
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- 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.
- Gabriel's staircase
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- 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”
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- All about models
- 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.
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- 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
- What If
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Gavin Simpson
- 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
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Professor David Draper
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- 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
- 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.
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- James' Empty Blog
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Karl Broman
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- 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/
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- 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.
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- "The Expert"
- Label Noise
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
climate change
- SolarLove
- "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.
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- "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.
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- "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.
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- RealClimate
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Social Cost of Carbon
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- David Appell's early climate science
- Earth System Models
- 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
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Warming slowdown discussion
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- And Then There's Physics
- 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 Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- 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.
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- 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
- 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.
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
- 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.
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- The Sunlight Economy
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: maths
The designers of our climate
The blog … And Then There’s Physics wades deeply into the recent Monckton-Soon-Legates-Briggs paper. And, they conclude, what it is saying is that, conditional upon no feedbacks, equilibrium climate sensitivity (“ECS”) needs to be small. Except that they don’t say … Continue reading
Posted in astrophysics, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, Carl Sagan, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, differential equations, ecology, economics, engineering, environment, ethics, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geoengineering, geophysics, humanism, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, methane, NASA, NCAR, Neill deGrasse Tyson, NOAA, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, probabilistic programming, R, rationality, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, sociology, solar power, statistics, testing, the right to know
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It’s the Trend, Stupid
The matter chronicled in Tamino’s post is just more reason why the results of Fyfe, Gillet, and Zwiers at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1972 which I wrote about at https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/warming-slowdown-2/ and https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/warming-slowdown-part-2/ look stranger and stranger. I increasingly think that the caution regarding ensembles … Continue reading
Posted in carbon dioxide, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate education, ecology, energy, environment, forecasting, geophysics, history, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, NOAA, obfuscating data, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, science education, statistics, Uncategorized
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Naomi Oreskes and significance testing
Naomi Oreskes has an op-ed in The New York Times today, which intends to defend the severe standards of evidence scientists employ, with special applicability to climate science and their explanation of causation (greenhouse gases produce radiative forcing), attribution (most … Continue reading
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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climate internal variability is just residual variance from modeling with a smooth curve?
I happened across what I consider to be an amazing slide while “reading around” the work of Deser and colleagues. It is reproduced below, taken from Dagg and Wills: (Click image to see a larger picture, and use browser ‘back’ … Continue reading
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
“… making a big assumption …”
“That’s making a big assumption.” (This post is a follow-on from an earlier one.) In the colloquial, the phrase means basing an argument on a precondition which is unusual or atypical or offends common sense. When applied to scientific hypotheses, … Continue reading
Bayesian inference works even in a chaotic or deterministic world
Professor John Geweke, in a Comment on an article by Professor Mark Berliner a bit back (1992), shows how Bayesian inference continues to be a means for expressing subjective uncertainty even in a scheme where there are no stochastics but … Continue reading
Understanding mechanisms in climate over short periods and in local regions
This is interesting, because it shows how any particular observational history of Earth is one election of a large number of possible futures. This is exactly the same point made by Slava Kharin in his 2008 tutorial lecture “Statistical concepts … Continue reading
Posted in carbon dioxide, climate, climate education, differential equations, ecology, energy, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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Climate Variability Diagnostics Package
NCAR’s CVDP, just written up in AGU’s EOS. The purpose, and links. The talk. Nicely done test engineering effort.
Posted in climate, differential equations, engineering, environment, geophysics, mathematics, maths, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, physics, science, statistics, testing
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An equation-free introduction to Bayesian inference
By Tomoharu Eguchi from 2008: “An Introduction to Bayesian Statistics Without Using Equations“.
example of Bayesian inversion
This is based upon my solution of Exercise 2.3, page 18, R. Christensen, W. Johnson, A. Branscum, T. E. Hanson, Bayesian Ideas and Data Analysis, Chapman & Hall, 2011. The purpose is to show how information latent in a set … Continue reading
extrapolations
Not much comment required. Don’t need any fancy “climate models”. Just need to extrapolate, for a very short time frame, where things are going.
Posted in carbon dioxide, climate, climate education, conservation, consumption, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, energy reduction, engineering, environment, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, humanism, investment in wind and solar energy, mathematics, maths, meteorology, NOAA, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, statistics
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El Nino, the scientific story (by Daniel Gross)
A scientific detective story. El Niño. How in the world did they figure that out? “Fishing in pink waters: How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery“. By Daniel Gross. Hat tip to Greg Laden.
