarios, which halved global fossil energy use from 2005 to 2050
Attendees of the AGU Chapman conference on updating usable projections of future sea level, on the steps of the Musee Redpath, McGill University.
Google query: how many days of the week have a cat in them Google AI answer: Only 1 day of the week has the word "cat" in it: • Saturday (scater?) — wait, actually no! Only Saturday contains the exact letter sequence c-a-t (S-a-c-a-t-u-r-d-a-y). Would you like to hear a cat joke, or is there another riddle or pet topic I can help you with?
The reference scenarios employed in the U.S. government analysis may not reflect the most likely human responses to climate change. In keeping with the standard definition of a reference scenario, they were calculated for worlds that neither experience climate change impacts nor implement any mitigation policy. Keeping policy (or the lack thereof) constant, these scenarios were then used to calculate the damages to the global economy resulting from climate change - thereby assuming that human civilization would choose to suffer and to adapt to climate change, but never to mitigate. In reality, even a highly myopic society would likely undertake some mitigation efforts once the effects of climate change became sufficiently apparent and severe. More plausible alternative reference scenarios - ones reflecting the probable human response in the absence of significant near-term mitigation - might reflect an "overshoot and panic" response (Figure 2). "Overshoot and panic" scenarios can be characterized by the degree of warming sufficient to trigger a 'panic' reaction, the level of warming at which society will aim once it panics, and the timescale over which it seeks to achieve this level of warming. For a probabilistic SCC calculation, all three of these parameters could be treated as random variables. Alternatively, assuming that society overcomes barriers to efficient behavior once it starts to panic, the latter two could be calculated through a cost-benefit optimization. In addition to being potentially more realistic, these scenarios differ in another important way from the approach adopted in the U.S. government analysis: assuming that "panic' begins at moderate levels of warming (e.g., 2-4°C), they reduce the contribution to the SCC of highly uncertain economic damages triggered by extreme warming.
Ungerman: When events like that one happen often enough, people lose confidence in institutional authority. There goes "the science," or "the church," or "the official story." Demonology, astrology or conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile cabals ruling the world fill the gap. The result of all of those conditions is that life has begun to feel governed by forces beyond our understanding, by knowledge that is unverifiable and by authority that is distant and suspect. It is, in a word, beginning to feel medieval. UN
Carl Sagan (1996): “I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
point. Because motions to impeach are privileged, any House member can call up such a resolution and the speaker must promptly schedule a time to consider it. This would give House Democrats an opportunity to outline the case against Vought in a public forum - and force House Republicans to go on record in support of the OMB's onslaught against the public good. The purpose of such maneuvers is to shed as much light as possible on Vought's power grab and make lawmakers pick a side: the people or the man who is single-handedly eviscerating Congress' power of the purse with devastating effects.
There are important reasons to model long-term climate system dynamics beyond the end of the century, which serves the needs of communities studying long-term impacts and (ir)reversibilities over multi-century time scales (e.g., ice sheet, sea level rise, and species extinction researchers). The period after 2100 AD is covered by long-term extensions of emissions and land use to 2500 AD based on simple extension narratives and harmonization logic (See Sect. 4). We recognize that the period up to the end of the century, traditionally covered by future scenarios, becomes significantly shorter with every new phase of CMIP. Future phases will see lAM-based scenarios reach beyond 2100, but that technical development was not possible within the current timeline. Rather, for this iteration of ScenarioMIP, we request that the ESM models run all scenarios at least to 2150 AD, using the 2100-2150 AD forcing from the extension protocol (see Sect. 4). In addition, teams are also requested to run at least two long-term extensions up to 2500 (preferably H-ext and VL-ext).
A roulette wheel showing about a 15% probability of warming exceeding 4.5 C.
ABUSES OF POWER F ive days after our exchange, Kopp and 15 of his colleagues demanded that the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering retract the Voortman study. They wrote that the Journal's reviewers "failed to recognize the context of this manuscript and the breadth of the existing literature, resulting in at best a superficial review. Upon close examination, we believe the paper contains fatal methodological flaws that compromise the validity of its conclusions and merit retraction." But anyone who understands what I explained above will understand what they are doing. They say that Voortman "stands in contrast both to other studies conducting Similar tide-gauge analyses." Note the language. They don't say that other studies disprove Voortman; they say it "stands in contrast." Nor do they say the studies did the same tide-gauge analysis; they say "similar tide-gauge analyses."
