
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- 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
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- London Review of Books
- 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.”
- Mertonian norms
- 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/.
- 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/
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Earle Wilson
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- All about Sankey diagrams
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- 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
- Professor David Draper
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Karl Broman
- Risk and Well-Being
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- 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.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- 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.
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- 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
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- James' Empty Blog
- American Statistical Association
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Label Noise
- Slice Sampling
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- 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.
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
climate change
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- RealClimate
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- weather blocking patterns
- 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
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- "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.)
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- Sea Change Boston
- 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
- 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.
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Simple models of climate change
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- 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.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Ice and Snow
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- 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.
- And Then There's Physics
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- World Weather Attribution
- "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.
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- 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.
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Warming slowdown discussion
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Reanalyses.org
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Climate model projections versus observations
- 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.
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: biology
Professor James Hansen responds and explains:
The recent paper by Hansen, Soto, and others has caused a stir, as I suspect it was intended to do so. I posted about this paper earlier. Now Professor Hansen has responded to the critics of his team’s work and … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, arXiv, astrophysics, bifurcations, biology, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate models, COP21, denial, disingenuity, dynamical systems, ecology, education, environment, ethics, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, James Hansen, maths, meteorology, NASA, NCAR, new forms of scientific peer review, NOAA, oceanography, open source scientific software, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, probability, rationality, reasonableness, science, science education, sea level rise, temporal myopia, the right to know, time series, WAIS, zero carbon
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rappin’ the truth
(Hat tip to the Yale Climate Connections project.)
Posted in Bill Nye, biology, Boston, carbon dioxide, chemistry, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, ecology, education, environment, evolution, geophysics, global warming, investment in wind and solar energy, Neill deGrasse Tyson, physics, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, science, science education
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Links explaining climate change Kevin Jones liked
Kevin Jones asked me if I could put the links in a Comment on a post I made at Google+ in a collection or something for reference. I am therefore repeating the Comment with these details below. No one simple … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, astrophysics, bifurcations, biology, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, chance, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate models, climate zombies, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, environment, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, history, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, living shorelines, mass extinctions, mass transit, mathematics, maths, meteorology, methane, microgrids, model comparison, NASA, natural gas, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, science, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sea level rise, sociology, solar power, statistics, temporal myopia, the right to know, Tony Seba, WHOI, wind power, zero carbon
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“Can we avert the post-antibiotic world?”
(Hat tip to Dan Satterfield.) A TED talk. Bacteria develop resistence so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided developing new ones is not in their best interest. From the speaker, Maryn McKenna.
ARTICLE: “Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous”
Bill McKibben writes about the hope of domestic and home solar, and air-based heat pumps (*), in The New Yorker. I share that hope. Another good book on the same: Mark Schapiro’s Carbon Shock: A tale or risk and calculus … Continue reading
Posted in biology, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, energy, energy reduction, environment, ethics, investment in wind and solar energy, rationality, reasonableness, solar power, sustainability, wind power, zero carbon
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Destroying the Most Persistent Scientific Myth In America – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Destroying the Most Persistent Scientific Myth In America – Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere.
Posted in Bayesian, biology, carbon dioxide, chance, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, denial, ecology, education, ensembles, environment, forecasting, geophysics, global warming, hiatus, history, IPCC, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, obfuscating data, physics, probability, rationality, reasonableness, science, science education, spatial statistics, statistics, temporal myopia, time series
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“This planet comes with limits”
Carl Safina elaborates on the limits of exploitation. It’s consistent with what David Suzuki conveys in his succinct presentation, linked below: As Suzuki says, this isn’t politics or opinion, or even biology, it’s just math.
“Human activity has nothing big enough to affect Earth”
“Human activity has nothing big enough to affect Earth.” That’s disingenuous and, usually, the speaker knows better but is trying to dissuade an audience from thinking human activity does. Or they parrot someone who is trying to do that. But … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, biology, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, consumption, ecology, economics, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, ethics, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, history, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, meteorology, methane, natural gas, notes, open data, physics, politics, population biology, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, solar power, statistics, the right to know, time series, wind power
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R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis
R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis (Nonlinear Regression).
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, biology, climate change, ecology, environment, Python 3, R, statistics, Wordpress
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The B-Team
Yes!! B Team Leaders Call for Net-Zero Greenhouse-Gas Emissions by 2050 About the B Team. See also Track 0
Posted in astrophysics, biology, Boston Ethical Society, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, compassion, conservation, consumption, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, environment, ethics, forecasting, geoengineering, geophysics, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, meteorology, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, sociology, the right to know, wind power
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David Suzuki on the 59th minute and exponential growth
Posted in astronomy, astrophysics, biology, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, Carl Sagan, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, engineering, environment, ethics, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, physics, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sociology, statistics
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On nested equivalence classes of climate models, ordered by computational complexity
I’m digging into the internals of ABC, for professional and scientific reasons. I’ve linked a great tutorial elsewhere, and argued that this framework, advanced by Wood, and Wilkinson (Robert), and Wilkinson (Darren), and Hartig and colleagues, and Robert and colleagues, … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, ecology, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, MCMC, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, optimization, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, probabilistic programming, R, science, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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“[W]e want to model the process as we would simulate it.”
