Open access notables
It s always a special pleasure to note an article including Skeptical Science s founder John Cook in the author roster. Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy includes not only Cook as a collaborator but also a cast of other familiar authorities on human cognition in connection with climate science, in particlar how our mental equipment struggles with following a continuous thread of truth through a tangled knot of disconnected confusion in the form of misinformation. We re not necessarily very good thinkers in the best of circumstances. We often fail to think clearly when we re in the presence of misinformation or synthetic ignorance, especially when it s calculated and crafted exactly for the purpose of paralyzing competent thinking. In their abstract the authors note Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate. One can extend that th
Open access notables
Publishing in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, Rasmus Wuff proposes a new hydrometeorological metric to help track changes in precipitation as we change our climate, precipitation intensity duration index or PID. As the title implies, The World’s Largest Point Rainfall Found Using the Precipitation Intensity Duration Index reveals a rather eye-popping statistic: in 2007 over the course of just 4 days, Réunion Island s Cratère Commerson was drenched with just shy of 5 meters of rainfall- 4.936 meters to be precise. This particular event isn t attributable to climate change, but might be considered as currently known upper brackets on the range of rainfall possibilities. Expanding this range doesn t seem sensible.
Open access notables
Among five items in this week s government/NGO section is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory s annual report Utility-Scale Solar, 2023 Edition, chock-a-block with statistics and graphs quantifying an explosion of installed permanent energy sources. Photovoltaic deployment is accelerating and now outpacing wind as costs have rapidly plunged. Given the natural properties of wind and solar energy supplies, reserve power storage is very much in frame. Current battery storage capacity is about 22GWh, what a sizeable nuclear plant could deliver over the course of 10 hours or so. There s of course much more to be done but it s also true that we re only now beginning to seriously tackle the job of energy modernization.