Tag: climate

Shared Links for Jun 15th

  • Being “Used To” Our Lifestyle Makes Change Seem Difficult – The range of lifestyles which people have been able to become accustomed to and enjoy throughout history and spread out over the globe, is immense. Some of them are sustainable; ours is not. The willingness to experiment and accept change, to be flexible at a societal level, is of paramount importance today, and has in the past meant the difference between survival and obliteration for countless other civilizations, as detailed in Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse". But change is hard, whether you drive an SUV and have managed to shave your lifestyle requirements down to 8 earths from 10, or whether you're the child of a prostitute in Calcutta. We are creatures of habit, quite literally. (tagged: sustainability film energy green stuff money )
  • The Need for Geoengineering – A WSJ op-ed advocating near term geoengineering, of the stratospheric sulfate aerosol variety. It would be fast acting, relatively easy to reverse, and of the options on the table today, is the least mysterious, since it's not so different from the effects of a large (historically speaking) volcanic eruption like Mt. Pinatubo. The author cautions that even at best, all this would do is give us time: we still need to get the atmosphere back to ~350ppm. What a fascinating modern age it is we live in! (tagged: climate technology geoengineering )
  • Early Reviews of NYC’s New High Line Park – A round up of several reviews of the High Line Park, which has just opened in NYC. (tagged: architecture urban design landscape garden parks nyc )
  • The High Line – An abandoned elevated freight rail line in Manhattan is reborn as a long linear park three stories above the streetscape. I love how the design incorporates the rails and the overgrown feeling that the old line had developed on its own. This and the closure of Broadway at Times Square makes me want to visit New York. Inspiring to see that this kind of change is possible. (tagged: urban design architecture green garden parks nyc )
  • Pedalpalooza 2009 – Wow, a two week long bicycle festival in Portland, spanning the summer solstice? Sounds like a wonderful way to start a bike tour! Hopefully it will still be going on next summer. (tagged: bicycle transportation oregon portland festival activism )

Shared Links for Jun 12th

  • Your Backyard Farmer – A couple of women in Portland who will do your organic vegetable gardening for you! They visit dozens of personal gardens all over Portland every day to tend their micro-fields, and can help teach you how to grow too. If we're willing to pay people to come do landscaping (and certainly "we" seem to be willing to do that in Pasadena), why not vegetables too? I've thought about this business model in the past too. Seemed like it would probably be a lot of work, and not a whole lot of pay, but it does have the advantage of starting up with virtually no capital. Just hand tools, seeds, and smiles 🙂 (tagged: gardening food green urban sustainability business )
  • Are we ready for honesty? | Jerusalem Post – A right-wing Israeli talks about what an honest discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict would look like. Should they annex the West Bank formally, and set up a greater Israel in which the Arabs cannot vote? Should they expel the Arab Israelis in exchange for removing all the settlers? It might sound like crazy talk… but at some level, the questions he brings up are the real questions Israel has to deal with, no matter how ugly they might be. (tagged: israel palestine obama war policy westbank gaza terrorism )
  • China Begins Its Transition to a Clean-Energy Economy – Lots of great plans from the Chinese leadership, but are they actually enforceable, implementable, or verifiable, even by China's own government? And even if they are, the terrifying fact is that they don't end up reducing emissions, they just end up slowing the rate of increase, what what we really need is a virtual cessation of CO2 emissions worldwide. The universe is not required to be accordance with human ambition. (tagged: energy china climate policy politics )
  • Wordnik – A site for anyone who loves words and language. More than a dictionary, different from the Wiktionary, fun and social. Give words a life of their own! (tagged: education language dictionary technology web2.0 )
  • Conservative Cyclists Transcend Cultural Stereotypes – As with sustainability more generally, we're only likely to make progress on cycling when it can stop being a partisan issue. Thankfully I'm not the only one who likes it because it's cheap! (tagged: bicycle transportation politics )

