NY Times says Al Gore does not shit global warming gold

Here's a NYT article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/sc...e%2c%20Al&_r=1

Highlights:

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Full article.

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”
Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”
Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.
Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.
Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”
Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.
“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”
“An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.
Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”
He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.
“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”
Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”
Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.


“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,” Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.”
In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,” he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.”
He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.
Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback,” he said. “I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.” He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.
He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”
While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”

(page 2)


Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.
It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.
Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem” that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,” he added, “does not help.”
So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.
Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”
Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.
“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.
Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.
“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”
Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.
“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.
“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”

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Originally Posted by attaboy

Here's a NYT article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?pagewanted=2&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes %20Topics%2fPeople%2fG%2fGore%2c%20Al&_r=1

Highlights:

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”

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Lindzen takes money from energy companies. He charges oil and gas
companies $2,500 dollars a day for his consultancy work. When he
testified before a senate committe in '91 his trip was paid for by
Western Fuels. A speech he wrote, 'Global Warming: the Origin
and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus", was paid for by OPEC. He
works for the energy industry and this should be taken into account when
examining any of his work. This not to say that he's a liar nor to say
that he's a bad scientist, just saying that he has his own agenda.

Article From Harpers Magazine:

THE HEAT IS ON (Global Warming Disinformation)

I will have to kinda agree that modern Global Warming is caused by PEOPLE, Without people there would still be global warming of a certain degree, maybe not to the extent it is going up now tho, but in the end it would still reach a certain point.
Science does prove that Global Warming has always happened between ice ages and will continue to happen.
Just as a Dome Stadium will heat faster with 87,000 people in it watching a football game than it would with no one in there.
The main fact of cause of Global Warming is over population.
With 2 billion people the earth would still warm but would do so slower, just like the accumulation of chicken shit in a chicken shed, More chickens means more chicken shit.
So the root cause seems to be damage on the infrastructure is directly proportional to the amount of people using the natural resources.

When is someone going to do a study on cause and effect of the oxygen depletion of the air in the world today.?

There is a difference between natural global warming and the kind
of global warming some people are worried about now. Of course
the earth warms up and cools down naturally but what is happening
now does not correspond with what seems to happen during the
natural warming/cooling cycles. Perhaps it'd be better to call the
current issue human-caused global warming.

I watched "An inconvenient truth' last night.
As well as presenting some very heartfelt arguments, the evidence was very compelling.
Only total idiots would choose to simply ignore them.

Read the article. Al Gore is doing a disservice to the cause by fudging the facts and hyping the problem. Science shouldn't be based on heartfelt stories. Nor should it be based upon a majority vote.

When the global warming story first broke into the MSM it was reported to be all our (human) fault. It wasn't until people investigated and began pushing back that the touts of climate models admitted that global warming is a natural event exasperated by humans. If we don't question the lazy "experts" they will continue to feed us slop passed off as science.

Knowingly accepting lies because we've been told it's for our own good breeds contempt for us on the part of the liars. We'll be treated with less and less respect and we'll be pushed aside in the name of expediency. If a person doesn't like the church laying guilt trips on them, then why should they accept the guilt trips perpetrated by politically motivated people?

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Originally Posted by attaboy

Al Gore is doing a disservice to the cause by fudging the facts and hyping the problem. Science shouldn't be based on heartfelt stories.

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I disagree, it's the fact that his interest in the topic was peaked as a science undergratuate that gives him validity as far as I'm concerned.
His liberal tree hugging leanings didn't do him that many political favours.

Sitting under a heavy man made smog in ChiangMai at the moment, it is fairly clear that the environment is affected by people and their actions.
It seems obvious enough that at a time when we are pumping more and more poop into our atmosphere than we have ever done in the history of the world that we are looking at a very different set of circumstances.

Farmers should stop burning their stubble.

What Al Gore is doing by pontificating global warming based solely on data from the past 30 years is disingenuous.

