climate change – CGW's Blog

Mind the difference between what you know, and what you think you know

More of us should familiar with Bayesian probability, in which you acknowledge your priors and update frequently.

In predictions and finance, the average is more often close to the best than to the worst. So figure if you really want to be average. Poker, chess, earthquakes and economics are either so varied or still missing some underlying sense for predictions to be especially good; in contrast to other weather and the emergence of collective wisdom.

All that’s from the 2015 book “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t,” by pollster, odds-maker and very-online-person Nate Silver. This book was before Trump’s first election, and when Silver began his combative persona online. Back then, poker and gambling was a world of mathematical insights, presaging other books like one in 2018 by Annie Duke. It injected a kind of numeracy among the professional class, which was good, though we’ve been fighting against the numbers ever since.

As Silver, who was 37 when this book came out, wrote then: “This book is less about what we know then about the difference between what we know and what we think we know.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Nonviolence should be a tactic of resistance movements, not a holy covenant As famed South African activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.”

Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?

That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.

As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:

moral: we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option and
strategic: it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option

Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.

As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Is a river alive

What if a river isn’t just scenery or infrastructure—but a living being with rights, memory, and agency? If a corporation has personhood, then certainly ecological systems can.

That’s from the much-publicized lyrical 2025 book Is a River Alive by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It’s gotten heaps of praise, though I’ll admit I found it an over-stretched poem at times. It felt a bit pompous but I so appreciate the book’s premise.

Below I share notes for my future reference.

My environmental impact

Climate catastrophe is sound science.

More slowly than I’d like to admit, I’ve changed behaviors in recent years. A resolution of mine for this year has been to do more. I wanted to capture a small accounting of what I’ve done so far and how I think I can do more.

Most prominently, last fall, we installed a 12-panel solar array on our roof. According to projections from our installer Solar States, this should more than account for our electricity usage.

Because of that installation, we replaced our traditional natural-gas hot water heater with a heat pump variety from A.O. Smith. We intend to turnover our other appliances (stove, clothes dryer and furnace) too, as part of electrification. Despite being a home from the 1890s, transitioning all of our home to electricity which can be primarily served by our solar installation will be an important contribution. I’ve happily encouraged a couple friends to follow this same transition.