Accidental climate science

Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.

The Editorial that Defends a Ghostwritten Paper by Citing Additional Ghostwritten Papers

A few days ago, sixty-four individuals co-signed an editorial in Archives of Toxicology calling for the reversal of the November 2025 retraction of Williams, Kroes & Munro 2000 (hereafter WKM2000), published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. The editorial, authored by Christopher Borgert and 63 others, appeared on the

When a Chatbot Says Water Is More Dangerous Than Glyphosate

Half the world now uses generative AI assistants (Stanford HAI, 2026). Many of the queries ordinary people ask land on questions about science, including the contested-science topics this newsletter covers. So we decided to check something simple: how do these everyday AI assistants answer? Do they give consistent answers? How

Penny wise, pound foolish

How much does it really cost to answer a tough scientific question? We recently attended a glyphosate symposium. It was fascinating to hear the state of modern science around glyphosate from toxicologists, epidemiologists, regulatory scientists, and advocates. One theme that caught our attention was how "expensive" these experiments

“Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business”

The editor told us that we were the first ones to ask for retraction.

“Health for all, Hunger for None.”

The Bayer slogan behind a federal act invocation. Here Nina B. Elkadi and Naomi Oreskes discuss President Trump's invocation of the Defense Production Act to boost glyphosate (Roundup) production, arguing that the "national security" framing is unwarranted since the herbicide is primarily used on crops for

How AI Unsettles the Apprenticeship in Astronomy

This essay is part of Observing AI Entering Astrophysics series. Astronomy apprenticeship in the United States is facing a perfect storm. Federal funding for graduate training has contracted sharply: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in physics and astronomy were cut roughly in half in 2025, and the proposed FY2026

EPA throws out science in favor of anti-regulatory ideology

In her latest opinion piece for The BMJ (British Medical Journal), Naomi Oreskes examines the US Environmental Protection Agency's recent actions on climate science and glyphosate. These moves, she argues, are not really about science — they are about dismantling the regulatory state. The administration repealed the greenhouse gas

Let's stop doing irreversible things. Do we need a million satellites?

The FCC public comment period for two major satellite proposals is closing fast.

Observing AI Entering Astrophysics:A Series Introduction and Request for Perspectives

Astronomy may be the natural science which AI rewires first. Its infrastructure is unusually open. Most data is public. The scientific record is mostly open through online preprint servers. Core software is open-source. Nearly every step of the workflow is digitalized. This reduces friction for AI agents to participate. This

Private money cannot replace public funding of science

In a recent Science essay, Naomi Oreskes argues that private philanthropy and corporate investment cannot replace sustained federal funding for research. Drawing on U.S. history, she shows how public support built the long-term research infrastructure that serves a wide range of national needs, from national defense to environmental protection.

Unspoken Crisis: What Our Analysis of 700,000 U.S. Catholic Services Did Not Find

Climate change is no longer a distant “global issue.” It is local emergencies that carry the names of friends and neighbors. Heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent worldwide and more attributable to climate change. And yet, hardly anyone is talking about it,

Astro

Mars as a Red Herring in Climate Conversations

Mars has been a place for dreams for a long time. A god of war, a planet, the home of invaders in science fiction, more recently the scientific and space exploration frontier. The details change, but the function remains the same. Mars is a projection surface. It absorbs whatever story

Essays

Lineages of Science in a Warming World: Who Owns Climate Knowledge?

Science is often spoken of as if it were a single institution: what science says, what science has shown. In practice, it is a tangle of labs, companies, contracts, grants, and norms that fall, broadly, into three lineages. One lineage is public and mostly open. It lives in universities, government

News

Launching Reckoning Science

We believe in science and its achievements, but also in the need to examine how it is actually made, including its limits and its entanglements with politics, money, and power.

AI

AI will soon be able to audit all published research – what will that mean for public trust in science?

Self-correction is fundamental to science. One of its most important forms is peer review, when anonymous experts scrutinise research before it is published. This helps safeguard the accuracy of the written record. Yet problems slip through. A range of grassroots and institutional initiatives work to identify problematic papers, strengthen the

Archive

Scientists’ political donations reflect polarization in academia – with implications for the public’s trust in science

People who lean left politically reported an increase in trust in scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic, while those who lean right politically reported much lower levels of trust in scientists. This polarization around scientific issues – from COVID-19 to climate change to evolution – is at its peak since surveys started tracking