Rad Geek People's Daily

Over the last 40 years, climate science has transformed from a method for navigating uncertainty to a teleological campaign against doubt.

In the conventional understanding, climate change is uncertain. We don’t know how much carbon the human race will ultimately pump into the atmosphere; we don’t know, precisely, how much warming any eventual atmospheric concentration will cause; we don’t know how much this warming will affect sea levels or weather patterns; and we don’t know how well future societies will adapt.

These uncertainties are all the scientific justification we should need to to reduce emissions, invest in more resilient infrastructure, and protect natural systems. We don’t know exactly how dangerous three or four degrees of global warming will be by the end of the century, but we don’t need to know in order to act. There’s a reason that William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate economics, titled his book The Climate Casino: the risk is enough for us to hedge our bets.

More recently, though, this foundational idea of the modern environmental movement has itself been cast as a form of climate denial. In their landmark polemic Merchants of Doubt, the historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway executed an ambitious reframing of the science of climate change, alleging that the central obstacle to climate stabilization was campaigns financed by the fossil fuel industries, which used PR tactics to artificially inflate the true uncertainty in scientific climate change data. Scientists and advocates created new scientific bases for climate action, such as the 350 Parts Per Million standard and two-degree temperature targets. Climate impacts were no longer seen as the consequence of centuries of industrialization but rather the criminal fault of a few polluting industries. And climate change, under the new science, is not a future risk but a present catastrophe. Nordhaus, the father of the carbon tax, now regularly comes under fire for his perceived lack of climate ambition (his work has purportedly enabled climate change denial and delay.)

In place of uncertain outcomes, this new generation of climate advocates offered the certainty of present events. Doing so has entailed significant exaggeration beyond the hard facts of climate science, including the overhyping of climate change’s contribution to present-day extreme weather events and the use of implausible warming scenarios that forecast dire future impacts. This transformation has had the intended effect of narrowing the solution set understood as climate action. Climate change under the new regime is not an emergent long-term risk to be managed by smart planning, expanding technological capabilities, and deepening societal resilience. Instead, it is an immediate physical threat, earning illicit perpetrators — so-called fossil capital and the ever-growing army of climate deniers — an increase in climate-related litigation and regulation.

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Climate targets, single-event attribution analysis, and other forms of science activism have completely changed the way researchers, advocates, and journalists talk about the problem of climate change. The United Nations and hundreds of governments have endorsed atmospheric temperature targets. Friederieke Otto was recently named a contributing lead author on the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report. And the camp of climate deniers, a term once reserved for those who, through ignorance or malice, rejected the mainstream science of the greenhouse effect, has come to describe opponents of the Green New Deal and advocates of nuclear energy, which climate activists claim is too speculative for the certain policy prescriptions made by climate science.

But while activists may have taken over climate science, their big-picture results are not flattering. The vast bulk of the global energy supply still runs on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions continue to rise. The Trump Administration is systematically dismantling the climate policy apparatus that has been built up over the last generation, and it is not alone — governments around the world are rolling back climate commitments. There’s little uproar, because climate change remains a low priority for the public. And trust in climate scientists, and in science itself, shows signs of decline. . . .

. . . Reconstituting climate science and policy will require contending with this fractious new informational and political gestalt. For a newly successful climate science to take root in the coming years and decades, we need a renaissance in uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a dirty word — in climate science or anywhere else. Indeed, it is better understood as a kind of epistemic bravery: an assertion that while scientists and policymakers can’t predict the future, a scientifically informed, democratic public is capable of navigating it.

— Alex Trembath, Merchants of Certainty
Asterisk 13: Science (Winter 2026)

O.K., I do not yet have any real idea what to say about this — in maximally general terms, my starting points are to note that the Cuban Communist regime has been really awful for decades, both a totalitarian nightmare politically and socially, and a study in the most multidimensionally dysfunctional aspects of closed, planned economies, under revolutionary state socialism. U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba from the Cold War to the present has been like most U.S. sanctions regimes — stupid, appallingly belligerent and ineffective when not actively, massively counterproductive. (A policy of isolation cuts off and hurts ordinary Cubans but often strengthens, not weakens, the hands of their hermit-kingdom rulers.)

