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
- 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”
- 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
- Awkward Botany
- 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
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- 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
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Karl Broman
- 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
- 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.”
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- 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
- All about models
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- American Statistical Association
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Risk and Well-Being
- Mertonian norms
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- 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.
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Number Cruncher Politics
- 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.
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Label Noise
climate change
- Reanalyses.org
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- 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
- SolarLove
- Simple models of climate change
- 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 Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- And Then There's Physics
- 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
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- 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.
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- 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%.
- RealClimate
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- 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.
- The Sunlight Economy
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- 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.
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Spectra Energy exposed
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- "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 net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
Archives
Jan Galkowski