botwerks

i had this in my instapaper favorites from my reading queue a few months back. with the recent santorumism in the news as of late, this popped back into my noggin.

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

Warming Arctic Permafrost Fuels Climate Change Worries - ny times article about research taking place in alaska around massive methane bubbles.  for those deniers who haven’t been paying attention to the dangers associated with various gases, you might not think that CO2 is that big a deal (i’m looking at you michele bachmann) but methane is some particularly nasty stuff.  feedback loops are a real bitch.

check out the research that russian scientists are doing on this front as well.

this book was a birthday present from my folks this year and i’ve finally got around to sinking my teeth into it.  i really should have prioritized it in the reading queue since it’s proven to be a most illuminating read.  over the past few years i’ve been doing a surprising amount of reading on the topic of climate change, sustainability and energy economics.  the majority of this reading has been polemics on either side of the topic or pretty academic in nature.  this book is a nerds approach to the personal application of various energy technologies and their mapping to ones personal energy consumption.  if you’re at all interested on the topic of the viability of a wide range of sustainable energy mechanisms this is probably the definitive source.  if you’re inclined there’s plenty of technical detail in here for the folks that really want to get into an analysis of the relative performance or applicability one energy technology vs. another.

the narrative throughout the book is a look at what your personal energy utilization is (skewed towards the behaviors of a UK reader) and then layers a range of sustainable energy technologies against this energy use and shows how much of each technology would be required to address your energy use.  the scenarios are readily digestible and if you’re genuinely interested in the viability of living a sustainable lifestyle or getting an understanding where you should be pushing for technological development in either the market or regulatory space i can’t recommend this book enough.

increasingly i’m of the opinion that folks who want to wax poetic from one end of the spectrum or another without having done some personal research on the topic should really just STFU.  if you’re really concerned about global warming / climate change and you think we need to take dramatic steps to halt our carbon consumption and exhalation, then you need to be prepared to think long and hard about where you stand on topics like nuclear energy (classic or novel new designs) and how to make some serious modifications in your lifestyle.  if you don’t think that global warming / climate change is human influenced, well, you’re suffering from other problems and i suspect you don’t do a whole lot of thinking for yourself so this is kind of pointless.

if you’re interested in the tl;dr summary…

this stuff is hard.  really, really hard, there are no easy answers and ones ability to make effective personal changes in their lifestyle has limited impact.  sure, you can put a turbine on your roof, but the impact is negligible.  PV on the roof top is a good thing if you’re in the right area, etc..  still, there’s a lot of retooling that needs to be done, and that’s going to chew up carbon.  in a stroke of, go check my math, brilliance, all the content is online. (http://www.withouthotair.com) go check the facts, go check out the analysis, run the numbers for yourself.  more books should do this.  particularly those on contentious topics.

p229 – has a rather handy chart that outlines individual actions which can have a rather profound impact on your personal energy footprint.  going vegetarian has some notable bonus points other than the health benefits.

here’s an interesting little nugget as I catch up on a backlog of reading from the past month’s worth of travel and work.

from Melvyn Leffler’s recent essay in foreign affairs, 9/11 in retrospect:

Rather than thwarting proliferation, U.S. interventions on behalf of regime change provided additional incentives for rogue nations to pursue WMD. Iranian and North Korean leaders seem to have calculated that, more than ever before, their countries’ survival depended on possessing a WMD deterrent (a message that has probably been reinforced by the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya in 2011 following Libya’s renunciation of its nuclear capability several years earlier).

this little bit about the interventionist (albeit limited in scope) activity wrt to Libya poses an interesting dilemma for U.S. foreign policy. there’s a populist moral perspective that assisting uprisings which lead to the establishment of democratic governments is a good thing and on the whole this is likely the direction that we’d like to see our government take. but the secondary signals that emerge from this are more than a little thorny and certainly have the potential to encourage less than peaceful behaviors of governments which are at risk of populist rebellion and with nuclear ambitions.

what a total PITA.