But whether or not the U.S. is acting wrongly and badly (I absolutely think it is), this seems like it could be really significant! If these reforms amount to anything in the end — of course it is far too soon to know whether they will, but these are very big moves — it could be a really hopeful development. I am baffled that as of today (22 June 2026), this has been very publicly developing for at least 10 days, but there currently seem to be not one story yet about these measures in the New York Times Americas section, and only one (1) short article in The Guardian, on president Díaz-Canel’s speech to the politburo, without much on the overall framework or significant details on the policies that were actually enacted last week, buried in their usually voluminous Latin America and Caribbean coverage. I’ve been trying to catch up on this story through Associated Press wire articles since I read about it through a post by Polymarket (!) to X dot com. I don’t know what’s going to happen for the island or for its catastrophically failed experiment in one-party revolutionary communist rule or for the U.S.’s ludicrous decades of destructive, until-now perennially failing efforts at isolation and regime change, if these reforms do take hold and deepen, if they are acknowledged and diplomatically rewarded, etc. But it seems like folks ought to be reading and talking more about this!

June 12, 2026:

HAVANA (AP) — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Friday announced a package of economic reforms aimed at attracting investment, expanding participation by Cubans living abroad in the economy and decentralizing parts of the country’s administration.

The president did not provide details about the measures or a timetable for their implementation but said during remarks to state media that it is now time to change and that the country simply cannot continue on its current course.

Every opportunity in the midst of a crisis must be seized as a moment for takeoff, as a moment for growth, Díaz-Canel said, according to a statement from the presidency that was republished by state-run media. We have established a group of priorities to confront this situation, he added without offering specifics.

— Andrea Rodríguez, Díaz-Canel announces economic reforms to attract investment and involve Cubans abroad
Associated Press, 12 June 2026

June 17, 2026:

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s powerful Communist Party, or PCC, called an unscheduled session Wednesday, a rare occurrence that comes days after President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced an economic reform package aimed at opening up the struggling island’s economy.

Also Wednesday, in a surprise move, the National Assembly was also convened for Thursday to follow up on the party meeting.

Both sessions come at a critical time for Cuba, as it grapples with the effects of a U.S. energy blockade aimed at forcing a change in the island’s economic model.

Last week, Díaz-Canel told journalists that the upcoming reforms would expand authorizations for private companies, which were first legalized five years ago. Without providing specific details or deadlines, the president noted that the plan will also allow Cubans living both on the island and abroad to invest in tourism, while granting state-run companies greater freedom to partner with the private sector.

He also forecast changes to the currency exchange market and raised the possibility that private businesses could import and export goods directly, bypassing the state intermediation currently required.

— Andrea Rodríguez, Cuba’s Communist Party convenes unscheduled session to debate new economic measures
Associated Press, 17 June 2026

June 18, 2026:

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s Communist Party has approved an emergency economic package featuring unprecedented free-market measures aimed at opening up the struggling island’s economy following heightened pressure from the United States.

While the full document has not been released, here are some of the proposals, based on statements by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and other officials.

Decentralize state-run economy . . .

Nonspecific changes to foreign exchange market . . .

Government downsizing . . . to reduce the number of ministries from 27 to 21 . . . .

Municipal independence . . . [to] give municipalities greater authority to approve businesses operating within their jurisdictions and to manage relations with economic actors, including state-owned enterprises, cooperatives and private companies. . . .

Autonomy for state-owned companies . . . Companies would be allowed to design their own pay systems, use and distribute profits with fewer restrictions, import and export goods, and enter into partnerships with private businesses and cooperatives. . . .

Elimination of state intermediaries . . . businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises, would be allowed to import and export goods directly rather than through state-run entities . . . .

Subsidies to phase out . . . moving food and other goods to market pricing.

Rebuilding abandoned infrastructure . . .

