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 And if consent is withdrawn, they lose.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
- 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/
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- 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
- Mertonian norms
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Professor David Draper
- London Review of Books
- Slice Sampling
- Label Noise
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- 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/
- Risk and Well-Being
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- 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
- 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.
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Gabriel's staircase
- Gavin Simpson
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- James' Empty Blog
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- "The Expert"
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- 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”
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- 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/.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- 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
- "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.
climate change
- "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.
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- Ice and Snow
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- 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.
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- 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%.
- "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.)
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- And Then There's Physics
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- "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.
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- 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.
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Climate change: Evidence and causes A project of the UK Royal Society: (1) Answers to key questions, (2) evidence and causes, and (3) a short guide to climate science
- 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.
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- 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
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Risk and Well-Being
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Earth System Models
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
Archives
Jan Galkowski