Sure we all need to be energy conscious for a variety of reasons other than global warming.

Last time Al Gore got on his high environmental horse was about the "hole in the ozone" affair. Nasa subsequently debunked the entire notion. Did Al Gore recant his alarmist political posturing.....nooooo!
As a result of that debacle the average auto buyer now pays about $600.00 more for each car so the R-34 refrigerant can be used in A/C systems instead of cheaper and more efficient R-12 freon.
Fuck Al Gore!
He does the whole environmental issue a great disservice with his disingenuous self serving political alarmism!
Fuck Al Gore!

:saythat:

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Originally Posted by attaboy

Farmers should stop burning their stubble.

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I prefer to use a razor.

The whole issue of global warming is complex, I'm sure. What you can't dispute is that it is stupid, short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating to:
1. Pour shit into rivers and seas.
2. Tear down our forests at the rate we are doing.
3. Burn land in order to create farming areas.
4. Pour shit into the atmosphere.
5. Pump shit out of vehicles.

Whether you believe Al Gore's movie or not, no one in their right mind can argue with the bleeding obvious. When sea mammals and fish are being shown to have incredibly high levels of toxins in their bodies, we know we've fucked up. I personally think it's too late.

I don't think it should be case of believing or not believing in
one side or the other. Advocates of both sides in this debate
present evidence for their points of view. The evidence should
be examined properly and the scientific merits of the cases
weighed without prejudice. Deciding whether current global
warming is man-made and different from other episodes of
global warming is not a moral, economic, ethical, or political issue,
deciding what to do about it, if it is man-made, is.

To me the evidence that it is man-made is compelling, I have
seen few hard facts that would convince me otherwise.

^^I agree we shouldn't need a crisis to motivate us, but government and most people only act after a crisis occurs. If Gore's movie is correct one-third of the CO2 released is due to farmers burning the stubble in their fields or burning brush to clear new fields for growing.

Putting a stop to burning sounds like a low tech inexpensive rapid way of reducing CO2 output. But then it could well be the most efficient way to clear land and kill weed seeds in third world environments.

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Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Fuck Al Gore!

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Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Fuck Al Gore!

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twice in one post.

i wonder if tipper has anything to worry about.

That fat bastard spends over $ 5,000 dollars a year heating his family home! I don't want any fucking hypocritical twats preaching at me. The first thing "they" should do is scrap Air Force One and start travelling in economy class like the rest of us plebs.

Al Gore is doing it to benefit Al Gore. He made his fortune in Google stock. The computer/tech industry. His house and grounds are so big the pool house on his property costs $500 bucks a month to heat alone. The new darling of silicon valley is this alternate energy wave thats sweeping the country. This from a extremely wasteful industry that uses CRTs, then LCD and tons of other non-biodegradables in production. Do you ever hear about the energy saving techniques employed by that industry in production, or the environmentally friendly products they're working on to help the planet earth? It's all about the cash, baby! Newer start-ups and potential IPOs are the darling of these entreprenuers. They're selling you something, and making themselves very rich by doing it. How? Using Al Gore's movie to create a needless sense or urgancy to get you to buy something today that you won't know if you realy need for a century or so.

New York Times Article 14 March, 2007

March 14, 2007 --> Start-Up Fervor Shifts to Energy in Silicon Valley --> By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 — Silicon Valley’s dot-com era may be giving way to the watt-com era.

Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars.

It is no secret that venture capitalists have begun pouring billions into energy-related start-ups with names like SunPower, Nanosolar and Lilliputian Systems.

But that interest is now spilling over to many others in Silicon Valley — lawyers, accountants, recruiters and publicists, all developing energy-oriented practices to cater to the cause.

The best and the brightest from leading business schools are pelting energy start-ups with résumés. And, of course, there are entrepreneurs from all backgrounds — but especially former dot-commers — who express a sense of wonder and purpose at the thought of transforming the $1 trillion domestic energy market while saving the planet.

