Andrew MacDougall
Canadian Climate Scientist from Nova Scotia, specializing in Zero Emissions Commitment, carbon budgets, permafrost carbon, and biogeochemical feedbacks to climate change.
- The great gift of a classical Earth Science education. All data is best displayed as a ternary diagram 🙂
- This is a super insightful graph from @kingsmillbond.bsky.social illustrating how countries like India that are experiencing economic development later are skipping over some (not all) fossil dependency. ember-energy.org/latest-insig...
- Even more evidence that Syphilis originated in the Americas. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Well that was blunt. “ We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient... And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
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- It’s mental that western car companies are just boldface lying about EV sales. electrek.co/2026/01/14/c...
- This is horrifying. I’ve cycled thousands of km in rural Nova Scotia and been chased and nipped by a few dogs. My deepest condolences to this poor kids family. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallNicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession
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- The foundational axiom of science is that reality is real and that it can be understood at least to some approximation. The foundational axiom of fascism is that there is no such thing as reality, and truth is whatever the leader says it is. Science will always wither under fascism.
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- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallThe beautiful idea of NCAR, to improve understanding of our planet through a cooperative, shared and open intellectual team effort, is literally what has got me out of bed every morning for nearly two decades. This cannot, CANNOT be allowed to happen. eu.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
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- People might laugh but indoor air quality in rinks is generally terrible, and hockey kids get asthma at disproportionate rates. Electric Zambonis really are an important innovation.
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallPeople used to say, with great confidence, that variable renewables could never safely provide more than 5% of grid power. That estimate has crept up ever since, though the "great confidence" part never wavers. Anyway, about China ...
- Oh boy definitely some Technocracy vibes here. Might be time to brush up on mid 20th century science cults. electrek.co/2025/11/21/e...
- And there goes short haul trucking. Another ‘hard to mitigate’ sector that turned out not to be hard to mitigate.
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- Canadian Universities do not, and have never used standardized tests for entry. So we just built systems to deal with these kinds of problems. I did not take a single standardized test between grade 6 and completing my PhD.
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallI wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
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- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallNow that the Sept and Oct data are (belatedly) in, it looks like 2025 will be the second warmest year in the record (~80% probability). The last three years are in a class of their own.
- No emission peak this year. Emissions up in China, US and EU. Land use change emissions are down.
- Published today in Earth System Science Data: The Global Carbon Budget 2025 essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es...
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallNEW: Global fossil fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless 'stated policies' are abandoned Contra some terrible news coverage, IEA World Energy Outlook shows coal near peak, oil peaking by 2030 & gas by 2035 (see chart) What's going on? 🧵 + cool charts www.carbonbrief.org/iea-fossil-f...
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- "China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels. " www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
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- Levelized coats of solar in China has reached $27/MWh, that’s 2.7 ¢/kWh
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- This is actually an astounding statistic. In the 1800s 40 acres was what was seen as necessary to feed a family. The increase in yields from the green revolution is simply astonishing, even though it came with steep environmental costs (pesticide, nitrate pollution, monoculture).
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallShielding Chart xkcd.com/3158/
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- Went to the wake of a former student today. I was on his supervisory committee and he defended his MSc last May. Life is short and we never know what day might be our last. Rest in peace Jack, you will be missed. www.clcurry.com/obituaries/1...
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- Well that’s not good.
- The NPC thing will be these calculator worshiping cultist’s downfall. Not believing that other people are real is a fatal blind spot.
- #NovaScotia we she keep an eye on this.
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallIn a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!
- There is no algorithm for truth.
- "In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
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- Interesting article. A few impressions: 1) This guy seems like a nightmare supervisor. 2)The cultural revolution caused a the kind break in Chinese society that allowed the kid of a shop keeper to become a leading scientist. 3) GTFO in 2020 was an amazing decision www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
- I have a feeling it will all be sane-washed. Like how many histories of WWI start with: ‘The Kaiser was a very dumb man, everyone knew this including the Kaiser but for some reason no could do anything about it’
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- A reminder that an LLM is just a statistical model of language. And like all statistical models cannot be used outside the data it is tuned to. Language is itself a model of reality, so an LLM is two levels of approximation from reality. Symbols all the way down.
- Reposted by Andrew MacDougallOur finalised paper on flat10MIP is finally up in GMD! This is the experimental protocol which allows for a simple, emissions-driven evaluation of TCRE, ZEC and climate reversibility in CMIP7. Thanks so much to all who ran these simulations as a proof of concept! gmd.copernicus.org/articles/18/...
- Good post from Zeke. One thing to note is simple climate emulators like Fair don’t account for carbonate dissolution from the ocean floor, so over 1000 years the CO2 uptake will probably be a bit stronger and you might start to see some cooling.
