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I have put together a quick spreadsheet to allow me to do a bit of sensitivity analysis of what it would take for the US to get to 80% "clean energy" in its electricity supply by 2035, as proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union Speech

1. I started with the projections from the EIA to 2035 available here in XLS. 2. I then calculated the share of clean energy in 2011, assuming that natural gas gets a 50% credit for being clean.  That share is just under 44% (Nukes 21%, Renewable 13%, Gas 10%). 3. I then calculated how that share could be increased to 80% by 2035.

Here is what I found: 1. Coal pretty much has to go away.  Specifically, about 90% or more of coal energy would have to be replaced. 2. I first looked at replacing all the coal with gas, all else equal.  That gets the share of clean energy up to about 68%, a ways off of the target. 3. I then fiddled with the numbers to arrive at 80%.  One way to get there would be to increase the share of nukes to 43%, gas to 31% and renewables to 22% (Note that the EIA reference scenario -- BAU -- to 2035 has these shares at 17%, 21% and 17% respectively, for a share of 45% just about like today.)

wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.

It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.

Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.

Perhaps like me, you watched the BBC Two Horizons program Monday night presented by Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society and Nobel Prize winning geneticist for his discovery of the genes of cell division.

James. He really believes there's some kind of mainstream science "warmist" conspiracy against the brave outliers who dare to challenge the consensus. He really believes that "climategate" is a real scandal. He fails to understand that it is a common practice in statistics to splice together two or more datasets where you know that the quality of data is patchy. In the case of "climategate", researchers found that indirect temperature measurements based on tree ring widths (the tree ring temperature proxy) is consistent with other proxy methods of recording temperature from before the start of the instrumental temperature record (around 1950) but begins to show a decline in temperature after that for reasons which are unclear. Actual temperature measurements however show the opposite. The researcher at the head of the climategate affair, Phil Jones, created a graph of the temperature record to include on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists. For this graph he simply spliced together the tree ring proxy data up until 1950 with the recorded data after that using statistical techniques to bring them into agreement. What made this seem particularly dodgy was an email intercepted by a hacker in which Jones referred to this practice as a "Mike's Nature trick", referring to a paper published by his colleague Mike Hulme Michael Mann in the journal Nature. It is however nothing out of the ordinary. Delingpole and others have talked about how this "trick" was used here to "hide the decline" revealed by the other dataset, as though this was some sort of deception. The fact that all parties were found to have behaved ethically is simply further evidence of the global warmist conspiracy. Delingpole takes it further and casts aspersions on scientific consensus and the entire peer review process.

When Nurse asked Delingpole the very straightforward question of whether he would be willing to trust a scientific consensus if he required treatment for cancer, he could have said "Gee, that's an interesting question. Let me think about that and why it's different."

Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.

Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.

The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.

Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project.

Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server.

but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’”

have you noticed how the capacity of the media to explain in lay terms such matters as quantum physics, or cosmology, is contracting faster than the universe is expanding? The more mind warping the discoveries the less opportunity there is to fit them into 30 seconds in a news cast, or 300 words in print.

There has been a long running conspiracy of convenience between science reporters and the science being reported to leave out inconvenient time and space consuming explanations, and go for the punch line that best suits the use of the media to lobby for more project funding.

Almost every space story I have written over 50 years has been about projects claiming to ‘discover the origins of the solar system/life on earth/life on Mars/discover the origins of the universe, or recover parts of things like comets because they are as old as the sun, except that we have discovered they aren’t ancient at all.’ None of them were ever designed to achieved those goals. They were brilliant projects, brilliantly misrepresented by the scientists and the reporters because an accurate story would have been incomprehensible to 99.9% of readers or viewers.

Dear Prof. Haidt,You understandably got upset by my harsh criticism of your recent claims about the mechanisms behind the alleged anti-conservative bias that apparently so permeates the modern academy. I find it amusing that you simply assumed I had not looked at your talk and was therefore speaking without reason. Yet, I have indeed looked at it (it is currently published at Edge, a non-peer reviewed webzine), and found that it simply doesn’t add much to the substance (such as it is) of Tierney’s summary.

