Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
Stephan: I got an email this morning, that I have been thinking about off and on all day. A reader in Minnesota wrote me to say that she knew SR must be read by thousands of people, so why did it have so few 'likes' on Facebook? And why did I do nothing to promote it? The last is easy to answer: I do nothing about promoting SR, because just producing it each day takes several hours.
There are four reader groups: the website, the subscription list, the Facebook edition, and Twitter. The last two are made possible because of the courtesy and generosity of Jeff Vander Clute, who does this for me. The combined readership last week was about 15,000. SR grows because you all pass it on.
As to the number of 'likes', which I hadn't previously considered, thinking about it today I understood what the reader intended. Consequently, I would appreciate it if each of you, if this is in fact true, and you have not already done so, 'like' SR on Facebook. That would be helpful.
Thanks.
-- Stephan
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Politicians who, all too often, are the servants of the special interests who provide them the money they need to get re-elected seem unable to put the welfare of the world above personal advantage. But bankers and insurance companies have begun to take climate change very seriously, because they understand what it means to their future success. Here is the views of the President of the World Bank, who makes my point.
The president of the World Bank on Saturday warned the finance chiefs of the world’s leading economic powers that global warming is a real risk to the planet and already affecting the world economy in unprecedented ways.
Addressing the G20 finance ministers at their meeting in Moscow, Jim Yong Kim called on the world powers to ‘tackle the serious challenges presented by climate change.’
‘These are not just risks. They represent real consequences,’ said Kim, calling the lack of attention to the issue by finance ministers and central bank chiefs ‘a mistake’.
He said failing to tackle the challenges of climate change risked having ‘serious consequences for the economic outlook’.
‘Damages and losses from natural disasters have more than tripled over the past 30 years,’ said Kim, giving as examples the $45 billion of losses from the 2011 floods in Thailand, whose effects ‘spread across borders disrupting international supply chains.’
‘Years of development efforts are often wiped out in days or even minutes,’ Kim said, asking the G20 to ‘face climate change, which is a very real and present danger.’
The G20 finance ministers’ agenda in Moscow is dominated by concerns about competitive currency devaluations and a new drive by EU powers to force big business […]
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
Stephan: When I was a boy, and lived at Wilson Creek Farm, in Gloucester County, Virginia, we took oysters from the creek, a kind of tidal baylet off Mobjack Bay in what is called The Tidewater. The oysters were about five to six inches across then. Joe Nichols, the county historian, older than my father, told me that when his father was a boy, probably about 1870, the oysters were as big as saucers, and that when Wilson Creek was built in 1653, old documents said they had been as big as dinner plates. I tell this story to give a sense of continuity and context to this very sad report; another consequence of climate change.
Behind the counter at Seattle’s Taylor Shellfish Market, a brawny guy with a goatee pries open kumamoto, virginica, and shigoku oysters as easily as other men pop beer cans. David Leck is a national oyster shucking champion who opened and plated a dozen of them in just over a minute (time is added for broken shells or mangled meat) at the 2012 Boston International Oyster Shucking Competition. You have to be quick, these days, to keep up with demand. The oysters here were grown nearby in Taylor’s hundred-year-old beds, but the current hunger for pedigreed mollusks on the half shell stretches to raw bars and markets across the country.
A similar oyster craze swept the United States in the 1800s, when the bivalves were eaten with alacrity in New York, San Francisco, and anywhere else that could get them fresh. Development of a fancy new technology, canning, meant there was money in preserved oysters, too. Gold miners in Northern California celebrated their riches with an oyster omelet called hangtown fry. New Yorkers ate them on the street; late at night they ate them in ‘oyster cellars.
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Monday, February 18th, 2013
CHRIS MOONEY, - Mother Jones
Stephan: More and more studies correlating brain structure with political beliefs are coming out. He are the two latest studies.This work puts a radical new light on political belief.
It is still considered highly uncool to ascribe a person’s political beliefs, even in part, to that person’s biology: hormones, physiological responses, even brain structures and genes. And no wonder: Doing so raises all kinds of thorny, non-PC issues involving free will, determinism, toleration, and much else.
There’s just one problem: Published scientific research keeps going there, with ever increasing audacity (not to mention growing stacks of data).
The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes.
First, in the American Journal of Political Science [1], a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear-tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes-and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not […]
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Monday, February 18th, 2013
GILES PARKINSON, - Clean Technica
Stephan: Here is an excellent assessment of the possible, and I consider it to be good news. The main thing that should concern those of us in the U.S. is that the stranglehold carbon energy has on our Federal government is going to seriously retard America's progress. This is the intersection to two major trends: the transition out of carbon energy, and the increasing deterioration of the United States because we are falling further and further behind as a result of that corruption.
The stunning set of data, cost profiles and market analysis produced in the first few weeks of calendar 2013 have confirmed what many had long suspected – that the global energy markets are changing faster than anyone had thought possible.
The implications for the incumbent energy industry – be they generators, network operators or retailers – couldn’t be more significant. The business models that supported the ageing infrastructure are broken, and if they can’t adapt to the new environment, they may soon be out of business. The idea of a rapid change to a largely renewable energy grid no longer seems aspirational, it could be inevitable.
Consider what we have learned this month:
– The price of wind energy (and in some isolated cases solar PV), is already cheaper than coal and gas in Australia. This gap is likely to widen considerably in the coming decade.
– By the time new baseload capacity is required in 10 years time, other technologies, including solar thermal with storage, and concentrated solar PV, will also be cheaper than coal and gas. Marine energy and geothermal could be close to parity.
– But not only do we have ‘grid parity
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