Anymore it seems impossible to do a Web search that includes particular terms. A search like
"+A +B"
gives results where term B is not in the search results. Google does this, and now DuckDuckGo does it too, and as far as I can tell, so does Bing. And if you try to exclude term C
I asked Grok: Create an image of the last group of humans alive on Earth after global warming and climate change have killed everyone else.
It created this. A little harsher than I expected, but OK.
Link.
Here's a chart (thanks Grok) showing the sea surface temperature of the Nino3.4 region in the central Pacific Ocean. The SST is going off the chart.
The high bulge to the right of 2026's line is 2015, which peaked on Nov 18, 2015 at 29.81°C, an anomaly of 3.26°C relative to a baseline of 1982-2010.
Here are the latest ocean heat content numbers from NOAA, through 1Q2026. Eyeballing, it looks clear that OHC is accelerating for both regions.
0-700 m region: linear slope = 0.22 W/m2 = 0.035°C/decade
acceleration = 0.0089 (W/m2)/yr = 8.9 (mW/m2)/yr
where "mW" is milliwatts.
0-2000 m region: linear slope = 0.68 W/m2 = 0.037°C/decade
acceleration = 0.0079 (W/m2)/yr = 7.9 (mW/m2)/yr
The R2 numbers are all high, > 0.90.
All this bother over milliwatts! :-)
PS: corrections welcome, especially on the unit conversions.
This lively woman, Brooke Eby, said she was finally diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, or, she says, the same disease that Stephen Hawking had, "before he became an island boy."
I hope you know what that means.
I wonder if that will be his lasting impression in the public sphere.
Don't know if any of you care. Probably not.
-=-=-
Her name is Brooke Eby. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., at 33. She died yesterday at the age of 37.
Arthur Eddington, physicist and mathematician, wrote:
“The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness”
He also wrote:
“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”
Both of these are in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1928.
Eddington made his name in astronomy and especially by traipsing off to PrÃncipe in 1919 to attempt to measure the bending of light around the sun predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The island is inside the underarm of Africa, and the eclipse occurred on May 29th. At only 1.5° N of the equator it was probably miserable at the time, especially wearing the heaps of clothing expected of English men back then. Eddington said he had confirmed Einstein's prediction, which made Einstein famous. I once read that Eddington cherry picked his data, but Wikipedia says
The results were argued by some to have been plagued by systematic error and possibly confirmation bias, although modern reanalysis of the dataset suggests that Eddington's analysis was accurate.
Maybe he just got lucky or had a sixth sense for his experiment. Maybe he knew what he was doing.
Anyway, back to these quotes. Eddington didn't accomplish much in the field of physics or the new quantum mechanics, as far as I know, but he did have a few crazy ideas. He claimed the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe was exactly 136*2256, approximately 1.57e79.
The "136" looks suspicious.... Eddington claimed the fine structure constant α was 1/136, which was about the value being measured back then. But better measurements found it to be a little less than 1/137, so Eddington cooked up a way to find one more degree of freedom, thus 136+1=137. For this he was ridiculed and some people started calling him "Arthur Adding-one," and the episode detracted from his scientific credibility.#NotACoincidence
— Michael E. Mann (@michaelemann.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 8:25 AM
[image or embed]
NSIDC says that the Arctic's sea ice extent minimum has been reached for the year, 4.60 million square kilometers on Sept 12th. That's about the area of the European Union, and only tenth lowest since satellite records began back in November 1978.
"This year’s minimum is yet another low extent in a changed Arctic," said senior scientist Walt Meier. "While this year’s minimum is in line with recent years, it is far lower than anything we saw in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.”
Here's a quick reminder of what "extent" means versus "area":
Sea ice area is the total region covered by ice. Extent is the total region with at least 15 percent sea ice cover. NSIDC usually reports extent, which gives higher values than area.
And the Antarctic has likely reached its maximum for the winter down there:
In the Antarctic, sea ice extent has been tracking near record low levels for most of this growth season, most likely reaching its maximum extent on September 14 at 17.59 million square kilometers (6.79 million square miles). If this maximum date holds, this will be the third lowest Antarctic sea ice maximum on record.
Here's NSIDC's own story and an animation for the Arctic. Here's an image I asked Perplexity AI to generate: "an image of vanishing sea ice."
Kluth says of the Mercator map, "Greenland is especially exaggerated: It appears to be 14 times larger than all of Africa, when in fact, it is smaller than Algeria.
How a bogus map exposes 'one reason for Trump's obsession with Greenland,' Alternet, 11-Sept-2026
There are 111 data centers in the state of Oregon, as of 2025, consuming 14 TW-hr of electricity last year. That's an hour power consumption of 1.6 GW. It's equal to 71% of household use of electricity.
32 more data centers are planned.
That's a lot of AI slop. Maybe a few more unproven conjectures in mathematics. More ridiculous crap from Trump.
Via KPTV.com
https://youtu.be/dezHhFjj16A?si=x4ph7vVA-BbqG_zc
It's not clear if dolphins or humans have the better lives
Here's an op-ed in today's New York Times, by Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Free link.
If Vance is elected president in 2028, I don't think he's capable of stopping this decline. He doesn't exactly seem the sharpest tool in the national shed.We are in a worldwide battle for hearts and minds. The future of republican government in the United States, and globally, hangs in the balance. As Mr. Trump oversteps executive authority, weaponizes the Justice Department and tries to cow the media, private sector and universities, the citizens of China, Iran, Russia and other autocracies are watching America’s democratic beacon flicker. The stumbling of the American experiment, alongside the favoritism Washington is showering on far-right parties worldwide (even in a Germany haunted by its Nazi past), is blurring the ideals that long inspired repressed peoples to strain for the dignity and autonomy that only representative government can provide.
The United States is squandering its ability to bend the arc of history toward more freedom.