Yes, you do acknowledge that there may be multiple reasons for the imbalance between the number of conservative and liberal leaning academics, but then you go on to characterize the academy, at least in your field, as a tribe having a serious identity issue, with no data whatsoever to back up your preferred subset of causal explanations for the purported problem.

your talk is simply an extended op-ed piece, which starts out with a summary of your findings about the different moral outlooks of conservatives and liberals (which I have criticized elsewhere on this blog), and then proceeds to build a flimsy case based on a couple of anecdotes and some badly flawed data.

some doctors seem to have embraced even disproven remedies. Take, for instance, a review of acupuncture research that appeared last July in the New England Journal of Medicine. This highly respected journal is one of the most widely read by doctors across specialities.In Acupuncture For Chronic Low Back Pain, the authors reviewed clinical trials done to assess if acupuncture actually helps in chronic low back pain. The most important meta-analysis available was a 2008 study involving 6,359 patients, which 'showed that real acupuncture treatments were no more effective than sham acupuncture treatments'.

The authors then editorialised: 'There was nevertheless evidence that both real acupuncture and sham acupuncture were more effective than no treatment and that acupuncture can be a useful supplement to other forms of conventional therapy for low back pain.'

First, they admit that pooled clinical trials of the best sort show that real acupuncture does no better than sham acupuncture. This should mean that acupuncture does not work - full stop. But then they say that both sham and real acupuncture work as well as the other and thus is useful. Translation: Please use acupuncture as a placebo on your patients; just don't let them know it is a placebo.

Despite the revolutionary technological advance of the printing press in the 15th century, there is precious little economic evidence of its benefits. Using data on 200 European cities between 1450 and 1600, this column finds that economic growth was higher by as much as 60 percentage points in cities that adopted the technology.

Historians argue that the printing press was among the most revolutionary inventions in human history, responsible for a diffusion of knowledge and ideas, “dwarfing in scale anything which had occurred since the invention of writing” (Roberts 1996, p. 220). Yet economists have struggled to find any evidence of this information technology revolution in measures of aggregate productivity or per capita income (Clark 2001, Mokyr 2005). The historical data thus present us with a puzzle analogous to the famous Solow productivity paradox – that, until the mid-1990s, the data on macroeconomic productivity showed no effect of innovations in computer-based information technology.

In recent work (Dittmar 2010a), I examine the revolution in Renaissance information technology from a new perspective by assembling city-level data on the diffusion of the printing press in 15th-century Europe. The data record each city in which a printing press was established 1450-1500 – some 200 out of over 1,000 historic cities (see also an interview on this site, Dittmar 2010b). The research emphasises cities for three principal reasons. First, the printing press was an urban technology, producing for urban consumers. Second, cities were seedbeds for economic ideas and social groups that drove the emergence of modern growth. Third, city sizes were historically important indicators of economic prosperity, and broad-based city growth was associated with macroeconomic growth (Bairoch 1988, Acemoglu et al. 2005).

One of the most frustrating experiences produced by the winter from hell is dealing with the airlines' automated answer systems. Your flight has just been canceled and every second counts in getting an elusive seat. Yet you are stuck in an automated menu spelling out the name of your destination city.

Even more frustrating is knowing that you will never get to ask the question you really want to ask, as it isn't an option: "If I drive to Newark and board my Flight to Tel Aviv there will you cancel my whole trip, as I haven't started from my ticketed airport of origin, Ithaca?"

A human would immediately understand the question and give you an answer. That's why knowledgeable travelers rush to the nearest airport when they experience a cancellation, so they have a chance to talk to a human agent who can override the computer, rather than rebook by phone (more likely wait on hold and listen to messages about how wonderful a destination Tel Aviv is) or talk to a computer.

