Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

RFK Jr. doesn’t believe Sirhan Sirhan killed his father

Maybe people are a little tired of Kennedy conspiracy theories, but they just won’t go away. RFK Jr. actually went to the prison where Sirhan Sirhan is and interviewed him after examining the evidence. His conclusion, apparently, is that Sirhan Sirhan fired shots and intended to kill RFK, but a second shooter actually made the fatal shot at close range.

The Washington Post article has actual footage from the press conference just before and the confusion just after the killing, which I had never seen. You can hear a reporter saying “we don’t want another Oswald”.

dystopian Schumpeter meets Keynes

This article is about a serious attempt to consider climate change in a traditional economic model. Where does the dystopian part come in? Well, it sounds like the model suggests we are not going to innovate our way out of the consequences of climate change.

For these reasons, we develop the Dystopian Schumpeter meeting Keynes (DSK) model, which is the first attempt to provide a fully-fledged agent-based integrated assessment framework. It builds on Dosi et al. (2010, 2013, 2016) and extends the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S) family of models, which account for endogenous growth, business cycles and crises. The model is composed by heterogeneous firms belonging to a capital-good industry and to a consumption-good sector. Firms are fed by an energy sector, which employ dirty or green power plants. The production activities of energy and manufacturing firms lead to CO2 emissions, which increase the Earth surface temperature in a non-linear way as in Sterman et al. (2013). Increasing temperatures trigger micro stochastic climate damages impacting in a heterogeneous way on workers’ labour productivity, and on the energy efficiency, capital stock and inventories of firms.

The DSK model accounts both for frequent and mild climate shocks and low-probability but extreme climate events. Technical change occurs both in the manufacturing and energy sectors. Innovation determines the cost of energy produced by dirty and green technologies, which, in turn, affect the energy-technology production mix and the total amount of CO2 emissions. In that, structural change of the economy is intimately linked to the climate dynamics. At the same time, climate shocks affect economic growth, business cycles, technical-change trajectories, green-house gas emissions, and global temperatures…

Simulation results show that the DSK model is able to replicate a wide array of micro and macro-economic stylized facts and climate-related statistical regularities. Moreover, the exploration of different climate shock scenarios reveals that the impact of climate change on economic performances is substantial, but highly heterogeneous, depending on the type of climate damages. More specifcally, climate shocks to labour productivity and capital stocks lead to the largest output losses and the highest economic instability, respectively. We also
find that the ultimate macroeconomic damages emerging from the aggregation of agent-level shocks are more severe than those obtained by standard IAMs, with the emergence of tipping-points and irreversible catastrophic events.

microgrids in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico blackouts have provided some opportunities to test microgrids, or small-scale combinations of intermittent renewable energy with battery storage.

Broken transmission lines and utility poles have been repaired–at a painfully slow pace, though the majority of Puerto Ricans finally have power again–but the grid is still vulnerable (last week’s blackout followed another blackout two weeks ago). The next hurricane season is a little more than five weeks away. In the event of another storm, a network of microgrids could keep going even if the larger grid fails again…

Though the current microgrids are used at individual buildings, in theory, larger systems could support a whole community. Jonathan Marvel, a Brooklyn-based architect working with Resilient Puerto Rico, is talking to mayors about the possibility of microgrids that could provide power to 20,000 people.

Individual microgrids could also be linked together. In Arizona, Sonnen is adding solar and energy storage to thousands of new homes in a community to create a “virtual power plant” that can share energy between homes. When connected to the grid, the system helps stabilize the overall grid, but it can also operate if a disaster takes the larger grid out. Sonnen has done the same thing in Germany.

the French AI strategy

Other countries (than the United States) are developing strategies for how artificial intelligence will affect work, productivity, and growth in the near future.

France’s national strategy also reveals that Macron’s government is wrestling with how to ensure that AI supports inclusivity and diversity, and to make certain that its implementation is transparent. The French aren’t just theorizing; they’re taking action. France plans to invest 1.5 billion euros (almost $1.8 billion dollars) in the next five years in artificial intelligence research. The French are looking to create their own AI ecosystem, train the next generation of scientists and engineers, and make sure that their workforce is prepared for an automated future.

