Eric Holthaus at Grist has a look at Antarctica's melting glaciers - Ice Apocalypse.

In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.

Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast Southern Ocean. Further inland, the glaciers widen into a two-mile-thick reserve of ice covering an area the size of Texas.

There’s no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when.

The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.

The Antarctic now seems to be in danger of melting as fast as the Arctic has. The Washington Post has a report on troubling findings from the world's largest ice sheet - Scientists confirm that warm ocean water is melting the biggest glacier in East Antarctica.

Scientists at institutions in the United States and Australia on Friday published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared — Totten is melting from below. ...

These waters, the paper asserts, are causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year, and to lose about 10 meters (32 feet) of thickness annually, a reduction that has been previously noted based on satellite measurements.

This matters because more of East Antarctica flows out towards the sea through the Totten glacier region than for any other glacier in the entirety of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Its entire “catchment,” or the region of ice that slowly flows outward through Totten glacier and its ice shelf, is larger than California. If all of this ice were to end up in the ocean somehow, seas would raise by about 11.5 feet.

CleanTechnica has an article on danger signs emerging on the west antarctic ice sheet - Key Glacier In West Antarctica Breaking Apart From Inside Out — “We May See Significant Collapse Of West Antarctica In Our Lifetimes”.

One of the key glaciers in West Antarctica, as far as the stability of the ice sheet there, Pine Island Glacier, was the site of an enormous 225-square mile iceberg calving in 2015. New research from Ohio State University has determined that this event was even more notable than first thought, as it was the result of a deep, subsurface crack that had formed approximately 20 miles inland — nowhere directly near the calving event.

What this means is that the the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is becoming more unstable far inland, rather than just at the edges in, or near, direct contact with the ocean — very likely due to mechanisms similar to those witnessed in Greenland in recent years. As the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet actually lies below sea level, relatively warm ocean water can make it far inland, unseen, slowly eroding the foundations — causing increased ice sheet flow, mobility, breakage, and general instability.

The NYT has a report on research into the melting of Antarctica's ice sheets - Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans From Polar Melt

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.” ...

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the earth, with the base of the ice below sea level. Warm ocean water is causing the ice sitting along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. As the front edge of the ice pulls away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat much faster than before.

The BBC reports the Wilkins Ice Shelf is showing signs of breaking away from Antarctica - Ice bridge ruptures in Antarctic.

An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped.

Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s.

Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean.

European Space Agency satellite pictures had indicated last week that cracks were starting to appear in the bridge. Newly created icebergs were seen to be floating in the sea on the western side of the peninsula, which juts up from the continent towards South America's southern tip.

New Scientist reports on a scenario popularised by Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Forty Signs Of Rain" - the flooding of Washington DC as a result of global warming - Antarctic bulge could flood Washington DC.

Rather than spreading out evenly across all the oceans, water from melted Antarctic ice sheets will gather around North America and the Indian Ocean. That's bad news for the US East Coast, which could bear the brunt of one of these oceanic bulges.

Many previous models of the rising sea levels due to climate change assumed that water from melted ice sheets and glaciers would simply run into the oceans and fill them uniformly. These models predict a 5-metre rise in sea levels if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, but fail to acknowledge three important factors.

First, Jerry Mitrovica and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada considered the gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheets on the surrounding water, which pulls it towards the South Pole. As the ice sheet melts, this bulge of water dissipates into surrounding oceans along with the meltwater. So while the sea level near Antarctica will fall, sea levels away from the South Pole will rise.

Once the ice melts, the release of pressure could also cause the Antarctic continent to rise by 100 metres. And as the weight of the ice pressing down on the continental shelf is released, the rock will spring back, displacing seawater that will also spread across the oceans.

Redistributing this mass of water could even change the axis of the Earth's spin. The team estimates that the South Pole will shift by 500 metres towards the west of Antarctica, and the North Pole will shift in the opposite direction. Since the spin of the Earth creates bulges of oceanic water in the regions between the equator and the poles, these bulges will also shift slightly with the changing axis.

