
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- 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/.
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- "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.
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- 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.
- 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/
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- 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
- Gabriel's staircase
- 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.”
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- 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
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Ted Dunning
- Mertonian norms
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- All about models
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- 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.
- 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.
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- 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.
- Awkward Botany
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Label Noise
- American Statistical Association
- 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
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- 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
climate change
- 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.
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- SolarLove
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- David Appell's early climate science
- World Weather Attribution
- 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.
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- "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.
- And Then There's Physics
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- 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
- Ice and Snow
- 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
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- MIT's Climate Primer
- 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.
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- "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
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- weather blocking patterns
- RealClimate
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: nor’easters
“Climate Science for Climate Activists” is a wrap
The class “Climate Science for Climate Activists” I have taught for the last 6 or so weeks is now completed. The slides are available here.
Posted in alternatives to the Green New Deal, Anthropocene, Association to Preserve Cape Cod, being carbon dioxide, Blackbody radiation, bridge to somewhere, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, cement production, Clausius-Clapeyron equation, clean disruption, clear air capture of carbon dioxide, climate, Climate Adam, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate grief, climate models, ClimateAdam, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, ecomodernism, electric vehicles, electricity, Emily Shuckburgh, emissions, energy utilities, environment, evidence, EVs, flooding, floods, fluid dynamics, fluid eddies, food, food scarcity, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuels, Gavin Schmidt, geoengineering, geophysics, glaciers, glaciology, Glen Peters, Global Carbon Project, global warming, Grant Foster, Green New Deal, Green Tech Media, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Humans have a lot to answer for, hydrology, Hyper Anthropocene, ice sheet dynamics, icesheets, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, John Marshall, klaus lackner, lapse rate, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, life cycle sustainability analysis, Mark Jacobson, meteorological models, meteorology, Nathan Phillips, National Center for Atmospheric Research, negative emissions, nonlinear systems, nor'easters, ocean warming, oceanic eddies, oceanography, oceans, permafrost, personal purity, photovoltaics, precipitation, Principles of Planetary Climate, radiative forcing, Ray Pierrehumbert, Robert Young, science, sea level rise, seismology, shorelines, Sir David King, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Stanford University, Stefan Rahmstorf, Steven Chu, Stewart Brand, sustainability, Svante Arrhenius, Tamino, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, utility company death spiral, Wally Broecker, water, water as a resource, WHOI, wild fires, wind power, wishful environmentalism, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, zero carbon
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Disaster planning in a new climate, inland from the coasts
See Glynis Board’s “The New Normal: Super Storms Highlight Importance Of Disaster Planning”.
Posted in adaptation, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, bridge to nowhere, climate disruption, flooding, floods, games of chance, hurricanes, hydrology, meteorology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR, New England, nor'easters, precipitation, resiliency, risk, statistics, sustainability, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon
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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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Ductless Minisplits in Blizzard, 2017-02-09
(Updated, 5th December 2020) We heat and cool our home with Fujitsu `ductless minisplit` air source heat pumps. But this is New England, and it’s winter. A common question is how do they do under winter conditions? Well, today we … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, atmosphere, attribution, being carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide, CleanTechnica, climate, climate change, climate disruption, demand-side solutions, efficiency, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, marginal energy sources, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, meteorological models, meteorology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR, New England, NOAA, nor'easters, oceanic eddies, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, risk, the right to know, water vapor
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On failing to learn important lessons
As previously posted here, people along coasts and their governments, are failing to learn the lessons of both climate-induced sea level rise, and storms like Extratropical Sandy. Now, it’s startlingly clear how ignorant people are of these necessary lessons. The … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, bollocks, case law, citizenship, civilization, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, coastal communities, coasts, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, ecological services, economics, environment, environmental law, evidence, flooding, forecasting, global warming, greenhouse gases, hydrology, Hyper Anthropocene, John Englander, liberal climate deniers, living shorelines, meteorological models, meteorology, nor'easters, oceanography, physics, planning, politics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, Robert Young, science, science denier, sea level rise, seawalls, shorelines, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, water, zero carbon
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`Hermine Unique among Storms’
Post-tropical storm Hermine is the story of the emergence of weather chimeras. Simple. The forecasting precedents have changed. We cannot look to the past to anticipate the future any longer. We’re playing by different rules. And we don’t know what … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, anomaly detection, Anthropocene, bifurcations, changepoint detection, climate disruption, coastal communities, Dan Satterfield, ecology, environment, global warming, hurricanes, Hyper Anthropocene, meteorological models, meteorology, nor'easters, oceanic eddies, oceanography, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, science, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, thermodynamics
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“Getting our heads out of the sand: The facts about sea level rise” (Robert Young)
If current luck holds, North Carolina may well escape the 2013 hurricane season without the widespread damage that has so frequently plagued the fragile coastal region in recent years. Unfortunately, this brief respite is almost certainly only that — a … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, Boston, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, coastal communities, coasts, ecology, environment, evidence, global warming, hurricanes, Hyper Anthropocene, living shorelines, Massachusetts, National Park Service, New England, nor'easters, oceanography, quantitative ecology, risk, Robert Young, science, sea level rise, shorelines, spatial statistics, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets
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Can the City of Boston adapt to and help mitigate climate disruption?
(See the major update at the bottom of this post as well.) (On “Less Science and More Social Science” at And Then There’s Physics) And Then There’s Physics is one of my favorite blogs discussing climate disruption and related policy … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, anomaly detection, Anthropocene, Bill Nye, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bollocks, Boston, bridge to somewhere, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate education, climate justice, Daniel Kahneman, destructive economic development, economics, engineering, environment, finance, floods, forecasting, Gaylord Nelson, global warming, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, insurance, investing, John Englander, Joseph Schumpeter, Kerry Emanuel, MA, Massachusetts, meteorology, Minsky moment, nor'easters, organizational failures, politics, risk, sea level rise, sociology, statistics, supply chains, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, 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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Southern New England Meteorology Conference, 24th October 2015
I attending the 2015 edition of the Southern New England Meteorology Conference in Milton, MA, near the Blue Hill, and its Blue Hill Climatological Observatory, of which I am a member as we as of the American Meteorological Society. I … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, capricious gods, climate, Dan Satterfield, dynamical systems, ensembles, ENSO, environment, floods, forecasting, geophysics, Hyper Anthropocene, information theoretic statistics, mesh models, meteorology, model comparison, NCAR, NOAA, nor'easters, oceanography, probability, science, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, time series
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Questions About El Nino Answered – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Source: Questions About El Nino Answered – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Hansen et al.
Tamino weighs in on the Hyper-Anthropocene paper by Hansen, Sato, et al, references in my postings here as https://667-per-cm.net/2015/07/23/welcome-to-the-hyper-anthropocene/ and https://667-per-cm.net/2015/07/27/professor-james-hansen-responds-and-explains/ Update, 18th October 2015 To quote Eli Rabett of Rabett Run, EliRabett said… Evidently today the editor has decided … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Antarctica, Anthropocene, Arctic, astrophysics, bifurcations, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, Cauchy distribution, chance, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate zombies, COP21, denial, differential equations, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, environment, ethics, floods, forecasting, games of chance, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, IPCC, James Hansen, mathematics, maths, meteorology, nor'easters, oceanography, physics, politics, probability, rationality, reasonableness, science, sea level rise, statistics, Student t distribution, Tamino, temporal myopia, the right to know, transparency, UNFCCC, zero carbon
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“Why Using El Nino to Forecast the Winter is Risky” – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal
Why Using El Nino to Forecast the Winter is Risky – Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere.
New “NASA and NOAA” global temperature series
Love the “But I digress” in Tamino‘s post “NASA and NOAA” about new global temperature series from both agencies. Tamino references this lecture by the middle-of-the-road climate scientist and hurricanes expert Professor Kerry Emanuel:
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, denial, ecology, environment, forecasting, geophysics, global warming, hiatus, hurricanes, IPCC, meteorology, NASA, NOAA, nor'easters, oceanography, open data, physics, politics, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, statistics, Tamino, WHOI, Wordpress
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What Boston will eventually look like under TWO DEGREES global warming
International efforts are under way to bring greenhouse gas emissions to zero in a manner fast enough to limit global warming to +2 degrees Celsius. That’s proving tough to do, and there are some expectations it won’t be achieved. Some … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Boston, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, ecology, environment, floods, forecasting, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, IPCC, living shorelines, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, nor'easters, oceanography, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, sea level rise, statistics, zero carbon
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‘Weather by Icon’ Is A Bad Way To Get an Accurate Forecast – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
'Weather by Icon' Is A Bad Way To Get an Accurate Forecast – Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere.
Why decentralized electrical power has to win, no matter what Elon Musk says, and utilities are doomed
Posted in bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, citizenship, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, compassion, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, diffusion processes, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, ethics, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, global warming, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, living shorelines, mass transit, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, microgrids, natural gas, NCAR, NOAA, nor'easters, obfuscating data, oceanography, open data, optimization, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, solar power, state-space models, statistics, temporal myopia, testing, the right to know, time series, wind power, zero carbon
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on the state of New England wind power
Cape Wind suffers more setbacks, as one commentator said, being “litigated to death”. See the details. And on the good side, the Block Island project proceeds, even if that is a much smaller project. New England, I hope you enjoy … Continue reading

