CA HSR, RIP (kind of)
So just as high speed rail gets a political lift via the Green New Deal, the one active effort bites the dust in California. Read the link though, it's not entirely dead - Newsom committed to a strange little stretch…
elirabett
Recent Articles
Eli Rabett’s: Dividend and Fee Carbon Taxes
Eli has an idea. Usual disclaimers.Let's have a dividend and fee carbon tax. Let's pay the first year dividend and only start to collect the fee in the second, and let's even give bonus' for good deeds, like riding public…
Making Tracks in the US
So with the Green New Deal on the street there is considerable talk about improving railroad travel. Eli has a couple of perhaps odd points to make.First high density is NOT something that is needed for fast trains, as a…
It’s perfectly fine to talk on a cell phone in an elevator
I have climate-related tabs piling up on my browser that I wanted to blog about, but felt I had to start with the important and pressing issue in the headline, first.Mainly, the time spent in an elevator is brief and…
The left imitating Republicans
I probably should prove something beyond just my sense that it's happening, but I feel that the left side of the political spectrum, a little or a lot closer to where I belong than the other side, is becoming more…
Horn tooting
In today's San Jose Mercury News (moderately climate-related):Opinion: Follow the will of voters and protect San Jose’s Coyote ValleyThe 7,400-acre valley stretching from San Jose to Morgan Hill feeds our foothills and provides crucial drinking waterBy BRIAN SCHMIDT As the…
Gavin Explains It All
Well, Eli is retired so he is outsourcing to Gavin Schmidt who,explained it all in a series of tweets with the BlackPhysicists Tweeter. They actually, between them had a real conversation of value, which Eli here unrolls. Below the BlackPhysicists…
Eli Explains It All: Or Why Just About Everybunny Gets Energy Thermal Energy Transfer Between the Surface and the Atmosphere Wrong
Everybunny who has been hanging about the Climateball Court for the Christmas Dinner Playoffs has heard the bit about how heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere by radiation is small compared to that by convection.Eli posted an elegant…
I’ll take Bashkirtsev’s can’t-lose side of the bet with James Annan
James Annan is low-key:The bet - final outcomeYou may be wondering what had happened with this. As you will recall, some time ago I arranged a bet with two Russian solar scientists who had predicted that the world was going…
My take – The Carbon Tax Is Dead, Long Live the Carbon Tax?
While I'm inventing traditions, how about a new one that a blog post riffing off another blog post should directly steal the headline?So I'm riffing off of William's post regarding the lab experiment in Washington State, with a revenue-neutral carbon…
Eli Explains It All: No Atmospheric CO2 Is Not Saturated
One of the evergreens, besides the one that more CO2 is needed to grow more lettuce, is that the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is saturated. Part of the TL:DR to this is actually interesting and in the optional reading below, but…
Call it Our Party Housecleaning. Or just somewhat-moderating our hypocrisy. Take your pick
I'd like to suggest a new tradition in the period immediately following an election - to choose this time to go after the ugly flaws on one's own side of the political house.I've written in the past that - during…
Where I stopped resisiting Vox’s call to resist – it’s a matter of distance
I wasn't thrilled reading the title and intro to Yglesias' article, "House Democrats must resist Trump’s infrastructure trap":President Donald Trump’s infrastructure trap is back, and for the new House Democratic majority to succeed, they need to escape it.It’s forgotten now,…
Eli Explains It All: How Back Radiation Warms the Oceans
There appears to be a limited but vital audience for this newish series, Eli Explains It All, so once more the Bunny Brings Enlightenment. An everygreen amongst the ignorati is that backradiation can't heat the ocean because it is all…
Conversations With Exelon
Eli sat in on an interesting conversation last week at the Brookings Institution involving Chris Crane the Exelon CEO. Exelon is a large electricity generator and supplier in the US with over $30 billion in revenue and a large fleet…
Seneca almost hits the mark on technological change
I saw a reference to Seneca while reading Let It Shine, a history of solar energy (more on the book later). The reference was intriguing, and here's the full quote:24. Reason did indeed devise all these things, but it was…
Eli’s Thermo Class Is In Session
Lately Eli has been playing Clarissa, explaining all the thermochaff thrown up against the wall by his friends the confused. First it was the Green Plate Effect showing how the presence of a colder third body decreases the cooling rate…
Just when I thought I was out, I pull myself back in
Longtime readers may remember that I (Brian speaking here), realizing what great reputations politicians had, decided to become one myself, and was elected to the board running the water agency for Silicon Valley for four years. I wasn't re-elected, moved…
The abortion law/environmental law connection
Much craziness over Kavanaugh. Separate from the recent controversy is his opinion on upholding settled precedent, wherein he pretends that Roe v. Wade and abortion rights are not under threat if he's seated. For those who don't know all the…
While Eli’s Away, the Arctic’s That Way
Hi Gang,Eli is out on the flatlands and yes he has been neglecting his duties, but there are a couple of interesting things this year in the Arctic. For one thing although the melt is not as large as in…
Mongolia: land of Priuses and coal
The headline is the answer to where we spent our summer vacation: two weeks in Mongolia, finishing with a week in South Korea.Lots that could be said. Maybe the most blog-relevant though was the astounding number of Priuses (my favored…
One of Life’s Little Delingpole Lights or Nature Bites Last
James Delingpole is out there shaking the cup for himself, setting up a gofundme to pay for treatment for chronic lyme disease and a bad overbite.Here is my Lyme disease GoFundMe https://t.co/iBZly4pYMT Back story is on pt III of this…
Heat Has No Hair
Among physicists and chemists, well at least the theoretical side of the latter it is well known that electrons have no hair by which is meant that a bunny can't tell one electron from another. This has serious consequences in…
The Simplest Green Plate Effect
Sometime ago Eli created a simple example of how the presence of a colder body can limit the rate at which a warmer one emits energy. If the warmer body is receiving energy at a constant rate, then the steady…
Temperature Correlation Scale Over Time and Distance
What makes global temperature anomalies plots and maps go is the correlation of temperatures over a large area. This also is key to homogenization of individual station data when something like position or time of day when measurements are made…
Administrivia
Yes, Rabett Run has a full time administrator, but he sleeps a lot being very old. Thus Eli has removed the comment notification gadget because the spam is getting fierce and it was exceedingly annoying. Read the damn topnotch posts and…
Reto Knutti on Research in the Era of Fake News
Reto Knutti wrote his experiences of Fake News and how to deal with it for the Schweiz am Wochenende. It also appeared on the ETH Zurich website. Since it is in German, Eli thought a translation would be useful. As…
Interesting Times in the Arctic
Well, after what has been a boring melt season, maybe even Neven thinks so, the Northern Hemisphere heat wave appears to have created some interesting times (in the sense of the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times) at…
The blind orange squirrel on Trump’s scalp finds a nut
I share the same appalled reaction as the rest of the planet to Trump's dimunitive behavior when standing next to Putin. That isn't really what this post is about, but I can't entirely ignore it. I disagree with the claim…
Public Access Policies for NASA
At least for the physical sciences public access policies are fairly recent and not at all clear. This became obvious to Eli in a recent Twitter exchange and indeed, shows that many have not read the FAQ.Note, that these are…