Re-upping this 2018 tweet by climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe.

The original tweet can be seen here. Nearly six years later the thread in which it occurs is still well worth a bookmark. It's packed with resources, both in the main thread and dispensed during the course of answering the questions of many of those replying.

The thread also provides a glimpse of some of the nonsense that climate scientists are subjected to on social media. People replying with no relevant qualifications, little understanding of the topic, and no desire or capacity to learn, but who nevertheless have a direct line to experts in their field which they can use to be disrespectful, dismissive and abusive.

NB. Prof Hayhoe makes a typo in that thread. She states that on average "all geologic activity put together, emits only about 10% of the heat-trapping gases that humans do". She later corrects that to 1% [sic].

A delightful post in the North East Bylines from teacher and smallholder, Melody Bird.

As the digging went on, we made cross curricular links to the Battle of the Somme and sang ‘mud, mud glorious mud’. The clart was all encompassing. Accident prone Pupil H looked like the creature from the black lagoon by the end of the afternoon, but I think he was still smiling. The children keep referring to soil as dirt and so I keep correcting them. 6 inches of it and rain water means we can survive on earth. Yet it hardly gets a mention in the curriculum as I think I’ve mentioned before. For life on earth soil is more precious than gold… yet kids don’t see it as valuable as most of their food comes off a supermarket shelf. We really need to launch new campaign “Just Top Soil”.

Excerpts from the diary of a teacher on the verge of climate breakdown Week 9: Potatoes

I stumbled across the official story behind the famous "Earthrise" photograph taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Not only was it humanity’s first view of Earth from another planetary body, but it also played an important role in the growing environmental awareness in the late 1960s and '70s. The image was used as the cover photograph for the Spring 1969 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog and US Nature photographer Galen Rowell later described it as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". [¹][²]

The Wikipedia entry contains additional information, including interesting details about the camera and film development process used as well as the image's impact and legacy.

Fifty years later, Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the photograph, observed "We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth."

A Última Árvore (The Last Tree)
Mixed-media sculpture, Will Ferreira, 2013

Following last month's decision by the International Union of Geological Sciences to reject the proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch, I saw one or two comments on social media by environmental campaigners who seemed to regard the decision as a setback, even a defeat.

In the light of this, I was interested to read the following a couple of days back, in a paper published last year on the stratigraphic basis of the proposed epoch. This is from the introduction (the emphasis is mine and I've removed the inline references for readability):

"It is no longer necessary for every paper on the subject of the Anthropocene to summarize the case for the proposed new series/epoch and its suggested start in the mid-20th century, or to outline the whole history of the Anthropocene concept. Instead, this paper takes as its starting point recent work which reconfigures the Anthropocene from a proposed geological epoch to an emergent, unfolding, intensifying event. This work proposes that the Anthropocene concept would be most useful to science if it continues to be regarded as an informal time unit alongside the GTS."

Source: The stratigraphic basis of the Anthropocene Event

I have no expertise in the field, but I do like this approach, focusing not on the attempts at classification, but on the effects of recent human activity -- particularly on the effects of the Great Acceleration.

It reminded me of a twitter thread I read last year by Jacquelyn Gill, a palaeoecologist, who pointed out that we already have a geological epoch defined by humanity, namely, the Holocene, and that defining the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch is not necessary for raising awareness about the profound global changes our activities are causing.

Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading (and the creator of the warming stripes) has posted on twitter this animation of sea level rise between 1900 and 2023. It's a crucial range of data, but personally I find this complementary graph posted in the replies to be a more helpful visualisation.

Some pseudo-sceptic in the replies posted a de rigueur "Plymouth Rock" jibe: Here's a short thread about that by Rob Larter, a polar marine scientist*.

*I've linked to the last tweet in Rob's thread to prevent twitter truncating it with a "Show replies" link. Please just scroll up to see the thread in its entirety.