— Andrea Rodríguez, What to know about Cuba’s economic measures aimed at opening up the island’s economy
Associated Press, 18 June 2026

June 19, 2026:

Cuba pushes through sweeping free-market reforms in biggest economic shift since the revolution

HAVANA (AP) — Observers on Friday called Cuba’s new free-market reforms the most sweeping economic overhaul of the island’s communist economy since the Cuban revolution, as the grandson of former President Ra´l Castro said in an interview that Cuba must seek to move its economy forward.

The 176 measures aim to further decentralize Cuba’s state-run economy, which has been left gasping by a tightened embargo under President Donald Trump. Under the island’s current economic model, the government largely determines what is produced, who produces it, the prices at which goods are sold and how the country’s resources are allocated.

The plan includes more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad. It even permits fast-food chains to establish themselves on the island.

Elements that for decades were listed as pillars of the revolutionary economy, such as the state monopoly on foreign trade and the centralization of productive forces, have been dismantled, said Luis Carlos Battista, a Cuban-American political scientist and lawyer who is a doctoral candidate at the University of Salamanca.

Cuban leaders like former President Ra´l Castro — who still wields significant power on the island — have sought to push forward more limited reforms of Cuba’s economy in the past, but efforts have run into bureaucratic hurdles. In passing the reform, Cuban authorities cautioned that implementation could be slow, and noted measures will not be viable if the U.S. does not lift the energy and financial embargo on the island.

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In an interview published Friday, in the United Arab Emirates-based The National, Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, grandson of the revolutionary leader, reiterated that Cuba doesn’t even slightly represent a threat to the U.S.

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Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that the proposed measures were based on an analysis of the Vietnamese and Chinese models, communist countries with market economies.

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What is likely to pose a significant barrier are U.S. sanctions on Cuba, said Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute in Washington. . . . Without sanctions being lifted, Schlenker and other analysts said many of the presented measures will be inapplicable, especially due to the limitations and prohibitions imposed on potential investors, who are penalized in the U.S. financial system if they do business with Cuba.

Beyond that, there are a number of other obstacles that could stymie significant reforms, ranging from mistrust from potential investors to what Battista, the Cuban-American analyst called slow and inefficient bureaucracy.

Despite these obstacles, the Cuban government faces a short window for obtaining results, said Paolo Spadoni, associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University in Georgia.

If Cuban leaders hope to survive this unprecedented crisis and the pressure from the United States, they must move quickly with the implementation of reform and the achievement of tangible results, Spadoni said.

— Andrea Rodríguez, Cuba pushes through sweeping free-market reforms in biggest economic shift since the revolution
Associated Press, 19 June 2026

Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer. I remember in my high school physics class we were first taught the value of Earth’s gravitational constant g, and then asked to perform an experiment that should reveal it.

Of course, working with cruder tools, limited patience, and air resistance, many of us didn’t wind up squarely on 9.8 m/s². One of my partners was quick to scribble out our actual observation, and she and I had a brief struggle over control of the pencil as she attempted to put in the “correct” answer. She had a better sense of the teacher’s intentions than I did. The tables that honestly reported a “wrong” result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that “worked.” We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown.

Students in science fairs and adults in professional labs know the answer they’re supposed to get. A result has to be statistically significant to “count” and, just like in my physics class, students can be tempted to keep reworking their results until they get the right answer. There was no p-hacking at my research internship, but part of the education I received in a professional lab was how much the scientific process was dominated by anxiety, not curiosity. 

—Leah Libresco Sargeant, Rethinking High-School Science Fairs
Asterisk, February 2026

IT IS THIS VERY IDEOLOGICAL PROJECT that demands the flattening down of the real historical Greek and Roman tradition and demands hostility towards classicists who actually cherish it, because the study of the ancient world does not conform neatly to modern bigotries or hard-right ideology. The irony is that it is precisely this complexity that has drawn generations of readers and scholars to the Greek and Roman classics and ensured their continued place in the pantheon of great works. Indeed, as Stanford classicist Reviel Netz notes in Why the Ancient Greeks Matter, it was the very fractious, discordant, individualistic nature of Greek culture—clearly visible in their literature—that set them apart from previous and contemporary societies.

