Add to jeez’s comments the Ethanol being produced with Brazils comparatively more mature program (sugar cane) in lieu of useless rainforest.

Corn is a nutrient intensive crop using much more fertilizer. This in turn leads to a 7500 square mile death zone at the terminus of the Mississippi Delta.

Ethanol production requires vast volumes of water straining aquifers in the regions where it is produced.

As the AMO joins the PDO in cycling negative in a decades time, drought will reign in the corn belt and diminished degree days will prevail in northern wheat fields exacerbating current shortages.

Current soaring wheat and soya prices mean this year’s corn planted acreage is off 6% from last. Cross your fingers on late spring frosts and floods.

So why is Ethanol getting a bum rap?

2 BILLION bushels of corn would feed a lot of hungry people.

So would the wheat and soybean crops not planted in order to produce the above.

And that’s just numbers for the US. It does not include diversion to biofuels in Europe or Africa.

This is the one place I agree with Fidel Castro. Current biofuel policy and subsidies are crimes against humanity.

“Lots of folks make low cost temperature dataloggers.
http://www.omega.com/ppt/pptsc.asp?ref=OM-EL-USB-1&Nav=tems08
I use this one, about $80.”

You might have been able to save $0.05 had you bought it through http://www.weathershop.com/USB2_temp-humidity_logger.htm which has the advantage that Anthony would appreciate the business. (See URL above on the right side navigation bar.)

I’m tempted to get one for use at a hillside property my wife and I just bought, but its 1F resolution is a bit disappointing. My Davis VantagePro reports 0.1F and I think is quite accurate. There are a lot of those reporting to wunderground.com, but there are probably a lot of siting issues. Like mine – I have 0.3 acres with fences, house, trees, and asphalt parking making it hard to site. However, my snow melts about the same as the rest of the area snow, and my site is better than several Anthony has highlighted.

The 0.1F reporting resolution makes for some nicely smooth graphs, e.g. mine at
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.htm

REPLY: FYI The MMTS and CRS sites only report to 1 degree F, the idea was to mimic that.

Because environmentalists and democrats want to punish and tax ‘Big Oil’ respectively which only hurts consumers, it doesn’t make oil companies inherently virtuous nor worthy of technological protectionism. So I don’t see the need to overly blame biofuels.

I’ll admit, corn based ethanol doesn’t make a lot of sense right now. But from laziness or not, no distinction is being made between sugar based ethanol and other biofuels including ethanol from other sources. Some of that may be pie in the sky, but they don’t deserved to be smeared in case they do pan out.

I know I probably have some oil companies in my mutual fund choices in my 401(k). But my returns for that part over the past 6-7 years sure and hell hasn’t come close to what I’ve shelled out for gas over that period. So I have no reason to love oil companies who sure and hell aren’t crying about $3+/gallon gas. A situation not of their own making but not such a horrible situation to be in, either.

I have no reason to believe gas will not reach $4 this year and approach $5 the year after. So I’m not willing to blanketly dismiss all options because a few have been false starts or because of who they came from. I guess if I liked paying $4+/gallon, I might.

http://www.omega.com/ppt/pptsc.asp?ref=OM-EL-USB-1&Nav=tems08

I use this one, about $80. Simple software, USB. Small. Sufficiently accurate for this app ? Well, considering some of the site issues raised by the survey, probably a lot better.

Some biofuels, algae, GM e.coli, may make economic sense someday. The AGW proponents of today’s products don’t dare look at the whole picture (at least not honestly) or they would cringe in horror. That comment probably applies to the entire GW ‘problem’.

If I could just meet a 56 year old with the same attitude as the 16 year old…

I’ve noticed in the German media that they are trying to cloud and obscure the real reasons for the food shortages – never mentioning the global warming hysteria. They use terms like:

- food shortages arising from changes in demand structures
- global warming induced droughts (really!)
- increased demand for meat
- growing numbers of people to feed on the planet
Just to name a few.

I think the skeptic websites now have to continuously drive the followig message: THE FOOD CRISIS IS DUE TO THE BASELESS AGW HYSTERIA.
This meassage, or FACT, will have to be repeated over and over again during the next few months and years.

Personally I think it very mean that the US and Canada even suggest that they might withhold their agricultural bounty from the rest of the world for mere energy resources.

Why do you think we’re all getting blue in the mouth? #B^1

The biofuels issue drives me to fury. To contemplate the cost in human life and suffering for the most vulnerable of the world causes me terrible anger.

That way the latter two can be upgraded as needed while the former can be regularly calibrated according to a rigid protocol.

Electronics are too susceptible to issues from a wide variety of sources for measuring physical quantities over time.

As for a network of measuring stations – these already exist – look at the user-maintained stations linked to the weather underground. Its very interesting to troll through these comparing the urban stations to the rural ones on a cold night. Differentials of 5-8 degrees F can be seen across just 10 miles.

Its rather painful to watch politicians enact pernicious policy under the rubric of the environment that only makes things worse (other than helping the pocket books of the influential farm lobby).

“We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

“The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.”

If the average citizen knew that the science experts predicting rising temperatures can’t even figure out what the temperatures were in the past, the global warming scare would die a quick death. Why don’t skeptics simply tell the public how bad the temperature science really is?

If the govt can’t competently record current temperatures, and they can’t even get the past right because their records of past temperatures keep changing every month, why would anyone trust that they know what temperatures will be in the future?

Shouldn’t these guys prove they can competently handle the simple science of taking the temperature before we entrust them with predicting the future?