Bart Simpson writing on chalkboard, “GDP is not a measure of welfare”
But this is a place where, to go back to something I was saying at the beginning of the conversation, I see a big difference between having a vision and not. The big bywords of the era right now are "energy affordability." We're all talking about affordability, and I also think energy should be affordable and people should be able to afford it. That is not, I think, a forward-looking vision of this. I want to see clean energy abundance described. I want to see a political party that actually has a vision of a world in which we have more energy and the fruits of that energy available to us, available to people in poorer countries — that is able to describe why it wants that and how it's going to achieve it. We're at the intersection of a few things that people will come to believe have failed. Climate politics has proved very hard, and one reason it has proved hard is that over a long period of time, endlessly trying to motivate neonle to avoid a disaster that thev
Raulston says he wants to expand the research. As an example, he said a government could turn to a prediction market to estimate how much the sea level could rise in a particular region. They could invite a range of research teams to participate in the market and make infrastructure decisions based on the outcomes of that market - rather than paying for one expert. Prediction markets could also be "a new type of scientific institution for aggregating expertise," Raulston said. "If the primary output of the research is a forecast, we'd argue this is a better way to aggregate that information and summarize that information in a more timely fashion," he said. "Because you don't have to wait for the possible years it takes to review a paper."
From Armstrong McKay et al 2022: Fig. 2. Our global warming threshold estimates for global core and regional impact climate tipping elements. Tipping elements (A) relative to IPCC SSP projections and likely future scenarios given current policies and targets (B) and how many thresholds may be crossed per Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) projection (C). Bars in (A) show the minimum (base, yellow), central (line, red), and maximum (top, dark red) threshold estimates for each element (bold font, global core; regular font, regional impact), with a paleorecord of GMST over the past ~25 ky (95) and projections of future climate change (green, SSP1-1.9; yellow, SSP1-2.6; orange, SSP2-4.5; red, SSP3-7.0; purple, SSP5-8.5) from IPCC AR6 (23) shown for context. Future projections are shown in more detail in (B) along with estimated 21st century warming trajectories for current and net-zero policies (gray bars, extending into (A); horizontal lines show central estimates, bar height the uncertainty ranges) as of November 2021 (96) versus the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C (green bar). The number of thresholds potentially passed in the coming decades depending on SSP trajectory in (C) is shown per decade (bars) and cumulatively (lines).
The 19-point gap between Puerto Rico (51%) and DC (32%) statehood is likely largely attributable to the perceived electoral consequences of each new state. Washington, D.C. voted 90% for Kamala Harris in 2024, while Puerto Rico has a genuinely competitive political system with a Republican-affiliated governor, Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon. Puerto Rico has also moved closer to statehood on its own terms: voters on the island have endorsed it in multiple referenda, most recently in 2020 and 2024, giving the proposal a democratic mandate that also fits the official process of territories becoming states. That combination of bipartisan plausibility and bottom-up momentum makes it a much easier sell to mainland voters.
US academic freedom index, declining from 0.91 in 2018 to 0.40 in 2025
Academic freedom index in the UK, showing a decline from 0.93 in 2016 to 0.63 in 2025
Lofgren worries Trump will "fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him." But Stassun believes it doesn't matter whether Trump restocks the board or leaves its positions unfilled. As proof, he points to the increasingly awkward conversations in the last year between the board and NSF's top two officials: Brian Stone, Panchanathan's former chief of staff and now designated NSF head, and Micah Cheatham, its chief management officer. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?'» Stassun says. "And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'"
US authors attending the IPCC working group 1 lead author meeting in Santiago, Chile
Position Description: Harvard Divinity School (HDS) invites applications and nominations to fill an open-rank professorship in Religion, Business Ethics, and the Economic Order. This professorship aims to promote the study of the mutual influences of religion, business, and economics, attentive to ways that religion shapes, guides, and challenges practices of production, exchange, and distribution. We welcome applications from scholars who approach these questions historically, sociologically, environmentally, ethically, and/or conceptually, with attention to any of the geographical areas, cultures, and religious traditions of the world.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Earthrise from Artemis 2
Meanwhile, you could channel your outrage into organized political action rather than an individual ethical choice by joining and supporting climate or labor advocacy groups that are thoughtfully working on the issue. If you're morally against A.I., you owe yourself and the people in your community more than just a private protest.
