climate change

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We Must Reduce Energy Use, Not Just CO2 Emissions, To Prevent Catastrophic Global Warming

July 15, 2009 in analysis, carbon mitigation, energy generation, solar electricity, solar thermal by nils | 1 comment

Playing With Fire (image by charles chan, CC 2.0 license)

An article in Sunday's Science Daily reports on research showing that more than half of the Earth's warming since the dawn of the industrial age is due to the heat released from our energy use, not atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect.

While the greenhouse effect is still a significant contributor - and will become more so as GHG levels in the atmosphere rise - simply the heat released when burning fuels is also being stored in the atmosphere, as well as in the earth, sea, and arctic ice.

China’s Coal Plants Getting Less Dirty, How To Rebuild The Built Environment, Who To Follow on Twitter

May 11, 2009 in analysis, carbon mitigation, energy generation, green building by nils | 2 comments

Smokestacks (image by shoothead, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some good news from China this week, and a blueprint for addressing the huge amount of energy used, and GHG's generated, by the built environment:

China has become the world leader in building clean coal power plants, although they have a ways to go still, according to this New York Times article.

China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the I.E.A. cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth.

Structural Problems In The Economy, and How Britain Can Go Renewable

May 8, 2009 in analysis, business benefits, economy by nils | Add your comment

Roundup Time! (image by williac, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some more roundup links. These pages have been hanging around in my browser for weeks, waiting for me to blog about them. As with the links I posted earlier this week, I consider these "go to" articles and sites - continuously interesting and relevant.

Honestly, the most interesting article I've read on the economic crisis, because it suggests the problem is structural and provides a prescription for addressing it. (From the New York Times a few weeks ago.)

Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

Climate Change and Sustainability Thoughts From Around The Web

April 8, 2009 in analysis, energy efficiency, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

A mythical character (image by Eddi 07, CC 2.0 licensed)

A handful of good articles from the past few weeks, on climate change and sustainable building.

'A "Manhattan project" to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm.'
Climate Progress, the "indispensible blog" according to Tom Friedman, lays down the law on what is and isn't going to solve the climate change crisis.
Climate policy myths
Grist Magazine's online edition is presenting, and debunking, the top myths related to climate change and the policies needed to address it.

Climate Change In Extremistan

November 12, 2008 in analysis, investing, opinion by nils | 1 comment

Taleb's The Black Swan. Image via Wikipedia

In his Edge Magazine essay Life Is Not A Casino, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the trader and author (of The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness) discusses why he no longer thinks that using statistics and probability to make decisions is wise. The problem, he says, is that:

When it comes to low odds, decision making no longer depends on the probability alone. It is the pair, probability times payoff (or a series of payoffs), the expectation, that matters. On occasion, the potential payoff can be so vast that it dwarfs the probability—and these are usually real-world situations in which probability is not computable.