Professor Darren Wilkinson offers a pithy insight on how to go about constructing statistical models, notably hierarchical ones: “… we want to model the process as we would simulate it ….” This appears in his blog post One-way ANOVA with … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, ecology, engineering, forecasting, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, optimization, population biology, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sociology, statistics, stochastic algorithms
Tagged ANOVA
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struggling with problems already partly solved by others
Climate modelers and models see as their frontier the problem of dealing with spontaneous dynamics in systems such as atmosphere or ocean which are not directly forced by boundary conditions such as radiative forcing due to increased greenhouse gas (“GHG”) … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, climate, climate education, differential equations, ecology, engineering, environment, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, meteorology, model comparison, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, population biology, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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illustrating particle filters and Bayesian fusion using successive location estimates on the unit circle
Introduction Modern treatments of Bayesian integration to obtain posterior densities often use some form of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (“MCMC”), typically Gibbs sampling. Gibbs works well with many Bayesian hierarchical models. The standard problem-solving situation with these is that a … Continue reading
Species abundances, raw abundances, and species composition
From Climate Change Ecology, An intuitive explanation for the 'double-zeroes' problem with Euclidean distances.
Liddell and Kruschke, on conditional logistic Bayesian estimation
(“Ostracism and fines in a public goods game with accidental contributions: The importance of punishment type”) An overview. The article
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, biology, citizenship, civilization, compassion, ecology, economics, ethics, humanism, investing, MCMC, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, sociology, statistics
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Exciting if improbable news
There’s a report in the Financial Times today that UN negotiators are considering a proposal to phase out oil, coal, and gas by 2050. There’s a second permitting fossil fuels to be used, but only in countries which ensured “net … Continue reading
Posted in biology, Boston Ethical Society, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, consumption, ecology, economics, energy, energy reduction, environment, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, meteorology, methane, nuclear power, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, solar power, wind power
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Why I don’t eat commercially caught fish
And, of course, I don’t eat land animals either. I will sometimes have scallops and clams.
Global temperatures, Friday, 21st November 2014
From the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. Hat tip to Carl Safina.
Defeating “The Index” in Gilbert, Arizona
“Home rule” means a lot of things. But, as the Catholic hierarchy in Rome once did, the educational authorities of Gilbert, Arizona, USA, are apparently taking it one step too far. Dan Satterfield reports that certain pages in a biology … Continue reading
“People are too insignificant to affect climate”
Setting aside outright fabrications (1) such as those promulgated by the Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), laughingly selected as the Chair of the House Committee on Science, a common claim in the Comment sections at The Hill and elsewhere is that … Continue reading
“Rising seas will be unstoppable”
Carl Safina, author of the exquisite The View From Lazy Point, writes, in part: Well. Who. Cares. This is news you can snooze. So go ahead and hit that snooze button. Could we plan for what will happen centuries from … Continue reading
Posted in biology, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, conservation, consumption, ecology, economics, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, geoengineering, geophysics, humanism, meteorology, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, solar power, wind power
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Hope. This is why, in part, I am an atheist.
Carl Sagan’s last interview on Charlie Rose: The point is, how can any world view which is based upon either ignorance of, apathy towards, or misconception about the physical universe offer any realistic promise or hope or optimism, any more … Continue reading
Posted in astronomy, astrophysics, atheism, biology, Boston Ethical Society, Carl Sagan, citizenship, civilization, ecology, education, engineering, environment, geophysics, history, humanism, mathematics, maths, meteorology, NASA, Neill deGrasse Tyson, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science
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Lotka-Volterra systems and predator-prey relationships
Lotka-Volterra systems are one of the oldest and most fundamental mathematical renditions of ecological problems. They are typically illustrated with predator-prey relationships, but I was introduced to them dealing with problems of competition for space by plants in niche ecological … Continue reading
Posted in biology, ecology, mathematics, maths, physics, science
Tagged Lotka-Volterra
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World Ocean Radio
I sometimes wish my UU community would understand the following: We are not living in reality; if so, we would not enable delusion. We are not being practical; if so, we would assure that our needs would be sustained for … Continue reading
Posted in atheism, biology, climate, climate education, ecology, environment, oceanography, reasonableness, science
Tagged anthropocentrism
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“Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems”
Sugihara, May, Ye, Hsieh, Deyle, Fogarty, and Munch published what I consider to be a pretty interesting paper in Science called “Detecting causality in complex ecosystems”, linked: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1227079 http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/csc-reading-group/sugihara-causality-science-2012.pdf Professor Andrew Gelman of Columbia seemed unimpressed by the article, and … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, biology, ecology, economics, engineering, maths, reasonableness, science, statistics
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