Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
Physicist Richard A. Muller was in the news last year after his Koch-funded study of global climate change concluded that it’s real, surely to the Koch brothers’ dismay. Now he’s penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which he says that his ongoing research has led him to the same conclusion as 99.9% …
Continue reading “Muller concludes that humans are behind climate change.”
Physicist Richard A. Muller was in the news last year after his Koch-funded study of global climate change concluded that it’s real, surely to the Koch brothers’ dismay. Now he’s penned an on-ed for the New York Times in which he says that his ongoing research has led him to the same conclusion as 99.9% …
Continue reading “Muller concludes that humans are behind climate change.”
In the history of record keeping, so far 2012 is the hottest year in U.S. history. Spring was 5.2° warmer than the 20th century average, and fully 2° warmer than the prior record, in 1910. (That’s a huge difference. We’re not talking about tenths of a degree here.) Even more alarming is the resulting increase …
Could the North Carolina legislature microwave a burrito so hot that they themselves could not eat it? →
The NOAA reports that the temperatures wasn’t just record-breaking in March, but beat the prior record by a stunning 8.6°F above the average for the 20th century. In the history of U.S. weather record keeping, only one month has ever seen a larger departure from the historical average: January 2006. Every state—all fifty—had a record …
Here’s something I never thought to wonder about: the average height of clouds. From March 2000–February 2010, clouds got 100–130 feet lower. There’s no long-term monitoring, so it’s not clear whether this is part of a larger trend. One theory is that this might be part of a negative feedback loop as the planet responds …
New York Times: Climate Scientists Hampered in Study of 2011 Extremes“'I’ve been a meteorologist 30 years and never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,' Jeffrey Masters, a co-founder of the popular Web site Weather Underground, said last month. 'Looking back in the historical record, …
BBC News: CO2 climate sensitivity ‘overestimated’Of all that is very clearly known about global climate change, the one connection that is not well understood is the quantity of climate forcing that results from each unit of CO2. That is, exactly how much additional heat can the atmosphere store for each each ton of CO2 that …
Big Think: What’s the Plural of Texas?When Texas joined the union, it was with the condition that they have the ability to form four additional states from their land, allowing a total of five Texases. That's a right that they've never given up, which has resulted in occasional movements in support of Texas divisionism. Kevin …
Planet Money: What If We Paid Off The Debt?Back in the good old days—before President George W. Bush, before fighting two wars, before September 11th, before a huge tax cut paid for with debt—it looked very much like the entire debt would be paid off by 2012. In producing the final Economic Report of the …