The agreement includes $8,750,000,000 for the National Science Foundation (NSF). The agreement includes $7.176,500,000 for Research and Related Activities (R&RA). In developing the spending plan and allocating funds, the agreement directs NSF to equitably distribute funding to support all basic research directorates within R&RA, as well as the Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate. No directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level.
DOE Office of Science budget: The Budget would: • Stop wasting Biological and Environmental Research resources on climate change and focus funding on advancing biotechnology and AI-enabled earth-energy system modeling to support the Energy Dominance agenda.
NYTimes front page — above the fold photo is a family in San Antonio burning furniture to stay warm during winter storm Uri. Headline is about drinkable water running out. Below the fold photo, cheers at Mission Control as Perseverance rover lands on Mars.
“Before the housing bill could become law, though, it would have to clear the House again, or advance through a conference committee, a temporary and unusual method used to resolve differences on legislation between the chambers.”
What Is Being Done About Climate Change? The United States and other countries are taking steps to limit or reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These steps include using energy more efficiently and using more clean energy. Clean energy is energy that puts less or no greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The sun, wind and water are sources of clean energy. Many nations, states and communities are planning for climate change impacts that may be unavoidable. For example, some coastal areas are planning for flooding and land loss that may result from rising sea levels. Another way to help is by learning about Earth and its climate. The more you know about how Earth's climate works, the more you'll be able to help solve problems related to climate change. What Can You Do to Help? You can help by using less energy and water. For example, turn off lights and TVs when you leave a room. And turn off the water when brushing your teeth. You can help by planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
EWR: “Due to the federal funding lapse, security wait times may be significantly longer than normal. Wait times are subject to rapid change based on passenger volumes and TSA staffing. For these reasons, wait time reporting has been temporarily suspended. Please allow for significantly more time and check with your airline for the current status of your flight.”
“But OMB, which has been directing NSF on its actions with NCAR, will make the final call on this and other ideas.”
Adjusted NASA GMST vs year
Figure SPM.4: Subset of assessed climate outcomes and associated global and regional climate risks. The burning embers result from a literature based expert elicitation.
B.4.5 Climate change risks to cities, settlements and key infrastructure will rise rapidly in the mid- and long-term with further global warming, especially in places already exposed to high temperatures, along coastlines, or with high vulnerabilities (high confidence). Globally, population change in low-lying cities and settlements will lead to approximately a billion people projected to be at risk from coastal-specific climate hazards in the mid-term under all scenarios, including in Small Islands (high confidence). The population potentially exposed to a 100-year coastal flood is projected to increase by about 20% if global mean sea level rises by 0.15 m relative to 2020 levels; this exposed population doubles at a 0.75 m rise in mean sea level and triples at 1.4 m without population change and additional adaptation (medium confidence). Sea level rise poses an existential threat for some Small Islands and some low-lying coasts (medium confidence). By 2100 the value of global assets within the future 1-in-100 year coastal floodplains is projected to be between US$7.9 and US$12.7 trillion (2011 value) under RCP4.5, rising to between US$8.8 and US$14.2 trillion under RCP8.5 (medium confidence). Costs for maintenance and reconstruction of urban infrastructure, including building, transportation, and energy will increase with global warming level (medium confidence), the associated functional disruptions are projected to be substantial particularly for cities, settlements and infrastructure located on permafrost in cold regions and on coasts (high confidence). {6.2, 9.9, 10.4, 13.6, 13.10,15.3,16.5, CCP2.1, CCP2.2, CCP5.3, CCР6.2, CC
Probabilistic snow forecast from 2/20, through 2/23 7am.
