Converting water and CO2 to hydrocarbons is not new...but...it takes energy and a lot of it. The reverse of this reaction is very widely used in industry to make hydrogen via steam reforming and the water gas shift reaction. TFA says that the petrol synthesizers are using electricity from the national grid but does not bother us with any details of how much electricity they are using. It is unquestionably a lot of electricity, though. So why isn't this a great discovery? I mean, it takes electricity and converts it into a hydrocarbon fuel that we can easily store and use, right? Well, this process is certainly a large net energy consumer in that the energy in the synthesized petrol is only a small fraction of the electrical energy used to make it in the first place. This means that we would need to generate huge quantities of electricity to produce the petrol. The very reason that we extract hydrocarbons (oil, gas, and coal) out of the ground in the first place is to obtain the energy contained within them so a process that consumes a lot of electrical energy to reproduce a small fraction of the original hydrocarbon energy used to create the electricity is...ridiculous...and would accelerate the generation of carbon dioxide. Now, if we lived in a world that did not generate electricity from hydrocarbon fuel directly or if we had large quantities of electrical energy that was unused and available from, say, wind turbines or tidal generators, then we could consider a process to create hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide and electricity...but that is not our world now or in the forseeable future. Electricity generation from wind turbines, solar energy, and the like is expensive, heavily subsidized, and would result in extremely expensive hydrocarbon fuel if it were used in a process such as that described in the article.

This seems harsh. Microsoft has done a lot more than collect tolls. They were the first to make spreadsheets and wordprocessor linked together in an 'office' package, they were the first to create Windows, and they were the first to see the importance of a workable digital rights management that allowed users to use copyrighted stuff on their computers, to name three things.

Madoff kept all of his billions of money in a single account at JP Morgan Chase bank. If they are going to bust his programmers, they should bust his bank too. Even for a bank the size of Chase, Madoff just leaving billions of dollars sitting in the account instead of investing it like he claimed to be doing must have gotten their attention one or a hundred times. If the bank looked the other way to hang onto a lucrative cash deposit, they are just as guilty as the programmers.

It's more religion than logic.

Exactly...the entire atmospheric sciences field is being stifled by the climate change zealots who attack anyone who even suggests that are questions yet to be answered or...even worse...hints at the heresy that the entire basis of the global warming model is...wrong. There are powerful political forces at play in the global warming debate...and they are driven by the wealthy oil have-not nations of the world. The actual science is just something to be used and manipulated to achieve their ends...enforced rationing...and the political power that accrues.

Most of what you see in the mainstream media is how we produce CO2, and how CO2 can heat the planet. But they don't link the two to show that the amount we produce does and has heated the planet and they don't talk specifically about how even a small increase can be disastrous other than a rise in ocean levels.

The atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased from 310 ppm to 384 ppm in 50 years. There has been a lot of handwaving about how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a 'greenhouse' gas that is absorbing heat and preventing it from radiating into space but nothing credible quantifies the effect of that change in concentration. To list just a couple of the problems with the theory:

1) There is already an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere to seemingly provide all of the infrared absorption possible by carbon dioxide. Adding additional carbon dioxide does not increase the absorption effect since there is already an excess beyond what is needed.

2) Uncondensed water vapor has a 'greenhouse' effect 4x to 5x times greater than CO2. Similarly, though, there is already an excess of water vapor in the atmosphere so increasing water vapor does not increase the absorption.

3) Absorption of infrared radiation by any of the gases in the atmosphere causes the absorbing molecule to heat whereupon it almost instantly collides with another molecule contributing to an increase in temperature of the gas mixture, members of which then re-emit radiation which then continues on into space. A (slightly) warmer atmosphere would radiately slightly more heat to space leading to a balanced flow of heat rather than a buildup of heat at ground level.

Satellite imagery from as recent as 1979 shows enormously more ice than we see today.

No, it doesn't.

The sensor drift only started in Jan 2009, and it was spotted within a few weeks.

Agreed that that's what TFA says, but how could they possibly KNOW that the problem only started a few weeks ago. They were unaware of the problem until they begain receiving emails from people disputing the numbers for something that was obviously wrong. The emailers recognized a problem based on independent knowledge of something that was in error. What if there was no one with that kind of independent knowledge last August? What if the sensor has been failing/drift ing intermittently for the last 3 years? What is troubling is that so many people such as yourself are willing to unquestionably accept such an obviously major problem as 'no big deal.' They were stating conclusions based on that sensor data to the effect that a drastic melting of ice was underway and urging dramatic rescue action. "The Earth is screaming!" was the way that one of the impartial NSIDC scientists put it in media reports.

The budweiser ads which DID air were bad enough. There was one about one of the budweiser horses picking up a tree in its mouth and galloping around and another one about a boy horse running off to the circus to meet up with his girl horse sweetie. Maybe the people in those high-price ad agencys who are creating this stuff are on drugs. Hey, people, you're selling BEER here. No one gives a sh#t about the horses. Show me a cold can held by some guy partying with his girlfriend in a bikini. Or, if you want highbrow, tell me how the beer tastes better because your trucks have great refrigeration or you ship it fresh or you filter it with great filters or something.