Beyond Solyndra: Solar Energy’s On-Grid Torment — MasterResource

If you are a homeowner and you want to ‘do the right thing’, save the planet and stick it to your utility company. So you decide to put a solar rooftop system on your house but it costs thousands of dollars and tax credits and subsidies don’t cover all of it. No problem, the vendor says we will lease you the system with no upfront cost. This sounds like a great deal until you realize that you are signing a 20 year lease on equipment with rapidly falling prices and in a market of rapidly improving technology.

An attempt to blind you with statistics

I used to teach statistics for a number of years at a major Australian university so this was a bit of a laugh to me but others might be a bit baffled so I thought I should point out in plain language what is going on.

What he is talking about is the probability of global warming. He admits that there is a very large range of possibilities -- from no warming to big warming. He then makes an assumption that the pattern of probablities is "fat-tailed" -- i.e. that a lot of the possibilities are bad.

But how can he know that? The only guide we have to future trends is the past -- and the past shows an overall trend of very gentle warming. His "fat-tail" is just guesswork. The real, known distribution of climate events should induce in us the utmost serenity

The Birds, now occupying near you | Watts Up With That?

I think they’ve been occupying a bong too long.

Colorado ski resort opens early with 44 inches of powder - KansasCity.com

In a coup that will long be remembered in skiing circles, Wolf Creek announced it would be the first resort in the U.S. to open, the earliest opening in resort history.