The attackers just needed a little bit more information: they needed a regular, non-root user account to log in with, because as a standard security procedure, direct ssh access with the root account is disabled. Armed with the two pieces of knowledge above, and with Greg's e-mail account in their control, the social engineers set about their task. The e-mail correspondence tells the whole story: From: Greg To: Jussi Subject: need to ssh into rootkit im in europe and need to ssh into the server. can you drop open up firewall and allow ssh through port 59022 or something vague? and is our root password still 88j4bb3rw0cky88 or did we change to 88Scr3am3r88 ? thanks

Thanks indeed. To be fair to Jussi, the fake Greg appeared to know the root password and, well, the e-mails were coming from Greg's own e-mail address. But over the course of a few e-mails it was clear that "Greg" had forgotten both his username and his password. And Jussi handed them to him on a platter. Later on, Jussi did appear to notice something was up: From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit did you open something running on high port?

From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit hi, do you have public ip? or should i just drop fw? and it is w0cky - tho no remote root access allowed

There are two new papers in Nature this week that go right to the heart of the conversation about extreme events and their potential relationship to climate change.

Let’s start with some very basic, but oft-confused points: Not all extremes are the same. Discussions of ‘changes in extremes’ in general without specifying exactly what is being discussed are meaningless. A tornado is an extreme event, but one whose causes, sensitivity to change and impacts have nothing to do with those related to an ice storm, or a heat wave or cold air outbreak or a drought. There is no theory or result that indicates that climate change increases extremes in general. This is a corollary of the previous statement – each kind of extreme needs to be looked at specifically – and often regionally as well. Some extremes will become more common in future (and some less so). We will discuss the specifics below. Attribution of extremes is hard. There are limited observational data to start with, insufficient testing of climate model simulations of extremes, and (so far) limited assessment of model projections.

The two new papers deal with the attribution of a single flood event (Pall et al), and the attribution of increased intensity of rainfall across the Northern Hemisphere (Min et al). While these issues are linked, they are quite distinct, and the two approaches are very different too.

In 2008, crude oil topped $111 a barrel for the first time. During that time, the U.S. average retail price for regular unleaded gasoline reached $3.28 a gallon. Despite the increase, people in the United States still pay significantly less for gasoline than people in many other countries.

This chart depicts the elements of production, transportation, refining and distribution required to transform crude oil into finished petroleum products like gasoline.

In the United States, the average tax on gasoline is 47 cents per gallon. The tax is usually a combination of federal, state and local fees, underground storage tank fees and other environmental fees. Many European countries attach much higher fees as an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and raise revenue, increasing the overall price of gasoline.

[UPDATE: Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a post on this subject that  -- surprise, surprise -- is perfectly consonant with what I write below.] [UPDATE 2: Andy Revkin has a great post on the representations of the precipitation paper discussed below by scientists and related coverage by the media.]  

Nature published two papers yesterday that discuss increasing precipitation trends and a 2000 flood in the UK.  I have been asked by many people whether these papers mean that we can now attribute some fraction of the global trend in disaster losses to greenhouse gas emissions, or even recent disasters such as in Pakistan and Australia.

I hate to pour cold water on a really good media frenzy, but the answer is "no."  Neither paper actually discusses global trends in disasters (one doesn't even discuss floods) or even individual events beyond a single flood event in the UK in 2000.  But still, can't we just connect the dots?  Isn't it just obvious?  And only deniers deny the obvious, right?

If you know only one language, you live only once. A man who knows two languages is worth two men. He who loses his language loses his world. (Czech, French and Gaelic proverbs.)

The hypothesis first put forward fifty years ago by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf—that our language significantly affects our experience of the world—is making a comeback in various forms, and with it no shortage of debate.

The idea that language shapes thought was taboo for a long time, said Dan Slobin, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the ice is breaking.” The taboo, according to Slobin, was largely due to the widespread acceptance of the ideas of Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. Chomsky proposed that the human brain comes equipped at birth with a set of rules—or universal grammar—that organizes language. As he likes to say, a visiting Martian would conclude that everyone on Earth speaks mutually unintelligible dialects of a single language.

