Zeke Hausfather

Interesting. One of my favorite graphs that I’ve ever made was on this very topic:

Carbon Direct releases groundbreaking paper calling for integration of superpollutant mitigation with carbon removal strategy | Carbon Direct Reduce, remove, and monitor your carbon emissions with Carbon Direct’s science-backed carbon management platform.

A new report by Carbon Direct (out today) makes the case for how combining superpollutant mitigation and durable CDR could work in practice:

There has been a lot of recent interest by companies in mitigating short-lived climate "super-pollutants" like methane and refrigerants. This can have a strong short-term climate impact, but to credibly counterbalance CO2 emissions requires combining them with durable carbon removal.

CMIP6 trends over the last 13 years (red) and the 13 years before (black) (using the screened simulations), along with the estimate trends from FR26 over (roughly) the same periods.

Is there an acceleration in global warming expected in the CMIP6 climate models? yes! But not as easy to detect in the real world.

(from www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...)

(see also: www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar... from 2024).

Some of us tried to note that removing short-term unforced variability is more of an art than a science 😉

For a rainy day Each month, you put a little aside in a savings account. It’s not always the same amount because – you know – life is life, but each month a little gets squirreled away. Then you …

For a rainy day

Has global warming accelerated? Why? How much? How do we know? What does it all mean? etc. With hand-drawn illustrations, dodgy metaphors, and a complete lack of clear answers.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/07/f...

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

I mean, openclaw is a (very rudimentary) version of that. The agents still have some initial guidance but are set loose on the internet (with some weird consequences, e.g. theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

I have no idea of AI will ever become conscious, and I'm not sure that is a question that can be answered.

But I'm increasingly convinced that any sufficiently advanced AI will be indistinguishable from consciousness.

My 2026 and 2027 global temperature forecasts The best thing about predicting the near future is you don't need to wait long to be wrong

For more details on how a strong El Nino might impact 2027 temperatures, see my December post on 2026 and 2027 forecasts: www.theclimatebrink.com/p/my-2026-an...

The El Nino cometh.

This would push up our estimate for 2026 global temperatures (though its still unlikely to surpass 2024 as the warmest year), and make 2027 very likely to be the warmest year on record given the historical lag b/w ENSO and surface temp.

Time series plot depicting predicted Nino 3.4 region ocean temperature anomalies from the latest (Mar 2026) ECMWF ensemble. It depicts an extremely rapid rise in such temperatures, from modest negative anomalies to strong positive anomalies, by mid-summer 2026--indicative of a transition from weak-moderate La Nina conditions to moderate-strong El Nino conditions over just a few months.

Whew.

All signs are increasingly pointing to a significant, if not strong to very strong, El Niño event. I'll have more to say in coming weeks & months, but for now I'll just say that this is increasingly likely to become a major regional-to-global climate driver in 2026-2027.

That being said, the error bars in our study are large enough (0.27 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade) to encompass the new Foster and Rahmstorf estimate.

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenod...

I'd say the increase that we estimated in Forster et al 2025 is closer to 40% than doubling (as the Foster and Rahmstorf method is imperfect at removing short-term natural variability): essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

That being said, clean energy investment has grown rapidly, and in 2025 the world spent more on clean energy ($2.3 trillion) than global military spending back in 2022 ($2.2 trillion).

One of my predictions during our Climate Brink end of year wrap-up was that 2026 might be the first year where global clean energy investment exceeds global military spending.

Unfortunately with recent wars we will likely have to wait a few more years for it to occur: www.theclimatebrink....

Clawed On Anthropic and the Department of War

Highly recommend this Dean Ball piece on the Anthropic / DOD imbroglio over the weekend:

Important point: fuel costs go up, inflation goes up, interest rates go up, RE deployment suffers

For more (and daily updates to the data), check out the Climate Dashboard: dashboard.theclimate...

For 2026 annual temperatures, we are currently on track to see the 4th warmest year on record at 1.47C above preindustrial levels, but uncertainty remains large enough that it could end up anywhere between the warmest and 5th warmest year.

February 2026 was the 5th warmest February on record, at 1.5C above preindustrial levels in the ERA5 dataset.

This is not that surprising given weak La Nina conditions at the start of the year; February tends to be one of the months most sensitive to ENSO.

An obituary for the short-lived DOE Climate Working Group, from Andrew Dessler over at The Climate Brink. It arose with a bang and died with a footnote in the EPA's endangerment finding repeal. www.theclimatebrink....

Definitely one of my favorite lyrics.

Hmm… www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/t...

📉 Global Temperature Dashboard - The Climate Brink / @hausfath.bsky.social
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Explore our article: climate.copernicus.eu/c3s-data-pow...   

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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI

Well well well. Be very interested to hear more from folk who are in the loop with this.
www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

We need a bigger scale!

I do think there is a Jervons paradox risk here, where AI work becomes so cheap (compared to humans) that the amount of work being done dramatically increases. Its less us using it as a tool to enhance scientific output (in my case) and more swarms of autonomous agents doing tasks.

Mathematics in the Library of Babel — Daniel Litt Mathematics isn't only about saying true things. It's about asking the right questions, being confused, stumbling about, getting distracted, being wrong, recognizing when you're wrong, being stuck. Mo...

Yeh, I was considering adding a section on its performance in mathematical proofs, but my knowledge of that is mainly second hand. This was a really good discussion of what it can (and cannot) do there: www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/...

AI has an impact, and we need policy to ensure that it is primarily powered by clean energy. And its still helpful to contextualize it relative to other things that we do in our lives.

All reasonable points, though I'd suggest that the median day with Claude Code here is a bit of an outlier (as it represents using the AI tool non-stop all day with many agents running), and even in that case uses less energy than their refrigerator.