Aurélien Goutsmedt

The presumed upcoming El Nino will help cement and quantify global warming acceleration, showing that 2C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.
See Another El Nino Already? mailchi.mp/caa/another-... Also available on Substack: jimehansen.substack.com/p/another-el...

Genuinely fascinating divergence.
Oil and energy market types: really beginning to freak out.
Global macro types: mostly relatively calm and expecting this to all blow over.

every single macro-type person i've spoken to this week has been very much in the 'ah it'll blow over' camp

i don't understand why, but this is the consensus

The vulnerable Gulf energy assets putting the world on edge Infrastructure in the region plays a critical role in global power supply

Great visuals to understand Middle East different pressure points on energy and materials.

Oil & LNG of course, but also aluminum, fertiliser and water.

www.ft.com/content/e05d...

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Europeans live longer than Americans, despite spending less on healthcare.

Asia’s big economies brace for Iran war energy shock Some of the world’s biggest fuel importers rush to secure oil and gas supplies as Middle East conflict chokes flow

Some thoughts for @financialtimes.com: "The situation is terrible for #Taiwan, #SouthKorea and #Thailand, given their high levels of dependence on the #Hormuz route and lack of robust strategic reserves."

www.ft.com/content/b5ce...

Markets were incredibly complacent at the start of the week, but - with Brent now around $85 - I think we're starting to price a reasonable risk premium. This is up 18% from Friday and I think starts to accurately reflect risk of a major supply disruption...
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/a-massive-...

"Producing journal articles isn’t what we are actually meant to be doing — we’re supposed to be learning meaningful things about people, power, and society."

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

This blog post by @davekarpf.bsky.social is really worth reading and reflecting upon.

German Chancellor Merz spent the past two weeks travelling first to Beijing and Hangzhou, then heading to Washington a few days later to meet Trump. Merz’s itinerary functions as a crude but accurate map of Germany’s external exposure.

open.substack.com/pub/outsampl...

Many European manufacturing regions also depend heavily on US final demand. For some regions, a significant share of manufacturing value added is ultimately absorbed by the US market through trade and production linkages.

Using regional employment data, the map shows which parts of Europe are most exposed to the rise in Chinese import competition across manufacturing industries. The results highlight the industrial core of Germany and the manufacturing belt of CEE.

Crucial point. Supply shocks require a fiscal not monetary response.

Chartbook 436 Unseasonal war. How the US-Israeli war on Iran threatens the global agricultural cycle. One impact of the war being waged by the US and Israel against Iran that is not getting as much attention as it deserves, is the impact on the global supply of fertilizer.

"Talk about a polycrisis linkage: Netanyahu persuades Trump to attack Iran, which responds by attacking Qatar, which responds by shutting down LNG, which spikes fertilizer prices in India which upsets the Indian fiscal consolidation effort!"
adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

This is a must-read by the guy who literally wrote the book on it:
Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War
goodauthority.org/news/is-oil-...
bsky.app/profile/did:...

I'm really glad European policymakers are focused on what's important

A picture of PEW poll on global attitude survey, saying the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good vs bad, where the US has the worst rankings and Canada the best

Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best

Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!

Polling from More in Common shows that Greens and Reform win a higher share of voters who struggle to make ends meet, while Labour and the Conservatives win those who are most financially comfortable

Reform UK and the Greens are hoovering up financially insecure voters. My piece this week looks at the return of Britain's class politics (with a twist) www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Russia is main beneficiary of Iran war-fuelled spike in oil prices
• Rise in crude prices gives Kremlin breathing room after recent slump in oil revenues
• Yet Moscow could struggle to boost exports amid drone attacks in Black Sea ports & sea ice in Baltic terminals
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?—Asterisk There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s really going ...

9. It can reasonably be objected that the starry-eyed advocates of LLMs are themselves cultists. Even some inside the tribe accept that it is so! But too much Bluesky AI discourse reminds me of vintage Dawkins/Harris atheism - taking up the bad intellectual habits of those they condemn. Finis.

5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.

1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...

La guerre au Moyen-Orient menace-t-elle l'économie mondiale ? Alors que la guerre au Moyen-Orient se poursuit, les mauvais souvenirs des répercussions énergétiques et économiques de la guerre en Ukraine refont surface. Faut-il craindre un deuxième épisode d’infl...

Merci @franceculture.fr pour l'invitation ce matin à parler des conséquences économiques de la guerre en Iran : pétrole, inflation, dollar, résilience...

www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

After months of wrangling and an epic list of delays, the Commission has finally released its Industrial Accelerator Act.

This could turn into one of the EU’s most consequential industrial policy files in years - and the proposal is honestly not a bad place to start.

Some quick thoughts:

A good thread by @nilsredeker.bsky.social but I disagree with his optimistic assessment of the @ec.europa.eu IAA. A quick thread :

Monetary policy is about facing dilemmas, always. High IR hurt low/middle class households, as it is more difficult to get/pay back a mortgage, and the ecological transition with its cpaital intensive industries. Low IR+QE favor tech bro's fascist oligopolies and turbocharge billionairs' wealth.

What the 2022 energy crisis taught us about inflation — and why it matters now with Iran The European Central Bank itself has repeatedly said over the years that its policies are ineffective when dealing with energy shocks.

Gas prices are surging again after the US-Israeli attack on Iran, and talk of ECB rate hikes returned this week.

Before repeating 2022-2023, it’s worth revisiting what actually happened during the last energy shock and how the ECBs crisis policies played out.

Vacancy for a fully funded 4-year PhD at @uvahumanities.bsky.social on the key roles played by social science, demography, and nutritional science during the blockades of the First and Second World Wars, especially where they related to food.

Trump’s War on Iran Could Screw Over US Farmers The Middle East supplies a huge amount of the world’s fertilizer. Conflict in the region has sent prices soaring ahead of the critical spring planting season.

there's a lot going on right now but did you know a massive amount of the world's fertilizer flows through the middle east, and did you know that that fertilizer needs to be shipped to the us *right now* for planting season, and uh did you know we are at war with iran