The upshot is that the North American continent and the Indian Ocean will experience the greatest changes in sea level - adding 1 or 2 metres to the current estimates. Washington DC sits squarely in this area, meaning it could face a 6.3-metre sea level rise in total. California will also be in the target zone.

"Policy-makers must realise that the effects could be greater or smaller in different areas," says team member Natalya Gomez. The team have so far only considered one ice sheet, so the effects of other ice sheets across the world could also have a similar impact, she says.

New Scientist also has an interesting article on past gyrations in the climate - 1709: The year that Europe froze.

People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw - and then the mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, and from Czechoslovakia in the east to the west coast of France, everything turned to ice. The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.

IN ENGLAND they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy's west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man," wrote William Derham, one of England's most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.

Derham was the Rector of Upminster, a short ride north-east of London. He had been checking his thermometer and barometer three times a day since 1697. Similarly dedicated observers scattered across Europe did much the same and their records tally remarkably closely. On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.

Later that year, Derham wrote a detailed account of the freeze and the destruction it caused for the Royal Society's Transactions. Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was "a general calamity". England's troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.

In France, the freeze gripped the whole country as far as the Mediterranean. Even the king and his courtiers at the sumptuous Palace of Versailles struggled to keep warm. The Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt in Germany: "I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a sable fur piece around my neck and my feet in a bearskin sack and I am still shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one."

The Toronto Star has an article on "Why most of us aren't doing much about climate change – and what could change that" - The missing pieces. A major part of the answer ? Smart meters.

If you're reading this, chances are you think climate change is a problem and you want to know more about it.

But if you own two cars, blast the heat in your house and use incandescent light bulbs, George Marshall would call you a climate-change denier, perhaps even more so than those who don't believe in it.

"The people who outright say, `This thing isn't happening, this is an international conspiracy, the science is all wrong'... they at least have an internal coherence between what they say and what they do," says Marshall, the U.K.-based activist and author of Carbon Detox.

"The real denial, the definition of denial, is the disconnect between what you know and what you do. In other words, denial isn't not knowing something; denial is much more knowing something but not letting that in any way affect what you do."

By this definition, the majority of us look like a bunch of Armageddon-inviting hypocrites. And yet even after reading this article, even after a twinge of guilt, we will still leave the heat on, grab our keys, and drive an empty car to work.

Why? With environmental calamity fast approaching, why is it so hard for us to get up and do something?

This is the next generation of climate-change denial, and it's as big a problem as the first. Because if we keep it up, the road to hell really will be paved with little more than good intentions.

Don't beat yourself up just yet. Adopting pro-climate behaviours is about more than willpower. And it's about more than being informed, too.

"The assumption has always been that all that we have is an information deficit," Marshall says. "That assumption has underlined climate-change communication and the entire way we speak about it for 20 years. And still does."

We're all familiar with these campaigns: the melting glaciers, the stranded polar bears, the IPCC updates that say things are getting much, much worse.

But there's little evidence that information alone, no matter how terrifying it is, actually changes people's behaviour. In his book, Fostering Sustainable Behaviour: Community-based Social Marketing, Canadian environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr cites numerous studies on energy-conservation campaigns, from handbooks to workshops, that show that even if people's attitudes change, their actions usually don't.

One part of the problem is external barriers. Obviously if the infrastructure is lacking, we won't change. We won't take the bus to work if there is no public transit, for instance.

But an equally important issue is our own internal struggle. Psychologists now know there are a number of tripwires in the human mind that prevent us from doing all the climate-friendly things we'd really like to do.

Social psychologists know what motivates us to change. In fact, we sound a lot like children, and spoiled ones at that.

People are programmed to want results right away – clear, immediate indications that what they're doing matters. Unfortunately, we will never see ecological "results" from our carbon-cutting efforts. The best-case scenario is that we manage to ward off the apocalypse – someday.

This is exactly why we have to change how we think and talk about climate change, says Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Virginia. "If I want you to change your behaviour, I probably should spend a lot less time scaring you about the enormity of the global problem. I should spend more time helping you think about what you as an individual can do to reduce your own personal footprint."

Not that climate-change campaigns don't do this – we often find "10 Things You Can Do" at the end of a dystopian forecast – but even then we tend to look the other way because of another human foible known as the "single action bias."

