The environment - a four-fer

First - from the Canadian Broadcasting Company:

4 Vancouver men aim to row the Northwest Passage
Four Vancouver adventurers say they hope to spark discussion about climate change by attempting to become the first people to row the Northwest Passage this summer.

On July 1, the four men will begin their journey in a specially designed 25-foot boat, starting from Inuvik and ending in Pond Inlet, Nunavut on the east coast of Baffin Island in the early fall.

The modern-day explorers say the Northwest Passage has become semi-navigable due to the deterioration of arctic ice from climate change.

Excuuuuuse me but the Northwest Passage has been routinely navigable. Considering that these people are from Vancouver, they should explore their own wonderful Maritime Museum and walk the decks of the St. Roch. From the website:

The St. Roch was the first vessel to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (1940-1942), the first to complete the passage in one season (1944), and the first to circumnavigate North America.

Second - from The Beeb:

Met Office experts meet to analyse 'unusual' weather patterns
About 20 of the UK's leading scientists and meteorologists are due to meet at the Met Office to discuss Britain's "unusual" weather patterns.

They will try to identify the factors that caused the chilly winter of 2010-11 and the long, wet summer of 2012.

They will also try to work out why this spring was the coldest in 50 years - with a UK average of 6C (42.8F) between March and May.

The Met Office hopes the meeting will identify new priorities for research.

What about their great and all-powerful supercomputers? Weren't these supposed to make their forecasts accurate? Seriously, the Met office has been spending huge stacks of British taxpayer money on two large supercomputers and their forecasts have been completely decoupled from reality. How about admitting that the models do not work and going back to the traditional wet finger in the air and a peek at your barometer... Third - from Melbourne Australia's Herald Sun comes this from Andrew Bolt:

Climate Commission�s dupe: �one in two chance� of no humans by 2100
Retired admiral Chris Barrie is disturbingly prone to alarmism. He tells the ABC he�s read a book, Lord Rees� Our Final Hour, which he says warned we�d be wiped out if we didn�t face �the climate change consequences and some other behaviours that are not so good�:

There�s a one in two chance that by 2100 there�ll be no human beings left on this planet. The planet will exist, but it�s just that my granddaughter won�t be part of it. And I think that�s a pretty alarming statistic, probability, one in two chance if we don�t correct our behaviours.

Referring to the Climate Commission�s report he �assisted� in launching, Barrie adds:

If anybody reads through this report and gets to the alarming conclusion that if we don�t correct our behaviour by the end of the decade, that is in seven years time, then our future looks pretty bleak.

The Climate Commission presents Barrie as some kind of global warming expert, and had him help launch their latest scare report. The ABC did not question Barrie�s credentials or his absurd claims.

Can they explain why?

Typical Malthusian -- making some hand-wringing claim about a future catastrophe too far away for us to reliably experience and the history books will always record them as being dead wrong. But they get their ink in the newspapers of the day. Bad news always sells newspapers... Fourth - from Bloomberg - an inadvertent side-effect of the Ethanol scam:

Gulf of Mexico's Extinction-by-Ethanol
Less than a year after the summer drought of 2012 baked the U.S. grain belt, farmers in the region have been deluged by rain.

Aside from the threat that weather might pose for a second year to the U.S. harvest, the heavy rains may help fulfill of a prediction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: A swath of the northern Gulf of Mexico that each summer turns into a dead zone, drained of oxygen and devoid of life, will be larger than usual.

Dead zone? More:

The dead zone starts innocently enough. Each year, when the snow melts and spring rains fall on Midwest farmland, millions of tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer that was applied to barren fields the previous autumn are washed into Mississippi River tributaries.

In years when there is more rain, more nitrogen ends up in the water -- and vice versa. Last year's drought is considered the main reason the 2012 dead zone covered only 2,889 square miles in the Gulf, the smallest in several years, and down from 6,767 square miles in 2011. If conditions are right this year, the dead zone might occupy an area the size of New Jersey, or 7,800 square miles. Researchers usually take an official measurement in July.

Ethanol? More:

The culprits behind the dead zone are many, but one deserves special attention: corn. Unlike, say, soybeans, which can grow without fertilizer, corn can't grow without it. It takes 195 pounds of fertilizer to grow an acre of corn.

And the U.S. grows a lot of corn -- more than any other country. What's more, 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, which fuel companies must blend with gasoline under a congressional mandate. The Gulf dead zone is yet another reason for Congress to kill that mandate.

Yeah -- bad for engines, takes more energy to produce than it yields on combustion, makes obscene money for a few crony capitalists (Archer Daniels Midland - I am looking at you). Bad news all around. To keep your tank Ethanol free, check out the Pure Gas website. I use it to buy gas for my smaller engines -- these can get really chewed up by Ethanol. It is hygroscopic so you get a lot of corrosion regardless of what kind of fuel treatment you use. Best just not to buy it...