Friday, April 3, 2026

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (or IFoA) produces excellent synthesis & reports related to climate change. Here's the latest one: Parasol Lost: Recovery plan needed

Remember, these are actuaries =  experts in the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty. More about the report in the video below.

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Cartokit

Cartokit is a direct manipulation programming environment for interactive cartography on the web. Vey cool! See more over on GitHub: https://github.com/parkerziegler/cartokit


RUST

RUST is apparently the new hip programming language: https://rust-lang.org/

Thursday, March 26, 2026

State of the Global Climate 2025

The State of the Global Climate 2025 by the WMO is out and confirms once again what we have already known for decades. This one comes with a cool ArcGIS Dashboard of the 2025 Extreme Events, a great tool for presenting such data.

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

The Dance of the Continents

Dance of the continents is a very nice Esri Story Map showing the interplay of plate tectonics and evolution over the last 600 million years. I especially like the first section where you can step backwards in time to see the (current) continents come together first as Pangea and then again as Rodinia.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

AI & Jobs: Vulnerability

Saw this on Flowing Data: Jobs vulnerable to AI. This links to Measuring US workers’ capacity to adapt to AI-driven job displacement where the authors 'mapped' job vulnerability as a function of a) exposure andb) adaptability.

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Defossilization

That was a new term for me: defossilization. We will still very much need carbon-based compounds (even after we transition to 100 percent sustainable energy) for manfacturing of plastics, detergents, medicines, and more.

Okay, so we still have plenty of oil around...so why not use the oil for that? We should have plenty 'excess' capacity in the oil fields! Plan is a CO2-to-methanol process powered by solar energy and then the methanol is converted to olefines (e.g. ethylene & propylene) which are petrochemicals that can be used to manufacture plastics and more.