"When we do feel a need to respond, we as humans tend to want to respond by doing one thing," Maibach explains. "And that's why a lot of the climate-change communication efforts ... have suggested trivial things for people to do. You know, like `Change your light bulbs.'

"On some level it works ... but do we really want people to be doing something that's truly, in the grand scheme, meaningless, when we have every reason to believe that's all they will do if that's what we ask them to do?"

In light of this, warding off climate change may seem more daunting than ever. But there is a silver lining to our idiosyncrasies: our susceptibility to peer pressure.

Humans are social beings. Whether we admit it or not, we love to conform. Acting as part of a group makes us feel secure, and knowing how we're doing relative to others lets us take stock of ourselves. Falling behind the group: bad. Keeping up with it or ahead of it: good. We try to stay in line with what sociologists call "social norms," otherwise known as the status quo.

Wesley Schultz, a California-based environmental psychologist who specializes in social norms, has seen how powerful, cost-effective and behaviour-specific they can be.

In a study published in 2007, Schultz and his colleagues used "normative messaging" to try to get people to lower their home energy use. Simply giving households regular feedback on how they were doing relative to the rest of the group, along with a little social approval or disapproval of their consumption (in the form of happy- or angry-face emoticons) was enough to get virtually everyone to cut down on their energy use. Not because it saved them money, not because they thought they were saving the planet. but simply because they were being graded relative to their peers and given a pat on the back.

It works so well, in fact, that social psychologists are trying to pressure governments and policymakers to stop thinking about financial incentives and information campaigns and start thinking about norms. The Australian Psychological Society has already committed to compiling research on the subject to educate authorities on how to more effectively reduce carbon-emitting behaviour.

"The most important influence on our behaviour is not the media, as we think, it's actually other people," says Susie Burke, senior researcher at the APS.

Moreover, norms are not only effective by virtue of peer pressure, they also combat the powerlessness we feel when we think about climate change.

"We often feel that when we do make an effort, it's a small thing, so what's the point? But if other people see me doing it, I am therefore participating in the establishment of a social norm, which encourages and invites other people to change. It's about knowing that and trusting that that is a very powerful social force. And that encourages your own actions even when they seem so small in the midst of such major problems."

So what would a social-norm-based campaign look like? "We need smart meters," says Schultz. "We need houses, buildings, entities that can give real-time information about their consumption. And this real-time information needs to be coupled with some kind of normative element, or specific targets. So if we need to conserve five per cent, you can see `Where am I relative to that target, and where is my group, my community or my city, relative to that target?'"

EcoGeek has a post on renewable energy in Antarctica - Antarctic Bases Converting to Solar and Wind Energy.

The Antarctic Treaty requires all signing parties to "limit adverse impacts on the Antarctic environment," so it makes sense that research stations are moving towards using renewable energy, despite the challenges presented by the extreme weather.

The icy cold can make plastic brittle, the strong winds can overwhelm wind turbines and solar panels work great during long summer days, but are useless during dark winters. But none of this has stopped some bases from moving ahead. Belgiums's Elizabeth research station hopes to be the first to rely solely on wind and solar power, England's Rothera base is installing solar thermal panels for heating water and air, Japan's Syowa base is already using solar power and Australia's Mawson station has been using wind turbines since 2003.

The major motivator for the switch is avoiding the pollution and high transport costs that come with burning fuel. The Rothera base has already seen a savings of 1,000 liters of fuel from their solar thermal array. A wind farm planned to power both the New Zealand and U.S. stations will save approximately 463,000 liters of fuel per year, an 11 percent reduction.

The ABC has a report on the latest Antarctic ice shelf that is about to collapse - Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse

A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent. "We've come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes," David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said after the first - and probably last - plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.

The flat-topped shelf has an area of thousands of square kilometres, jutting 20 metres out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula. But it is held together only by an ever-thinning 40-kilometre strip of ice that has eroded to an hour-glass shape just 500 metres wide at its narrowest. In 1950, the strip was almost 100 kilometres wide. ...

Nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002. The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.