Shared Links for Jun 7th

Shared Links for May 26th

Shared Links for May 12th

  • Forecast: On Climate Change, Cooler Temperatures Bring Hotter Air – Augh, we are prisoners to so many perceptual fallacies. Recency and narration loom large among them. It turns out that the average temperature of the last 12 months is a reasonably strong predictor of whether or not people think they'll personally experience the effects of climate change (a multi-decade to century-scale process). We are failing to deal with problems we didn't evolve to perceive clearly. (tagged: climate statistics fallacy propaganda science )
  • In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars – Ah, the New York Times has discovered Vauban! Now if only it had happened when gas was $4/gallon, we might have had a chance. We desperately need more experimentation in urban design, so we can have working examples to look at and build on. (tagged: sustainability green urban design bicycles germany transportation parking architecture )
  • Spuds in a Box – Build a box whose sides you can progressively remove from the bottom up, plant potatoes in the bottom, and fill with dirt as they grow. Remove lower slats to harvest spuds. I've certainly heard this suggestion from other people too. Will be interesting to see how well it works for these guys. Seems like you could also do this with some kind of bag, and if you sewed in sleeves/tubes periodically, that you could tie off, and then untie when you wanted to reach in and root around for a spud, you wouldn't have to worry about soil falling out when you pry off the boards. Others are supposedly reporting 50kg of potatoes from 0.5 m^2 area. (tagged: gardening green sustainability agriculture food urban design potatoes )
  • How Much Do You Earn? – A great annotated visualization of income distribution in the US as of the year 2000. It would be awesome to see an animated version of this, and see how it evolves through time. Turns out I make just about the most likely income in America ($20k), which is far below the mean (and the median). As a "household" though, I suppose we're right about at the median ($40k). Interesting. (tagged: economics wealth taxes government policy visualization )
  • The Capitalist Threat – Geoge Soros on Karl Popper's Open Society, from the mid-90s. He rails against the West's failure to extend a helping hand to the post-Soviet nations. He acknowledges that Truth may not be a strong enough motivator for most people, and that within a society that has decided to be Open, there are still many other choices to be made, but somehow fails to mention the way these two things end up pushing an Open Society closed with propaganda, apathy, and misinformation. Political evangelism – the process of deciding what (arbitrary) values your society is going to have – creates huge incentives for those who do not highly value truth to assert authority. I guess that's part of his point though, to robustly inoculate society against those assertions of perfect (authoritarian) knowledge. (tagged: economics politics popper society philosophy )

Shared Links for May 5th

  • How David Beats Goliath – When the rules are stacked against you, the intelligent thing to do is break them. (tagged: strategy law war insurgency guerilla gametheory basketball lawrenceofarabia )
  • Continuous bankruptcy – Bankruptcy as it stands now is a discontinuous process. Your legal solvency is binary: either you are bankrupt, or you are not. It doesn't have to be that way, and I think you can make a good argument that it's better if it isn't. Continuous processes work themselves out in small steps, with lots of information flow along the way. Discontinuous ones are like explosions. It's easier to muster resistance to an explosion once you see it coming, and delay it. But how much better to start getting signals early on, and avert it altogether? (tagged: finance policy economics bailout banks bankruptcy discrete continuous )
  • Digital Recovery of Moon Images – Ahh, NASA. Your data management has improved over the years, but that's not saying much. 20 tons of magnetic tape in an abandoned McDonalds houses the only extant copy of the pre-Apollo analog imaging of the Moon (still the highest resolution available in most places). It can only be read by one machine on Earth, which was recently rescued from a chicken coop, and refurbished by a man who is about to die. You can't make this stuff up. (tagged: information technology space nasa archive data moon )
  • Will the Future Be Geo-Engineered? – The future is already geo-engineered, and has been ever since we started burning coal on a large scale more than 200 years ago. The question now is whether we back off, and try to let the system return to the quasi-equilibrium that allowed our civilization to arise, or introduce new and exciting perturbations, with completely unpredictable non-linear effects. I know which one I'm hoping for. (tagged: geoengineering technology non-linear climate policy environment )
  • Hacking Scalia – Law professor gives class an assignment to dig up as much "private" info as possible on Justice Scalia, a notable anti-privacy force on the SCOTUS. This irritates Scalia. Exactly! (tagged: law privacy scalia scotus )
  • No new coal: what real direct action looks like – The $10 million spent on violently policing the "climate camp" protest outside Kingsnorth is absurd, given that a single motivated saboteur, capable of advance planning and actually willing to risk arrest and injury, can walk into the power plant and shut down 500MW of coal fired power generation. If governments fail to deal with greenhouse gas emissions effectively, and remain in thrall to the carbon lobbies, it seems likely that soon this kind of action will become more common, and truly disruptive. All it takes is a few thousand people who actually care, and our infrastructure can be brought to its knees. (tagged: energy environment green coal climate protest kingsnorth directaction )

Shared Links for Apr 28th

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

When the Rivers Run Dry is a kind of modern, global Cadillac Desert, looking at present and future water issues around the world.  I think in the end it was too ambitious, looking at too many individual situations superficially, without going into the details on how they came to be the way they are (which Cadillac Desert was able to do, since it focused only on the American West), and also without drawing enough insightful generalizations from the many different cases the author studied.  It ended up feeling mostly like a dreary litany of mistakes painstakingly repeated in nation after nation, decade after decade, apparently without any learning going on.  Often these projects were funded by the World Bank and other international “aid” organizations, or by powerful central governments.  In both cases, the motivations often turned out to be short sighted and political or financial and had little to do with good engineering, productive agriculture, fisheries, or long term stability.

Continue reading When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Shared Links for Apr 8th

  • The secret, social lives of bacteria – Cooperative behavior between bacteria, both inter and intra species, coordinated via chemical messages. Behavior like "should we make light?" and "should we kill the host now?". Scary, awesome, and a beautiful system to investigate with algorithmic game theory! (tagged: cooperation biology technology bacteria science )
  • Computational Legal Studies – More people using machines to understand politics. A whole new class of dual use technology. Propaganda or transparency? Manipulation or clarity? Unauthorized social networking. (tagged: transparency technology government law )
  • Public Private Investment Partnerships a la Enron – Giving banks the ability to both buy and sell into the toxic asset markets being set up under PPIP is a recipe for market gaming in the tradition of Enron, as outlined in this example. Great, a trillion dollar Enron! (tagged: finance bailout economics policy enron ppip banks )
  • The New Nostradamus – Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses large game theory simulations to try and predict the outcomes of complex negotiations involving many parties, both economic and political. Sounds interesting. Also sounds a little bit like bullshit. But apparently the CIA did a prospective trial (no backtesting bias) and found that the models made accurate predictions something like 90% of the time, when the analysts providing the inputs to the model made wrong predictions. Not so surprising that computers are better at synthesizing massive logical datasets into an outcome. The hard part seems like it would be getting the right inputs, and also trusting that people behave rationally, and (perhaps) know what's good for them. (tagged: economics politics science math prediction gametheory technology )
  • Ice Shelf Instability Backgrounder – A good backgrounder from last summer on the Wilkins Ice Shelf (which has just collapsed), and shelf dynamics in general, with links to the relevant literature. None of this is quite as sudden and shocking as the media reports have made it out to be. (tagged: climate antarctica ice shelf )

Shared Links for Apr 6th

  • Sing a dirge for the unused adipic acid – An essay on the unpleasantries of being lab safety officer, and the sentimental attachment that scientists have to their expired reagents. (tagged: science chemistry lab safety )
  • Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype? – A process for manufacturing cement which sequesters CO2 (instead of releasing it) has been recently hyped. Chemistry looks dodgy though, and the company (Calera) is not forthcoming with details, or even a gross inputs/outputs for their miracle black box. Caveat emptor. (tagged: carbon climate technology cement )
  • Self Irrigating Planter Resources – A nice little gathering of pointers to information on DIY self-watering planters. Still trying to figure out how one might be able to use tires to make one of these…. (tagged: gardening technology food sustainability urban )
  • The Case Against Breast-Feeding – Backlash against the relatively new social imperative (in the west) that women must breastfeed to be good mothers. I think the real issues are that we haven't structured our society and its expectations to meaningfully accommodate having children and equitable peer spousal relationships. I agree there's something broken, but I don't think it's breastfeeding. And I feel like it's another example of the Newtonian hangover… we're so used to being able to figure things out authoritatively, a la Newton, that we almost don't know how to deal with planning around and purturbing complex systems like the climate, or ecologies, or economies, or agricultural systems, or genomes, or nutrition… which we depend on, but don't understand fully (and because of their chaotic nature, may never understand fully. We're used to Apollonian systems, but actually we live in a Dionysian world. (tagged: science food children health breastfeeding society )
  • Collapse Of The Ice Bridge Supporting Wilkins Ice Shelf Appears Imminent – This ice shelf is 3x the area of Rhode Island. It's already floating, so it won't have any effect on sea level as it separates, but that's a lot of ice. Wish we had better time series for this kind of observation. Really need the best long term Earth monitoring system we can build. (tagged: environment climate antarctica ice )
  • The strengths of the academic enterprise – A great essay by Dijkstra on the nature of academia, and the problems of cooperation between entities with dramatically different time horizons. Who knew he was interested in things other than graph theory? (tagged: academia science sustainability education technology )