Tag Archives: climate change

by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront There is a sense of humor here being shown by Lloyd. He is asking Elon Musk to build differently than what he would do if planned by the market. Granted electric vehicles have been a part of what Tesla offers. Lloyd is asking Elon to go a step farther and build something smaller that the US car manufacturer behemoths have been building. Lloyd wants it even smaller and on a car suspension rack. It makes sense for...

from Peter Radford “Mathematics is the art of the perfect.  Physics is the art of the optimal.  Biology, because of evolution, is the art of the satisfactory”. That’s Sydney Brenner speaking.  He should know a thing or two.  He won a Nobel Prize. It’s a shame, is it not?  Economies are always changing.  Not just in terms of innovation and all the normal things we think of as change, but also in more simple terms: in the people making up an economy change.  They are born and they die.  And...

Letters from an American by Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson Feds trying to convince Florida Governor to take the funding for hurricane Milton damage. Better ask Mikie Johnson if that is ok. He was really having a hissy about the $20 billion setup for failure of aid. Biden just stepped right around him. Not bad for an old guy that can not think . . .. While the Feds are getting ready for the next hurricane (Milton) to hit the US, Florida’s...

You all down South there can wait 30 more days for additional Federal relief after hurricane Helene has done the worst seen in decades and we decide how much more you will need. “Mike Johnson’s Big Decision Could Impact Helene Relief Efforts,” MSN. Its ok, he is one of them. His $20 billion should tide you over. What an ass . . . Pre-Helene hurricane hitting land, Mike Johnson allocates $20 billion in relief funding. It now appears the Level 4...

by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront Scope 4 emissions help me justify my flight to New Zealand and compensate for its carbon footprint. I apologize for my posts not showing up at the usual times; I got back from Australia and New Zealand with a crushing jet lag that I still haven’t recovered from, with a cold thrown in as well. I hope to be back to my usual programming shortly. Everyone is talking about “Scope 4” and “avoided emissions” these...

I was married by the time I started graduate school. I suspect that being in a committed relationship, and in particular with someone who was also a grad student, kept me centered during the stressful times. Perhaps these were different times, but a recent study shows that today’s PhD students are struggling with mental health issues: “The researchers compared the rate at which PhD students, people with master’s degrees and a sample of the...

As Category 4 Hurricane Helene approached the Florida Panhandle, a number of Republican senators and representatives voted against supplementing disaster relief in a government funding extension which was passed by both houses of Congress. Many of the Republican lawmakers voted against the provision of additional necessary funding to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) represent states that were hit particularly hard by Hurricane...

The existential threat to humanity in this century is climate change. It is estimated that upwards of half a billion people will be displaced by flooding, fires and desertification due to global warming. But such frightening predictions are based on climate modeling. How reliable are these models? It turns out, remarkably reliable:“Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted...

Kevin Drum has a post up about the present and future of EV charging stalls in the US. As of 2023, the number was 184,000, with public charging stalls outnumbering Tesla stalls 6:1. Is that a lot or a little? Well, lots of people say that they’re holding off buying EVs because of the range, which is still less than most ICE cars. One way to mitigate that concern is to have more charging stalls than gas station nozzles*. So how many gasoline...

Lewis Strauss, former chair of the AEC, coined the phrase “too cheap to meter” referring to the potential for nuclear power. It was a phrase I grew up hearing in Oak Ridge TN, but it never came to be, there or anywhere else.Now, the Wall Street Journal claims that day has arrived, not because of nuclear, but because of wind and solar:“The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war...