There was a report out a couple of months ago about striped icebergs. I saw it listed in Snopes where someone has suspected it was a joke. Not so. The London Times carried a report saying that it might be beautiful, but it’s created from dirt, animal excrement and fragments of dead bodies.

Keith Makinson, of the British Antarctic Survey, said that icebergs that seemed to show stripes were quite common in southern waters, but it was the first time that he had seen brown stripes. They are believed to be created when ice crystals form under the water and, in a process described as “inverted snow”, rise to stick to the bottom of the ice shelf. As the ice crystals form a new layer at the bottom of the ice shelf, which later fragments to float away as icebergs, tiny particles of organic matter are trapped.

A New York Times article says farmers are cutting back on corn somewhat in favor of soybeans:

Strong worldwide food demand, and the accompanying higher prices, are beginning to influence American farmers.

A government report released Monday indicated that farmers intended to make significant cuts in corn acreage in favor of soybeans. That could help ease shortages of cooking oil, which have hit poor countries hard.

The shift also signaled at least a temporary decline in the appeal in farm country of the renewable fuels boom, much of which is based on corn. High corn prices and low ethanol prices have turned ethanol production into a difficult business.

Food for fuel is getting hit pretty hard these days, but who eats switchgrass?

Oklahoma has secured 1,100 acres of land for the world’s largest stand of switchgrass devoted to cellulosic ethanol production. Planting will take place within the next 45 days.

Or, as one reader suggests, “Missouri City Produces as Much Electricity from Wind as Residents Consume.”

Quite a story, if you have the funding. At a cost of $9 million for only 1,395 residents, the system was built at a cost of almost $6,500 a person. I wonder if they had to build their own or rent an existing distribution system to all the homes.

They must have an excellent and steady wind source, too. It will be interesting to see how it works out for them. Maybe some backup power from the local power company? It just seems a little early to claim 100% before it’s been tried out for lengthy period.

It’s time to move from clothes dryer to clothes line. I had a load on the line yesterday and I ended up adding an extra pin to each shirt. I was afraid they would end up in the Johnsons’ yard with that wind. They must have dried in record time.

And then the power went off. First it sounded like firecrackers going off out in front. I ran to the window and saw wires blowing up and down and making contact every so often.

We all know why gasoline prices are so high. It’s because Congress has not allowed oiling drilling in Alaska. At least that’s what we know if we believe what the President recently said.

According to a post in Gristmill, the administration’s own Energy Information Administration found otherwise:

It is expected that the price impact of ANWR coastal plain production might reduce world oil prices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel [in 2025].

Gristmill points out that there are 42 gallons in a barrel, leading to a very slim trimming of the price. Besides, the same study suggested what might happen:

Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could countermand any potential price impact of ANWR coastal plain production by reducing its exports by an equal amount.

Next idea?

Andrew Leonard writes about a story in the Financial Times with the title “Camel demand up as oil price soars.” It’s about rising fuel costs in India:

In Berkeley, the price of gas nudges four dollars a gallon, and the citizenry rush out en masse to buy Priuses. But in the desert state of Rajasthan, it’s camels that are flying off the lot.

Leonard wonders when Clydesdales will make a comeback here in the States.

Rocky Twyman has what he hopes is a solution to high gasoline princes. He’s asking for divine intervention:

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it’s come to that.

“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”

Washington, D.C., San Francisco…Twyman could ride the bus or take the train.

Freakonomics reports on the possible connection between climate change and witchhunts. Really. Take this link to get to the links.

Times columnist Nick Kristof recently highlighted economic research showing that climate change may be driving up the rate of executions of suspected witches in East Africa.

Tough times in the Congo may have been behind the recent witchcraft panic there, where police arrested 13 people accused of using black magic to shrink men’s penises.

University of Chicago economist Emily Oster also found a surge in witch hunts during Europe’s “little ice age,” from the 1500’s to late 1700’s.

Dubner and Levitt also wrote of some other surprising climate results over the ages, ranging from property crime, to life expectancy, to civil war.

What other unexpected consequences, whether economic, social, political, or otherwise, should we expect to see from climate change?

Not appealing to you? Maybe not to you, but Oxfam is in the business of recycling bras.

Oxfam is an exception. Although it shares this general policy of not reselling underwear, its recycling plant in Huddersfield, Wastesavers, reveals that bras are “invaluable revenue-generating items” - not something your greying M&S job will have been called before. Clothes that cannot be sold in shops end up here, when the material is either recycled, if the item is damaged, or sold to traders who send them to developing countries.

The Britannica Blog calls this uplifting news.

Will going green cost or save? Critics charge that it will ruin the U.S. economy (worse than it already is) to cut back on carbon emissions. A story in the Oregonian (via Gristmill) discusses the new “green collar jobs” in the Northwest.

A quarter of all the petroleum ever consumed in the history of the world was consumed in the last 10 years.

That’s from a PBS Nova interview with David Greene of the National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ethanol ain’t going to do it.

Elizabeth Rosenthal has a great opening paragraph to her NYT story about the environmental costs of shipping food here and there around the world:

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

Rosenthal says that Kiwis from Sanifrutta, Italy, travel by sea in refrigerated containers: 18 days to the United States, 28 to South Africa and more than a month to reach New Zealand.

I’m reading an article about the possible demise (functional extinction) of the eastern hemlock tree due to a tiny Asian invader called the woolly adelgid. I’m aware of some problems with other species and there are some listed in the article that I never knew about:

A University of Virginia study discusses the scents produced by flowers and how they’re altered by pollutants in the air:

So instead of wafting for long distances with the wind, the flowery scents are chemically altered. Essentially, the flowers no longer smell like flowers.