I haven’t been posting as much as I usually do, since I have been preparing testimony for the Congressional hearing on Wednesday. The committee has finally posted details of the hearing here. It should be a rousing debate. At least I won’t be all alone on the anti-CTL side.

In the course of preparing, one of Climate Progress’s readers sent me some high-quality information on the high level of water use in the liquid coal process, which I though I’d share. The key factoid is five to seven gallons of water are necessary for every gallon of diesel fuel that’s produced (and double that if you coproduce diesel fuel and electricity from coal).

This comes from a very useful report: “Emerging Issues for Fossil Energy and Water” by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The key chart is (click on it for a clearer image):

GPM is gallons per minute, Bgal is billions of gallon, BPSD is barrels per steam day (whatever a “steam day” is), and I think 42 gallons per barrel (that’s what it is for oil, anyway). Ed Markey (D-MA) put this all in layman’s language on Grist:

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We have known for a while that global warming is making our weather more extreme, especially extreme heat, drought, heavy rainfall, and flooding. Now we have more predictions:

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

Perhaps that is why we have been setting records for tornados lately. This is especially bad news for this country because, as the study notes: “The central/east U.S. experiences the most severe thunderstorms and tornadoes on Earth.”

The full study, “Will moist convection be stronger in a warmer climate?” was published in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) earlier this month. The research has mixed implications for wildfires:

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