“A pause or not a pause, that is the question.”
Very, very well done, Tamino.
“Stochasticity!”
RadioLab’s show/podcast this week was a tour of the world of probability, and its interface with people. I judge it great, but, then, I would. Their description? Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the … Continue reading
Bayesian deconvolution of stick lengths
Consider trying to determine the length of a straight stick. Instead of the measurement errors being clustered about zero, suppose the errors are known to be always positive, that is, no measurement ever underestimates the length of the stick. Such … Continue reading
Ray Pierrehumbert on the new U.S.-China climate deal
Professor Pierrehumbert offers his thoughts in Slate. He’s the author of Principles of Planetary Climate which is, as far as I’m concerned, the definitive climate book.
Posted in astronomy, astrophysics, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, Carbon Tax, chemistry, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, conservation, consumption, demand-side solutions, differential equations, ecology, economics, education, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, forecasting, geoengineering, geophysics, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, methane, NCA, NOAA, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, scientific publishing, solar power, statistics, wind power
Tagged climate book
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A conclusion that “the hiatus” in global land surface warming is natural variability
Lovejoy provides conclusive statistical evidence, free of use of climate models, that the so-called “hiatus” in global land surface warming is due to natural variability and is decidedly not a suspension of global climate change. See S. Lovejoy, “Return periods … Continue reading
Observed change: National Climate Assessment
See NOAA’s “observed change”.
Posted in citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, maths, meteorology, NCA, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science
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“I very much enjoy taking those people on, but, meanwhile, it breaks my heart”
Amen, brother Bill. I very much know what you mean. It really hurts.
Posted in astrophysics, atheism, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, Carl Sagan, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, compassion, ecology, economics, education, engineering, environment, forecasting, geophysics, history, humanism, mathematics, maths, meteorology, methane, Neill deGrasse Tyson, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, solar power, wind power
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Brendon Brewer on “Hard Integrals”
Hard Integrals.
Posted in Bayesian, mathematics, maths, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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Brian Hayes on clear climate models for the curious public
American Scientst has a nice article by Brian Hayes recounting the basic physics of climate, and then recommending both public engagement with clear, simple climate models, at least by the curious and scientifically literate, and the development of models which … Continue reading
Posted in astrophysics, carbon dioxide, Carl Sagan, cat1, citizen science, civilization, climate, climate education, conservation, consumption, differential equations, education, energy, environment, forecasting, geophysics, mathematics, maths, meteorology, oceanography, physics, reasonableness, risk, science, scientific publishing, statistics
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“It’ll be okay: Trust me”, redux
Professor Steven Koonin offers up another dollop of vague, specious criticism of climate science in his editorial in The Wall Street Journal. He is credentialed, no doubt authoritative. But compelling arguments for a position should be judged as if the … Continue reading
Posted in art, Boston Ethical Society, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, Carbon Tax, citizenship, climate, climate education, conservation, ecology, economics, education, energy, engineering, environment, forecasting, geophysics, mathematics, maths, meteorology, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, science
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The dp-means algorithm of Kulis and Jordan in R and Python
dp-means algorithm. Think k-means but with the number of clusters calculated. By John Myles White, in R. (Github link off that page.) By Scott Hendrickson, in Python. (Github link off that page.)
Posted in Bayesian, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, mathematics, maths, R, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
Tagged dp-means
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Blind Bayesian recovery of components of residential solid waste tonnage from totals data
This is a sketch of how maths and statistics can do something called blind source separation, meaning to estimate the components of data given only their totals. Here, I use Bayesian techniques for the purpose, sometimes called Bayesian inversion, using … Continue reading
singingbanana does “The Lorenz Machine”
On the power of mathematics, and why 55:45 versus 50:50 matters.
Posted in Bayesian, engineering, mathematics, maths, rationality, reasonableness, risk, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
Tagged code breaking
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Emission reductions since 1990
It is popular to gage progress towards greenhouse gas emissions reductions by how much they have been reduced since 1990. This is done by the federal government, and it is done by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is the wrong … Continue reading
Posted in astrophysics, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, chemistry, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate education, conservation, consumption, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, energy reduction, engineering, environment, forecasting, geoengineering, geophysics, history, investing, mathematics, maths, meteorology, methane, NASA, nuclear power, oceanography, optimization, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, solar power, WHOI, wind power, Wordpress
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How fast is JAGS?
How fast is JAGS?.

