
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Gabriel's staircase
- 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.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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.
- 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
- Mertonian norms
- Label Noise
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- "The Expert"
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- American Statistical Association
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- 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.
- 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
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- What If
- 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
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Earle Wilson
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- 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.”
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- 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/
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Gavin Simpson
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
climate change
- Reanalyses.org
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- The Sunlight Economy
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- "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
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 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. In two parts.
- "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.)
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Earth System Models
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- 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.
- 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.
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- 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
- David Appell's early climate science
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- 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
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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.
- 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%.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- 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.
- 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
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- 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.
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Skeptical Science
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- World Weather Attribution
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Ice and Snow
- 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.
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Florida
“The financial crash and the climate crisis” (The New Yorker Radio Hour)
A great podcast episode. Check out the thoughts of the late Professor Martin Weitzman as well, in “The man who got economists to take climate nightmares seriously“.
Posted in American Statistical Association, an uncaring American public, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, bifurcations, bridge to nowhere, Buckminster Fuller, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, catastrophe modeling, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate grief, climate justice, climate mitigation, climate nightmares, climate policy, climate zombies, coastal investment risks, flooding, floods, Florida, global warming, global weirding, home resale values, Hyper Anthropocene, objective reality, oceans, Robert Young, Scituate, shorelines, Sir David King, temporal myopia, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, unreason
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50,000+ golf balls, along a coast
KQED carried a story about free diver and 16 y.o. Alex Weber who discovered not only a new source of plastic pollution, but another testament to the casual, careless sloppiness of people. And Ms Weber has converted it into a … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, an uncaring American public, coastal communities, coasts, consumption, ecological disruption, Ecological Society of America, ethics, field research, Florida, Humans have a lot to answer for, marine debris, oceans, plastics, pollution, science, sustainability, sustainable landscaping
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The fate of Antarctica
That’s from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech in Pasedena, CA. The source article is: A. S. Gardner, G. Moholdt, T. Scambos, M. Fahnstock, S. Ligtenberg, M. van den Broeke, J. Nilsson, “Increased West Antarctic and unchanged East Antarctic ice … Continue reading
Miami Beach
(Hat tip to Yale Climate Connections)
POWER MOVE: Brought to you by Siemens and The Atlantic
HOW ON-SITE ENERGY SOLUTIONS CAN HELP SAVE THE GRID RE:THINK ORIGINAL SIEMENS The traditional power grid is under tremendous pressure. In many places, infrastructure needs to be upgraded. Extreme weather and cybersecurity are constant concerns. These challenges threaten entire communities … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, American Solar Energy Society, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, energy utilities, Florida, games of chance, grid defection, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Joseph Schumpeter, local generation, local self reliance, microgrids, prediction markets, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, regulatory capture, reworking infrastructure, risk, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar energy, stranded assets, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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A lesson for Boston
And, from the Harvard Business Review: There was a time a decade or two ago when society could have made a choice to write off our massive investment in a fossil fuel-based economy and begin a policy driven shift towards … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, bollocks, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, coastal communities, coasts, Cult of Carbon, Daniel Kahneman, environment, flooding, floods, Florida, global blinding, global warming, greenhouse gases, hydrology, Hyper Anthropocene, John Englander, living shorelines, Mark Carney, nor'easters, oceanic eddies, oceanography, Our Children's Trust, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, sea level rise, seawalls, selfishness, shorelines, solar energy, the right to be and act stupid, water
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Disney’s Robert Iger resigns from Trump advisory panel over the Trumpistas’ decision to quit COP
“Protecting our planet and driving economic growth are critical to our future, and they aren’t mutually exclusive,” he said in a statement. “I deeply disagree with the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and, as a matter of principle, … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, Buckminster Fuller, carbon dioxide, citizenship, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, COP21, destructive economic development, Disney, Donald Trump, environment, Florida, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, Robert Iger, Walt Disney Company
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Why we sold our Disney Vacation Club timeshares
Hat tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week, in their “Florida slowly confronting sea level nightmare.”
Posted in Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg, carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, coastal communities, coasts, Disney, Disney Vacation Club, environmental law, flooding, Florida, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, Joe Romm, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, living shorelines, science education, shorelines, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets
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Boston, are you ready?
Yeah, how about warming up the seas a bit more by building pipelines, buying into more explosive methane (*), and encouraging fracked gas people to export? What could it hurt? There are many alternatives, most sketched here on this blog. … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, bollocks, Boston, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, climate change, climate disruption, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corruption, disingenuity, ecology, evidence, false advertising, floods, Florida, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, fracking, geophysics, global warming, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, MA, Massachusetts, methane, mitigation, natural gas, NOAA, nor'easters, physics, pipelines, prediction, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, regulatory capture, science, sea level rise, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, utility company death spiral
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Bill Nye’s “Global Meltdown”: Climate grief in 5 steps
Postscript, 2nd April 2016 I’ve been asked offline whether I buy McPherson’s catastrophic warming scenario. I don’t, or at least I wouldn’t bet on it. Each of the components of Professor McPherson’s scenario are based upon solid science. But in … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Bill Nye, bridge to nowhere, Carbon Cycle, Carbon Worshipers, climate, climate change, climate disruption, denial, Eaarth, Earle Wilson, energy, environment, Florida, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, physics, planning, rationality, reasonableness, science, selfishness, zero carbon
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Underestimated Rates of Sea Level Rise
Posted in adaptation, Antarctica, Anthropocene, Arctic, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, coastal communities, ecology, floods, Florida, fossil fuels, geophysics, glaciers, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, icesheets, IPCC, James Hansen, John Englander, Richard Alley, Scituate, sea level rise, Stefan Rahmstorf, temporal myopia, the right to know, Wally Broecker, zero carbon
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Walt Disney World holiday, November 2015
Link to photos and other information available at Google+: https://plus.google.com/110148824733929465219/posts/UzzEQ1azUPe If you are just interested in the photos and videos: https://goo.gl/2s5EQ0 The Epcot Food & Wine Festival was a bust: Too many people, walking in uncoordinated directions, and too little … Continue reading
Posted in biofuels, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, compassion, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, Disney, ecology, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, Florida, fossil fuels, global warming, microgrids, rationality, reasonableness, recycling, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, Walt Disney Company
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Miami — Why Worry?
“They’re not scientists!”

