Mathijs Boom

"Short Circuiting. Sabotage on Your Day Off" – Fascinating material from 1981 by a Dutch anti-nuclear "resistance group" named after Gyro Gearloose: "Willy Wortel en de Lampjes."

CfP voor iedereen die aan 20ste-eeuws protestbewegingen en ordehandhaving in Nederland werkt: deadline 1 nov. www.ru.nl/over-ons/age...

I will be giving a talk about Ghosts Behind Glass in Delft 🇳🇱 on Friday 6 November, 15:00-17:00 at Radius Center for Contemporary Art & Ecology. In conjunction with Tending Loss: Mourning Beyond The Human exhibition. If you are in the Netherlands, please come over! www.radius-cca.org/en/agenda/bo...

Book of the day On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman review – an astonishing memoir of terminal illness www.theguardian.com/books/2026/o...

No reason fascinating academic books shouldn’t look good too, like these three.

$30,000 fellowship stipend for PhD candidates working on the history of meteorology, climate science or adjacent fields.

Dutch energy research policy in March 1974. The key question isn't scarcity, experts noted, it's the environment: "We simply cannot burn everything."

Electricity is 23% of global final energy but delivers 37% of useful energy and powers 46% of the global economy. We don't need to replace every fossil joule. We need to replace the services. A much smaller task. Great to see the @iea.org’s new Electrification report finally measure this.

Two years after its completion (after 17 years of construction, 2007-2024), France's new nuclear power plant Flamanville 3 will shut down for a year starting this coming Saturday. This to replace its faulty reactor lid and for a major first inspection. www.france24.com/fr/info-en-c...

'm fascinated by this kind of no-context 1970s Dutch tv: jazz dancers in front of what looks like a refinery, part of a '77 retrospect on the oil crisis of '73.

Heading into a rapidly warming future with substantially less research to tell us how the planet is changing. This takes denial to a whole new level.

Join our new intensive Winter School in Planetary Histories, November 23-26 at KTH Stockholm! Application open now shorturl.at/x0KgY

I'm writing a thing about history education and "AI". Myself and another came up with some 'considerations' and I was wondering what people make of them in their current form. All critique appreciated, I'm trying to get to durable and defensible positions.

Once upon a time the widespread demise of forests catalyzed an environmental movement and helped push an energy transition.

En nog een vacature voor een promotieplaats bij collega @maartjegelder.bsky.social aan @uvahumanities.bsky.social maar deze gaat over gender en protest in de 16de eeuwse Noordelijke #Nederlanden werkenbij.uva.nl/vacatures/pr... #medievalsky #twitterstorians #earlymodernsky

Heroic nautilus of the centre of the title page of this edition of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's Herbarium Diluvianum. One of the all-time great book titles, that. In fact there's nothing about this I don't like.

This is really grim. Imagine a different world. @tninstitute.bsky.social

Same. HUGE gap between experts & everyone else. This was already expert consensus 2 years ago. Now? Trump's horrible & evil war have wrecked the perception of oil & gas as stable and cheap in the decade when solar, wind, batteries, EVs are SURGING worldwide www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

Two possibly interesting PhD positions on "submerged" and "extractive dependencies" in the context of project titled "Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea" in Bonn: www.idos-research.de/en/stellen-p... and www.idos-research.de/en/about-us/...

You can get to a high-warming world without high emissions . That's the part of this week's "RCP 8.5 is implausible" discussion that's getting missed. A short thread on why the relief is premature 🧵

Meanwhile the California grid now boasts the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants worth of batteries -- the total cost of which was, I suspect, less than a single nuclear plant.

Fascinating. One day, I’ll be a historian of peat and peatlands.

Peatlands store more carbon than the world's forests yet fundamental questions remain unanswered. Today we publish 50 priority research questions, identified by 467 participants from 54 countries #PeatQuest #Peatlands www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Global peatland experts share their top 50 research needs. Many of these are obvious (better mapping) and many should be obvious (centre local and indigenous communities), but some might surprise you (there is a lot that we do not know about what the microbes in peat are up to).

Genuine, history-making stuff. A watershed.

This is a critical point: *today*, even in countries that don’t introduce policies & measures to support it, consumers can unilaterally enact electrification and demand destruction

Written about a year ago

Currently 431-432 ppm

A reminder of where we stand. Source: ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

This looks like an interesting project! www.uni.lu/en/jobs/doct...

The #AMOC by 2100 will thus be so weak (~8 Sv) that it is very likely on the way to full shutdown, as our study last year showed: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... In my view, this now makes a full #AMOC shutdown more likely than not. Definitely not a low likelihood risk, as we used to think.

Worth following!

Vol. 1, no. 6 of the CO2 Newsletter, Aug-Sep 1980, is now downloadable. Founded by American geologist William Barbat, each issue was 8 pages of excerpts from recent reports, editorials and deeply researched articles. Pls comment on/share this thread! 1/9

Vacancy for a three-year post-doc position at the Universiteit van Amsterdam! This postdoc position, part of the European Research Council (ERC)-sponsored 𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐂𝐊𝐀𝐃𝐄 project, seeks to understand the long legacies of blockades on the post-war order.

Sounds like the stuff of an 18th-century luna-theological argument for the existence of a divine architect.

We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum

The Wayback Machine archive is, like Wikipedia, one of the last corners of the internet that hasn't been killed by greed & slop. That ... may not last long.

The stupidest tool from the box. Keeps demand and prices artificially high, costs billions, and largely ends up with households that don't need support. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦

“The “methodological blind spot” that she and Minderhoud have uncovered went undetected for so long in part because geoid estimates are most accurate in Europe and the eastern seaboard of North America, where the majority of published researchers are based.” e360.yale.edu/features/sea...