Peter Jacobs
@past_is_future
Followers
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researching Pliocene and future climate and hoping to keep the former from becoming the latter.
Washington, DC
Joined October 2015
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Pinned Tweet
No matter how awful the news gets today, we had some perfect moments.
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Computer, show me a metaphor for the futility of solving climate change through personal lifestyle changes.
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How is Tony Hawk trending and people aren't including his best tweet- one of the top 10 tweets on this hellsite of all time?
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Early days of the Biden presidency & so far the NY Times has written a piece about his peleton bike, watch, & fired an editor at the behest of a right wing outrage machine for expressing emotion at a peaceful transition of power after an insurrection.
Make of it what you will.
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We should tell people that available evidence indicates SARS-CoV-2 was a mundane zoonosis, that after four years there's zero evidence it was engineered or was inside a lab prior to its discovery in December 2019, and that Lab Leaker claims are overwhelmingly wrong & conspiracist
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Respectfully, if your take on what's happening right now with NOAA/NWS is that it's a wearisome rehashing of tweets and we should move on, you have no idea what the stakes actually are and you should probably sit this one out.
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Nate doesn't understand this topic at all. he mainlines abject nonsense from weird conspiracist dorks who routinely spout scientifically illiterate idiocy. He beclowned himself on this topic so many times it became a running joke to his own employees who had science backgrounds.
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not only did he not actually read the paper, he very clearly didn't read through all the leaked personal messages he's citing here (which show the move away from believing lab scenarios were plausible), & instead is just regurgitating the weird conspiracist dorks' spin about them
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Absolutely unreal watching professional pundit after professional pundit in the ostensibly liberal media talk about how the illegal actions tonight will appeal to voters as theater *as though the fact that they can influence the public isn't one of the reasons they're crimes*.
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@mbsocol
@RobertWargas
I actually got footage of a BLM Antifa supersoldier in the act of vandalizing the White House, may God have mercy on our souls.
WHY WON'T THE LIEBRAL MEDIA TALK ABOUT THIS???
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Chait, Silver, Yglesias et al. need this to be about meta-punditry because the actual domain experts doing science on the origin of the pandemic have looked at the evidence and say it looks zoonotic.
@diannaeanderson
Apparently I believe in obfuscating science, which is why I spent three weeks looking into this and interviewing virologists
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@ClimateHuman
@bhaviklathia
I think people choosing to live their values is super admirable, and I certainly try to do my part. It's only when demands to change lifestyles detract from or compete with the actual necessity of overhauling the global economy to be low carbon that it becomes a problem.
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If you're an environmentalist who is characterizing the current pandemic as some sort of positive or nature's self defense against people: A. you're wrong; B. you're gross; C. please unfollow me right the fuck now.
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@aaronhuertas
Aaron, I heard if you make an NFT of the words "viable candidates at the top of the ticket" for this party, the NFTs would be superior to actually fielding good candidates because when the flesh & blood politicians who'd be drawn to this party flame out, you still have the NFTs.
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Murray died of black lung, after spending years working to thwart regulations to protect miners from it.
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“It got warmer during the Permian-Triassic? You don’t say. Because of a geologically rapid increase in CO2, huh? And all life nearly died? Hmm. Well yes of course that assuages all concerns I had about our present greenhouse gas emissions. Silly me!”
@KHayhoe
I’m endlessly amused by the idea that paleoclimatology would pose a major embarrassment to climate scientists if they only knew about it
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There is in fact *no* evidence SARS-CoV-2 was ever inside a lab, let alone engineered in one, prior to the late 2019 outbreak. 4.5 years on, the balance of extant evidence indicates it was a mundane zoonosis at or just upstream of Huanan market. Wishing otherwise won't make it so
Pretty much every new revelation strengthens the case for a
#COVID19
research related origin in Wuhan. It’s time for the scientific community and all major media to make clear that this is now the leading and most plausible hypothesis.
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I don't endorse running more celebrities and rich people for President, but at least Oprah: a) legit came from a humble background to become hugely successful, b) is an actual rather than pretend billionaire, and c) would staff the White House with 100% fewer white nationalists.
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🚨BREAKING🚨
Earlier this year, scientists made headline news around the world tracing the medieval "Black Death" pandemic to a zoonotic spillover likely originating from marmots and their ectoparasites, in or around the Tian Shan region of central Asia.
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"In My Defense, It Was Really Good Lotion: The Scott Pruitt Story"
Scott Pruitt is a good friend and a very good man, caricatured by left and MSM. I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took. He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable.
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Isaac Chotiner please interview Nate Silver about his conviction that respected international scientists have perpetrated the greatest scientific hoax in modern history against the world, to hide their culpability for creating the pandemic (aided by powerful government officials)
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It is absolutely INSANE that Alina Chan and the NYT Opinion team are claiming this as evidence for a lab origin for the pandemic when it has been thoroughly discredited for years.
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When people talk about a 2-2.5C world positively, as "achievable", "not extreme", good news, etc. It'd be nice if they plainly stated this would be effectively signing the death warrants of coral reefs, the Greenland Ice Sheet, etc. What they're talking about is not moderate.
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if anyone is curious about what extraordinary evidence led the FBI to claim that SARS-CoV-2 likely wasn't a natural spillover like pretty much every other pandemic, prepare to have your minds blown by this rock solid investigation:
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there's probably a less honest way to make a living. but this has gotta be up there.
Have you pre-ordered your copy False Alarm?
False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about
#climatechange
is wrong - and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.
Pre-order now:
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If anyone is interested in what the scientific understanding is (rather than public opinion), our best estimate for how much of the observed warming is due to human activity is actually... all of it
46% of U.S. adults say human activity contributes a great deal to climate change, while 29% say it contributes some. 24% say human activities contribute not too much or not at all to climate change.
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The only thing surprising about watching Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, et al. turn into caricatures of the sort of vapid media take havers they all got rich mocking & presenting themselves as an alternative to has been how quickly it happened.
If this is the new normal (where you go through an incredibly fraught decision process to determine whether it's OK to meet a friend you haven't seen in 2 years for coffee) then it's no wonder the vast majority of people prefer the old normal.
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We are at a genuine inflection point. Science tells us that many risks of warming are worse than we thought just a decade ago. But solutions are far cheaper than expected as well. We have a real chance to dramatically limit warming if we can be smart enough to seize it. Will we?
This is stunning: the IEA World Energy Outlook has 2020 Chinese solar PV prices cheaper than Integrated Assessment Models projected they would be in 2050.
Data from Krey et al 2019:
(h/t
@mammuthus
)
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@IwriteOK
Did she really have to dump on him like that? I have poo pooed Crenshaw in the past as well but this might be taking it 2 far. I know she really gives a crap, but still.
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if you replace "Proximal Origins" (Andersen et al. 2020) with "Hockey Stick" (Mann et al. 1998/1999), this is copy&paste exactly the same crank dipshíttery that weird climate denial conspiracy dorks shrieked about after quote-mining climate scientists' private correspondence 👇
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I have never seen so many adults trying so hard to prove that they're too cool for a female pop star and I swear to god it's infinitely more cringey than the actual fandom.
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Carl Sagan died on this day in 1996, having been denied tenure, denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and disparaged by his peers. He was a scientist with a big heart and a big imagination. He was not a saint or a martyr, he was just a person. As are we all.
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this site has turned into an absolute cesspit of anti-science nutbuggery fueled by these paid bluecheck weird conspiracist dorks
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their assessment is: "sure there's absolutely no indication that WIV or any other lab had SARS-CoV-2 or its progenitor, let alone that anyone in a lab got infected with it. but it sure would be scary if they did!!!"
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@jonatanpallesen
@whstancil
The total known genetic diversity of early lineages of a novel virus was found inside a market w/susceptible animal hosts, around which early cases cluster. That very market was identified years prior as a spillover risk bc a related virus emerged this way. A real headscratcher!
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Holocene infrastructure, Pliocene sea levels
give me a horror story from your specialty in five words or less
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Some ways to identify 🔍 conspiracy theorists: often not actually domain experts ☑; smear genuine experts as corrupt ☑; claim to have evidence that is being gatekept/censored ☑; argue mutually inconsistent lines of "evidence" for the conspiracy ☑; immune to falsification ☑
The one thing that has stayed constant over the past 2 years is natural origin proponents (scientists and journalists) accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist and spreading misinformation despite their own views slowly evolving over time to meet my stance.
