March 11, 2026 - Daniel Swain - "Winter" 2025-2026 warmest on record across most of Western U.S., including SoCal & Sierra Nevada Well, now it's official: Winter (Dec-Feb) 2025-2026 was the warmest on record across the majority of the American West, and a top-3 warmest winter nearly everywhere that it didn't quite cinch the record. That includes nearly all of the Colorado #
Oh. Great.
Hah. And we thought it would be the water wars - no, it will be starvation as every crop from Senoma to St. Louis fails.
Yay.
@tezoatlipoca @violetmadder @weatherwest
The president of the United States has hopefully insured the disruption of Fertil production for the near future at least basically over planting season
Don't worry, we'll get both.
When my weather app is listing "collapse of the ocean current" as trending weather...that's not good.
@deirdrebeth @weatherwest 's funny but I've had a lot of time on my hands recently (eye operation) and have watched The Day After Tomorrow again for the first time in ages. Re-evaluated it and decided it is a caricature. Yes, lots of utterly ridiculous stuff (for starters an all-American hero like Dennis Quaid would never drive a Honda) but I've been looking at AMOC trends and...yeah. Looks like AMOC is weakening, and has been for decades. And one particular drop coincided with the coldest UK December in 100 years, and a 13cm rise in sea levels in New York.
https://www.channel4.com/news/the-key-atlantic-current-that-could-change-europes-climate-forever
That's one of my go-to disaster movies for that very reason. It skirts the edge of reality.
Quaid may have been all-American, but he was also a scientist, so the better made car works for me 😁
@deirdrebeth @weatherwest one of the darkly humorous things I've noticed reading up on the dire (or not) state of the AMOC is people saying "yeah, but in reality this would take decades, not days or weeks.".
If it's been weakening since the 50s (and that's a big if) then that's lots of decades. Almost 10 of them in fact ;-)
Yes! We're 45 years past the largest push by scientists to get people to understand what was going to happen if we didn't change our ways (there were individuals pushing since at least 1910), and yet I hear people say "but they said it would take generations!". Yes, they did. And we've had 2-3 generations born since then.
@deirdrebeth @weatherwest that news footage I posted really hit me because it's only a month old; this is clearly making scientists more and more uneasy but is relegated below well, almost everything (I only found it because I started following noc.ac.uk on Bluesky).
I've left it far too long to take real notice but this unexpected timeout in my life has woken me up to the realities of what is happening to the AMOC.
This is the scenario I had been worried about for the last couple of years. I’ve lived in California in my entire life. 1997 anyone?
The prospect of a significant amount of the Sierra Nevada snowpack such as it exist evaporated over a few days is not cheering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_California_New_Years_Floods
I really wish American hadn't been consistently ruled by fossil fuel morons and had instead listened to James Hansen in 1988.
Oh man the rich people hated the Limits to Growth.
Even though our world trajectories looks quite similar to one of their collapse scenarios.
@alienghic Yep, the rich people, and even worse, their apologists. The economist whose paper trashed LTG (disingenuously & inaccurately) went on to win the Nobel Prize & teach at Harvard! Neoclassical Economics virtually dismisses any effects of AGW on "the economy!"
And yes! How many people today realize that we are living in a collapse scenario?
I've noticed that economists who write excuses for why the rich should be rich get showered with a great deal of money and press coverage.
@alienghic Exactly! And the scale is almost inconceivable! Academic economics is virtually captured by believers in the Neoclassical paradigm. Dissenting views are typically banished.
And who do politicians listen to? You guessed it! And they're "Climate Change Doesn't Matter"-ing us into oblivion...
Sometime when you have an hour, Prof Steve Keen, a "heterodox" economist, is worth a listen:
If you follow Simon Clark at all, he’s done a video on the climate denialism in that era. Professor Keen is mistaken in one sense about Nordhaus by depicting him as suffering a case of bad model.
Nordhaus worked for science denial lobbyists. In other words, he’s a paid assasin. He’s paid to deceive people. This is the greatest fault. I lay at Keen’s feet is that he argues this is some sort of academic game over truth when the topic is moral malignancy.
In short, mainstream economics, the neoliberalism that Keen correctly, debunks is not a project of bad math it is a deliberate criminal malignant ideology, deliberately crafted to legitimized totalitarian rule by wealth.
This isn’t an academic exercise. This is a deliberate methodical campaign to destroy our sovereignty and it’s been very successful. It’s not an academic matter. It is a political matter of our sovereignty.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @alienghic While I consider faulting Prof Keen to be a useless tangent, I came in to his classes thinking exactly as you do - and I still do, as far as neoliberalism is concerned.
On that topic I have been delighted with the work of Prof Clara E. Mattei. Currently reading her new book "Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention." Enthusiastically endorse!
We are on the same page then. I find her to be an absolute treasure. The issue before us is not economic theory, but public affairs. The fundamental crisis of economics is that it is a discipline that is holy unfit for purpose.
Mattei deals with economy in the appropriate way as a matter of decision-making power. Economics is an ideology.
One aspect of economics has to deal with what is manufacturing and material engineering. The other part is social structure.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @alienghic Not familiar with Simon Clark; mind posting the link to that video?
I get the impression that Prof Keen is intently focused on economics per se. (Full disclosure: I have been attending his online seminar courses for three years.) I believe his belief that Neoclassical econ is akin to a cult is sincere.
33 min
I believe this is the correct video. It should contain a timeline that would talk about the Climate conference conferences. You can probably scrub through the video to get an idea.
I’ve basically listened to tens of hours of his online interviews or content and have read most of his debunk literature in recognize now that every book he produces is 95% of the previous book.
I used to fly the flag for him specifically, but I’ve withdrawn my support for a number of reasons. He’s done definitive work, but when he spouts off about public policy I disagree with him because he’s doing the same thing as mainstream economist just different
The way I would describe Neo classical/ liberal economics is that it’s less a cult than a deliberate political ideology to legitimize totalitarian rule by wealth.
Economic and political power are inseparable, as is freedom and equality.
The main issue to answer with regard to economics is the balance of power. Where the means of exchange flows in the economy. Where scarcity is created in order to exploit. Everything else is Engineering
If you enjoy watching or listening to podcasts, you can’t beat also picking up
“what is politics?” You know you have the right channel with Eurythmics riffand Alfred E. Neuman.
The channel creator background is anthropology, specifically social anthropology. He brings clarity to politics.
The other reading I would recommend is from anthropology
“ hierarchy of the forest” by Boehm
eminently readable and to the point
You might like his clarity. He has a number of early episodes that directly talk about the muddled nature of left versus right. I think the episode is titled wurbs.
I got a question for you because Steve Keen is on record saying that he would prefer as a matter of policy to have inflation between 3 1/2 to 5% in order to “increase the velocity of money”
Has he ever in his class explained how this higher inflation is going to be deployed?
The two major sources of inflation would be production constraint, or more money added to the economy.
..
Furthermore, he is economic models stratified the economy into four representative agents:
Government finance business and labor.
And one of the chief findings of his career, going back to to I want to say 2017 was a conclusion that money tends to aggregate in the financial sector. Yet, if you look at the real economy, you know the thing he talks about, clearly billionaires and corporations are aggregating the line share of money
And the other thing I would ask you is that given everything you’ve learned if I said if I were to tax economic participants in order to cause them to spend money versus inflicting any level of inflation would you understand given everything you’ve been taught that there’s a difference between taxing and inflation in terms of the money supply?
Because I consider myself very familiar with his work, I consider a lot of it definitive, but I have a problem with a lot that he says
Well, to speak briefly on the work of cultural anthropologists. Hierarchy can only establish itself by convincing people that a compromise needs to be made, and it is necessary to find an enemy or an out group to depend against or pillage.
It’s necessary be to human psychology because the unique aspect of humanity is collective action, that is egalitarianism, which is directly defined as an inverted dominance hierarchy. The rank and file dictate the limits of authority.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-trump-iran-war-could-actually-worsen-climate-change
Koch Network paid $550 million dollars to end climate action.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
Who knows how much Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are paying to the GOP.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/business/xai-humain-saudi-musk-spacex.html
https://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600
Russia too.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-us-saudi-arctic-energy-rdif-ukraine-russia-capital/
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5711276-trump-arctic-oil-climate-crisis/
Yeah, it looks like a giant zit, doesn’t it?
Errr, can’t deny the truth of what you just put down there
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