The L.A. Times has the full story, which is by the AP and so not fair game for reposting (sigh. Associated Press: you owe me. I made you money on more stories and pictures than I can shake a stick at back in the 1980s) here.

Instead I'll point out that if you saw the Matthew McConaughey flick, "Safari," you know this place.

Drivers near Barstow have for years figured it was an abandoned movie set, in fact. But it's a molten-salt plant. The first new one is about to go online in Spain:

We could do a lot more of these. I can think of places in the Trans-Pecos where they wouldn't even interfere with the grazing! One PhysicsToday commenter posits:

James M. Essig | March 10, 2009 10:31 PM | Reply

This molten salt technology for purposes of storing solar energy is a great idea. Any material with a high heat capacity is good for storing energy so that the solar stations can continue to generate power on cloudy days and at night.

I can see that other systems that use materials that remain stably solid at temperatures as great as perhaps 2,000 K to 2,500 K but with high specific heats could be effective provided that such materials could be closed off by layered highly reflective and refractive dewar type shielding apparatus. The very hot thermal masses could continue to pump out power for cloudy days on end depending on how large the thermal masses where.

Solar power can be effectively utilized along with wind power, tidal current power, hydroelectric dams, and biofuels. A concerted effort is needed to produce an economic study with the goal of actually going completely green and renewable within our lifetimes. To sustain the human race indefinitely is by definition going to require going sustainable.

Running our climate into the ground in such a manner that we make no further consideration for our descendants hundreds and thousands of years into the future is selfish foolishness.

It's not toxic.

Via The Green Parrot's blog I found this link where you can learn your "Walk Score", a livability index based on an address' walking distance to those services you regularly need.

This is a fantastic tool. What if people only valued houses by the upper tier of "walk scores" (Of course some already do....)? What would that do for all of those foreclosed property values, which are typically concentrated in urban areas with high walkability numbers?

The Hereford plant, which is about an hour from me, went under six days after the new President took office.
Looks like this is another victim of the banksters:

“Although the ethanol refinery is in the late stages of construction, on December 31, Panda Ethanol was notified by Societe Generale, the administrative agent for the Hereford subsidiary’s lending syndicate, that one of the major syndicate banks had informed Societe Generale that it would not fund its share of further borrowing requests for the project. After repeated conversations with the syndicate and an unsuccessful attempt to secure debtor-in-possession financing, the Hereford subsidiary’s management concluded that the only prudent option available was to put the facility up for sale through a Section 363 sale process.”

Texas is burning. Please don't cheer. Thousands of acres of powderbox-dry woods and brush in the Hill Country have gone up in flame since Thursday, and it's getting worse. That white streak in the satellite photo below is the smoke plume from just one fire.

If you are so minded, say a prayer for the firefighters -- and the wildlife, and the livestock, and the homes and families and parks in the way of those fires across the state.

This time it's Santa Barbara / Montecito. More than 100 homes burned, with 2,500 more people facing evacuation. Fire season along the CA coast isn't over yet.

Only useless information intended to save human life on Earth.

This blog, Climate Progress is a fantastic one-stop resource for the most important issue facing your life, the life of your loved ones and the generations to (hopefully) come.

Here are some interesting quotes there:

"The UK’s Independent reported today some pretty shocking news in “Exclusive: The methane time bomb“:

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

 Read more…

Because B*tches Get Stuff Done!

Edit: couldn't embed.

hat tip: riverdaughter

First, f*ck Tom Friedman and the T. Boone Pickens that he rode in on.

I had been planning on writing a similar post when I read and commented on Gob's post yesterday about alternative energy. Paul had a comment that I wanted to talk about because I think it frames the issue in a way that isn't helpful to understanding what is happening or what is going to happen. Namely, looking in political terms at energy and the new push by energy companies and their surrogates into alt.energy is just buying into their '$hell' game (so to speak).

Bipartisanship, perhaps an oxymoron already, brings us an apparent oxymoron: "Drilling for Clean Energy" from Representatives Jim Marshall and Roscoe Bartlett, writing in the WaPo:

...a strategic plan to use the remaining value of our federally owned oil and natural gas reserves to fund a clean, affordable and independent energy future for America, a goal worthy of short-term environmental concessions and risks.

Their idea is to open up ANWR and offshore for drilling, but under changed financial terms that would capture more of the revenues for the federal government, and ensure that the money goes to develop solar, wind, nuclear, and "better" biofuels.

This is why I have been working nearly 7 days a week for nearly the last year.

"A congressional stand-off that has blocked extension of federal tax credits for renewable energy projects is setting off a boom in the wind and solar industries. Developers and customers are racing to install systems by year's end to qualify for the credits, which can cut the cost of a large commercial system by 30%."

So what exactly has tied it up?

McClatchy's Columbus Ledger-Dispatch:

"Gas was killing us," Chris said.

In more ways than one.

"This is not a highway car," Chris said. "It's a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. We discovered that practically all that we need in our life -- shopping, work, medical -- is within seven miles of the house. That's what we use the electric car for."

Never occurred to me to connect "local" to electric vehicles, but yes.

It might have been" (AP*):

Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace...

The Nobel Prize-winning former vice president...

