
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- NCAR AtmosNews
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Slice Sampling
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- "The Expert"
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- James' Empty Blog
- Gabriel's staircase
- London Review of Books
- 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.
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- 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
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Earle Wilson
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- 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.
- 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.”
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Label Noise
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- Awkward Botany
- 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)
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- 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
- Gavin Simpson
- 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”
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- American Statistical Association
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Karl Broman
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Mertonian norms
- What If
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- 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
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
climate change
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Earth System Models
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- World Weather Attribution
- "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.
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Risk and Well-Being
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- 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.
- "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.)
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- weather blocking patterns
- 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.
- The Sunlight Economy
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- 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
- SolarLove
- 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
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- And Then There's Physics
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- 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: 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
- 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
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- 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.
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- 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 Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- 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
- "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.
- Skeptical Science
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Ice and Snow
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: secularism
The U.S. Constitution is a remarkable construct …
… well suited for the early 19th century. Updated 2020-12-05 The New York Times reports today that the United States Supreme Court … late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had … Continue reading
Six Principle Plays in Denialist Playbook
It’s all about advancing anti-science and doubts about science, as well as confusing the public for ideological and financial gain. (h/t Scientific American)
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ignorant American public, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, Ben Santer, climate denial, climate science, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, COVID-19, denial, Desmog Blog, science, science denier, science education, secularism, Skeptical Science
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Still a climate hawk, and appreciate all my climate friends: To the climate deniers, the greenwashers, the liberal environmental opportunists, and the environmental purists who will never compromise …
“Not ready to make nice” (Dixie Chicks) I stick by my friends in these hard times: Tamino’s community The Azimuth Project Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution The American Statistical Association The International Society for Bayesian Analysis Losing Earth: The decade we … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, Anthropocene, Bayesian, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate grief, coastal investment risks, ecological disruption, ecological services, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, engineering, environment, flooding, global warming, Grant Foster, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, Joseph Schumpeter, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, mathematics education, personal purity, population biology, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, regulatory capture, risk, riverine flooding, sampling without replacement, Scituate, secularism, shorelines, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, Solar Freakin' Roadways, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, statistical dependence, SunPower, the energy of the people, the green century, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon, Unitarian Universalism, unreason, utility company death spiral, UU Needham, Wally Broecker, Walt Disney Company, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we''
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“About” section of this blog has been revised, and rules of commenting made more prominent
See the About section of this blog for a revision in the blog’s description and rules governing commenting made more explicit and prominent. In fact, I have copied these at the bottom of this post. The heading of the blog … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, blog, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, CleanTechnica, climate change, ecology, Ecology Action, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, ecopragmatist, engineering, global warming, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, ILSR, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Carney, reasonableness, secularism, solar democracy, solar domination, Stewart Brand, technology, the energy of the people, the green century, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Alex Steffen on Climate Defeatism
On 31st July 2018, Alex Steffen wrote (on Twitter) that: Reminder that climate defeatism—arguing that we are already so screwed that there’s no real point in acting to limit climate emissions or ecological damage—is absolutely a form of denialism, and … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Solar Energy Society, Anthropocene, anti-science, attribution, being carbon dioxide, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, Bill Maher, Bill Nye, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, Buckminster Fuller, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, climate business, climate change, climate economics, corporations, denial, engineering, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, James Hansen, John Farrell, Kerry Emanuel, klaus lackner, liberal climate deniers, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, Michael Bloomberg, reason, reasonableness, science denier, secularism, Stewart Brand, the green century, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, unreason, zero carbon
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Censorship of Science by the administration of President Donald Trump
See work by the Columbia Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. … President Trump has directed EPA and DOI to reconsider regulations adopted to control greenhouse gas emissions, despite the wealth of data showing that those emissions are the key … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, Azimuth Backup Project, citizen data, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, Donald Trump, dump Trump, Ecological Society of America, environmental law, epidemiology, global blinding, Neill deGrasse Tyson, open data, rationality, reason, reasonableness, science, secularism, The Demon Haunted World, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, tragedy of the horizon, unreason
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These are ethical “AI Principles” from Google, but they might as well be `technological principles’
This is entirely adapted from this link, courtesy of Google and Alphabet. Objectives Be socially beneficial. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. Be built and tested for safety. Be accountable to people. Incorporate privacy design principles. Uphold high standards of … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, artificial intelligence, basic research, Bayesian, Boston Ethical Society, complex systems, computation, corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility, deep recurrent neural networks, emergent organization, ethical ideals, ethics, extended producer responsibility, friends and colleagues, Google, Google Pixel 2, humanism, investments, machine learning, mathematics, moral leadership, natural philosophy, politics, risk, science, secularism, technology, The Demon Haunted World, the right to know, Unitarian Universalism, UU, UU Humanists
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perceptions of likelihood
That’s from this Github repository, maintained by Zoni Nation, having this description. The original data are from a study by Sherman Kent at the U.S. CIA, and is quoted in at least once outside source discussing the problem. In addition … Continue reading
On the responsibilities of scientists
On 4 September 2017, I added a blog post here titled “On the responsibilities of engineers”. Scientists have responsibilities, too. And I am delighted to say that the National Academies have just demonstrated a proud example of how such responsibilities … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, anti-science, attribution, Boston Ethical Society, chemistry, citizenship, compassion, Donald Trump, dump Trump, ecology, Ecology Action, economics, environment, environmental law, Environmental Protection Agency, ethics, evidence, fossil fuels, justice, land use to fight, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, pollution, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, science, science denier, secularism, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the stack of lies, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon
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“You don’t have that option.”
Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think he’s awesome. Marvelous. I saw him in Boston. He and I did not get off well, at the start, because of my being awestruck, and feeling very awkward, and the short time we had … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Bayesian, citizen data, citizen science, Climate Lab Book, Earth Day, ecological services, ecology, environment, Hyper Anthropocene, Neill deGrasse Tyson, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reason, reasonableness, religion, science, science education, Science magazine, scientific publishing, secularism, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, United States, XKCD
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`Message from Sally Yates to Justice Department lawyers before she was fired’
The story. On January 27, 2017, the President signed an Executive Order regarding immigrants and refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries. The order has now been challenged in a number of jurisdictions. As the Acting Attorney General, it is my ultimate … Continue reading
Posted in atheism, Donald Trump, dump Trump, ethical ideals, justice, secularism, UU, UU Humanists
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