Got $10K to burn? The Micro Fueler, a backyard fueling station, can create pure E100 ethanol from sugar feed stock. “It’s third-grade science,” says Thomas Quinn, founder and CEO of E-Fuel. “You just mix together water, sugar and yeast, and in a few hours, you start getting ethanol.” The $9995 Micro Fueler has a can fill its own 35-gallon tank in about a week by fermenting the sugar, water and yeast internally, then separating out the water through a membrane filter. E-Fuel representatives claim that the initial cost of the machine can be offset by up to 50 percent by federal, state and local credits, and the cost of raw sugar can be brought down to $1 or below through a system of carbon trading coupons. The Micro Fueler can produce a gallon of ethanol from about 10 gallons of sugar. OK, it makes no economic or environmental sense, but some people blow that kind of cash on worse...

So to speak. No meteorologist or television station kept records of what they predicted, nor compared their predictions to actual results over a long term. No meteorologist posts their accuracy statistics on their résumé. No station managers use accuracy statistics in the hiring or evaluation of their meteorologists. Instead, the focus is on charm, charisma, and presentation. Their words say they care about accuracy, but their actions say they do not. Robin Hanson asks: Why should we expect this to be any better for other kinds of news? If viewers can watch the same person day after day making predictions about something they care about and personally verify day after day, and still not care much about accuracy relative to looks and charm, how much can we really expect people to care about accuracy of news on unrest in Thailand, the credit crisis, or a new medical study? Can we really expect people to track the accuracy of advice...

Consider the biofuels backlash. The British government’s top environmental advisers had some choice words on the recent push for more biofuels. Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, warned of a “perverse outcome” saying “If one started to use biofuels…and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane, . . . WSJ’s Environmental Capital thinks that rolling back biofuel mandates could be good for the environment and might even be politically appealing. But they simultaneously point out that the biofuel surge has been credited by some as shaving as much as 15 percent off the cost of oil. Additionally, with so much bipartisan support for biofuels in the U.S., it seems unlikely that the American voters would embrace a sudden desertion of an industry pegged as a solution to global warming and energy independence. In fact, the “insane” and “profoundly...

I didn't think that anything could surprise Robin Hanson. At the SETI conference last week I was surprised to hear NASA's Chris McKay suggest we look for dinosaur relics on the moon. . . From McKay's 1996 paper "Time for intelligence on other planets": It is now considered probable that the dinosaurs were not the lumbering clods of urban myth but that they were biochemically and behaviorally as sophisticated as present mammals. Evidence continues to point to parentling and social behavior that is on a par wit small mammals and birds. ... [Considero] the small carnivorous dinosaur Stenonychosaurus, which stood about 120cm, weighed about 40 kg, and had [a brain size ratio] about equal to that of a possum or an octopus, and lived over 12 million years before the end of the dinosaurs. ... One might speculate that perhaps Stenonychosaurus or her progeny did build radio telescopes, but their civilization was destroyed by some internal or external catastrophe....

Or, climate change and the Necronomicon. A new study by scientists has suggested that zombie attacks might increase if the current projections of global warming are realized. “If the earth gets warmer, it means longer springs, summers, and falls, and shorter winters,” said John Carpenter-Romero, Ph.D., a zombie-ologist who co-authored the study. “And shorter winters means more time for the undead to prey on the populace.” Dr. Harrister, the other co-author, and head of Zombie Robotics at Wayward Robot, Inc., explained that cold winters typically stalled the walking dead. “It is well known that zombies can’t operate in cold weather. It freezes their brains.” The pair calculated a 32.782412% increase in zombie attacks if CO2 increased to twice its pre-industrial rate. “Clearly, this is a very troubling result,” said Dr. Harrister, “If we don’t do something soon, the streets will be filled with blood.” I hadn't considered that. Recent efforts to involve more statisticians in decision making could better...

The lunatics have escaped the asylum. [via Prometheus] Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. . . There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. . . We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. Pielke asks: So whenever you hear (or invoke) an argument from expertise (i.e., "the experts tell us that we must ...") ask if we should listen to the experts in just this one case, or if we should turn over all decisions to experts. If just this one case, why this one and not others? If a general prescription, should we do away with democracy in favor of an authoritarianism of expertise? Discuss....

The earlier post Terraforming Gap noted the bizarre anxieties from an outpost of the climate change millennial movement. Here's another. We should fight like hell, but no matter what, we're going to have at least the consequences of a seriously altered climate to deal with. Thought that's true, I dislike the term adaptation. First, it seems to imply to me that we actually can adapt to climate change, that we can move smoothly from being people who live in this climate to people who live in that one. But we don't know what that climate will be like, or even if it will be a stable-but-different climate or an oscillating pattern of various weird climates. We have never had a stable climate. It's an oxymoron. Climate always changes and that's a good thing since otherwise our world would be dead, a frozen clinker, a space rock. Humans have been adapting to climate change all along. In fact, some experts...

See this report from an outpost of the climate change millennial movement. Rumors abound that the militaries and intelligence services of a variety of great power countries have, in the past, worked on dubious approaches to weather control. The idea of a geoengineering arms race may superficially parallel this line of thinking, but it's actually a very different concept. Unlike "weather warfare," geoengineering would be more subtle and long-term, and would have nothing to do with steering hurricanes or inducing local droughts; moreover, unlike weather control, we know it can work, since we've been unintentionally changing the climate for decades. Geoengineering as a military strategy would appear to offer a variety of benefits. Research can be done out in the open, taking advantage of civilian work on anti-global warming geoengineering ideas. If my argument that nuclear weapons and open-source warfare have made conventional warfare essentially obsolete is correct, climate-based warfare would offer an alternative non-nuclear weapon, one that would...