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there are grown ass men making a living off of "if they came for Aunt Jemima, they'll come for you next" scaremongering if you want to know where the balance of power sits in our society
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Spend trillions of dollars trying to survive on a different planet totally inhospitable to life & falling for pseudoscientific nonsense about uploading your brain to computers vs. paying a bit more tax to improve regular people's lives on the only hospitable planet we have 🤔🤷🤡
@wapodavenport
My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness
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the most frustrating thing about conspiracy dipshittery & pseudoscience, beyond the real world harm it causes of course, is how it diverts attention and effort away from genuine empirical efforts to interrogate & potentially challenge prevailing viewpoints.
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*walks into stratigraphers meeting*
“MUCH OF YOUR RESISTANCE TO ADOPTING THE ANTHROPOCENE IS THAT IT FORCES YOU TO ADMIT THAT THE HOLOCENE IS JUST A PLEISTOCENE INTERGLACIAL AND YOU COWARDS WILL NEVER PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY. YALL ARE STILL CLINGING TO THE TERM QUATERNARY FFS”
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The single biggest impediment to ending the mainstreaming of "Lab Leak" conspiracy theories is that people in media, politics, and occasionally science routinely fail to distinguish between the hypothetical possibility of a lab related origin & specific concrete Lab Leaker claims
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a Holocene climate
What's been discontinued or cancelled in your lifetime that you wish would make a comeback?
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@LizMair
@MattOrtega
@kombiz
I say this as someone who follows you and enjoys many of your comments: no. It's ludicrous to pretend that words carry the same societal weight across all contexts. Unless there has been a centuries long campaign to dehumanize your daughter by comparing her to apes, not the same.
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To my fellow graduate students who are worried about speaking up against legislation that will ruin you financially bc you're worried about seeming "political": there is no upside to your silence.
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This is "The Good Anthropocene" ecomodernists love to brag about.
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fellas, is it suss to like... know stuff about China?
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@sciam
is devoting its whole March issue to COVID-19, and I am proud to have co-written a piece with virologist
@stuartjdneil
& conspiracism expert
@STWorg
about why conspiracy theories around SARS-CoV-2's origins are hindering science. A few quick points!
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I'd long been deeply suspicious of the take "it would take another Katrina/a climate 9/11" to get people to act on climate.
The ability of half the country to not only shrug off the mass death toll of COVID but to turn it against the scientific community has put that to rest.
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is there a specific name for this sort of "all the genuine experts agree with me — ah well, nevertheless" dynamic?
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If you were worried that climate contrarians wouldn't do something abhorrently gross like try to blame COVID-19 deaths on health organizations and climate concern, rest assured they absolutely are 👇
The
@WHO
failed to prepare the world for a pandemic, spending the years since the Sars and ebola alarms talking more about climate change, obesity and tobacco:
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Preemptively tapping the sign:
The single biggest impediment to ending the mainstreaming of "Lab Leak" conspiracy theories is that people in media, politics, and occasionally science routinely fail to distinguish between the hypothetical possibility of a lab related origin & specific concrete Lab Leaker claims
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god this is so dumb. the media has learned NOTHING since climate contrarians spun them- it’s beat for beat the same playbook. “internet sleuths” making mountains out of molehills & using multiple mutually exclusive arguments to attack the mainstream scientific view, etc.
Another significant cache of documents related to coronavirus work at Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth has just been unearthed—again, by the same group of internet sleuths. Regardless of what you think of the content, this pattern is troubling.
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Obviously the attempted subversion of Democracy on Jan 6th and intentional mishandling of national secrets should be of the highest concern, but placing idiotic partisan hacks like Grenell, Ratcliffe, Pompeo et al in intelligence leadership roles remains an underrated scandal IMO
What a vicious lie.
I doubt anyone buys it unless they really want to, but just in case…
There’s nothing that US military equipment would do to help Hawaiians suffering from wildfires.
They’re not trade-offs. America can, and should, do both. Cutting one wouldn’t help the other.
