June 17, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters on Steroids
Shortly after my paper Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” was accepted for publication, I was tipped off to a public but unnamed and well-hidden directory on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contained 17 (now 18) of the most recent versions of the “billion dollar disaster” (BDD) tabulation, dating to March 2020….
June 10, 2024
Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake
Scenarios are fundamental to climate research and policy. As THB readers know better than most everyone, for years climate science and policy have been off trackin relying heavily on an outdated extreme emissions scenario called RCP8.5, one of four RCP scenarios developed starting almost two decades ago.(1) Some in the climate science community, though slow out of the…
June 6, 2024
The Energy Policy Act of 2026
“When I talk about energy, I am talking about jobs. Our American economy runs on energy—no energy, no jobs. In the long run, it is just that simple.” President Gerald Ford, 1975 Following the passage of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, House Majority Leader Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) drolly observed, “It is extremely difficult…
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 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,…