Lining its banks were millions of cylindrical holes full of water. On closer scrutiny, they turned out to contain black dust and soot that, having absorbed the warmth of the sun much faster than the reflective ice had, sunk through the ice, creating cylindrical holes.

Check out the full post and accompanying pictures here: NYRB Blog.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.
[Full Article]

Although the article doesnt mention it, one solution might be to just turn off the water currently being used for coal and oil fired power generation plants, although it might be easier just to use a magical sorcerer to pull invisible water off another mystical plane. But then, we could just have them transmogrify manure into clean coal, yeah!

“At least three factors likely contributed to the methane increase,” said Ed Dlugokencky, a methane expert at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “It was very warm in the Arctic, there was some tropical forest burning, and there was increased rain in Indonesia and the Amazon.”

[NOAA Report]

This report comes on the heels of recent worries about Global Warming from the Copenhagen talks, Energy and Nuclear Energy Companies leaving the U.S. Chamber of commerce in a temper tantrum over energy policy, recent tsunami and earthquake activity, and general scientific 4-degree rises and unscientific doomsayers. We’ll stick with the (real) scientists on this one.