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
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.
Housekeeping
A reader mentioned (thank you!) that last week s edition included at least one paper flagged as open access that actually wasn t. It seems to be the case that Nature Publishing is passing some duff data into the publication metadata food chain, with the result that Unpaywall (we employ the Unpaywall API to identify open access) is repeating this erroneous input to us. This week s edition finds direct links to open access articles from Nature journals still not working, but PDF links appear to be working properly.
Open access notables
The Intelligence Community Must Evolve To Meet the Reality of Arctic Change is a product of the Wilson Center s subject specalist center The Polar Institute. As its title suggests the report is squarely centered on nitty-gritty details of geopolitical adaptations forced by climate change as they re reflected in national security matters, here (unsurprisingly given the Wilson Institute s mission and purpose) specifically the security of the United States. Let alone what passport is in one s pocket, the report s provenance and urgency is a bellwether indicator of radical change in the Arctic thanks to our sudden climate accident. Recommendation #4 is rather striking but is based on a claimed track record of success in other arenas: Prioritize Top Secret with Special Access clearances for non-IC Federal Interagency Arctic and climate experts. This report is included in this week s collection of government/NGO repor