
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Prediction vs Forecasting: Knaub “Unfortunately, ‘prediction,’ such as used in model-based survey estimation, is a term that is often subsumed under the term ‘forecasting,’ but here we show why it is important not to confuse these two terms.”
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Mike Bloomberg, 2020 He can get progress on climate done, has the means and experts to counter the Trump and Republican digital disinformation machine, and has the experience, knowledge, and depth of experience to achieve and unify.
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Risk and Well-Being
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- Number Cruncher Politics
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- American Statistical Association
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Mertonian norms
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Gabriel's staircase
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- London Review of Books
- What If
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Earle Wilson
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Awkward Botany
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
climate change
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- Warming slowdown discussion
- RealClimate
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Climate model projections versus observations
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Simple models of climate change
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Sea Change Boston
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Paul Beckwith Professor Beckwith is, in my book, one of the most insightful and analytical observers on climate I know. I highly recommend his blog, and his other informational products.
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. The second part.
- And Then There's Physics
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- Earth System Models
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Social Cost of Carbon
- David Appell's early climate science
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Jacobson WWS literature index
Archives
Jan Galkowski
More on RCP 8.5 from …
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The story of RCP 8.5
What’s there to know about RCP 8.5 by Climate Adam.
“Estonia Warns European Allies Against Direct Talks With Russia”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-16/estonia-warns-european-allies-against-direct-talks-with-russia: Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna.
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Dr Des Callaghan’s “Bryophytes around the world”
Dr Callaghan is a superb bryophyte photographer.
Posted in bryophyte, bryophytes, The British Bryological Society, zero carbon
Tagged bryophyte photography
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Entire NSF National Science Board fired by Donald Trump
More moves to make himself remembered in history, no doubt.
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The Climate Brink
I follow The Climate Brink carefully because Dr Dressler always has something useful to say, and because I often learn something reading him.
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from Canada PM Mark Carney
Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said in Davos this year that the longtime U.S.-led, rules-based system was rupturing, and that middle powers like Canada had to diversify their partnerships if they hoped to survive. “The old order is not coming back,” he stated. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
From the New York Times.
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thanks DT for making the case for solar and EVs and NOT oil
.
Go EVs!
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2026 March 14 [J 073.87] “Pi Day”



Geographic coordinates N42.227, W71.230, Westwood, MA, USA
Rare and hard to find 1937-1938
https://667-per-cm.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ChronicaBryophyta-1938.pdf is a PDF of 1938 paper ‘A YEAR-BOOK Devoted to the Study), of Mosses and Hepatics</a> by Fr. VERDOORN, Volume X, 1937, published by the Chronica Botanica Company, Leiden.



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EPA official actions on their “endangerment finding”
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Could this be why DT wants Greenland?
“Camp Century”, a former U.S. military base, is buried in the ice in Greenland. Apparently it contains lots of radioactive and toxic stuff.
Maybe they don’t want the USA retroactively embarrassed? This also would not be a problem if climate change were not real, but it is, despite what DT and cronies say and think.
Posted in climate change, climate denial, radioactivity
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AI and GPT don’t manufacture results from nothing
If the AI and GPT result reported in Nature is other than superstition,there must be a statistical model justifying it.
I’d like to know what it is and how it compares to existing well known prediction schemes and algorithms. Right now, can’t tell.
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16th September 2025, Westwood, MA
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Tagged Atrichum, macrophotography, mosses, New England garden, Polytrichum
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Pohlia lescuriana
Posted in ABLS, blog, Botany, bryology, bryophyte, bryophytes, mosses, New England Botanical Society
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Mckibben vs Nordhous
There’s a review of McKibben’s new book in The New Atlantis at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-bill-mckibben-lost-the-plot
I think people should read in full the Wikipedia article about Nordhaus before buying into this, even much at all I’d say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus
Welcome comments here.
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NOAA climate assessment which has been taken off the federal site
… By You Know Who …
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Fast-Track Review of Latest Evidence for Whether Greenhouse Gas Emissions Endanger Public Health and Welfare
On 7 August 2025, the United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine initiated a new study to “review the latest scientific evidence on whether greenhouse gas emissions are reasonably anticipated to endanger public health and welfare in the U.S.” (press release). Summarizing its purpose:
“The committee conducting the study will focus on evidence gathered by the scientific community since 2009 — when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency first declared greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health. Any conclusions in the committee’s report will describe supporting evidence, the level of confidence in a conclusion, and areas of disagreement or unknowns.
The EPA recently announced that it intends to rescind its “endangerment finding,” a statement issued by the agency in 2009 that found that greenhouse gas emissions do pose risks to public health and welfare. The National Academies study will be completed and publicly released in September, in time to inform EPA’s decision process.
“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of climate research and data have yielded expanded understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We are undertaking this fresh examination of the latest climate science in order to provide the most up-to-date assessment to policymakers and the public.”
The committee will be led by Shirley Tilghman, professor of molecular biology and public affairs, emeritus, and former president, Princeton University. The committee will also include experts in public health, extreme weather, climate modeling, agriculture, infrastructure, and other areas.
The committee has issued a request for information to the public and scientific community. The study is being self-funded by the National Academy of Sciences.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.”
Some recent NAS papers related to this subject:
- “The intensification of the strongest nor’easters.”
- “Human and climate impacts on the alpine Critical Zone over the past 10,000 y.”
- “Barystatic sea level change observed by satellite gravimetry: 1993–2022.”
- “Abrupt shift of El Niño periodicity under CO2 mitigation.”
- “Human influence on climate detectable in the late 19th century.”
- “Fossil fuel methane emissions likely underestimated in a model based on atmospheric δ13C trends.”
- “Observation-based estimate of Earth’s effective radiative forcing.”
- “Increasing boreal fires reduce future global warming and sea ice loss.”
There are of course many more.
RFI.
P.S. 8 August 2025: Another report related to this “Outrage over Trump team’s climate report spurs researchers to fight back”. See article in Nature.
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A New Phase in Trump’s War on Data

“RIGGED”
Nothing new …
Censorship of Science by the administration of President Donald Trump
“Azimuth Backup Project (Part 5)”, upcoming presentation by Prof John Carlos Baez
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Biofluorescent marsupial

(from Nature)
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