Hap tip to Tamino:
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- All about models
- 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.
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Gavin Simpson
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- 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/.
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Label Noise
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- 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.”
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- 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
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Ted Dunning
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- 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
- Risk and Well-Being
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- All about Sankey diagrams
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- NCAR AtmosNews
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- "The Expert"
- 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
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- "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.
- "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.
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- 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.
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- 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.
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- weather blocking patterns
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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.
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Skeptical Science
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- World Weather Attribution
- 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
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- 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.
- SolarLove
- Ice and Snow
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- RealClimate
- "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.)
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Reanalyses.org
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Mathematics and Climate Research Network The Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN) engages mathematicians to collaborating on the cryosphere, conceptual model validation, data assimilation, the electric grid, food systems, nonsmooth systems, paleoclimate, resilience, tipping points.
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- David Appell's early climate science
Archives
Jan Galkowski
ecoquant
Dear mr.Blanket Man.
[snip]
The second law says that transfer of energy from cold to hot, can only be in the form of work.
Why does the gh-theory say that energy is transferred as heat to the surface?
[snip]
I don’t get many comments. shrug Getting comments or even traffic is not why I write my blog, but I do have the utmost respect for my 177 followers.
I’m leaving this one here as an example of what not to post.
Responding and engaging trolls are simply a waste of time that could be put to better purposes.
With the edits (made by the Moderator), the comment from @lifeisthermal now can be addressed in a proper context. The physical work related to the greenhouse effect is adiabatic expansion (where the “work” is coming from internal cooling) coupled with radiation of heat energy into space. The adiabatic portion occurs with constant potential temperature, at constant entropy. Lost of energy by emission is another energy exchange, indicative of a non-closed system. (Second law only applies to closed.) And the greenhouse effect and global warming are simply corollaries of the First and Second Law.
First note: Temperature of parcels of air decrease monotonically as altitude about Earth’s surface decreases. The rate of decrease is termed the lapse rate, and its profile is uniquely specified by any given atmosphere, whether it contains greenhouse gases or not. Atmosphere at higher altitudes is colder than atmosphere at lower ones, and the atmosphere at the surface boundary layer, in contact with the surface is the warmest of all.
Second note: The atmosphere, sans clouds and other scattering, is transparent to high frequently radiation from the Sun. It warms the Earth’s surface and, to the degree water is involved there (and pretending no water above) water in air near it. Because of the First Law, Earth must remain in thermal equilibrium with space about it. Since upon receiving a parcel of energy from Sun, Earth is incrementally warming because of it, this must be radiated out. And so it is, but the layers which radiate are high in the atmosphere, not near the surface. Thermal radiation is exchanged the dense layers by convection and collisions of molecules, and very little by direct radiation. Moreover, presence of dense layers of atmosphere above mean their cross section for thermal photos is very high. So they rarely escape.
Third note: Introduce, now, greenhouse gases in atmosphere. These are per unit mass much more opaque to thermal photons than ambient Oxygen and Nitrogen, and, so, impede the emission of thermal energy from any rising parcel of air. The effect is to change the lapse rate so high atmosphere at a temperature
before the addition of greenhouse gas has 
only when 
where 
is the new altitude and 
was the old one.
Fourth and final note: But if the lapse rate is such that the new equilibrium-by-thermal emission altitude
is higher than the original 
, that means, because the lapse rate is a monotonic decrease in temperature the temperature of atmosphere near Earth’s surface must necessarily be higher. So, it warms the surface more than it would without the greenhouse gases.
That’s it.