Science & Technology

Allow me to digress briefly from the stated blog topic: any time I see NASA in the news, I always think of this graphic, which I find hysterical. (For more barrels of laughs, if you’re ever short on any, I recommend searching “NASA” on theonion.com) Anyway, NASA HAS discovered something super cool - what the media is branding as Earth… read more →

Truism: Cars are expensive. Expensive to buy, expensive to fuel, expensive to maintain. Since we all know this, (hence it being a truism), some data I recently came across caught me by surprise. And made we wonder whether I have been misjudging the actual cost of my driving choices. Here’s the scoop, and I begin with a confession. I own… read more →

You may remember earlier this summer when Google, Microsoft, and Cisco all dissolved their home energy management offerings. While those were hardly the only options in the market (there are several VC-backed companies that provide similar services), the big-name players made a quite a splash in the media blogosphere. But now it seems that Facebook will be stepping in, and… read more →

A study (.pdf) published in Climatic Change this summer didn’t seem to catch much attention from the climate blogging community (some exceptions here and here but certainly nowhere near the excitement of this week’s “Atlasgate”). Titled “Personality type differences between Ph.D. climate researchers and the general public: implications for effective communication,” the study at first seems to state the obvious:… read more →

Founder of the project, former Vice-President Gore, remarked earlier this year: It’s urgent to rendezvous with reality in order to take the appropriate steps to save the future of civilization as we know it. Tune in tonight (and throughout tomorrow) to The Climate Reality Project, where 24 speakers, one from each time zone, will showcase the effects of climate change… read more →

I’ve commented before about a dilemma produced by fuel-efficient cars: they emit less per mile, but also make it less expensive to drive... creating a countervailing incentive to drive more than you might have in a gas guzzler. Therefore I was happy to discover that the University of Michigan has been tracking and amalgamating the greenhouse gas emissions effects of… read more →

A newly published study (pdf) from the University of New South Wales and the University of California at Merced concludes that when compared to a carbon tax, a relatively unrestrained cap-and-trade system is economically advantageous. My first thought was that this is no news at all. The economic advantage of cap and trade - enabling capital to flow to the… read more →