gregladen | April 30, 2014The US National Weather Service does a pretty good job at predicting weather, but there are problems. In fact, we are behind compared to other nations, and parts of our infrastructure is deteriorating. Paul Douglas has been telling people for some time that we need to pay attention to our aging satellite system, and here Kate Sheppard talks about the slow but steady development of legislation to advance our storm prediction abilities:
gregladen | April 28, 2014The National Center for Science Education, the nation's leading organization in support of science education, has awarded Professor Michael Mann the coveted Friend of the Planet award.
From the NCSE
Climate change deniers have faced a similarly impressive foe: Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State. More than almost anyone else, Mann has been the public face of climate science. The author of more than 160 peer-reviewed papers, Mann has appeared before countless Congressional committees, battled climate change deniers in court, and written breakthrough books (such…
gregladen | April 28, 2014Solar energy is one of the best and most easily implemented options to reduce our use of fossil Carbon based fuels. Never mind that the sun is only up and strong for part of the day, and is often covered by clouds. If you put a few square meters of solar panels on the roof of a residential or commercial building, you get clean and free (after the investment into the system) electricity thereafter. Clearly, this is an underutilized technology. In recent years there has been a precipitous drop in the cost of implementing solar energy, so it is now economically kinda dumb to not put solar…
gregladen | April 25, 2014Investment in and development of clean energy seems to be undergoing a transition, and this is reflected in a number of items that came across my desk this morning. Without attempting any serious analysis, here's a brief summary.
Clean Energy investments have fallen over the last couple of years, leading some to assert that the transition to non fossil sources of energy is in trouble. But there is an excellent argument that the exact opposite is true. What has really happened is that the cost of implementing new clean energy projects has dropped dramatically, so the cost of investment has…
gregladen | April 24, 2014MOST CURRENT INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND HERE: Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor
See: Books on Linux and Ubuntu
NOTE: This may not be the blog post you are looking for. If you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 and want to tweak that, GO HERE.
Continue on for 14.04.
Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr has just been released, and I’m sure you are about to install it. I’ve put together a few ideas for what to do after installation in order to make it work better for you. You’ll find that below. First, a bit of ranty…
gregladen | April 23, 2014Great interview with Michael Mann on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, CBC, on climate change, faux pause, denialism, policy, and politics.
gregladen | April 23, 2014I have a little "science by spreadsheet" project for you, concerning the relationship between El Niño and Atlantic hurricanes.
The chance of an El Niño event happening this year seems to go up every few days, with most, perhaps all, climate models suggesting that El Niño will form this Summer or Fall. Climate experts tell us that there are typically fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during El Niño years. So, I was interested to see how many fewer. Also, there appears to be a different kind of El Niño that happens sometimes, perhaps more often these days as an effect of global warming,…
gregladen | April 22, 2014There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc.
Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies…
gregladen | April 22, 2014It is possible that this is the most important Earth Day. Earth Day is part of the process of broadening environmental awareness and causing positive change in how we treat our planet. We are at a juncture where we must make major changes in what we do or our Grandchildren, to the extent that they can take time away from the daunting task of survival in a post-Civilization world, will curse us.
I wrote a massive multpart blog post about Earth Day a four years ago, and here I'm giving you a slightly modified version of it, covering just a few aspects of the thing, and telling a couple of…
gregladen | April 19, 2014Here in Minnesota we do things a little different sometimes. Let me splain. First, a little background.
Bird parental investment is intense, or at least it can be. You all know the stories. A bunch of carp are regularly fed in a pond, so they learn to come to the edge of the water when they detect a presence there, and stick their big round mouths out of the water to beg for bits of bread. A mother or father bird has just started to feed the little hatchlings, who beg for food with their gaping maws. A windstorm. A weakened branch. Some bad luck. The bough breaks and the nest, with…
gregladen | April 19, 2014UPDATE: Linux Install.
Installing Copy on Linux was pretty easy. You go to the web page, download a tarball, upack it, then inside the tarball figure out the folder that matches your OS (i.e., 32 vs 64 bit) and go into that folder. Then run the Agent. That may, if you are good, put a thingie on your notification area. Click on that and then sign in and install and stuff, that's it.
