The headlines were abuzz last month following Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s talk at the National Press Club where he dubbed the global race for clean energy our new “Sputnik Moment” and warned that the U.S. risked falling behind other countries. In this imaginary race, our competition is no longer the Soviet Union, but China, which now leads in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels.
The Sputnik analogy is inappropriately applied for obvious reasons. The U.S. space program of the mid-twentieth century was an outgrowth of our military at a time when the United States and Soviet Russia were researching long-range ballistic missiles. The program was a high-cost, high-risk venture that never achieved economies of scale, nor was it intended to. There’s no question the race advanced us technologically and the productization of its research benefited generations of Americans.…
Continue ReadingBack in January of 2009, I reviewed the implications of a then just-published article in Nature magazine that was billed as shedding important new light on some aspects of the long-term (since the late 1950s) temperature history across Antarctica.
The article, by Eric Steig and colleagues, described more warming taking place over a larger portion of Antarctica than had previously been recognized. The implication was that the temperature rise across Antarctica was not lagging behind the rest of the world and thus “not bucking the trend of global warming” as apparently some “contrarians” were claiming.
Now, that result must be tempered, as a new paper is forthcoming that improves upon the analytical technique developed by the Steig team and finds significantly less warming across the continent as a whole (about 50% less), and a different geographical pattern of temperature changes across Antarctica—results that fit more closely with the existing (that is, pre-Steig et al.)…
Continue ReadingBuilding on yesterday’s Q&A on the realities of windpower, Part II has our heroine Jane discussing energy matters with her town supervisor:
Viewers are asking good questions about why I did or didn’t do such-and-such with the initial animated video. So here’s some background on making such a video as a teaching tool for wind activists around the country.
Making a Video
There are severe software restrictions when making these seemingly simple videos. For instance:…
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