For its part, Rome was a diverse society from its foundation and regularly extended citizenship to foreign ethnic groups and even freed slaves. Roman authors like Livy, and even foes of Rome like Philip V of Macedon, recognized that this liberality was a foundation of Roman strength. While the Greeks and the Romans could certainly be bigoted, their stereotypes map poorly onto the modern racism demonstrated by X’s unworthy defenders of Western civilization. Herodotus thought Egypt the oldest of all peoples, in some ways more civilized than Greece, with a better calendar and an older and deeper religious tradition. Homer imagined the mythical Ethiopian king Memnon as a cousin to the hero Hector and also the most beautiful man Odysseus had ever seen, a stark contrast to racialized claims that actress Lupita Nyong’o could not possibly play the famously beautiful Helen. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Romans felt little kinship with other European whites. If anything, Gauls, Britons, and Germans could be far more alien and barbarous to ancient writers than Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, or even Ethiopians.

The classical canon does not present a single vision of greatness, but many. It even questions the value of greatness itself. Even in Homer, Achilles’s vision of greatness through glory in the Iliad conflicts with Hector’s dogged defense of his home. The poem does not render a clear verdict on who is right, only who won. Homer doesn’t end with the triumph of Achilles, but wistfully notes such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses. Even if we take the Iliad and Achilles’s victory at face value, what triumph he has is undermined in the Odyssey: Achilles’s shade appears in the Underworld and rejects Odysseus’s declaration of his greatness. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, he laments, than be king over all the perished dead.

Homer is hardly the only figure in the classical canon to question the sort of violent masculine greatness to which the statue accounts aspire. Sallust famously concludes that the great military achievements of the Romans merely served to undermine their morals and domestic politics, while he extols the greatness of writing history. Tacitus, in the midst of praising his father-in-law Agricola’s military achievements, in turn questions the fundamental morality of Roman conquest itself through the famous words he attributes to Calgacus: robbery, butchery, and plunder they call by the lying name empire and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. Unless we view the ancients as if they were cartoons, it should not surprise us to find classical views on both violence and masculinity were complex and varied.

— Brett Devereaux, Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong
The Bulwark, 4 June 2026

Reading: Matthew Petti, A Pointless War in Reason (June 2026).

Trump still expected a quick and unambiguous surrender when he and Netanyahu launched the war a few days later. Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a first strike, and Trump said that he was anticipating a situation like with Delcy in Venezuela.

A month into the war, Trump admitted at an Easter dinner that he had told the British prime minister the war would last only three days. He gave a similar timeline to skeptical Middle Eastern leaders before the war began, telling them it would only take 100 hours, according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a pro-diplomacy nonprofit, who also broke the news of Iran’s 2003 offer.

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Whether or not the truce holds past April, Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals.

The war has led to an outcome that neither Iranians nor Americans wanted. But it has fulfilled the vision of Netanyahu, who declared from the rooftop of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv that bringing the U.S. directly into the war allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.

Ironically, it has also fulfilled the vision of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who foreshadowed his plans in a 2022 speech: By God, I see it with my own eyes, a war that will change the face of the globe, a regional religious war that will burn both the green and the dry. The American political class helped pile a lot of the kindling, and it doesn’t know how to put the fire out.

— Matthew Petti, A Pointless War
In Reason (June 2026).

It is easy to look at this appalling mess and come away with the conclusion that Donald Trump is especially foolish, rash, inconstant or callous and dangerously careless with deadly fights he cannot control. Donald Trump is all of those things, but his rudderless war is not just the latest expression of his peculiar vices or malign influence. The real fact, whether about Trump’s wars or the decades of American wars in the Middle East before this one, is that whether the War President is a fool or a mastermind or just some guy, they never have the control they think they have over the wars they bring into the world. War is not a tool you can wield; war is not a weapon you can aim. War is a fire, which grows out from where you set it, and burns on with a life of its own.