Weather, Water, Energy 11-06-06

One slow domino at a time. Rupert Murdoch has come on board with concern about that global warming thing. Maybe we should start paying some attention, he thinks. But, like the idiot Australian PM he owns, not too fast and not without everyone else contributing before Australia does, which of course, gives enormous power to the last holdout. Hmm, Murdoch and his paid-for politicians? . . . This may be pretty cool(ing). Creation of planes designed better to reduce fuel use and thus greenhouse emissions. Funny how possibly losing your industry makes you look for alternatives, isn't it? . . . . Even more cooling, a space sunshade might be feasibly possible, as this article describes, in case things start happening too fast for us to otherwise react. Of course, we have to commit to this and then wait the 25 years to get it done, but still . . . . For those of you thinking shifting from an industrial country to a service economy would reduce greenhouse gases dramatically, this says you're wrong. Even if individual services don't do much, their cumulative effect would apparently be much greater than we intuitively conclude. . . . Wetlands destruction in Indonesia is at such a scale that the CO2 released might make the nation a competitor to the Indias, Russias, and Britains in terms of global warming impact. . . . Speaking of India, it's planning to get as much as 16% of its total electricity from wind farms by 2030. Good luck with that. Maybe it will impress Australia and Murdoch. . . . OPEC is going high-tech to retrieve the "hard" oil that's left after they've Jed Clampetted the easy stuff. Not so good luck with that "major challenge." . . . Better news on the biofuels front, where U of MN researchers have developed a "carbon-neutral" way to turn vegetable-based fuels to syngas which could power hydrogen cells or sub for natural gas. The article didn't deal with the traditional critique concerning the water that might be needed, but progress is progress.