Blog Housekeeping Note

I'll be spending some/much of the next few days at the Climate Smart/Climate Ready conference, which has a focus on regional response and adaptation here in upstate New York.  Normal blogging will be interrupted, but there may be some conference blogging to the extent I think it has interest to my readers (who are globally distributed).  The line-up of speakers is pretty impressive, so I'm hoping to learn quite a bit.

Future Blog Platform

Hmmm.  Commenter Greg draws my attention to Google's planned closure of its reader service in July.  I personally have been using reader as my main way to follow news and blogs for many years, and I think its closure raises questions about Google's commitment to the entire blogging ecosystem that they host.

So this seems like a good time to do some thinking about the future technological platform for this blog.  Should I go all Facebook?  Switch to another blogging platform?  Twitter?  What say readers?

Administrivia: MWF Schedule

Just a short note on blog schedule. Historically, I aimed on this blog to do a post once each morning on weekday mornings.  This was never perfectly true: I always missed the odd morning when something didn't work out, and have occasionally added extra lunchtime or weekend posts as time and interest allowed.

However, in recent months I've had a lot of work-related travel and I've been failing more consistently to do more than a few posts each week.  I think it would be better to acknowledge this explicitly and provide readers with a bit more predictability by switching to a target schedule of posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.  Again, this won't be perfectly true, but I'll aim to make it true 90% of the time.  Posts will continue to be primarily quantitative/empirical exploration of issues in the area of energy/environment/economy with a focus on things that I think are important but not well-enough covered elsewhere.

Amazon Wish List

Every so often someone contacts me wishing to donate money to the cause of this blog and desiring me to add a tip jar to facilitate that.  On the whole I'd just as soon keep the blog non-commercial since my day job amply covers my family's needs.  However, there are times when I want to buy books but am restrained by the desire to keep the book budget from reaching astronomical proportions.  It occurs to me that this is a way that readers could contribute to the blog and so I've created an Amazon wish list out of the (several years of) deferred items in my cart there.

So if you are one of those people so moved, check it out: there are items ranging from a few bucks into the hundreds for various academic tomes on climate and an astounding $2300 for a used copy of "Sedimentary Basins and Petroleum Geology of the Middle East" (which I would love to have should any of my billionaire readers be so moved).  So there are opportunities to give at any plausible expenditure level. There's also a button over in the right hand sidebar of the blog for long term access to the list.

Google Reader Disaster

Count me with Tyler Cowen, Bruce Bartlett, and Brad DeLong - the new Google Reader is an absolute disaster.  Details here.  This has certainly soured me on the whole cloud/software-as-a-service thing.  One morning the provider just ups and decides to upgrade me to something much worse than what I had before.  I get no notice, no choice, and no recourse.  What on earth where they thinking?

Update: Hallelujah: a solution! (h/t Paul Kedrosky)

State of the Blog, Q3 2011

Note On Interruption

Google Blogger had a massive outage since sometime yesterday. Yesterday's post has been removed by them, and will hopefully be restored soon. Some recent comments have also gone missing. Hopefully normal blogging can resume soon...

Blogger in Distress

Paula Hay has an interesting new blog with a theme of looking at the rise (and possible fall) of civilization through a religious lens.  Right now she is in personal distress and in need of donations.  I encourage readers to help her out.  There but for the grace of God...

Update 4/30/11: Good news.  Paula has a rather heartfelt and emotional video thank-you here. Apparently she got enough donations to get over the immediate hump at least, and she now has a place to live for the summer and some work.  Thanks to any readers who may have helped her out.

I thought what she did was a pretty interesting experiment (and rather gutsy).  In a desperate situation, can you basically throw yourself on the mercy of the Internet, and expect it to help you?  And, for her, the answer was yes!  Of course, she wasn't trying to raise that much ($800), but on the other hand, she only has been blogging for two months, so I assume hasn't built a very large audience yet.

New Email Address

Note that I'm using a new personal email address: stuart -- at -- earlywarn -- dot -- org.  Anyone that ever writes to me, please change your address book.  The old sbcglobal address has become unreliable and will be retired altogether shortly.  (At some point, I may set up the blog to be at the earlywarn.org address too, but at the moment it just has an email address).