“It’s like 1996,” said Andrew Beebe, one of the remade Internet entrepreneurs. In the boom, he ran Bigstep.com, which helped small businesses sell online. Today, he is president of Energy Innovations, which makes low-cost solar panels. “The Valley has found a new hot spot.”

Mr. Beebe said the Valley’s potential to generate change was vast. But he cautioned that a frenzy was mounting, the kind that could lead to overinvestment and poorly thought-out plans.

“We’ve started to see some of the bad side of the bubble activity starting to brew,” Mr. Beebe said.

The energy boomlet is part of a broader rebound that is benefiting all kinds of start-ups, including plenty that are focused on the Web. But for many in Silicon Valley, high tech has given way to “clean tech,” the shorthand term for innovations that are energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Less fashionable is “green,” a word that suggests a greater interest in the environment than in profit.

The similarities to past booms are obvious, but the Valley has always run in cycles. It is a kind of renewable gold rush, a wealth- and technology-creating principle that is always looking for something around which to organize.

In this case, the energy sector is not so distant from other Silicon Valley specialties as it might appear, say those involved in the new wave of start-ups. The same silicon used to make computer chips converts sunlight into electricity on solar panels, while the bioscience used to make new drugs can be employed to develop better ethanol processing.

More broadly, the participants here say their whole approach to building new companies and industries is easily transferable to the energy world. But some wonder whether this is just an echo of the excessive optimism of the Internet boom. And even those most involved in the trend say the size of the market opportunity in energy is matched by immense hurdles.

Starting a clean technology firm is “not like starting an online do-it-yourself legal company,” said Dan Whaley, chief executive of Climos, a San Francisco company that is developing organic processes to remove carbon from the atmosphere. “Scientific credibility is the primary currency that drives the thing I’m working on.”

Just what that thing is, he would not specify. For competitive reasons, Mr. Whaley declined to get into details about his company’s technology. His advisory board includes prominent scientists, among them his mother, Margaret Leinen, the head of geosciences for the National Science Foundation.

In the last Silicon Valley cycle, Mr. Whaley’s help came from his father. In 1994, he did some of the early work from his father’s living room on GetThere.com, a travel site. It went public in 1999 and was bought by Sabre for $750 million in 2000.

This time around, entrepreneurs say they are not expecting such quick returns. In the Internet boom, the mantra was to change the world and get rich quick. This time, given the size and scope of the energy market, the idea is to change the world and get even richer — but somewhat more slowly.

Those drawn to the alternative-energy industry say that they need time to understand the energy technology, and to turn ideas into solid companies. After all, in contrast to the Internet boom, this time the companies will need actual manufactured products and customers.

“There are real business models and real products to be sold — established markets and growing economics,” said George Basile, who has a doctorate in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and specializes in energy issues.

Mr. Basile has just stepped into the fray himself. In January, he became the executive adviser for energy issues at Bite Communications, a San Francisco public relations firm with scores of technology clients that is now working to attract energy start-ups.

The sudden interest of lawyers, accountants and other members of the wider Valley ecosystem strikes some as opportunistic.

“There’s a large amount of bandwagon-jumping right now,” said Mark Hampton, chief executive of Blanc & Otus, a technology-oriented public relations firm whose clients have included TiVo, Sybase and Compaq. Still, he understands the interest of relative newcomers: “There’s a huge opportunity.”

They are all, plainly, following the money. In the first three quarters of 2006, venture capital firms put $474 million into a broad range of Silicon Valley start-ups in energy storage, generation and efficiency, according to Cleantech Venture Network, an industry trade group. Energy was by far the fastest-growing area of interest, and the amount was on par with what was put into telecommunications and biotechnology.

Yet the amount of money involved is still relatively small compared with the boom years. Over all, venture funding last year was still less than a third of the nearly $34 billion venture capitalists invested in the region in 2000, the peak of the bubble, according to the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto.