There are two pages you might find useful, one for Ubuntu the other for Copy more generally if needed.
Notably, the install on Linux was easier for Copy than for Dropbox. Dropbox install LOOKS easy but never…
gregladen | April 17, 2014The following is a selection of Google search terms that brought people to my sit today that I think would make good song titles, or perhaps, in some cases, a good name for a band.
what happens if you eat mold
vocal fry
fish bigger than a whale with a m
witches in europe
if you hit a brick wall at 45
killing spiders
indian women doodh feeding child with boobs
is blood blue
a bittersweet history
things the same in every culture
do we have blue blood
holocene brain shrink
richest man in d world
smiling chimp
killed by grizzlies
boobs word origination
what can cause green poo?
nude nuns
i…
gregladen | April 17, 2014John Stossel, writing at Real Annoying Clear Politics, (which is not a terrible place except for John Stossel) quotes some guy named Bjorn Lomborg about electric cars, thusly:
Do environmentalists even care about measuring costs instead of just assuming benefits? We spend $7 billion to subsidize electric cars. Even if America reached the president's absurd 2015 goal of "a million electric cars on the road" (we won't get close), how much would it delay warming of the Earth?
"One hour," says Lomborg. "This is a symbolic act."
There are a lot of reasons that this is wrong. First, cars are not…
gregladen | April 17, 2014UPDATED: Interview with Michael Mann on this court decision (and other matters).
An important Virginia Supreme Court finding came out today, related to the hugely complicated maneno that I feel totally unqualified to explain to you ... but Michael Halpern of the Center for Science and Democracy is:
The Supreme Court of Virginia today found unanimously in favor of the University of Virginia in its attempt to protect its employees from unwarranted intrusions into their privacy through the commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). In doing so, the Court rebuffed efforts by the American…
gregladen | April 17, 2014I get the impression that some of my colleagues are concerned about the phrase "War on Carbon" because it is bad messaging. That is wrong. We need to carry out a War on Carbon. We need to keep the Carbon in the ground. You know why.
Meanwhile, though, we can have some fun with the idea:
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gregladen | April 17, 2014One of the most important realizations of climate change research is exemplified in this graphic from Weather Uderground:
Caption from original: "Rate of temperature change today (red) and in the PETM (blue). Temperature rose steadily in the PETM due to the slow release of greenhouse gas (around 2 billion tons per year). Today, fossil fuel burning is leading to 30 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere every year, driving temperature up at an incredible rate.:
The point is this. The PETM (Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, millions of years ago) was a period of high levels of…
gregladen | April 17, 2014You will recall that last February, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, debated Ken Ham, the Not-So-Science Guy, on the question of creationism as a viable explanation for the Earth's history. The debate was held in Ham's home territory, at the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Nye didn't really debate Ham. He ate him for breakfast. Form now on we shall call him Ken Bacon and Eggs.
Anyway, people, including me, who have been engaged with the "debate" between science (evolution) and not-so-science (creationism of one kind or another) were very concerned when we heard that this debate might…
gregladen | April 16, 2014... and by that I mean the El Niño phase of the El Niño Souther Oscillation climate pattern.
We have been in an ENSO neutral phase for a while. Climate scientists have a hard time predicting El Niño, which arrives in Summer, Fall, or Winter, this early in the year, but nonetheless most prediction sources, and most models, now tell us that we are likely to have one staring, really, any time, but most likely Summer or Fall. Here's a graph of several models. The bottom colored area is Le Niña, who we assume was Jesus Christ's sister, and the top colored area is El Ninño, with the middle part…
gregladen | April 15, 2014Check out my latest post on 10,000 Birds.
That is all, thank you very much.
gregladen | April 15, 2014 Henry Markram
Henry Markram, a chief editor at Frontiers, the journal that recently retracted (resulting in multiple resignations of editors from that journal), inappropriately, an important paper on climate change denialism, just made the following comment on a post on that journal's blog.
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that…