Month: December 2010

“Who Killed the Electric Car” is an iconic film about what went wrong with the American Auto Industry. Continue reading “Revenge of the Electric Car – Movie Trailer”

Raw Data here.
News coverage from Science:

The 2010 meteorological year, which ended on 30 November, was the warmest in NASA’s 130-year record, data posted by the agency today shows. Over the oceans as well as on land, the average global temperature for the 12-month period that began last December was 14.65˚C. That’s 0.65˚C warmer than the average global temperature between 1951 and 1980, a period scientists use as a basis for comparison.

The 2010 meteorological year was slightly warmer than the previous warmest year, the 2005 calendar year, when the average temperature was 14.53˚C.

—- Continue reading “NASA: 2010 Warmest Year on Record”

One of the most critical tools for discovery of earth’s climate history was birthed by serendipitous accident as a weary antarctic scientist, on a whim, decided to chill a glass of whiskey with ice from a glacial drilling project.

“It was when I saw them burst as ice cubes melt in a glass of whisky that it occurred to me they would hold vital information about the altitude the ice was formed at, and most importantly, the air bubbles were reliable and unique indicators of the composition of the air – something we would prove over the years,”

Claude Lorius was that pioneering explorer, who, in the 1950s, answered a bulletin board job posting for polar research assistants, and fell in love with the “mercilessly hostile” vastness of the ice sheets.
Continue reading “Climate Science History: Claude Lorius and the Ice Core Record”

Engineer and Venture capitalist Tom Rand has an upbeat take on where we need to go with Renewable Solutions:

We’ve largely invented what we need to kick the fossil fuel habit. Efficiencies, clean sources and the smart grid are the third industrial revolution.

But we need to create market conditions that deploy clean technology at scale. We need massive capital (trillions) and it needs to move quickly. To do that, we need to shape the market.

These market signals can only come from policy, and policy (in a democracy) can only emerge in the face of a public that demands, or at least accepts, the need for it.  Hence this video. There’s no way to move forward if the public doesn’t believe it’s possible (never mind necessary).

To those that love the free market and shudder at the thought of ‘interfering’ in it: The market is not a natural kind – like a tiger, or a shrub – that operates under some set of natural laws that are best left alone, as the Chicago School argues. The market is more like an iPod – we invented it, and engineered it to our purposes. We invented credit, currency, contract law, exchange rates, banking systems, etc. Now we need to shape the market to enable a low-carbon economy.

Best ideas? Tax-and-dividend to change consumer behaviour and government-backed Green Bonds to generate low-cost debt capital (devil is in the details, see http://www.greenbonds.ca for my version).

Some would accuse a cleantech venture/angel investor of speaking from self-interest. Perhaps, but I put my money where my mouth is because I want to move the needle on carbon.

 

If you watched in awe at Ben Santer’s bloodless but brutal beat down of Pat Michaels, you may have asked yourself why you’ve never heard of this guy.  Here’s a long form talk delivered at Stanford, which fills in some of the gaps about the political infighting that climate scientists have had to engage in since the 90s. Continue reading “More Ben Santer”