staniford
sastyk | January 30, 2012Christian Parenti has a really good article in TomDispatch about the reasons why Climate Change may change people'st thinking about the role of government:
Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas.…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
sastyk | April 13, 2010To make up for yesterday's frivolity, today I am going to be very, very serious, and deal with weighty serious things. There will be no levity - not from me, and certainly not from my very serious readers. In fact, if I detect signs of levity from any of you, especially those of you with sad proclivities towards levity (Risa, Edson, Lora...I'm talking to you!), you will be publically denounced from my pulpit (I have to go build a pulpit now.)
More practically, I'm going to try and catch up on some things people have asked me to write about, many of which are more serious and require more…
sastyk | April 9, 2010What I like about Stuart Staniford's work is that he does such a lovely job of offering useful and clear visual descriptors of things that are often otherwise made less clear. The design of a good graph or visual is worth a lot. So I thought this bit about the way sea level rise plays out in the emerging data was very useful.
For the range of climate models used in the IPCC AR4, and for multiple different emissions models, they show the prediction range associated with that model (the different colored bands). The interesting thing that emerges here is that it sort of doesn't matter much…
sastyk | March 2, 2010I have an enormous amount of respect for Stuart Staniford, who I think is one of the best minds working on our collective ecological crisis. That said, we've had some serious debates, because I've tended to think that our situation, particularly our longer term food situation, is more serious than Staniford has - but those debates on my end have always included just a profound gratitude for the kind of analytic work he does.
(Days over 100 degrees in projected high emissions scenarios)
Staniford has done a fabulous review (Note: apologies for linkage problems, they should now be fixed!)…