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June 6, 2024
Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
Abstract For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (inflation adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to…
June 5, 2024
How New Graduates Can Thrive in a Workplace Dominated by AI
Dwight Eisenhower’s advice about plans and planning is still relevant today On June 6, the world will mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings and the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “the Boys of Pont du Hoc” speech honoring those who helped turn back the Nazi threat on the beaches of Normandy. We are now as far from Reagan’s speech as the speech was…
June 4, 2024
Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
Today, npj Natural Hazards, a journal in the Nature family of journals, officially published my new paper, “Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.” The paper shows — irrefutably in my view — that the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), fails to meet the agency’s standards for information quality and scientific…
May 29, 2024
What the IPCC Says about Drought
Last week, I testified before the Senate Committee on the Budget in a hearing titled, Droughts, Dollars, and Decisions: Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate.1 The hearing was the 18th in the Committee’s series on climate change this Congress, prompting the Wall Street Journal to suggest “the old-fashioned idea that the Budget Committee ought to focus on the budget.” The hearing could…
May 29, 2024
Response to the Environmental Protection Agency: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New and Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Stationary Combustion Turbines at Power Plants
Summary The Environmental Protection Agency in its “framing questions” on greenhouse gasemissions from natural gas combustion turbines at electric generating stations asserts that suchGHG emissions are important “pollutants” in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Butthat premise is not consistent with the future temperature effect — 0.017°C by 2100 — ofeliminating such emissions, as predicted…
May 24, 2024
Healthcare’s Hope in Artificial Intelligence
How much can we trust artificial intelligence (AI)? How much could AI transform an industry as stodgy as healthcare, where other technologies have failed time and time again? These questions were far from mainstream thought until just a few years ago, when the current wave of AI innovation captured the attention of the public, industry,…
May 15, 2024
Automation Isn’t Just One Thing: Insights from Two Census Datasets
Two recent datasets from the Census help to illuminate what’s occurring in robotics and in artificial intelligence adoption. While they have their limitations, both the Annual Capital Expenditures Survey (ACES) for robotic equipment and the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) AI supplement offer valuable information on the progress of automation. Annual Capital Expenditures Survey…
May 13, 2024
Wind Dreams
The optimal amount of practical wind power in the global energy mix is greater than zero. It is also much less than 100%. Today I argue why the proportion of wind power in the global electricity generation mix is always going to be closer to zero than to 100%. That doesn’t mean that wind power…
May 11, 2024
Bullish on Solar
I was reminded, following last week’s post on challenges faced by wind energy, that some people seem to view energy technologies like football teams. They have their favorite, who they support no matter how bad the losing position. And of course they also have their arch rivals, to be cheered against no matter what. Above all,…
May 10, 2024
May 6, 2024: Beyond the SCIF: A Conversation with Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) on AI and Biosecurity
Event Summary On May 6, following introductory remarks by Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Mike Turner (R-OH), Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) moderated a panel with AEI’s Dan Blumenthal, Anna Puglisi of Puglisi Ventures, Anthony Ruggiero of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Palantir’s Ken Staley, and Dov S. Zakheim of the…