- Bishop Hill blog - Attenborough on Earth Report

Some years ago, Sir David Attenborough wrote an article about his involvement in TVE's Earth Report series. There is much of interest, including the fact that programmes were sponsored by WWF at various times, and that he himself introduced each programme.

- Bishop Hill blog - TVE

Earth Report could at first glance be mistaken for the Earth Reporters series that was criticised by the BBC Trust in its report on illicit sponsorship. However, I think in fact this is another series entirely. TVE's website has disappeared from the internet, but its YouTube channel is extant and the Earth Report programmes can be seen there (for example this or this). I would urge readers to look at some of these films, which are amazing - pure propaganda.

RealClimate: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events

There is still a debate about the past trends (see previous discussions here, here, here, and here). Has the tropical cyclone activity or the number of cyclones increased? Note, the trends may not not necessarily linear, and if one tries to fit a straight line in time, it may not provide the best picture of the situation. As long as we have no reliable records on tropical cyclones for the past, I’d argue that we don’t know how well our models are able to capture long-term changes in tropical cyclones.

Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » My Questions for Chu

Accepting for a moment that the purpose of the loan program under which Solyndra received its money was truly reduction of CO2 output and fossil fuel use, what is the metric the DOE uses to score these investments against these goals (e.g. tons of CO2 output avoided over the next 10 years per dollar of government investment).

2.  How did Solyndra and other companies that were accepted for the program score on your metric?  How did companies that were turned down score?

Of course there was no such analysis — the government appears to have invested in whatever companies raised the most money for Obama or got Joe Biden’s heart palpitating or both.  Even if one pulls the obvious politics out of it, it appears they invested in stories they found appealing, the same mistake many novice investors make.