Ouch!

... said fellow Democrat Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain are "way ahead" of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.

That's interesting, isn't it?

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog (Lambert, where's my "Department of Analytical Tools"??).

Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):

Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster in 1983. On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas.

Oh, good:

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

"The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice – ice that formed last autumn and winter. I'd say it's even-odds whether the North Pole melts out," said Dr Serreze.

If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Stupid Republicans.

All coming soon, to a planet near you.

Twenty years ago, June of 1988, Jim Hansen of the Goddard Space Institute presented the first sound data showing human involvement in changing the Earth’s climate. Since then all of his predictions, from temperature rise to melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers, have come true. With new data, a more comprehensive understanding of the feedback mechanisms and better modeling, he sees much worse to come: sea level rises that will displace hundreds of millions of people, floods and drought on a scope and scale far beyond anything known in human history, extinction of half or more of the species on the planet and collapse of entire ecosystems.

Not to worry, though; we still have twenty years before it all spirals hopelessly out of control.

Maybe.

so that you don't have to!

Here is an exerpt:

"Bottom line, decreasing fossil fuel use in the developed world by 30% nets a total increase of carbon emissions of nearly 30% using current trends in India and China alone, not to mention the rest of the underdeveloped world."

Please feel free to check my sources, assumptions and math. I will gladly revise accordingly.

So, my first post, and first blogwhore, all wrapped up into one! ;-)

Would an interruption of the Gulf Stream be reversible? And if so, at what cost?:

One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.

This is a serious question, a very serious one, and I intend to use the popularity of my (French) blog to push the issue a far as needs be. I’ve chosen one example – so that we don’t get locked in trivial generalities – that of a possible interruption of the Gulf Stream due to human activity. The consensus is that such an interruption – which I understand already occurred for ten days in 2004 – would make the temperature in Western Europe drop permanently by 5 to 10 degrees Celsius, that is, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Is the interruption a possibility – even remote – and should the event occur, what are our realistic chances of reversing it?

Well, that's a good question. Damned if I know the answer.

I always enjoy the Left Coaster (especially eRiposte), and here's an interesting -- and distressing -- post from paradox:

As a very concerned Democratic Party constituent and citizen I had a natural expectation [Heh, indeedy!] that the 2008 nomination process would yield tangible policy plans for a number of urgent problems: precise extrication plans from the nightmare in Iraq, specific goals to reach in acquiring universal health care, unambiguous 2020 initiatives to combat global warming, and exact taxation proposals for inequality and deficit reduction start a very long list.

With a ludicrous American political propaganda corps obsessed with hair and preachers, a careful, optimistic Democratic candidate and a 2009 Congressional majority that hasn’t been set yet it’s finally dawned on me[*] that my expectations for the American electoral process remain absurdly high, faith will have to do that policy directions in Iraq, healthcare, global warming and inequality will be aggressively reversed by Senator Obama’s 2009 presidential term.

For now we’ll just have to wait on real details of how to get the country out of the canyon of a ditch we’re in.

Perceiving precise change on a number of big policy issues does not mean real progress will be immediately made on a number of smaller policy issues, however, and their diminutive [!!] nature on the agenda should not mask the enormous amount of good that will happen upon policy change and an Obama presidency. It can be credibly argued that great change over a wide policy swath is impossible, no person or country is capable of it, so the small moves of incremental change are what one should expect.

These are just two small vital acts of change among many that will be initiated in 2009, and of course an Obama presidency means critically important judicial and agency appointive choices that will vastly improve life for Americans in a myriad of small ways. Details of how the big issues facing us are going to be attacked are not clear yet, but it is certain even now that with continued hard work to elect Senator Obama president life for Americans, starting in 2009, will immediately start to get better in a lot of incremental, important ways.

Yes, well. (The creative class threw universal health care overboard a long time ago, so that's no surprise.)

But.... This is what the fervor was all about? Incremental changes? Tell me again why people are still so excited about this guy?

In a prophetic moment, Jack Webb speaks as the voice of Hillary Clinton supporters trying to explain to the rest of the Democratic Party why marijuana (Obama) is wrong for the party. Notice how he brings up Koolaid...

Now to find where he prophesies the coming of RuPaul.

Al Gore gave a talk at the recent TED Conference. It’s an updated and abbreviated version of his climate change slide show, with both alarming new data on the increasing speed of climate change and some heartening information on the growing public awareness that we need to act and soon.  Read more…

James Hansen in the Guardian, using real historical data, not computer models:

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed". A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth's history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.

"If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster," Hansen told the Guardian.

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls "slow feedback" mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

Hansen said that he now regards as "implausible" the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century."

But wait! There's good news!

I have already blogged extensively on the current food price crisis affecting mostly poor countries. Now, via Le Monde, we learn, unsurprisingly, that riots have exploded in parts of Africa in response to the cost of food.

L'Afrique piégée par la flambée des prix des aliments
LE MONDE | 04.04.08

©

Via the Independent,

"A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as "utilities" that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.

 Read more…

The Lieberman-Warner "Environmental Sell-out to REEELLY BEEG Corporate Polluters"

NASA time-lapse photography of the Arctic Circle: