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Published online 12 December 2008 |
456,
849-850
(2008)
| doi:10.1038/456849a
Corrected online: 14 December 2008
News
Nobel physicist to run energy agency
Obama appointments likely to focus on renewable energy and implementing cap and trade.
By choosing Nobel-prizewinning physicist Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy (DoE), US President-elect Barack Obama has sent a clear message: solving climate issues in a world dependent on fossil fuels will depend on science coming up with new energy technologies.
Three other key positions in Obama's climate and energy team have also been informally settled, and they point to an administration that will be serious about climate change and the regulation of emissions.
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Thanks, Eric, for this informative report on the people that will occupy key positions in Obama's climate and energy team. Obama has demonstrated especially good judgment in selecting Nobel Laureate Steven Chu to head DOE and its effort to develop "new energy technologies." The Obama team will likely recognize that our climate is controlled - not by anthropological carbon dioxide (CO2) - but by the energy released from nuclear reactions between chemical elements in the Sun. Some scientists have mistakenly assumed a uniform composition of chemical elements inside the Sun. Like the politician who discovered the presence of other layers below the stiffly beaten egg whites on a meringue pie, Dr. Richard Mewaldt of Caltech reported surprise earlier this week at the layers of different chemical composition in material ejected from the Sun: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/15dec_solarflaresurprise.htm?list1104666 Eight years earlier, measurements with the Wind spacecraft showed that abundances of successively heavier weight elements in impulsive solar flares are enriched by factors of ~10, ~100, and ~1,000 relative to the highly mass fractionated lightweight elements that cover the surface of the Sun [Astrophysical Journal 540 (10 Nov 2000) L111-L11]. http://epact2.gsfc.nasa.gov/don/00HiZ.pdf Continued public interest in the global climate of planet Earth may encourage the Obama team to address these experimental observations and to inform the public that Hydrogen-fusion is not the primary heat source for planet Earth. With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Information that President-elect Barack Obama receives from his science team will be tempered by his own observations this year. President-elect Barack Obama flew to Hawaii for the holidays, instead of staying in Chicago to enjoy the balmy weather that global warming brought there. Best wishes for the Holidays and the New Year ahead! Oliver K. Manuel, http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09