Month: November 2010

The Next Generation of Solar Thermal Storage

Large scale thermal solar systems are being built today around the world, more and more with thermal storage based on phase change of molten salts. That means, they will be able to continue making power on cloudy days or when the sun goes down.  MIT has announced a breakthrough in what may be the next generation of energy storage.

I promise I’ll be getting back to climate solutions videos, soon.  I had been hoping the barrage of climate denial that started a year ago would abate, but since that doesn’t look likely, I’ll just have to redouble my efforts, find the time, and get em done.

I’m using Final Cut software now, in the hope that will speed up my production process.  I’ll let you know how that works out.

The Greatest Threat to the Planet: The Right Wing Echo Chamber

The more deluded climate deniers are, the more certain they seem about their information.  I see it every day.  But it’s not limited to the climate denier community. We have a larger problem – the cancerous growth of a self reinforcing, right wing echo chamber media that has no anchor in reality, and no rationale other than political expediency in deciding which rumors, factoids, falsehoods and conspiracy theories it spreads.

Moreover, what, I am sure seemed like merely a great venue for disseminating one sided political propoganda, the Fox news, talk radio axis – has become over time an overwhelmingly powerful reality distortion field. It insures that not only are we as Americans divided by ideology, but that we functionally live on different planets in terms of what is accepted as true and false accounts of history and current events. Saddam attacked us.  Those WMDs are still out there.  Obama is a Kenyan smuggling muslims into the country. There is no climate change.

Ronald Reagan said you were entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. In 2010 America, those who claim to honor him have decided that, no, you are entitled to your very own fabricated reality.

Now on Twitter: Climate Crock Debunker Bot


from Popular Science:
“Getting into a climate change debate on Twitter could be even more exhausting than it sounds now that a software developer named Nigel Leck has automated the process. Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot @AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science.

Those responses are pulled from a database of hundreds of responses that the software matches up to the argument made by the original tweeter. Those who claim the entire solar system is warming are met with something like: “Sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming” followed by a link to corresponding scientific research.”

Word is that the climate bot links to sources like Skeptical Science, and…ahem…a certain climate themed video series as well.