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10 years ago today
@curryja
& Wyatt claim in a press release, "[T]he current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s... This prediction is in contrast to the recently released IPCC AR5 Report that projects an imminent resumption of the warming"
Happy Anniversary! 🥂
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I swear to christ if you tweet "haha maybe it's not a good idea to punch yourself in the dick right" and the tweet does numbers you'll get 50 dudes replying punching your own junk is Good, Actually & another 20 QTing you "can you believe this asshole doesn't punch his own dick?'
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all of these things can be true:
- a hypothetical lab related origin for SC2 wasn't axiomatically conspiracist
- extant evidence overwhelmingly supports zoonotic spillover
- Lab Leaker rhetoric overwhelmingly was & is weird conspiracist dork nonsense at odds with extant evidence
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even if it might not be as exciting in the moment as showing everyone he's the cleverest little boy in the room.
I wonder, quite a bit these days, how much different might Twitter and academia and Big Science be if they weren't so full of the cleverest little boys in the room?
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This is a guy who believes he became a self-taught 'virology expert' at the age of 74 in just a few months. He testified as an expert witness for Republicans in Congress on SARS-CoV-2 origins & moderated a SC2 origins panel for anti-China wackjobs within AVC/State. Simply unreal.
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the current meta-punditry whining about supposedly unfair suppression of Lab Leaker claims conspicuously avoids the reality that this is actually the type of rhetoric that was being pushed back against. There was no sober, non-engineering/non-bioweapon discussion being stifled.
Really disappointing & dangerous rhetoric from some one on the Senate Homeland Sec & Gov Affairs Committee- Event 201 was a pandemic prep exercise w/experts dedicated to strengthening global health security. The disinfo around biodefense/pandemic prep does us all a disservice.
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imagine being this ignorant of so many scientific disciplines at the same time and yet getting celebrated as some sort of visionary
If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants & animals die out on Earth, but are still alive on Mars
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Girl my love for you is like the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming: overwhelming.
#ClimateChangeValentines
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how is it even legal for scientists to revise their views with the accumulation of more evidence?????
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This is the leader of the ostensibly serious, ostensibly non-conspiracist, ostensibly science-focused Lab Leak. Bargain bin crank nonsense, completely untethered to consilience of evidence and anything approaching scientific rigor. It's top to bottom weird conspiracy dork idiocy.
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When I was little, I was often "the cleverest little boy in the room". Now that doesn't mean I was the smartest kid in the room, far from it. It means I was clever, people told me I was clever, and I made damn sure other people knew I was clever: answering before others, cracking
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Ladies, if he:
-doesn’t answer your texts
-won’t snap you back
-can't handle you getting salty
-can be crusty AF
-frequently plays it cool
-is spineless
-coils exclusively to the left
-is a protist
he's not your man, he's the foraminifera Neogloboquadrina pachyderma sinistral.
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it is absolutely true both that:
A) empirical questions should be rigorously interrogated, with our current understanding constantly refined in light of consilience of extant evidence
B) weird dorks pretending their crank conspiracism & pseudoscience are A should be called out
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prestige media will always be befuddled by things like a coal profiteering Senator from a coal producing state duplicitously blocking climate action, bc US political reporting eschews power analysis & practical consequences of politicians' positions in favor of theater criticism
“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.”
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I am not a virologist or epidemiologist. I listen to them & they have pointed out numerous errors in the NYT piece. However I am incredibly familiar with how pseudoscience & conspiracy theory pushers argue after dealing with hordes of them on climate, and it's the same dynamics.
lab leak is all about keeping zombie talking points alive well after they have been dead for years. sounds familiar to anyone who follows antivax?
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Can I rant a little bit about the misogyny in the way a lot of self-important climate "skeptics"/critics treat female climate scientists? 1/
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About 99% of the local "cryptids", "monsters", or "aliens" from Appalachia / the Mid-Atlantic are... just like obviously owls, man?
And 99% of the 1% that aren't are clearly just bears (sometimes with mange)?
on this day in 1952, the Flatwoods Monster was spotted for the first time
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the number of people saying "if you're vaccinated, what does it matter if unvaccinated people lie about it and continue to catch and spread COVID, you'll be fine" as though children, the immunocompromised, and the evolution of new variants don't exist is just ENRAGING.