“This is not 2000. It doesn’t feel like 2000 on the street,” said Stephen Levy, the center’s director. But, he said, “there’s no doubt there’s a buzz.”

Mr. Levy said that Silicon Valley was getting a lift from the public’s interest in finding energy sources and from government involvement in creating subsidies and policies that promote such sources. Still, he said, the ventures are clearly risky.

“We’ll have a sense very quickly — within two to four years — whether any of this venture capital has produced any products or services that are market-worthy,” Mr. Levy said.

Apart from the profit motive, many here say they are driven by more unselfish concerns: cleaning up the atmosphere and creating energy independence for the United States. One of the phrases heard most often in the industry is: “Do well by doing good.” Al Gore, with his warnings of global warming, has been a Valley darling of late.

“The résumés I’m getting now are almost identical to the ones I got seven years ago for CarsDirect.com,” said Larry Gross, chief executive of Altra , a company he founded in Los Angeles that is producing ethanol and developing fuels made from plants. “The quality, the schools, the work experience, the enthusiasm for wanting to fix something.”

Mr. Gross in 1991 helped found Knowledge Adventure, which made educational software, making him one of the many tech alumni in the energy world. For that company, he said he attracted around $20 million in venture capital; he has received $245 million for Altra. Mr. Gross said investors and entrepreneurs are drawn to energy by what drew them to hardware and software: the chance for huge growth in volatile markets.

Mr. Gross is the brother of Bill Gross, a technology-era icon whose business incubator Idealab spawned many successful start-ups, including Citysearch and WeddingChannel. Bill Gross is now chief executive of Energy Innovations, the solar panel start-up based in Pasadena, Calif., with Mr. Beebe as president.

Mr. Beebe said there were profound similarities between the Internet boom and the miniboom in energy. For one, he said, just as the Internet promised to decentralize computing and put control in the hands of users, the Silicon Valley version of energy innovation intends to decentralize the industry by making power generation more local — like solar panels on rooftops.

In 1998, Mr. Beebe was a co-founder of Bigstep and raised $75 million in venture funding. At its peak, the company had 150 employees, with most of them laid off during the bust. The company was later sold for less money than it raised — hardly a dot-com success. So does Mr. Beebe have the track record to make a solar energy company profitable?

“I face that question on a regular basis,” he said. “Only my actions will be able to answer it.” But he added that he felt confident about the political and market conditions for energy start-ups. He said the entrenched oil, coal and gas companies could not ultimately compete with the more efficient and environmentally friendly concepts Silicon Valley envisions.

“The idea of them turning a supertanker is an apt analogy,” he said. “They cannot take us over, they can only try to resist.”

Paint yer waggons, we're heading for Klondike.

From the Beeb today...

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Winter warmth breaks all records
Grindelwald ski resort. File photo
A lack of snow in Europe has affected business at ski resorts
Winter in the northern hemisphere this year has been the warmest since records began more than 125 years ago, a US government agency says.

The combined land and ocean surface temperature from December to February was 0.72C (1.3F) above average.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said El Nino, a seasonal warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean, had also contributed to the warmth.

Weather experts predict that 2007 could be the hottest year on record.

NOAA said that temperatures are continuing to rise by a fifth of a degree every decade. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.

Greenhouse gases

"Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer temperatures as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific," said Jay Lawrimore of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.


Heat map

Climate change: In graphics

He added: "We don't say this winter is evidence of the influence of greenhouse gases."

However, Mr Lawrimore said the research was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process, which released a report last month that found global climate change "very likely" has a human cause.

"We know as a part of that, the conclusions have been reached and the warming trend is due in part to rises in greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

The IPCC panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface.

They projected that temperatures would probably rise by between 1.8C and 4C by the end of the century, though increases as small as 1.1C (2F) or as large as 6.4C (11.5F) were possible.

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