State of the Blog, Q1 2011

Short Note on NYT subscriptions

The New York Times has a new policy in which regular readers will only get 20 free articles per month.  After that, you'll have to get a subscription to keep reading, with the exception that if you are reading based on an inbound link from a blog (like this one) or social media, you can read even if you don't subscribe and have used up your allowance of twenty free articles.

I approve of what the Times is doing.  Although it's not a perfect institution, I do read their website every day and it's struck me as crazy for some time that I can do so for free - there's clearly no future in that.  And since their paywall seems to be well designed such that I can safely link to articles there with the guarantee that all my readers will be able to read what I'm linking to, I intend to continue to do so freely.

If anyone runs into trouble reading Times articles linked here, let me know.

Comment Moderation Turned On

Well, our would-be troll has not taken a hint.  I was initially completely skeptical of the possibility that Ugo raised, that someone might be being paid to disrupt my blog (no doubt amongst many others).  However, kjmclark notes that online astroturf campaigns are definitely happening in some places, and I guess I don't doubt that this is well within the depths of depravity that some vested interests and their PR firms are willing to sink to (though what makes them think that this will persuade anyone, I don't know - certainly that's not the impulse it creates in me).  And clearly the troll in question has no intent of making an effort to follow whatever social norm I might establish here, and is instead being deliberately disruptive.  There is an air of continued determination about the effort which would be consistent with someone being paid - either that or a well-entrenched personality disorder.

At any rate, to allow me to head the situation off at the pass, I have now enabled comment moderation on all comments.  This will obviously mean that comments are a little less timely, and I apologize for that.  I think the trade-off is well worth it.  Possibly the situation will blow over.  If not, I may eventually appoint trusted moderators from amongst regular commenters willing to volunteer.  One way or another, I will host a civilized discussion of these issues amongst people of open minds and good intent; everyone in that category (which as far as I can tell includes all recent commenters but one) should continue to comment at will...

Climate Denialist Comments

I have found it necessary to begun deleting comments of a particular commenter who appears to be a climate change sceptic/denier.  On reflection, it seems worth saying a little more about that.

I certainly don't want to impose a litmus test on commenters broadly.  If I get the feeling that people are looking at my posts, or other comments, genuinely curious about the issues, thinking for themselves, and making whatever points about the issues occur to them in good faith, or asking questions, I have no problem with that.  There have been occasions when I thought a particular climate paper was overblown, and I've said so.

However, there is clearly a large climate denialist movement that is a) heavily funded by moneyed interests, and b) also supported by a bunch of people who don't have have a direct current pecuniary interest but are unable to admit even to themselves that (for example) their career in fossil fuel extraction was contributing to major harm to the climate, or are very ideologically rigid and cannot admit that maybe sometimes free markets and large businesses commit significant harm as well as causing much good.

I think the climate denialist movement is almost 100% in bad faith, and if I get the feeling that someone is basically parroting the standard talking points from it, bringing up all the bogus non-issues that it manufactures (eg Climategate) I just have zero interest in providing a forum for that.  It's my blog, I read all the comments, and I don't want to read ones like that (or the inevitable equally partisan backlash from the other side).  Find a different forum (there are plenty of both persuasions who will be happy to indulge you in endlessly rehashing that stuff).  There's clearly tremendous potential for comment threads here to devolve into yet one more long trollfest on those issues, and I will not allow that to happen.

My interest is to understand and evaluate the actual climate science - what is it saying, how much reliance on it can we safely place, what does it tell us about our future?  Anyone who, in my judgement, shares a genuine desire to do the same, and a commitment that finding out the truth is more important than promoting a particular ideology, is more than welcome to comment here.

Back Problems...

On an administrative note: I hurt my back on Monday and am under physical therapist's orders not to sit up.  That has cramped my blogging style more than a little!  It has started to improve and I hope to return to light blogging tomorrow (albeit from a near horizontal position...).

State of the Blog, Q4 2010

State of the Blog, Q3 2010

State of the Blog, Q2 2010

State of the Blog, Q1 2010

Gone Kayaking

My wife and I are headed up to Tomales Bay with kayaks and camping gear for the long weekend.

No further blogging until Tuesday morning.  Have a great weekend everyone.  Will try to add a few photos to this post when I get back.

In the meantime, there's an actual post below.

Update: A few snaps below the break.

State of the Blog, Jan 2010