France isn’t alone. Last month, the European Union’s executive branch recommended its member states increase their public and private sector investment in AI. It also pledged billions in direct research spending. Meanwhile, China laid out its AI plan for global dominance last year, a plan that has also been backed up with massive investment. China’s goal is to lead the world in AI technology by 2030. Around the world, our global economic competitors are taking action on artificial intelligence.

It’s therefore striking that the United States doesn’t have a national artificial intelligence plan.

The fact that I don’t find it striking reflects my lowered expectations more than anything. We don’t really have a strategy for infrastructure or education either, for example.

abrupt ecological change

Being able to forecast abrupt ecological change might be a good idea.

Abrupt Change in Ecological Systems: Inference and Diagnosis

Abrupt ecological changes are, by definition, those that occur over short periods of time relative to typical rates of change for a given ecosystem. The potential for such changes is growing due to anthropogenic pressures, which challenges the resilience of societies and ecosystems. Abrupt ecological changes are difficult to diagnose because they can arise from a variety of circumstances, including rapid changes in external drivers (e.g., climate, or resource extraction), nonlinear responses to gradual changes in drivers, and interactions among multiple drivers and disturbances. We synthesize strategies for identifying causes of abrupt ecological change and highlight instances where abrupt changes are likely. Diagnosing abrupt changes and inferring causation are increasingly important as society seek to adapt to rapid, multifaceted environmental changes.

how fish will move under climate change

It seems to me that fish might be able to adapt to climate change a little easier than other species, because they can just swim to a new part of the ocean that is now like what their old part of the ocean used to be like.

Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf

Recent shifts in the geographic distribution of marine species have been linked to shifts in preferred thermal habitats. These shifts in distribution have already posed challenges for living marine resource management, and there is a strong need for projections of how species might be impacted by future changes in ocean temperatures during the 21st century. We modeled thermal habitat for 686 marine species in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans using long-term ecological survey data from the North American continental shelves. These habitat models were coupled to output from sixteen general circulation models that were run under high (RCP 8.5) and low (RCP 2.6) future greenhouse gas emission scenarios over the 21st century to produce 32 possible future outcomes for each species. The models generally agreed on the magnitude and direction of future shifts for some species (448 or 429 under RCP 8.5 and RCP 2.6, respectively), but strongly disagreed for other species (116 or 120 respectively). This allowed us to identify species with more or less robust predictions. Future shifts in species distributions were generally poleward and followed the coastline, but also varied among regions and species. Species from the U.S. and Canadian west coast including the Gulf of Alaska had the highest projected magnitude shifts in distribution, and many species shifted more than 1000 km under the high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Following a strong mitigation scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement would likely produce substantially smaller shifts and less disruption to marine management efforts. Our projections offer an important tool for identifying species, fisheries, and management efforts that are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts.

“delusions of merit”

This long article describes how people who have made it tend to have have “delusions of merit“. In other words, they believe they have earned their place in society through effort or self-discipline, that those less fortunate have not made the effort or do not have the self-discipline, and therefore they feel no moral obligation to help those beneath them. The problem is, we are not talking about a vast middle class refusing to help a small underclass here. We are talking about a small minority failing to feel compassion for the vast majority of fellow people.

Philadelphia’s new rail park

This article on Philadelphia’s new rail park sounds kind of cool. Sure, we are copying an idea from New York with the typical one-decade lag, but it sounds like the designers have given some thought to ecology.

The Rail Park’s horticultural design is a “simple palette” with three main layers, he explained.

Hardy London plane trees — “the classic park tree” found along the outer lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway and throughout the city — will dominate the upper layer. Multi-stem oaks and Kentucky coffee trees will fill in the medium layer, along with shorter redbuds and other flowering trees, American holly and Eastern red cedars. A birch grove will “play off the window boxes” that adorn a neighboring apartment building, like “a domestic landscape writ large,” Hanes said.

The lower level of plants will be more diverse, with arrangements of shrubs and perennials that include:

  • Bottlebrush buckeye
  • Oak leaf hydrangea and viburnums
  • Sedges, tall grasses and ground covers
  • Several varieties of fern
  • Sumac
  • Asters
  • Sage
  • Goldenrod
  • Milkweed
  • Alum root
  • Wild petunias
  • Wild indigo

I can vouch for this part of town being sorely in need of some wildness.

April 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both: