I had great fun talking about Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs with Moira Gunn of TechNation in June, and the interview is now posted here. The interview focused on how we know climate is a problem, why uncertainty can make communicating the implications of the science
Read moreThe Arctic Sea-ice Monitor tracks the extent of sea ice over the Arctic, and has for a long time posted a wonderful graph that shows sea ice extent over each month in a given year. In the new graph now appearing on their site (reposted below) they show the monthly
Read moreJim Hansen just published a terrific summary of the past few decades of temperature measurements, and it shows the stark reality: increasing the average temperature even a modest amount substantially increases the chances of extreme temperature events. I showed this result conceptually in Figure 2-17 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate
Read moreUnless you’ve been asleep for years, it’s impossible to miss the data explosion. In 1998, for example, the first Google page index counted 26 million unique web pages. By 2008 that number had grown to 1 trillion, which means the number of web pages doubled every 8 months
Read moreThe frustration of scientists about how the climate problem is being ignored came out in full relief when Marty Hoffert, an NYU physicist, sent this missive to Andy Revkin in response to a post at dot earth: However welcome the news may be to market economists — and I’m confident
Read moreKate Gammon at Fast Company and Brenna Donoghue at Ethical Ocean just published interviews with me about entrepreneurs and the climate problem. The Fast Company article is here, and the Ethical Ocean article is here. In these interviews I talk about why I chose to focus on entrepreneurs, why ecological
Read moreGarvin Heath and his colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last month published analyses of the indirect greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation technologies. This work was also summarized in a set of articles that appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology (which also includes
Read moreThe Powder River Basin, one of the biggest sources of coal in the Western US, has a system for leasing mining rights that is deeply flawed, and has cost taxpayers “as much as $28.9 billion over the past 30 years”. From the article in the Washington Post today: Powder
Read moreGigaOm named me one of “10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure”. The article introducing the list describes the shifts now ongoing in the industry towards infrastructure, platform, and software as a service. In the past I’ve characterized this trend as “separating physical from virtual servers”. It is
Read moreThis article about the politics of mandating disclosure of campaign contributions got me thinking about what intellectual honesty means and why it’s important. Someone who is intellectually honest follows the facts where ever they may lead, and does so in spite of discomfort, inconvenience, or self-interest. That means that
Read moreInfoWorld and CIO Magazine listed me as one of their “Green 15”, the “2012 Superstars of Sustainable Information Technology”. I was the only individual human who made the list, but I’m in good company, along with familiar IT names like eBay, Google, and Facebook, and some big IT users
Read moreMy friend Alex Zwissler over at the Chabot observatory did a nice post that begins with an experiment you can do at home: This will be really exciting. …Today we’re going to do a real life SCIENCE experiment! … OK, well sort of. For those of you nice enough to
Read moreTMP Muckracker has reported that “Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are circulating a bill which would limit their state agencies’ ability to calculate sea-rise levels, a proposal that one member of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission science panel has termed “bad science.” The bill has not yet been introduced,
Read morePhoto credit: Jonathan Koomey I like site visits—there’s nothing like seeing a company’s innovations in person. In the case of Makani Power, I harbored some core misconceptions about their technology, and the visit set me straight. Corwin Hardham, CEO and one of the co-founders of Makani, invited
Read moreJoe Romm at Climate Progress today reported on a new International Energy Agency report showing that carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record in 2011 or 31.6 billion tons (CO2). The key point that Romm makes is that these emissions increases are consistent with the MIT no-policy case, and
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