.@louiscasiano from @FoxNews reached out to ask if we are actually planning on contaminating the hotel rooms of Proud Boys with bedbugs. The short answer is no, we don't even know if that's possible. But here's our full response.

@davewiner, https://t.co/LXMj1pRHP8:
"The epitaph of the United States may be that the idea of the rugged individualist was a lie, there never were any, and in the age of air travel and medicine we’re all very connected, our well-being depends on other people’s well-being."

John Wesley Powell tried to expose the lie in the late 1870s. Wallace Stegner wrote about it, at length, in "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian". Recommended.

"...individual initiative and individual labor and individual capital were inadequate to develop the irrigation works needed on an arid-belt farm unless the farm were located high on the headwaters of a small stream..."

"The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian. From approximately that line on, more than individual initiative was needed to break the wilderness."

"Powell’s way was a way tested by New England barn raisings and corn huskings ... tested even more fully by the Mormon experience of thirty years and the New Mexican experience of ten generations."

1/42 Good to see yesterday’s @thetimes editorial attacking the pandemic of covid misinformation. Here’s my twitter contribution to fighting it, as suggested. Lockdown and covid sceptics continue to consistently misuse cherry picked data to argue NHS not unusually busy.

2/42 NHS trust leaders believe this disinformation is profoundly disrespectful to staff and risks reducing vital compliance with restrictions on social contact. Below is a long two part thread answering the main "NHS not unusually busy" and other NHS related disinformation.

3/42 Much of the disinformation comes from simplistic year on year percentage comparisons of data. Some types of NHS demand are flat or lower year on year. But it’s a huge distortion to argue that these individual statistics mean the NHS is not unusually busy.

4/42 For example, there ARE much lower levels of winter flu year - a global phenomenon. There ARE fewer elective operations - because of covid pressures. And there are many other examples. But there are five problems with cherry-picking/using these individual datasets.

5/42 1. They do not capture anything like the current total level of NHS demand which is very differently shaped due to COVID-19. Traditional, existing, NHS datasets were built to reflect “normal” levels of demand, “normal” operations and "normal" capacity. This isn’t normal.

Excited to be able to share this comprehensive review on the many ways that climate change is increasing bushfire risk in southeast Australia, just published in @CommsEarth.

Thread 👇 describing what we found:

[paper is open

This was a huge collaborative effort across climate and fire science experts, including from @ClimateExtremes and @BushfireHub, who came together following the #BlackSummer disaster in Australia.

Our review focuses on forest fires in southeast Australia (NSW + ACT + Victoria).

The #BlackSummer fires were unprecedented:

*In their scale (23% of all southeast Australia forests were burnt)

*In their power (for every month of the spring and summer seasons), and

*In the number of fires that developed into extreme pyroconvective events

Climate in SE Australia in 2019 was also the hottest and driest on record.

Regional warming is part of human-caused global warming trend.

Dry conditions were part of a 3-year drought with consecutive winter rain failures. Long-term winter drying trend appears to be emerging.

Dry years in southeast Australia are usually also hot, (and wet years are usually cool), due to land-atmosphere feedbacks.

And years of large bushfires in southeast Australia have clustered in the hot-&-dry quadrant of historical climate conditions