French energy giant Areva has bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP).  And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”

CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage.  CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas (see “Hybrid solar/gas plants provide low-cost, low-carbon power when needed“).

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The general meltdown of the media on the climate story continues with the BBC’s “interview” of Dr. Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the center of the hacked e-mail scandal.

Many of the question were spoon-fed from the anti-science crowd:  “The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics.”

The interview reveals Jones is not terribly adept at answering questions, particularly the inane trick-questions from the disinformers.  Like many climate scientists, he issues very carefully worded statements in his own area of expertise and isn’t anywhere near as familiar as he should be on the literature outside of his expertise.  Of course, even the most careful wording can’t stop you from being mugged by the Daily Mail.

The interview is equally revealing of the BBC reporter, who is almost shilling for the disinformers here, asking some questions that go far beyond merely uninformed.  I’m so glad someone else thought that “several of the [BBC] questions were geared to get the answers the interviewer wanted to get, on the order of “do you still beat your wife’.”

This interview just about guarantees scientists and others will hear these questions again.  So let’s try to understand what’s the underlying purpose of some of these questions and look at some potentially clearer answers:

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In “Global warming’s snowball fight,” Dana Milbank, the Washington Post’s premier Capitol Hill reporter-turned-columnist, applied his trademark snark to the political debate over climate change. His George Will-style column is based on the premise that “the greens” have been “hoist by their own petard” because they have “argued by anecdote to make their case.” Milbank makes an incomprehensible attack on the “storm stories” of Al Gore for making people expect an “endless worldwide heat wave” even though it’s “not that Gore is wrong.” He goes on to mock science by anecdote:

Other environmentalists have undermined the cause with claims bordering on the outlandish; they’ve blamed global warming for shrinking sheep in Scotland, more shark and cougar attacks, genetic changes in squirrels, an increase in kidney stones and even the crash of Air France Flight 447.

The central flaw in Milbank’s piece is the idea that climate activists discuss the consequences of global warming to validate the theory of climate change. Rather, activists know that global warming is real because of the broad corpus of scientific understanding that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. When scientists, environmentalists, and politicians like Al Gore talk about storms and squirrels, they’re explaining what global warming has already done to the planet and what it will do in the future. There is no real debate over the existence of global warming — it’s a fiction created by the fossil industry, a handful of conspiracy theorists, and right-wing ideologues. Environmentalists talk about typhoons and kidney stones because those phenomena can kill people — and we are collectively responsible for increasing these threats.

The specific examples Milbank chose for mockery from a list compiled by the Heritage Foundation are in fact perfectly valid observations conducted not by “environmentalists” but by research scientists:

“shrinking sheep in Scotland” is a reference to The Dynamics of Phenotypic Change and the Shrinking Sheep of St. Kilda, a paper by Arpat Ozgul and other scientists published in Science, 2009. The paper simply finds that changes in regional climate explain observed changes in sheep body weight, making no assertions about global climate change.

“more shark and cougar attacks” refers to two different stories, neither of which “blame global warming” for the attacks. A 2008 article in the Guardian quoted Dr. George Burgess, a shark researcher at the University of Florida, as the “one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else” is an “increase in human hours in the water.” Burgess also noted that “[a]nother contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures.”

A 2007 Canada National Post story said that a “combination of warm winters and Alberta’s population boom is causing a recent jump in cougar attacks,” citing a Canadian government official. The “warm winters” are described as “natural fluctuations.” No mention is made of global warming.

“genetic changes in squirrels” refers to Genetic and plastic responses of a northern mammal to climate change by Denis Reale and other biologists, published in 2003 in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. The researchers found that “increasing spring temperatures” in the 1990s “advanced the timing of breeding” of red squirrels in the southwest Yukon by over two weeks. No “environmentalists” were involved.

“an increase in kidney stones” refers to 2008′s Climate-related increase in the prevalence of urolithiasis in the United States, published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by climate scientist Tom Brikowski and urologists Yair Lotan and Margaret Pearle. This funny-sounding problem, the scientists found, is expected to increase medical costs from kidney stones by $1 billion a year.

“even the crash of Air France Flight 447” refers to an RT.com story that quotes Aleksey Kokorin, a Russian scientist who works for the World Wildlife Federation. Kokorin warns that global warming could increase severe weather like the conditions that contributed to the crash of Air France Flight 447. At no point does he “blame” global warming for the crash.

It’s probably true that hack journalists are writing too many stories with sensationalistic headlines about work being done by climate scientists. It’s also true that scientists like to study funny-sounding things, something Milbank’s hero Sen John McCain (R-AZ) is famous for mocking. But manmade global warming is an unfortunate reality, not a “cause” based on shark and squirrel stories. Perhaps if Milbank worked harder at his job than surfing DeMint’s Twitter feed, Inhofe’s Facebook page, and the Heritage Foundation’s website, he’d understand that.

Cities Prepare for Life With the Electric Car

If electric cars have any future in the United States, this may be the city where they arrive first.

The San Francisco building code will soon be revised to require that new structures be wired for car chargers. Across the street from City Hall, some drivers are already plugging converted hybrids into a row of charging stations.

In nearby Silicon Valley, companies are ordering workplace charging stations in the belief that their employees will be first in line when electric cars begin arriving in showrooms. And at the headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric, utility executives are preparing “heat maps” of neighborhoods that they fear may overload the power grid in their exuberance for electric cars.

“There is a huge momentum here,” said Andrew Tang, an executive at P.G.& E.

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Warming is +0.18°C (.32°F) decade

Last week, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its monthly “State of the Climate Global Analysis” for January.

We see blowout warming in the satellite temperature record, which is so beloved of the anti-science crowd since they think — incorrectly — it doesn’t show warming.  Note that in UAH, we crushed the previous record.

In NOAA’s own surface dataset, January is slightly less record-shattering:

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Donald Trump and his hair assert that recent snow means “the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore,” reports the NY Post, the Daily Mail of America.

Activists are already saying this is the biggest break for the climate since Sarah Palin became the top conservative spokesperson on the science.  Anti-science disinformers suggest that it’s really more important that Trump’s hair has joined their cause, since it gets more attention these days and has, arguably, been more successful than Trump himself recently.

In a much-heralded speech last week, Bill Gates noted that if scientists could just figure out some miraculous way to harness the static electricity from rubbing Trump’s hair, the entire climate crisis could be solved.  Nathan Myrhvold was rumored to have already patented the idea.

Less seriously, this is what the Post reported Trump said, accompanied by his hair:
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