This #NewYear we must get serious about climate change. A big obstacle: our brains.

Current risks are vastly different from our ancestors, but our brains are wired the same. Knowing the science behind decision-making helps us better talk about climate threats & spark action. 1/

Just as no amount of flat temperature data would dissuade the climate cult, so no amount of flat (or even negative!) data on mask effectiveness will shake the faith of the Church of Covid. Beautiful Theories cannot be disproven by mere information.

The "Covid emergency" will never be over. It will mutate and seek out new missions when this particular virus threat abates, repurposing its funding and clinging to its power. They're already talking up the "next pandemic" and how we must forever remain at DEFCON 2 to be ready.

Masks are now a visible and tangible symbol of an entire agenda. Its champions will use every means possible to force you to wear them forever, including corporate pressure, their new favorite tool. Expect commercial mask requirements to linger, especially big corporations.

True believers, meanwhile, will wear their masks with grim determination and scowl ostentatiously at everyone who refuses to join them. It's a new virtue signal that will not go away any time soon. Mask scolding is a quick, easy, heady power rush.

All the while, studies will keep rolling out that masks don't help, and might even hurt. That was fairly common medical knowledge before the pandemic began, but it was aggressively suppressed when masks became a political symbol, and a totem for people desperate to DO SOMETHING.

As 2020 comes to a close, we're taking a look back at some of our best reporting on the environment.

The American landscape has become 48 times more toxic to insects since the 1990s, a shift largely fueled by rising use of neonicotinoid insecticides.

Banned in the EU, a sophisticated information war has kept these insecticides on the U.S. market.

Amid California's severe wildfires, grape growers in Sonoma County got exemptions to send in farmworkers who have few alternatives or options for support into fire evacuation zones.

With Trump's election, a small and previously marginalized group of toxics apologists suddenly took control over health and environmental regulations, ushering in higher profits for polluters and higher cancer rates for the American people.

Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron in Ecuador. The company sued him in New York — as of December, he has been under house arrest for over 500 days.

Fascinating new paper by @AndrewDessler and colleagues arguing committed warming might be higher than expected given historical pattern effects. Its combining a lot of different concepts together, so lets spend some time disentangling them https://t.co/ILi5z515Qy

A thread: 1/19

The paper's headline number is that we previously thought the world was committed to 1.3C warming, but that number is actually over 2C (> 1.5C by 2100). This is quite a different message than we get from Earth System Models, which suggest committed warming is only ~1.2C. 2/19

This would imply that the 1.5C by 2100 target is effectively impossible, and that long-term warming of >2C would be very difficult to avoid. However, the devil is in the details, and the picture is not quite as dire as it would seem at first glance. 3/19

When we talk about "committed warming" folks are generally talking about one of two scenarios: either constant CO2 and other GHG concentrations (and forcings), or getting all emissions (or just CO2 emissions) down to zero immediately. 4/19

In the first method – constant concentrations – we find that the world warms up another 0.5C or so, as the oceans continue to take up heat as more energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases than is being emitted back to space. Much of this additional warming happens by 2100 5/19