"This ice shelf and the nine other shelves that we have seen with a similar trajectory are a consequence of warming," Dr Vaughan said.

In total, about 25,000 square kilometres of ice shelves have been lost, changing maps of Antarctica. Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.

The Age reports that the latest iteration of the "seeding the oceans with iron" geoengineering strategy has been met with stormy weather within the German government - Ocean fertilisation plan near Antarctica hits trouble.

AN ELABORATE international experiment to fertilise a swathe of the Southern Ocean has run into trouble. Tonnes of iron dust were to be dumped into the sea from a German research ship across a 300 square kilometre area in the experiment to examine its possible use in absorbing a greenhouse gas.

With the expedition's 48 scientists already at sea planning to begin work near the Antarctic Peninsula, the German science ministry has suspended approval, Nature reported.

Smaller attempts have been made in recent years to examine whether iron dust can encourage marine algal blooms and increase the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. It is an unproven remedy with side effects, according to the Australian Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre in Hobart.

The Canadian-based ETC environment group's spokesman Jim Thomas said: "This case clearly shows why we need strong enforceable rules to prevent rogue geo-engineers unilaterally tinkering with the planet."

In a story not dissimilar to the plot of "Happy Feet", The Age reports that the King Penguin is under threat from global warming. A decade ago a friend of mine spent some time down on the ice studying the diet of these penguins. This involved chasing the birds and then squeezing them to make them regurgitate whatever it was they'd just caught. Apparently they got pretty cranky about this (and an angry Emperor penguin can be quite fierce it seems). The impact on the penguin population of this research wasn't measured.

CLIMATE change may threaten the survival of king penguins — one of the most iconic creatures of the Antarctic, researchers warn.

A long-term study of the penguins, known for their distinctive yellow feather "ear muffs", reveals just a slight ocean warming had a significant effect on their breeding success.

International researchers behind the project say that under current predictions for global warming, the penguins face the risk of being wiped out.

King penguins — the second largest penguin after the emperor penguin — live in the sub-Antarctic islands, including Macquarie Island, south-east of Tasmania. There are about 2 million breeding pairs worldwide.

Their diet consists mainly of small fish and squid, and because of their one-year breeding cycle they are considered sensitive to any seasonal change in food supply.

Over nine years, researchers studied the birds on an island in the Crozet Archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean, marking 456 penguins with electronic tags.

They found that high sea-surface temperatures reduced the amount of marine prey available to the king penguins, forcing them to travel further in search of food.

According to their calculations, a sea-surface warming of 0.26 degrees would lead to a 9% decline in the adult penguin population.

The NZ Herald has an interesting article about a proposed Antarctic wind farm (also noting that the wind strength on the coast south of Wellington is often greater).

Wellington is a tougher proposition for a wind farm than Antarctica, says a team exploring the possibility of building turbines at Scott Base. Experts from Meridian Energy have flown to the world's windiest continent to conduct feasibility tests around Scott Base, which three years ago was hit by a storm with wind gusts that exceeded 200km/h, destroying the base's wind vane.

Iain Miller, Antarctica New Zealand's Antarctic services manager, said if the windfarm went ahead, it would help power Scott Base and also the neighbouring United States base, McMurdo Station. "Interestingly enough, because of turbulence created by the landscape, the wind at Scott Base and McMurdo isn't as brutal as parts of New Zealand where there are windfarms," he told The Press. "Meridian is planning one on the southwest coast of Wellington where the wind speed and turbulence are worse."

If approved, the Antarctic windfarm would augment the diesel generators used to power the two bases. The high cost of transporting fuel to Antarctica, including use of icebreakers to create a shipping channel for the tanker, made wind energy a more economical prospect than in New Zealand. The NSF did a feasibility study four years ago of wind power at McMurdo Station and found it could save up to 1.2 million litres of fuel each year.

Another place with plenty of wind is South Dakota, which the Seattle PI reports is about to become a "mammoth wind farm". It really is big.

Plans for the world's largest wind farm, proposed to be built in South Dakota, have become more grandiose. South Dakota is officially rated No. 4 in the nation for the potential capacity to make electricity from wind, although the ranking is more than a decade old. Many industry officials believe the Great Plains state is the windiest of all.

Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., intends to erect enough wind turbines in several South Dakota counties to produce up to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, said Bob Gates, the firm's senior vice president of commercial operations. That would be eight times larger than the biggest wind farm in the world, a 735-megawatt FPL Energy facility with 421 turbines stretching across three Texas counties.

Clipper Chairman and Chief Executive Officer James Dehlsen told The Associated Press in 2004 the company intended to develop a $3 billion wind complex with 1,000 turbines that could produce 3,000 megawatts of juice in South Dakota. But as envisioned now, the project would be twice as large and cost $6 billion, Gates said. Taking into account that the wind doesn't always blow or is too light or strong at times to operate turbines, a 6,000-megawatt wind farm could supply enough power for an average of about 1.6 million homes, based on data from the American Wind Energy Association.

AHN reports that Singapore is to build the world's largest Solar energy plant.

The world's largest manufacturing plant for making solar energy products will be built in Singapore, it will be the first such plant in Southeast Asia. The plant is expected to start production of wafers, cells and modules used to generate solar power by 2010. It will be built by leading Norwegian solar energy firm Renewable Energy Corp (REC) in the Tuas View area with space set aside for supporting industries.

The plant will be able to produce products that can generate up to 1.5 gigawatts (Gw) of energy annually. That is enough to power several million households at any one time. The current largest plant in the world, also run by REC in Norway, has a capacity of 650 megawatts (Mw).

Renewable Energy Access has an interesting article on growing maize in the US for biofuel - "If Corn is King of Biofuels, Tropical Maize May Be Emperor". This isn't without drawbacks, but it is a lot better than corn based ethanol.

When University of Illinois crop scientist Fred Below began growing tropical maize, the form of corn grown in the tropics, he was looking for novel genes for the utilization of nitrogen fertilizer and was hoping to discover information that could be useful to American corn producers. Now, however, it appears that maize itself may prove to be the ultimate U.S. biofuels crop.

Early research results show that tropical maize, when grown in the Midwest, requires few crop inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer, chiefly because it does not produce any ears. It also is easier for farmers to integrate into their current operations than some other dedicated energy crops because it can be easily rotated with corn or soybeans, and can be planted, cultivated and harvested with the same equipment U.S. farmers already have.

Finally, tropical maize stalks are believed to require less processing than corn grain, corn stover, switchgrass, Miscanthus giganteus and the scores of other plants now being studied for biofuel production.

What it does produce, straight from the field with no processing, is 25 percent or more sugar—mostly sucrose, fructose and glucose.

"Corn is a short-day plant, so when we grow tropical maize here in the Midwest the long summer days delay flowering, which causes the plant to grow very tall and produce few or no ears," says Below. Without ears, these plants concentrate sugars in their stalks, he adds. Those sugars could have a dramatic affect on Midwestern production of ethanol and other biofuels.

According to Below, "Midwestern-grown tropical maize easily grows 14 or 15 feet tall compared to the 7-1/2 feet height that is average for conventional hybrid corn. It is all in these tall stalks," Below explains. "In our early trials, we are finding that these plants build up to a level of 25 percent or higher of sugar in their stalks.

This differs from conventional corn and other crops being grown for biofuels in that the starch found in corn grain and the cellulose in switchgrass, corn stover and other biofuel crops must be treated with enzymes to convert them into sugars that can be then fermented into alcohols such as ethanol.

Storing simple sugars also is more cost-effective for the plant, because it takes a lot of energy to make the complex starches, proteins, and oils present in corn grain. This energy savings per plant could result in more total energy per acre with topical maize, since it produces no grain.

"In terms of biofuel production, tropical maize could be considered the 'Sugarcane of the Midwest'," Below said. "The tropical maize we're growing here at the University of Illinois is very lush, very tall, and very full of sugar."

He added that his early trials also show that tropical maize requires much less nitrogen fertilizer than conventional corn, and that the stalks actually accumulate more sugar when less nitrogen is available. Nitrogen fertilizer is one of major costs of growing corn.

