
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Gabriel's staircase
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- 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.”
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- American Statistical Association
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- 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.
- London Review of Books
- Risk and Well-Being
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Label Noise
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- James' Empty Blog
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- "The Expert"
- 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
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Awkward Botany
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- 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.
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- 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/
- Professor David Draper
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Earle Wilson
- Slice Sampling
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- 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”
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- 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
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Number Cruncher Politics
climate change
- "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.
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Sea Change Boston
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- 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.
- Skeptical Science
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Warming slowdown discussion
- "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.
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- 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.
- The Sunlight Economy
- 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 Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- "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
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- 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
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Ice and Snow
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- "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.)
- Social Cost of Carbon
- 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
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Risk and Well-Being
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- 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.
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- 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%.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- weather blocking patterns
- SolarLove
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- 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.
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- 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
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: plastics
“Microplastics in the Ocean: Emergency or Exaggeration?” (Morss Colloquium, WHOI)
Update, 2019-10-28 00:34 ET I have compiled notes from the talks above, and from the audience Q&A and documented these in a Google Jam here.
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, bag bans, Claire Galkowski, coastal communities, coasts, diffusion processes, microbiomes, microplastics, NOAA, oceanic eddies, oceanography, oceans, perceptions, phytoplankton, plastics, pollution, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, science, science education, statistical ecology, WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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Marine microbes are eating plastics
The news item was reported in Science. I wrote about the possibility earlier, but, there, WHOI scientists had not confirmed that microbes were actually consuming plastics. This has been suspected since 2011, due to the work of WHOI scientist Dr … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anthropocene, basic research, ecological services, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, environment, marine biology, marine debris, materials science, microbiomes, microplastics, oceans, plastics, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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plastic-hating environmentalists as pawns and collaborative distractors of the Trump administration
Andrew Wheeler, 45‘s head of the Environmental Protection Administration and former coal industry attorney and legal advisor to Senator Imhofe, famed climate denier of the U.S. Senate, has stated it quite simply: Clean drinking water is a higher priority for … Continue reading
On bag bans and sampling plans
Plastic bag bans are all the rage. It’s not the purpose of this post to take a position on the matter. Before you do, however, I’d recommend checking out this: and especially this: (Note: My lovely wife, Claire, presents this … Continue reading
Posted in bag bans, citizen data, citizen science, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ecology Action, evidence, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, goverance, lifestyle changes, microplastics, municipal solid waste, oceans, open data, planning, plastics, politics, pollution, public health, quantitative ecology, R, R statistical programming language, reasonableness, recycling, rhetorical statistics, sampling, sampling networks, statistics, surveys, sustainability
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“What’s new with recycling”
South Shore Recycling Cooperative Director Claire Galkowski, spoke in Norwell, at the South Shore Natural Science Center, a couple of weeks ago:
Posted in Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, biofuels, Carbon Cycle, Claire Galkowski, coastal communities, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, EBC-NE, ecomodernism, ecopragmatist, education, extended producer responsibility, extended supply chains, green tech, greenhouse gases, local self reliance, Massachusetts, microplastics, paper, plastics, public health, quantitative ecology, recycling, science, solid waste, South Shore Recycling Cooperative, sustainability
Tagged plastic bag bans
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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
Tagged updated
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On plastic bag bans, and the failure to realize economic growth cannot be green
(Updated 2019-01-12.) Despite the surge of interest in plastic bag bans, the environmental sustainability numbers haven’t been run. For example, it makes no sense to trade using paper bags instead of plastic ones, even if the paper is recycled, because … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Anthropocene, development as anti-ecology, E. O. Wilson, environment, evidence, evolution, exponential growth, fragmentation of ecosystems, global warming, greenwashing, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, local self reliance, plastics, population biology, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, supply chains, sustainability, sustainable landscaping, The Demon Haunted World, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon
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Plastics in the oceans!
From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: (Click on image to see a larger figure, and use browser Back Button to return to blog.) “Tracking a snow globe of microplastics“ “WHOI Marine Microplastics Initiative“ “Sweat the small stuff“ “A hitchhiker’s guide to … Continue reading

