You compare those forces, and it looks like, How could this even be a struggle? But that’s the wrong measure. There are people, and they make a difference.
We can go back to my favorite philosopher, David Hume. His Of the First Principles of Government, a political tract in the late 18th century, starts off by saying that we should understand that power is in the hands of the governed. Those who are governed, they’re the ones who have the power. Whatever kind of state it is, militaristic or more democratic, as England was becoming. The masters rule only by consent. And if consent is withdrawn, they lose. Their rule is very fragile.
I should say that today’s masters of the universe, as they modestly call themselves, understand this very well. Every January in Davos, the Switzerland ski resort, the great and powerful gather to go skiing, enjoy themselves, and congratulate each other on how wonderful they are. Top CEOs and media figures and entertainment figures and so on.
But this year was different. The theme was different. The theme was: We’re in trouble. The peasants are coming with their pitchforks. As they would prefer to put it, we’re facing “reputational risks. They’re coming after us. Our control is fragile. We have to provide a different message. So the message at Davos was: Yes, we realize we’ve done wrong things during this whole neoliberal period. You, the general population, have suffered. We understand that. We’re overcoming our mistakes. We’re now going to be committed to you, the stakeholders and working-class communities, we’re really committed to your welfare. We’re becoming deeply humanitarian. We regret our mistakes. You can put your faith in us. We’ll take over and work for your benefit.
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- London Review of Books
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- 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/
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- 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
- Gavin Simpson
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- 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.
- 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.”
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- 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.
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Mertonian norms
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- American Statistical Association
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Higgs from AIR describing NAO and EA Stephanie Higgs from AIR Worldwide gives a nice description of NAO and EA in the context of discussing “The Geographic Impact of Climate Signals on European Winter Storms”
- Awkward Botany
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- 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
- 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.
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- 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.
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- 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
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- All about Sankey diagrams
climate change
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- weather blocking patterns
- 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.
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- 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.
- SolarLove
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Simple models of climate change
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- 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 model projections versus observations
- Sea Change Boston
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- AIP's history of global warming science: impacts The American Institute of Physics has a fine history of the science of climate change. This link summarizes the history of impacts of climate change.
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Reanalyses.org
- Skeptical Science
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- MIT's Climate Primer
- 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%.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- "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.)
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- 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
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Social Cost of Carbon
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- The Sunlight Economy
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- RealClimate
- Ice and Snow
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
Archives
Jan Galkowski