He explained that sugarcane used in Brazil to make ethanol is desirable for the same reason: it produces lots of sugar without a high requirement for nitrogen fertilizer, and this sugar can be fermented to alcohol without the middle steps required by high-starch and cellulosic crops. But sugarcane can't be grown in the Midwest.

The tall stalks of tropical maize are so full of sugar that producers growing it for biofuel production will be able to supply a raw material at least one step closer to being turned into fuel than are ears of corn.

"And growing tropical maize doesn't break the farmers' rotation. You can grow tropical maize for one year and then go back to conventional corn or soybeans in subsequent years," Below said. "Miscanthus, on the other hand, is thought to need a three-year growth cycle between initial planting and harvest and then your land is in Miscanthus. To return to planting corn or soybean necessitates removing the Miscanthus rhizomes."

The Australian reports that Dr Karl isn't a member of the cult of Nyos - "Clean coal a Goebbels scale lie".

SCIENCE broadcaster and New South Wales Senate candidate Karl Kruszelnicki has likened talk of clean coal to Nazi propaganda, describing it as a "complete furphy". The celebrity science commentator and Climate Change Coalition candidate today said the major political parties were lying when spruiking the benefits of clean coal technology.

Claims carbon dioxide could be removed from burning coal and stored underground or underwater were a lie, he said. Such technology would require one cubic kilometre of compressed carbon dioxide to be stored every day, something that was "physically impossible". "That is the volume of compressed carbon dioxide that we have to get rid of – not every 10 years, not every year, but every single day," he said. "It is simply a furphy, it's a porky pie to cover up the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal."

It was the kind of lie a Nazi propagandist would conceive, Mr Kruszelnicki claimed. "Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, said if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and this is a beauty," he said.

Dr Kruszelnicki also said political policies such as a $20m plan for exploration of underground caverns would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. He claimed any storage facility would eventually wear down and would release the stored carbon dioxide back into the environment.

The Age has an article on a Melbourne company putting bicycles back on the roads - "Recycled Cycles".

BILL BRETHERTON is living the maxim. No matter how many times you fall off, you have to get back on the bike. Even after four months of your life have disappeared. Not that the 27-year-old remembers much of how his world came crashing down in the middle of 2000 after he landed on his head while mountain biking on Mount Buller. What he does remember is that it prompted a radical meaning-of-life analysis that has seen this big-thinking Brunswick man start a bicycle recycling business to fund his charity work.

"It was a crazy time and because I couldn't pick up the same life straight away, I had a lot of time to think about where I wanted to go. It took about 18 months before I could ride again but I was determined not to let it beat me," Bretherton says.

This mental journey he pedalled during rehabilitation has seen him arrive, seven years later, at Human Powered Cycles, a volunteer driven co-operative that pushes pedal power as the solution for a more sustainable world. Each weekend countless people visit the workshop at the bottom of his garden, wheeling in their injured bikes. "Bill the Bike Man's" reputation is far reaching. ...

George Monbiot has a review of Cormac McCaryhy's "The Road" - "Civilisation ends with a shutdown of human concern. Are we there already?".

A powerful novel's vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy.


A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, "their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl". McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

So when I read the UN's new report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures.

Links:

* Marc Gunther - Making the Dumb Grid Smarter
* The Energy Blog - Startup Plans on Establishing Grids to Sell Electricity for Recharging Electric Cars
* REA - U.S. Demand for Renewable Energy Exceeding Supply
* REA - The power of solar radiation - from a purely scientific point of view
* Technology Review - IBM says it has a greener and cheaper way to reuse silicon from making chips
* Plenty - Labor of Lovins
* Technometria - 10 part series of lectures by Amory Lovins on IT Conversations
* Business Green - Climbing gas prices make case for energy efficiency
* The Energy Blog - U.N. Rapporteur Calls for Moratorium on Building Biofuel Plants Using Food Feedstocks
* Google - UK carbon footprint project
* After Gutenberg - Mordor? No, Athabasca
* Grist - Experts agree: We should all lie. A lot. About important stuff.
* Salon - Google's Brain
* Crooked Timber - Loafing with LaRouche
* Cryptogon - Travelers: Homeland Security is Googling You
* Cryptogon - AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance