ClimateBook

Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay - Paper Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

Another worthwhile book on this topic is Asphalt Nation. You'll find it somewhere, but I don't feed links into Amazon. One source is here: www.ucpress.edu/books/asphal...

P.S. -- Sir Walter is not one of my favourite people, and his role in popularising tobacco is the least of his sins.

A night thought:
"The devil is more laborious now than ever, the long day of mankind drawing towards an evening, and the world's tragedy and time near an end."

A resonant epitaph for our times. On the other hand, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that circa 1600, and we're still here.

In then end I got my bottle of brandy, though my means were so limited at the time, it wasn't much of a brandy, though at least a cut above Christian Brothers. Anyway, one of my memories of Dallas. That and Kel's Kitchen.

... All I had by way of ID was my Harvard undergraduate ID. It didn't have my birthdate on it. The cashiers looked at it and one of them said "Yeah, I guess you have to be 18 to go to Harvard." but the other said "Yeah, but maybe he's one of those child progenies" (sic. -- I wasn't, not much).

Way back in the day, when my parents had moved to Dallas, I was back from college and wanted to buy a bottle of brandy. I was already car-averse at the time and didn't have a drivers' license or any form of government ID with my birthday on it. It was before I had a passport. ...

I've reached the stage where I can hardly tell the assistant professors from the grad students. It seems like only yesterday some people used to think I was one of the students (doesn't happen any more, but nor do I get carded at bars, so there are compensations...)

Most of the career-stage limited positions I know of go according to "years since doctorate" or some such thing. But everybody should know this sounds like a great position in a great group at a great University, so go for it! Good luck with the recruitment.

"Early Career" would have sounded better than "young" in there, Joeri. As far as I know, in the U.K. it is not legal to discriminate according to age (except for the special exception bizarrely carved out for Cambridge, Oxford and St. Andrews which are allowed to force retirement at a fixed age.)

Pineapple pizza is actually a thing in FInland. It's called "Pizza Hawaii," and also involves ham and Aura (a bleu) cheese. Really, it's pretty good, though when I make it at home I leave off the bleu cheese.

grabby subscription model which more or less requires you to sign up for auto-renew rather than just paying for it a year at a time, and when I decided to cancel it was a real hassle that couldn't be done online.

that means repeated logins. I don't know what the answer to this problem is, but maybe most people don't care about privacy anymore so it's just me and a handful of others. I subscribed to the NYT for a while, but aside from getting fed up with their repeated editorial blunders, they have a very

logging in just to read something. I don't like to use a login via Google since that makes it too easy to suck up data, and handling multiple logins is a nuisance. Worse, I'm in the habit of clearing cookies several times a day to help limit tracking and data sucking (probably a quixotic effort)

I'm not a subscriber, but a lot of their material is not behind a paywall. Regarding subscriptions, I recognize that good journalism should be paid for (I send a donation to The Guardian from time to time). For me, the barrier to subscribing isn't the money so much as the inconvenience of

End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled Mohammed bin Salman’s utopian city was undone by the laws of physics and finance

As one example of truly excellent journalism, I'd point you to their article on the Saudi's Neom debacle: ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Another newspaper I find insightful and accurate is the Financial Times. It's a real contrast with the Wall Street Journal, especially in terms of their editorial stance. Their investigative reporting is superb, and they have generally shown a good understanding of science and technology.

(Unless it's mine, of course)

(or did at one point, don't know if that's still the case).

a bunch of MIT folks figured out that Ringworld would be gravitationally unstable, later books in the series included stabilizing rockets. And then there's Geoffrey Landis, maybe my all time favourite. His story on life on Uranus is terrific. I wish he would write more, but he has a NASA day job.

all sorts of ways, though without photosynthesis to provide food, ocean life would mostly die out.

I also like Larry Niven's Known Space series, especially the story that involved time travel and a black hole, with a scam that went way wrong. He listens to physicists. When

intelligent thinking of the condensation sequence of atmospheric components as the freeze out. (I used that a problem in my textbook). He didn't make use of the fact that after the ocean surface freezes over, geothermal heat flux would keep most of the ocean liquid, which would be useful in

One of my Golden Age favourites is Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air." Long before we knew of the actual existence of rogue (or "steppenwolf") planets torn from their stars, this story is about survival once the Earth has been flung out from the Sun's gravity. It has as an incidental theme some

This is the paper by Tobias, alumnus of the Oxford PCD group. Very nice work. One highlight is that it is even possible to model mineral differentiation and crustal formation. There are so many possibilities this work leads to.

I wholeheartedly concur. I spend a lot of my time working on the exoplanets we have inaccurately mis-named "subNeptunes," and it often makes me wish we knew more about what the actual Neptune (or Uranus) is.

but sadly, though Minuteman has 262 pages of magazines available instantly, including some big names like the New Yorker, The Economist is not among them.

One of the first things I did after arriving in Cambridge, MA was to get a Minuteman regional library card. It's a sad commentary on UK austerity that the offerings in even the smaller Evanston, IL library system blew away what was on offer in all of Oxfordshire, and Minuteman is even better....

In a recent reply to Elise Cutts, I mentioned that I find The Atlantic insightful and aggravatingly clueless in equal measure. I wish to emphasize that @adamserwer.bsky.social is one of the Atlantic writiers I can always look to for illuminating insights.

This is a very vivid graphic showing how focusing on production emissions of fossil fuels is a fools errand. The vast majority of emissions come from actually burning the fossil fuel. That should be the focus.

But the UK badly needs a better electricity pricing mechanism, so that electricity prices don't follow international fossil gas prices.

And of course, ramping up the price of oil, while screwing consumers, is a huge benefit to Trump's friends in the fossil fuel industry, and in Russia. Trump has, in effect, just provided a massive subsidy to Russia to support it's Ukraine war, off the backs of American consumers.