January 23, 2016
According to Paul Douglas (pers. com) there is some important news on what Jonas still has planned.
There is likely to be major flooding along the coast of Cape May, and in some areas of New Jersey there may be coastal flooding nearly of the magnitude that happened with Superstorm Sandy. So far…
January 22, 2016
The book is: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
Also by the same author: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
Here is my version of recent American political history:
Everyone in…
January 22, 2016
The answer: One Republican and One Democrat/Independent.
The Iowa Caucus is pretty much up for grabs in both parties. Over recent days, a clear Trump lead has been erased, and Cruz is now ahead in recent polls. Over roughly the same period, a clear Clinton lead has been erased, and Sanders is…
January 21, 2016
I had previously mentioned the ScienceDebate ad with the kids asking for a science debate. Here is some local coverage on the story (the ad was made here in the Twin Cities) including an interview with one of the stars, Susanlyn Singroy. (I don't agree with everything she said, but what the heck…
January 21, 2016
Friday AM Update: Overall the storm has shifted north. Washington DC is still on track to have something close to two feet of snow in the city, more to the west. The predicted snowfall for New York City, the city that eats meteorologists, is increasing, and The City may see a foot or more, with…
January 20, 2016
GO HERE FOR THE LATEST UPDATE
See below for update
Jonas, (and no, I do not condone naming of storms that are not tropical cyclones) is going to do bad things to the US East Coast and hinterland.
Imma let you get back to setting your hair on fire over this storm, but first I want to 'splain…
January 20, 2016
We often hope, even assume, that technology will fix our problems. We also know that sometimes technology creates a problem. In this case, technology can help us fix the problem of needing to keep the fossil carbon in the ground by making use of the sun, but created the problem of vaporizing birds…
January 19, 2016
The following is a repost of a Facebook Post by Michael Mann. I don’t think this needs any comment from me. The original is here.
Begin Repost
Several colleagues have notified me of the following email that has been sent to a presumably broad group of researchers and academics by John Droz of…
January 18, 2016
I have studiously avoided picking a Democratic candidate to support. I will not have to decide until Super Tuesday, when Minnesotans caucus to support one or another candidate. I like Hillary Clinton for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that she has considerable experience in the…
January 16, 2016
One mouse to rule them all
I had previously reviewed the Logitech Ultrathin Touch Mouse, suggesting it as a replacement for the Apple Magic Mouse. Now, I've tried it on my Linux machine (don't know why that took so long). It turns out to work very well, better than most, possibly all, mice I've…
January 14, 2016
I'm going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream…
January 14, 2016
Four elements are being added to the Periodic Table of the Elements. (I'm going to need a new shower curtain). These elements have been "known" for a long time, but are only now being added for reasons explained in the video below.
Meanwhile, have you read The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The…
January 14, 2016
The Nevada state government has just ruined solar energy in their state. From here,
Although Nevada is one of the sunniest places in the world, there has recently been a dark cloud hovering over the rooftop solar industry in the state. Just before Christmas, Nevada’s public utility commission (PUC…
January 14, 2016
A new paper just published in Nature has made a bit of a stir because it has been interpreted as suggesting that global warming has the benefit of avoidance of an Ice Age that was just about to happen. However, the paper does not actually say that, and we already knew that we may have avoided the…
January 13, 2016
According to Jeff Masters at Wunderblog, "The earliest named storm on record in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Pali, formed on January 7."
The storm is out in the middle of the ocean, west of Kiribati:
The reason this storm formed off season is a combination of high sea surface temperatures…
January 13, 2016
Tropical Storm Alex has formed in the Atlantic ocean. It is not entirely unprecedented to have a tropical storm form totally off season like this, but it is very rare. This happened mainly because of record high sea surface temperatures in the region.
The sea surface temperature is not enough to…
January 13, 2016
Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist is a new book by Howard Wainer that can serve as a manual for how to be a good skeptic.
Wainer is a statistician, formerly with the famous Educational Testing Service, and a professor at the Wharton…
January 12, 2016
A worthy Kickstarter science related project is afoot.
Face it. Most science is done on the command line. When it is not, we call it "science by spreadsheet" or name it by some other epithet.
Much of that is done on Linux or Linux like computers, but that actually includes Macs, and if you must…
January 11, 2016
... maybe they'll actually do something about them.
Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates' responses to…
January 8, 2016
Last December, the United States Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, headed by Ted Cruz, held a hearing to which they invited a gaggle of climate change deniers and one good guy to testify about how the science on climate change is all wrong. I wrote about it here. The…
January 8, 2016
The Time Scales of Political and Climate Change Matter
The US is engaged in the laborious process of electing a new leader, who will likely be President for 8 years. Climate change has finally become an issue in US electoral politics. The climate policies of the next US President, and the Congress…
January 6, 2016
... and not in a good way.
The Arctic has, of course, been warming in step with anthropogenic global warming, plus more. This phenomenon has probably increased disruption to global weather systems, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, over the last decade or so.
But something somewhat novel is…
January 6, 2016
Warm waters around Florida have resulted in a growth of the population of Portuguese Man-of-War, or should that be Portuguese Men-of-War, an organism commonly confused with jellyfish (because they look just like jellyfish).
The PMOWs have a sting, roughly equivalent in pain level to a bee sting,…
January 5, 2016
By now you are probably aware of the major flooding that happened over the last several days in Missouri. Larry Lazar gave us a guest post detailing his personal experiences in Eureka, where the flooding was extensive. This flooding is not over, but is simply moving down stream in the Mississippi…
January 4, 2016
The year that just finished, 2015, was the warmest year recorded in the instrumental record. The actual data for December is not officially available yet, but my friend and colleague John Abraham keeps track of the global surface temperature daily and has done an amazing job at estimating the…
January 3, 2016
This is a review of the Kindle Fire with 7" Display and Special Offers by Amazon. In short, this is a tablet/eReader that a lot of people will want, as long as certain needs are extant and certain expectations understood. I have one, and I'm very happy with it. It would take very little…
January 1, 2016
Despite the devastating storms across the country the last few weeks, NASA is forecasting the worst is yet to come. Michael Mann, author of "Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change" joins to discuss.
January 1, 2016
Minecraft is a gaming world. Or, if you like, a "sandbox." This is a three dimensional world in which characters do things, all sorts of things. The context for the world of Minecraft is very open ended. The player builds things, moves things, gets things, does things, in a way that makes any one…
December 31, 2015
This is a guest post by Larry Lazar.
If you have had the news on the last day or two you may have seen stories and images about the Missouri floods. Many of those images are from Eureka (where we live), Pacific (where my wife Kellie works) and Valley Park (which is on my commute to work). That…
December 29, 2015
The following is a list of posts on this blog that report new climate change research, usually but not always from the peer reviewed literature, or posts that are longer essays intended to give context to ongoing climate change research. The first few posts are from December 2014, which addresses…
