Everyone agrees the Polar Bears are doing OK More or Less Armed with our new tools and a big bag of facts, we can read Shellenburger's well-written and entertaining "take" on Climate Change. His opening chapter provides an excellent account of the current state of climate panic.  Then he gets down to his case, which is like Lomborg's warning about how our attempts to "fix" climate change may actually harm the people we are trying to help. Much of his writing is based on his experience in the Congo. He makes the totally valid point that extremely poor people in the Congo rely on wood for fuel: Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one mill...

  This one is short but involves homework. Take Hans Rosling's quiz to see how you stack up against the chimps who answer randomly. Chimp's score is 33%. Really. Do it. In the meantime, here's a toy for you from  gapminder . 

With BC in a state of emergency caused by record flooding and me sitting in the middle of it, I think it is at last time to roll up my sleeves and address the emergencies that confront all of us. Several times in my career I have found it useful to "collapse" a problem that looks like a time series (where you need data points over time and you want to predict what happens in the future) into a picture of what is going on now . The current situation contains the past and tells us what we need to know (all we can know) about the future. Throughout my essays on this subject, I hope you will actually consult my sources. What I tell you is built on what I learned from much smarter people who are, thanks to the miracle of the internet, available at your fingertips. This is important stuff. Far more important than all the stuff you forgot from High School. And my sources are far more entertaining than your High School teachers.  I will start with a great book, recommended by Bill ...