2/20 forecast, presented as probabilities of exceedance
How much snow to expect (2/20 forecast)
Approximate probability density functions based on NYT plots of snow likelihood
Original NYT plot of projections, from Feb. 20
Waterfall-style bar chart, with bars aligned so that it is easy to identify the median
Snow forecast as of morning Feb 22
New York Times presentation of NWS probabilistic snow forecast for New Brunswick, NJ
New York Times figure showing likelihood of different levels of snowfall in New Brunswick, NJ. Bin widths are 0.1 in, 0.9 in, 1 in, 2 in, 2 in, 2 in, 4 in, 6 in and an open-ended bin. On a per inch basis, the mode is less than 1 in, but the 2-4 in peak is the same height as the 0.1-1in bin, and the 8-12 in bin is a bit more than twice the height of the 4-6 and 6-8 in bins. The open-ended >18 in bin is taller than the 12-18 in bin, which is almost the same height as the 1-2 and 8-12 in bins.
So far, only two of the usual group of Republican holdouts to Mr. Trump's agenda - Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky…
2024 presidential election results for Mecklenburg Co, NC (home to Charlotte). D+32
The EPA has considered these comments and, in this final action, is not finalizing the alternative climate science rationale and is not finalizing new findings by the Administrator with respect to global climate change concerns under CAA section 202(a)(1). The EPA does not rely on any specific critique of climate science as a necessary justification for this action. Given our conclusion that we lack legal authority to regulate in response to global climate change concerns under CAA section 202(a)(1), it would be unnecessary and inappropriate to resolve such questions in this regulatory context. The EPA includes this section to summarize major scientific themes commenters raised and to acknowledge that scientific research and debate about climate change will continue. This discussion does not endorse or reject any particular assessment, study, or comment letter in the docket with respect to assertions regarding global climate change science and has limited its responses to the bases being finalized in this final action. The EPA’s conclusion in this final action is limited to the legal determination that CAA section 202(a) does not provide the authority to regulate GHG emissions from new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines for the purpose of addressing global climate change concerns, irrespective of how ongoing scientific debates are ultimately resolved.
Figure 2B from Ripple et al 2026. Caption: Tipping point threshold temperature estimates are shown with black dots; floating bars indicate lower and upper estimates. Note that the estimated tipping threshold of 1.2°C for low-latitude coral reefs has likely already been crossed.3 The dashed purple vertical line indicates 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels; a sustained global average temperature at this level is likely in the near future.2 Tipping point thresholds are adapted from Armstrong McKay et al.13 with updates from Lenton et al.3 Tipping impacts and timescales vary greatly. In some cases, effects on global temperatures may be uncertain or negligible (gray bars). Note that overlap can occur among feedbacks and/or tipping points, so their effects are not necessarily independent. See supplemental methods for further details, including data sources.
Our discussion will also confirm why we need to be working so hard to rein in ICE; stop the violence and the lawlessness; to force DHS to focus on criminals and leave the rest of us alone; and to block the expansion of these inhumane and dangerous detention centers. Keep working hard all. We are having the big fight about ICE we all wanted to have. Now, we need to win it, together - Simon
The U.S. share of global greenhouse gas emissions has been trending downward since the end of World War II, and the 2009 policy change didn't meaningfully alter its trajectory. The recent decline has been driven by the embrace of natural gas and renewables, which lower electricity prices when adopted for economic reasons rather than because of government mandates. Despite the obsession with gas-powered vehicles, light and medium-duty cars and trucks combined to generate just 1.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. EPA's Endangerment Finding had little effect on U.S. contribution to climate change
Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963 to regulate local pollution around the country, and regulators did that for decades. Then, in 2009, the EPA decided it would treat greenhouse gases like other pollutants, despite their damage being global rather than local.
On the one hand, it has produced great upheavals and losses for US science. Many universities experienced some degree of federal funding cuts for research; public, government, and private programs for building the scientific workforce were slashed or eliminated; the reimbursement of overhead costs in government grants for research (indirect costs) was threatened; and immigration for international students was curtailed. Yet for all of that, things now are better than might have been expected a year ago. Just last month, congressional budget bills for science had their funding restored from the Trump administration's original draconian cuts; legal challenges attempting to change indirect cost regulations were unsuccessful; and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation disbursed all the funds they had appropriated in 2025 to universities and research institutions before the money ex-pired. Both sides of this paradox are true, and it's difficult to understand the current moment of negative actions coexisting with positive headway without considering them both together.
FT showing spare grid capacity in the PJM region vs data center demand. Data center demand grows steadily and is projected to exceed spare capacity after 2026.