climate

It's been a while since I did one of these "what I'm listening to" posts. Since the last one, a bunch of things have changed: I've gotten deeply into climate work for volunteerism (so podcast skew really…

It's been over 20 months since we had to buy gasoline, because in Sept 2024, we traded in our 12 year old Subaru Outback for a Kia EV9. The Backstory We bought the Outback in October 2012. We needed something a big…

I firmly believe that Batteries are probably the closest thing to a silver bullet when it comes to our clean energy future. They are going to be the things that let us deploy a lot of solar, and use it through the night.…

Sean Dague would like to use his refrigerator to lower your energy bills. A few years ago, after buying a fridge, the Dutchess County resident did something few people do: He read the manual. (He’s a software engineer at…

There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford…

Thursday I got home at 7:30, and started squaring away a few things. I checked the weather to figure out if I could leave out a package for the mailman the next day, and noticed a giant string of thunder storms to the…

Potatoes are the most grown vegetable in the United States, followed by tomatoes, sweet corn, and lettuce. They’re also growing increasingly threatened by rising temperatures, which can lead to a drastic reduction in…

For the last decade I've been an avid bike rider. When I was still working in an office a co-worker started riding his bike in, and I figured out there was a 9 mile route I could take that larger avoided busy roads. The…

As I've said before, we did a piece of this trip 10 years ago, in the same Subaru Outback we took this time. 10 years ago it was a new car, purchased in 2012. Now it is not. So inevitably, once we're 50 km over the…

It's a 5 hour drive from Bar Harbor to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, plus a border crossing that went very quickly. We set out early to make sure we had plenty of time to settle in once we got there. One thing I…

The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way…

Photo by Cindy Shebley on Pexels.com Rooftop solar was overlooked. Now it's closing a New England power plant. New England ISO spent the time to deeply model the actual impacts of rooftop solar, and what actual hour by…

In Bar Harbor we stayed in a Inn outside of town, largely because it had both an indoor and outdoor pool and my daughter has gotten into swimming this year. That seemed to weather proof us for some activities. The room…

10 years ago my wife and I had taken a 2 week road trip through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine. During that trip we stayed at Fundy National Park in a Yurt. And we definitely wanted to come back. In 10 years, a…

The understanding that climate change and air pollution affect the developing brain has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Research has now linked prenatal as well as postnatal air pollution exposure to reduced IQ…

Osaka University in Japan is beginning a joint research project with civil engineering company Toda to develop the world's largest floating wind turbine. As Nikkei Asia reports, the goal is to have an experimental wind…

Analysts say there’s a lesson in that: The new jobs at these green factories may function as a political game-changer. “That may be an implicit long-term strategy for the Democrats: With domestic manufacturing likely in…

Weather conditions affect how much power can be carried on transmission lines, and high-tech DLR sensors attached to transmission lines give grid operators like National Grid real-world information on weather and thus on…

CHPE is expecterd to deliver 1,250 megawatts of clean energy, or enough to power 1 million New York City homes — about 20% of the city's electric demands.Power cable lines will be installed underground and underwater for…

Summer 2021 was different in New York than past summers. It wasn't the relentless brutal heat that we'd experienced the last few years. The heat that finally drove my parents in Vermont to install air conditioning. That…

This past week I was talking with my folks on the phone, and my mom asked a question: What climate organizations should she give to? She has typically been giving to various animal welfare organizations, but it's really…

2hrs and 50 minutes. When I looked at my phone yesterday, that's how much time it said I had left in the audio book of All We Can Save , a remarkable collection of essays and poetry on the climate crisis and solutions.…

From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company…

The news isn't good for 2018. US CO2 emissions are estimated to be up 3.4% from last year, from a new Rhodium report . The details of that report are really interesting. Unpacking those in order, we're doing a good job…

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading/listening to The Sixth Extinction . It was quite good, but the language was at a density level where I found listening to the audio book to be a lot easier than reading…

Over the past year and a half I've been volunteering with Citizens' Climate Lobby , a volunteer group with a laser focus on passing federal carbon pricing legislation in a bi-partisan manner. I got involved originally…

Source: Two Degrees: Cities, Architecture and Our Changing Environments | Commonwealth Club There were a few things in this podcast that struck me. The first was the summary of the thesis of Collapse: How Societies…

For thousands of years, people from Sierra Mixe, a mountainous region in southern Mexico, have been cultivating an unusual variety of giant corn. They grow the crop on soils that are poor in nitrogen—an essential…

Last summer about this time we made a big decision. We were going to work with Dandelion (a new geothermal company in the area) and replace all our Fuel Oil based forced air heating and hot water system with a Geothermal…

If automakers complied with the rules solely by improving the fuel economy of their engines, new cars and light trucks on the road would average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 (the charts here break out standards…

In looking for information related to my ny-power demo (which shows the realtime CO2 intensity on the New York power grid), I discovered Electricity Map . This is doing a similar thing, but at a global scale. It started…

Alsup insisted that this tutorial was a purely educational opportunity, and his enjoyment of the session was obvious. (For the special occasion, he wore his “science tie” under his robes, printed with a graphic of the…

Back in November we decided to stop waiting for our Tesla Model 3 (ever changing estimates) and bought a Chevy Bolt EV (which we could do right off the lot). A week later we had a level 2 charger installed at home, and a…

In November 2017 we replaced our Fuel Oil Heating system with a Geothermal one from Dandelion and bought a Chevy Bolt EV, which we're using as the primary car in the house. That for us means about 1000 miles a month on…

