Ricardo Simmonds

Phd in Environmental Studies. I write about science, technology, theology, environment, philosophy and spirituality. Opinions my own.

[John Bistline @JEBistline]

Data centers: “We use 17.4 billion gallons of water a year.”

Agriculture: “That’s adorable.”

[Matt Burgess @matthewgburgess]

New study estimates that the penalty for being male or white on the 2023-2024 academic poli sci job market was similar to the benefit of having a solo-authored pub in the top journal (APSR). In econ, this would be like if gender and race were *each* as important as a solo-authored AER pub in grad school.

Is anyone willing to defend this practice or argue that it couldn't have had any tradeoffs?

The paper doesn't have 2020-2023 data, where the preferences were likely even stronger. What was happening in poli sci was also the norm, not the exception, among academic fields, as anyone who has been in academia the past decade knows. In the U.S., this is all very illegal.

My advice for universities who don't want the feds to take away their tax-exempt status over this type of thing: show you can clean it up on your own, and show that you can enforce real accountability on leaders and departments who keep behaving in this way. And don't expect anyone to take your word for it on the honor system.

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

So get this…

There have been no hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin so far this year.

If we make it through Friday (9/11), it will be the first time in the satellite era (1966–present) that there have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic through this point in the season.

[Ryan Burge 📊 @ryanburge]

In 1965, 1.24 million babies were baptized Catholic in the U.S. In 2022? 438,000.

That's a 65% drop in infant baptisms in less than 60 years.

First Communions were 850K in 1990.
In 2025: 537K

Confirmations are up, though!
491K in 1990 to 498K in 2025.

[The Honest Broker @RogerPielkeJr]

Climate scenarios will have their day in court 👀

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

How bad was life before modern science, technology, and economic growth? Awful.

The example I will use in class this Wednesday is Henry Clay (1777-1852). He was one of the most powerful men of his time in the U.S., not just among the elite but among the elite of the elite: Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, Senator, and three-time presidential candidate. He was also rich and a large slaveholder. The U.S. was among the richest countries in the world (perhaps only behind Great Britain) and among the most technologically advanced. And we are not talking about the early Middle Ages, but about the first half of the 19th century.

Given the constraints of his time, he had nearly everything within reach.

Clay and his wife, Lucretia (both in the photograph), had eleven children: six daughters and five sons. He buried all six daughters. By 1835, all were dead: two as infants, two as children, two as young mothers. He also buried a son in a war his father had opposed. Another son, Theodore, fractured his skull as a child, but since nobody could treat him, he spent decades in an asylum in Lexington.

Think about this for a second: seven children dead and one handicapped out of eleven, in the first half of the 19th century, among the elite of the elite, in one of the richest and most advanced places on the planet.

And I was angry yesterday because my cell phone coverage in Toddington (England) was poor.

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

When the CV said “comfortable working independently”

[Ryan Maue @RyanWeather]

This move was expected after the UN IPCC linked climate modelers quietly admitted their extreme climate scenarios were always faulty.

The new management led by @MatthewWielicki is 86'ing RCP 8.5 across the government with extreme prejudice.

https://t.co/SgBHf360gn

[Ricardo Simmonds @SimmondsRicardo]

“20 families in California’s Imperial Valley consume more water than entire cities. The State of California gets more water from the Colorado River than Mexico, Nevada and Arizona“ https://t.co/XcgsE4irnY

[Scott Wessman @scottew]

Graphic showing how the Colorado River's water is used.

More water goes to alfalfa than ALL household + non-ag industrial use combined. Is this the correct regional priority?

Long term answer IMO: make water abundant (energy + the ocean)

2024 study:
https://t.co/YzgZOjPkG7

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Alfalfa uses like half the water from the Colorado River for like 0.1% of the economic benefit. To a first approximation it literally just wouldn't matter if we just stopped growing alfalfa forever.

It's only viable because farmers don't pay market rate for water.

[The Honest Broker @RogerPielkeJr]

NOAA proposes to amend the most recent US National Climate Assessment in light of the retirement of RCP8.5 et al. as implausible

https://t.co/M7Rz2VCHCS

[Ricardo Simmonds @SimmondsRicardo]

@lukei4655 Fr. Gabriel, just want to check your logic here- does that mean that if the same opinion was expressed by a cleric then it would be worthy of consideration? If direct experience is required for worth- should the opinions of celibate clerics on sexual matters be dismissed?

[Ricardo Simmonds @SimmondsRicardo]

@lukei4655 Fr. Gabriel, just want to check your logic here- does that mean that if the same opinion was expressed by a cleric then it would be worthy of consideration? If direct experience is required for worth- should the opinions of celibate clerics on sexual matters be dismissed?

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

The @IEA has once again revised historical annual data for oil consumption (it does so every August), resulting in some significant upgrades to global demand.

The net result is that 20025 oil consumption is now estimated at 104.8m b/d (that's ~300,000 b/d higher than the last estimate, and ***a huge 1.1m b/d higher*** than where the IEA pegged a year ago 2025 demand).

Despite the huge revision to demand forecasts, the IEA still sees the market last year as oversupplied, with supply running at 106.3m b/d on average.

The changes also mean that the 105.7m b/d of oil consumption that the IEA now anticipates for 2027 is **higher** than the absolute peak oil demand it forecast a year ago (when it said that global oil consumption would peak in 2029 at 105.6m b/d).

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

This is going to be a billion-dollar disaster across the Midwest.

View from space shows a violent line of storms, with embedded tornadoes roaring through Chicago with severe thunderstorm warnings including hurricane-force wind gusts up to 100 mph. Winds as high as 130 mph were detected just above the surface.

The complex of storms, which developed over eastern Iowa this morning, will continue racing southeast into Indiana and Ohio and is expected to be classified as a derecho.

[Sudo su @sudoingX]

BREAKING: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just started stamping an invisible watermak into every word claude writes.

paste your own essay into claude to fix the grammar, it comes back carrying an invisible signature that survives copy-paste and cannot be removed. no opt-out, worldwide.

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

This is a story about a college lost down the rabbit hole of performative progressivism. But at its heart, it’s about labor exploitation, the hell we put contingent profs through, and how the collapse of the tenure-system paved the way for cowardice and pseudo-radical groupthink.

[Zara Zhang @zarazhangrui]

This paper gives a fancy name to a problem you can already feel in your bones

"The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons." Checking AI output requires deep expertise. Deep expertise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats

So we're building systems that need expert supervision while dismantling the only known process for making experts

The paper calls the shared pool of human expertise the "cognitive commons." Every profession drinks from it. Nobody's refilling it.

By eliminating junior roles, each company is acting totally rationally, and the collective result: a profession that can't catch AI's mistakes anymore because it never learned to do the work in the first place

Who checks AI's homework in 15 years?

[Michael Liebreich - @MLiebreich.bsky.social @MLiebreich]

Stay grounded! If EVs jump overnight to 50% of global car and light truck sales that only eliminates ~1% of oil demand/year. Cars and light trucks are only 21% of oil demand, they have an 18-year life. Plus BEVs & PHEVs made up less than 50% of Chinese vehicle exports in H1 2026.

[Ricardo Simmonds @SimmondsRicardo]

“the Council was but the gasoline to a fire that had raged under the floorboards for decades. We have spent sixty years litigating that gasoline, but it’s time we reckoned with the fire.”

[Mike Lewis @mfjlewis]

The Church is in crisis, but the framing is all wrong.

https://t.co/GEj6CX4eW5