I picked a fairly specific term, in “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I checked prior to publishing yesterday’s post, and there were just a shade under 29,000 Google results for that term.  This is important because you need to pick the most specific term as possible, because this will result in less competition, and (if you’ve picked the right term for you) it means you will be more likely to get the ‘right’ kind of traffic.

Second, I made sure the term was in the title and mentioned a couple of times in the post.  I also made the term “Social Media Crisis Management” at the front of the post title, I originally had the title as “A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Crisis Management” but Amy wisely suggested that I flip it so the term I was targeting was at the front of the title.

when I published the post yesterday at 12:20pm, there were 28,900 Google results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I tweeted a link to it at that time.  Fifty minutes later at 1:10pm, the post was already showing up on the 3rd page for a Google search of #Social Media Crisis Management”:

There are more universities operating in other countries, recruiting students from overseas, setting up partnerships, providing online degrees and teaching in other languages than ever before. Capturing the moment: South Korea has turned itself into a global player in higher education Chinese students are taking degrees taught in English in Finnish universities; the Sorbonne is awarding French degrees in Abu Dhabi; US universities are opening in China and South Korean universities are switching teaching to English so they can compete with everyone else. It's like one of those board games where all the players are trying to move on to everyone else's squares. It's not simply a case of western universities looking for new markets. Many countries in the Middle East and Asia are deliberately seeking overseas universities, as a way of fast-forwarding a research base.

"There's a world view that universities, and the most talented people in universities, will operate beyond sovereignty. "Much like in the renaissance in Europe, when the talent class and the creative class travelled among the great idea capitals, so in the 21st century, the people who carry the ideas that will shape the future will travel among the capitals.

"But instead of old European names it will be names like Shanghai and Abu Dhabi and London and New York. Those universities will be populated by those high-talent people." New York University, one of the biggest private universities in the US, has campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi, with plans for another in Shanghai. It also has a further 16 academic centres around the world. Mr Sexton sets out a different kind of map of the world, in which universities, with bases in several cities, become the hubs for the economies of the future, "magnetising talent" and providing the ideas and energy to drive economic innovation.

If you think R21 is the strictest classification a movie in Singapore can receive, think again. The Oscar-nominated drama The Kids Are All Right has been rated R21 and has also had an additional condition imposed on it. The Board of Film Censors (BFC) says that it can only be released on one print. This is likely to be the first time an R21 film will be screened under such a condition outside of a film festival.

Further down the news article, it was explained that the Board of Film Censors issued a letter earlier this week to the film’s distributor, Festive Films: It stated: ‘The majority of the members [of the Committee of Appeal] agreed with the board that the film normalises a homosexual family unit and has exceeded the film classification guidelines which states that ‘Films that promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle cannot be allowed’.’ In addition, the committee said the fact that the film is allowed for release in Singapore at all was already a concession. It said: ‘Imposing a condition of one-print serves as a signal to the public at large that such alternative lifestyles should not be encouraged.’ – ibid

Firstly, can/should the civil service create additional rules at whim? Secondly, why is the idea of two gay persons raising a family considered something to be defended against?

The 10:23 demonstrations and the CBC Marketplace coverage have elicited fascinating case studies in CAM professionalism. Rather than offering any new information or evidence about homeopathy itself, some homeopaths have spuriously accused skeptical groups of being malicious Big Pharma shills.

Mike Adams of the Natural News website

has decided to provide his own coverage of the 10:23 campaign

Inept modern reconstructions have given seventeenth-century instruments a bad name, says Ford. In contrast to the hazy images shown in some museums and television documentaries, the right lighting and focusing can produce micrographs of startling clarity using original microscopes or modern replicas ( see slideshow ).

A flea, as seen through an eighteenth-century microscope used poorly (left) and correctly (right).