Apart from divergence from political principles which a polity might have thought they held for a long time, the key question is what would be the actual, realized long term costs of an extended dalliance with an anti-intellectual, anti-realist movement to the country whose majority swings that way? Are there any?
Failures to prepare for consequences of climate disruption and works to eliminate behaviors and choices involving greenhouse gas emissions are not limited to people who are anti-intellectual. There’s a lot of practical denial of climate disruption simply in people continuing to do and buy as they’ve always have done, even — and some evidence says especially — among the well educated, at least in the United States. So climate may not be a good test at all.
There may be more urgent challenges. A contest with a rising world power may offer one. As world hegemon, the United States prides itself on its military, and upon the technological successes of its recent past. It naturally assumes its military continues to be dominant, and that its technical capacity is unrivaled, and, so, tends to believe up-and-comers cannot seriously threaten it. Improvements in military capability are explained as happening as a result of espionage rather than inherent capability. The trouble with this story is that it leaves the hegemon underestimating the capability of the new power. For as long as technological capability and military prowess merely follows the path with which the hegemon is familiar, all remains predictable, and responses possible. But if a new power knows how to create new technology, hidden in its military establishment, the hegemon no longer has the ability to predict or even counter something which hitherto hasn’t been seen.
When such advances have been brought to military contest in times past, the militaries on both sides adapt only slowly. And measnwhile the casualty counts rise.
That’s a military threat. What about an economic threat?
There is some acknowledgement, for example, that the United States needs to transition its energy supply to zero Carbon sources. This might be seen as a government perspective, associated with Democrats, but there is substantial realization among businesses and business leaders that this is how it needs to happen. (In fact, I can’t seen how Senator Manchin can claim he’s listening to business in his various flavors of opposition. The people who have his ear do not represent anything like a typical cross section of business interests, weighted by wealth.) There are two ways this could be done. One is to purchase the needed technology on open markets, and a good number of those sales might go to China. The other is to build the capability to make them in the United States, despite the acknowledged gap between U.S. manufacturing capability here and that available in the international marketplace. So, does the U.S. wait until it has such manufacturing capability before it rolls anything out to address climate? How does the nascent manufacturing sector get supported and funded? Government grants? That’s not really an open market, and it’s an approach that offers many opportunities for mistakes by government.
So, an anti-China stance may well hurt the United States economically, because it can no longer rely upon international sources for parts, specifically China, for it cannot be seen as cooperating with its new arch rival. The build up of capability can result in delays, products of inferior quality, setbacks in the marketplace.
What would make sense is to buy now, transitioning to domestic sourcing once the industry masters its products and its market. But superpower rivalry seldom results in paths which make sense.
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- 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
- James' Empty Blog
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Mertonian norms
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- 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/
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Ted Dunning
- 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.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- 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.
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- 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.
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- "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.
- 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”
- American Statistical Association
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- 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
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Label Noise
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- 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.
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Karl Broman
- 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/
- NCAR AtmosNews
- 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
- 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.
climate change
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- 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 HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Reanalyses.org
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- "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.
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Warming slowdown discussion
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Sea Change Boston
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Skeptical Science
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Risk and Well-Being
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Social Cost of Carbon
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Climate model projections versus observations
- "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
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- 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
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Simple models of climate change
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- World Weather Attribution
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- 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.
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- "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.
Archives
Jan Galkowski