Weather, Water, Energy 2-12-07

David Roberts at Grist tips us to the new New Yorker article on the IPCC report and how only the knobheads still don't seem to get it. Even Australia's idiot PM seems to have decided it's time to find some other topic to be stupid on, like US Presidential candidates. . . . Meanwhile, the world marches on and gives us a hotter January than any on record, according to Japanese scientists. Me, I think they're just spooked by Tokyo's longest snowless winter ever. Those things make an impression. . . . We tend to look skeptically at all the "ethanol will save us" talk, especially when it so blithely skips over the global warming part of our energy problem, but here's a piece setting out the alternatives to corn for fuel stock and why they'll be better than critics think. The article waits until the end to point to the problems, but it does eventually get to them:

Ethanol has only 70 percent of the energy density of gasoline, making it less efficient, and its tendency to absorb water makes corrosion a concern for the current U.S. petroleum storage and distribution network, [an MIT professor] said.

"A broader vision should include the possibility of alternative biomass-derived fuels with better physical properties and better integration into the infrastructure--that is, fuels that will work in existing cars and which can be transported through existing networks," she told the committee.

. . . More water wars. DE is draining off underground supplies that that crazy MD and NJ seem to think they have a claim on. . . . And here's a nice piece on the different kinds of geo-thermal energy we may be tapping more in the future, this time pursued by KY and IN. Does a good job on the economics of it and the companies getting fired up, so to speak. . . . Which leads us finally to this Climate Progress post asserting that the solutions to energies have become a "holy grail" for gazillionaire wannabes. Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly gives the lie to the old BS about the harm to a nation's economy that would be caused by confronting our environmental concerns. Okay, I know it was never a lie. Seriously, was there nothing those obstructionists and deniers ever told the truth about? There have to be, like, a dozen dissertations on this in the future.