I have a twitter feed. There, you can learn about dead birds.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More Brackish Wonkisms
Elephant Diaries: My Semi-Charmed Life
The standard critique at the interface between the dying dinosaurs of print and the whip-smart web is that newspapers simply did not understand and embrace the web, and are doomed as a result. If newspapers would only do “X” – and among Internet cognescenti, “X” has many definitions – newspapers would be able to thrive, or at least survive, in the new world.
But if audience is a measure, newspapers have gotten the web fine. If our measure of “getting the web” is giving people something they want to read, newspapers have been fabulously successful. Web metrics are notoriously hard, but as Michael Hirschorn notes in an an Altantic piece speculating on the death of the New York Times, lots of people are reading newspapers on the web:
The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.
In other words, the Times is, clearly giving web readers what they want. This is not about doing a good job of delivering news on the web. It’s about the fact that in so doing, there is not enough money to be made to support the people doing it.
As I sit here looking out my back window on the beautiful yellow morning light sweeping down across Albuquerque, watching for the first birds to hit the feeder, drinking my first cup of coffee, my library of economics and archaeology and climate science stacked helter-skelter on the bookshelves behind me, I also could not help but smile at Hirschorn’s description of one of the things that will be lost when newspapers die:
It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.
(h/t Sophie)
Coal-to-Liquids Watch
Via Andy Revkin, we learn about the opening of China’s first coal-to-liquids plant. This is an important development, because of the very real possibility that relatively abundant coal could become a substitute for dwindling petroleum supplies – a happy prospect for cheap global energy, not so much for the climate. Choose the economic and environmental path you prefer.
According to BP, China has the third-largest coal reserves in the world, behind the U.S. and Russia.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Kids are Great Edition
Add up the savings (ad gated):
And refrigerator coils. All that dust that collects on them drives up your electric bill by making the fridge less efficient.
“How many of you have cleaned your refrigerator coils?” asks Angela Sylvestre, a volunteer helping with the energy-saving project.
Every hand in the room goes up, accompanied by a chorus of “I have!” and one crisp additional detail: “It’s disgusting.”
Why I Am Skeptical About Successful Greenhouse Gas Reduction Measures
From the Economist:
Coal’s share in global energy will continue to climb because of its relative cheapness and abundance, especially in the two largest coal-producing/consuming countries, the US and China. In the US, more coal-fired than gas-fired power plants will come on stream in the next two years. Globally, demand for coal will rise by 4.6% in 2009 to 6.8bn tonnes; this trend will gather speed as countries with large reserves aim to reduce their dependence on oil imports.
(ht Rich Sweeney)
US coal production was up 1.9 percent in 2008.
CO2 Basics
Andy Dessler does a terrific job in this piece of explaining CO2 basics:
So we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get?
Carbon dioxide by itself will only provide somewhere around 1 degree C warming over the next century. In order to get really large warnings over the 21st century, there needs to be strong positive feedbacks to amplify the initial warming from carbon dioxide.
NM Greenhouse Effort
Stuff I wrote over at the work blog on an intriguing effort to control greenhouse emissions in New Mexico via the state’s Environmental Improvement Board. Basically, the argument is that the EIB already has the legal authority to do it, and no additional legislation is needed. Interesting approach.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Water in the Desert Edition
Drier Climate on the Way for Southwest (ad gated):
Climate change is increasing the chances of severe and persistent drought in the Southwest, according to a new report from a panel of federal scientists.
“It’s going to get drier,” said Richard Seager, a climate researcher at Columbia University in New York.
That means diminished water supplies, Seager said.
It is possible that greenhouse-induced drying may have already begun, though the evidence is unclear, according to Seager, one of the report’s authors. “We can’t tell yet,” Seager said in a telephone interview.
Quote of the Day
Does this apply to today? Why, or why not?
When an economy is expanding and things are going well, it becomes easier to think in terms of spending resources to deal with problems. Times of recession or of slow growth and slowly rising living standards with reduced public resources result in downgrading the significance of nonproductivity linked social problems and discourage action to deal with them.
S. M. Miller, The Political Economy of Social Problems: From the Sixties to the Seventies