This talk by Jesse Jenkins at UPENN is one of the best looks at what doing deep decarbonization of the grid really looks like. Jenkins is a PhD candidate at MIT researching realistic paths to get our electricity sector…

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." Over the last year we've done a lot to our house to make it much less energy intensive, bought an electric car, and got involved in…

I'm going to open with, this book is flat out amazing. In school, or even through popular science journalism, we learn a bit about some key points of geologic time. But these are snap shots, Dinosaurs, Ice Ages, even…

This infographic summarizes how many people are expected to travel to the path of totality and where they will congregate. The patterns of converging lines to the path of totality represent the quickest drive paths from…

On Monday, August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will pass over the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming etc.). The California balancing authority area will be affected by a partial eclipse between 9:02 AM and…

The map above, based on a new analysis from the Climate Impact Lab, shows how 95-degree days (35 degrees Celsius) are expected to multiply this century if countries take moderate climate action. In this scenario,…

Staggs sat in the front seat and opened a MacBook Pro while the researchers looked up at the towering machine. Like the dozens of other turbines in the field, its white blades—each longer than a wing of a Boeing…

Extreme temperature spikes such as this one have occurred multiple times in the past two winters, whereas they only previously occurred once or twice per decade in historical records according to research published in…

The crack in Larsen C now reaches over 100 miles in length, and some parts of it are as wide as two miles. The tip of the rift is currently only about 20 miles from reaching the other end of the ice shelf. Once the crack…

Nearly 7 years ago I started down a project to use existing oregon scientific weather sensors to collect temperature data throughout our house. The basic idea is that Oregon Scientific weather sensors all communicate…

After previous missteps, Tokyo needs their hosting of the Olympics to not only go smoothly, but to wow visitors in order to regain some face. If Japan-based research company Star-ALE has their way, they'll be the ones to…

Poaching is a threat to the survival of rhinos worldwide, and anti-poaching efforts have always been one step behind. Now, park rangers in South Africa have a leg up. John Petersen from the Air Shepherd program tells…

Very cool interactive graph visualizing temperature anomalies reported in the US from 1964 to current. The full site gives all the data they used and methodology for the analysis.

(Note, this old post is background on some of the things I was doing here before.) A few weeks ago I lost my rfxcom receiver during a lightning storm. Which meant my old weather station reporting on http://home.dague.net…

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 Dr Jeff Masters, who created Weather Underground, has a "year in" post on the weather of 2012 . Which also tells the story in this…

Last night, among a generally jovial conversation around new finds in astronomy, I also was subjected to various out bursts of "electrical theory of mars" (i.e. Mars was carved by machines) and similar Grand…

I got my self some new temperature sensors for my hacked together home thermal monitor. The software that runs this is still aweful, that's on my project list. But at least now I'm able to figure out thermal variance…

In 1979, Jimmy Carter, in a visionary move, installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. This symbolic installation was taken down in 1986 during the Reagan presidency. In 1991, Unity College , an…

I have to give the weather channel folks a lot of credit for their android application. One of the quite nifty features is an alert model built into it that will actually translate national weather service alerts into…

There are consequences to the blind cult of "drill baby drill". It will be at least August (if even then) before well is stopped up. More from the Big Picture .

"For 40 years, we have worked tirelessly to ensure the health and safety of our natural environment," a visibly angered EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters. "But this can only work when it's a…

This whole mess is just heart breaking. Lots more photos at The Big Picture .

News reports of the failed attempt to contain the oil-spewing equipment on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico have referred obliquely to things like "ice crystals" or an "icy slush" clogging the…

Ubuntu 10.04 introduces a change on the default placement of the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on windows. This is a clone of where the Mac folks have had them over recent years, and a design that I remember…

The Big Picture has another great photo essay on Earth Hour 2010 , with some of the big cities that decided to turn off their lights for one hour on Saturday. Some of the images are amazing, as you can actually see the…

As I've been working on my weather station at home at nights, I realized the code would be a lot cleaner if I wasn't constantly keeping track of temperature units. So I created the Temperature module for Ruby which adds…

I've finally got some very simple ruby code collecting my weather sensors to the round robin database . It took me some time this weekend to finally get my head around RRD, with having to predefine all the data you want…

A few years ago I bought an Oregon Scientific wireless weather station. It's a nice way to keep an eye on what's going on outside. The unit supports up to 3 of these remote sensors (shown here), and aggregates it at a…

A little late on this, but Steven Colbert provides the best satirical response to the whole "it's snowing out side somewhere in the world, that must mean climate change is a hoax" that I've seen. Check it out…

There is a good posting on the Real Climate blog about the IPCC AR4 blow back that is happening. I think this gets to the heart of it: To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion…

Back in October I had a chance to talk with some Central Hudson (our local power company) reps at an IEEE conference. During that conversation I was disappointed to find out that there weren't any near term smart meters…

Ars Technica does an incredible job providing a climate change primer trying to get back to some basics. After the sensationalism around the leaked CRU emails the last couple of weeks, it's nice to have a piece that…

A quite interesting Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman a couple weeks ago that I missed makes the point that China is starting to shift their economy hard in the direction of green endeavors. Well, folks. Sputnik just went up…

So very awesome.

The pictures above are from a CNET article on Extreme Tree Houses. At $1875 per square meter, it isn't actually as ridiculously priced as one might think. Just imagine drinking your morning coffee up in the tree tops.…