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Alina Chan is lying. Again. What she's describing is not only something that didn't happen, it's not possible as described. The putative source this claim is based on already acknowledged that the version in Vanity Fair was untrue and Alina already knows this.
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"Scientists who don't embrace [mainstream scientific conclusion] can't get funding, which is why more don't publicly embrace [crank nonsense]" is a common claim across weird dork conspiracism about any number of topics.
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Alina Chan is simply a bad faith liar. People are understandably very reluctant to accuse any early career of something like this.
But it's a sad reality. No one is forcing her to do stuff like this.
AC: "this paper claiming certainty in the absence of data"
The actual paper:
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Accusing Katharine Hayhoe of all people of "making a successful career out of divisiveness" is so absurd it's almost easy to ignore how demeaning and insulting it is to her work both in science and its communication. Just inexcusable.
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Rush Limbaugh's favorite climate contrarian Roy Spencer says Alabama isn't heating up. This is quite an interesting claim! 🤨 Is Alabama not actually warming? 🤔 Let's take a look! 🧐 A brief thread 🤓 (and only one more emoji, I swear):
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In a different universe, I would be consumed with jealousy that
@DrKateMarvel
is both such an amazing scientist *and* such a devastingly good writer. But in this universe, I'm just deeply grateful we have her working on this issue.
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The politics of the status quo is still politics. Scientists, when you look back on your life, you will not regret being chided for "advocacy". You will regret saying nothing.
#WeNeedToChangeTheWorld
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I've compiled in video all the evidence for the Wuhan Institute of Virology engineering SARS-CoV-2, as detailed by Congressional Committees, reporting by Kathy Eban, TheIntercept, libertarian coal Viscounts, and exclusives from internet 'sleuths' and anti-biotech pressure groups:
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@jonatanpallesen
@whstancil
It would be difficult to have found an infected animal inside the market, seeing as the susceptible animals being illegally sold there were cleared before any animal samples were taken. Environmental sampling however colocated the virus and susceptible animals inside the market.
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I don't have a SoundCloud to promote, but follow and amplify Green Voices of Color, and don't forget that Breonna Taylor's killers are still walking around free.
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@YIMBY_Princeton
not sure if this was a deliberate reference or not but if not, enjoy lol:
My priors:
Lab leak 60% (⬆️ +20%)
Natural origin 40% (⬇️ -20%)
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Another climate denialist tipping his toe into coronavirus trutherism
Here is sobering statistics for the US based on real data that puts the health risk from COVID in perspective:
Medical errors kill 3.1 times more people per year than the common flu (influenza), and over 600 times more people than the Corona virus.
Why then the panic about COVID?
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It says something profound about the erasure or labor in American popular discourse that graduate school educated reporters don't know the difference between *strikes* and *boycotts* but write endlessly about the social panic of "cancel culture".
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this purported "strongest evidence" is either a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of an unfunded grant proposal, & requires viruses there's zero evidence anyone had pre-pandemic to be engineered in a way no one proposed, causing a lab infection there's zero evidence happened
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When people cite 25,000 - 69,000 flu deaths, they're talking about extrapolated estimates. NOT confirmed deaths- i.e. what are being reported for COVID-19. Apples-to-apples confirmed annual flu deaths are on average more like 3,500 - 15,000 per year.
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It will shock no one who follows climate to see this science denialist deep into election conspiracies as well.
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Computer, show me the offspring of a straw man and a red herring birthed on a slippery slope.
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One of the classic tactics of conspiracists & pseudoscience believers is to demand genuine domain experts "debate" their unsupported claims as though they're on equal footing as the mainstream scientific view.
Calling the
#COVID19
lab incident origin hypothesis a “conspiracy theory” w/o representing or evaluating the evidence should have been below the standards of
@stuartjdneil
&
@sciam
. Why not host a moderated, evidence-based debate on the origins issue? 1/6
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Hmm. It's been a while since I checked out what ocean heat content data were do-
*unintelligible shrieking*
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In the United States in the year 2023, saying something like "I'd prefer that the person two heartbeats away from being President *NOT* be a Creationist, climate contrarian, insurrection supporter" is reflexively treated as partisan rather than a universally acceptable position.
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