Ecology

Feed People or Feed Their Cars?

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Ethanol production is not a free lunch on the way to reducing oil consumption.
In fact, it is just the opposite. A much more costly lunch:

The jump in corn prices is already affecting the cost of food. The most notable example: in Mexico, which gets much of its corn from the United States, the price of corn tortillas has doubled in the past year,…
Poultry feed is about two-thirds corn; as a result, the cost to produce poultry–both meat and eggs–has already risen about 15 percent due to corn prices, says Tyner. Also expect corn syrup–used in soft drinks–to get more expensive,…

Any food that utilizes corn is going to get more expensive.

How many of you remember any of the glory be to ethanol stories mentioning this juicy morsel or including the increased cost of food in the cost of ethanol?

Flatulence

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It would be all to easy to attribute this fine piece of oratory to great leader:

We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows? We do know the CO2 in the past had its time when it was greater as well. And what happened when the CO2 was greater since then and now? There have been many cycles of up and down warming.

But, credit should be given to whom it is due. This was crafted by congress critter dana rohrabacher who apparently attending the same speaking schools as w.
As to “…what happened when the CO2 was greater since then and now?”:

Presumably, Rohrabacher was referencing a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Then, as in now, “sharp rises in temperature were initiated and driven by large spikes in greenhouse gases. … It took over 100K years for the ocean, atmosphere, and temperatures to return to their previous state. The result was a mass extinction event that took millions of years to recover from.” But scientists believe that massive methane releases from the ocean floors — not dinosaur farts — were the cause.

Via The Galloping Beaver.

Extinction By Fart

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Recent research suggests that only one of the 5 major mass extinctions was caused by meteor impact. The rest were more likely caused by deep-sea anaerobic bacteria:

In their models, if the deepwater H2S concentrations were to increase beyond a critical threshold during such an interval of oceanic anoxia, then the chemocline separating the H2S-rich deepwater from oxygenated surface water could have floated up to the top abruptly. The horrific result would be great bubbles of toxic H2S gas erupting into the atmosphere.

Warm things up a bit via volcanic sourced high CO2 and you create the making of massive bacterial farts of deadly gas.

The author of the article says that conditions for these bubbly killers occur in a massive scale when CO2 levels reach around 1000 parts per million. Current levels are at 385 and rising 2-3 ppm per year. Assuming the rate of increase does not go above 3 ppm/year then expect next mass extinctions to begin in at most 200 years.

Yep, your great-great grand children might be around, briefly, to see it.