Comments not related to oil or natural gas go here please.
304 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum: February 21, 2018”
The Pacific side Arctic ice continues to get clobbered – Bering almost gone and now Chukchi falling fast (also Greenland Sea on the other side dropping quickly). It’s supposed to cool down a lot next week, but it’s all relative as the Arctic anomaly stays above 2K).
Columbia ensemble is indicating growing chance of El Nino next year.
From my chair, it looks like we can kiss our stable nurturing climate goodby. Humans have poked and prodded and perturbed our Earth systems to the breaking point, and these systems are now breaking. Business as usual guarantees an unstable climate and gut-wrenching consequences for all life on this planet.
Paul Beckwith
Tipping Elements – the Achilles Heels of the Earth System
Tipping elements are components of the Earth system of supra-regional scale which – in terms of background climate – are characterized by a threshold behavior. Once operating near a threshold, these components can be tipped into a qualitatively different state by small external perturbations. To compare them with the human body, tipping elements could be described as organs which drastically alter or stop their usual function if certain requirements, such as oxygen supply, are not sufficiently fulfilled.
The threshold behavior is often based on self-reinforcing processes which, once tipped, can continue without further forcing. It is thus possible that the new state of a tipping element persists, even if the background climate falls back behind the threshold. The transition resulting from the exceedance of a system-specific tipping point can be either abrupt or gradual. Its large-scale environmental impacts could endanger the livelihood of millions of people.
Again I have to have my serious doubts. These guys aren’t doing the basic homework which shows CO2 released through only a single volcanic eruption is much more than man can generate on purpose in years. Protecting ecosystems from tipping points is a worthwhile goal, but how to get the volcanoes to cooperate?
Julian, you have it completely backwards. Volcanoes (surface and under ocean) plus volcanic outgassing and volcanic lakes emit 0.645 billion tons CO2 per year. Mankind’s actions emit 29 billion tons CO2 per year.
Which number is bigger? We win by about 45 times, yippee! People are stronger than volcanos (numbers count).
In fact, even if we include the rare, very large volcanic eruptions, like 1980’s Mount St. Helens or 1991’s Mount Pinatubo eruption, they only emitted 10 and 50 million tons of CO2 each, respectively. It would take three Mount St. Helens and one Mount Pinatubo eruption every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting. That is not happening.
So put your volcano fairy tale in the garbage where it belongs and fact check before commenting.
I’ve had other reality and intellectually challenged humans bring up this point. What don’t they understand, or are they just mentally challenged?
Mostly it’s a troll thing. Then others repeat it as if it’s fact since they can’t be bothered to check valid internet sources.
These guys aren’t doing the basic homework which shows CO2 released through only a single volcanic eruption is much more than man can generate on purpose in years.
I think you are either a paid troll or you are the one who didn’t do his homework way back in high school chemistry and physics class. Your statement is false!
You don’t have a clue what you are talking about, while the people you are criticizing actually did their homework and much more. Which is why they have advanced degrees.
As for your doubts, they hardly qualify as serious.
Hi Julian,
Some youths are apparently suing Washington for failure to act on climate change. I just posted a comment about it with a link.
Is that great news or what? Hey, let’s celebrate. ^u^
In any case, looks like so-called government has their work cut out for them, ay?
Climate change may very well = death to large-scale centralized governpimps.
Oh happy days.
Hi Caelan,
I’m a long long way from a worshiper of big government and big technology, but you are sure as hell going to wish you had the both of them back if you live long enough to experience life without them.
If typhoid or yellow fever or malaria or malnutrition or something similar doesn’t get you, then your local big man will have you whipped and put to work as a slave, or else just have you murdered out of hand as a rabble raising pain in the ass.
Free speech is something that only really exists when you have a government committed to protecting it.
Hi Glen,
Large-scale centralized so-called government as it currently manifests is untenable, so your arguments for it are kind of moot, yes?
When I was on a city bus once, a ‘local big man’ was harassing a ‘local smaller man’ and so I went over and told the local big man that if he kept at it, he’d have to deal with both me and the other guy. Worked like a charm.
When I was in a garage band, while we were out at a donut shop, a local big man for some reason just didn’t like our guitarist, so he followed us out and threatened him just outside the shop. When he made his move, our guitarist went swinging and might have broken his nose, because I got some of his blood on my nice shirt in the process of breaking it up and saving the local big man from even more injury from our guitarist.
Reality– nature– almost never seems to work the way we might think. Haha, good for it.
Hi Caelan,
Another of the many things you apparently don’t know is the difference between a bully and big man, a mob boss, a strong man. A pack leader.
Such a man never fights alone, except for amusement. It’s beneath his dignity. He just nods at one or another of his home boys, who happily proceeds to beat the crap out of anybody who irritates him. In case you wonder, you get to be one of his homies by proving you can beat the crap out of anybody around.
If he thinks you represent a serious threat, you can expect to find yourself jailed, sold into slavery, or simply murdered out of hand, as suits his whim.
Of course societies ruled by such men do occasionally evolve into ones that limit the power of the head man……. but by that time they have the rudiments of a central government.
Actually I think you do know these things,but deny them and complain about everything as a matter of habit.
People like you aren’t at all rare.
Ohhh III seee… Thank you for elaborating on my cute little anecdotes below my actual point and clearing things up for me…
So it’s instead more like Hollywood, then? Like that evil alternative universe Star Trek episode thing? Where Sulu has this giant scar on his face and Spock has a round beard?
Anyway, looks like The Federation is long past its rudiments, ay? Oh dear… What to do what to do what to do…
I wonder what happens next! Fill us in, Glen, fill us in! Don’t keep us in suspense! ^u^
“The Unpredictable Species argues that the human brain evolved in a way that enhances our cognitive flexibility and capacity for innovation and imitation. In doing so, the book challenges the central claim of evolutionary psychology that we are locked into predictable patterns of behavior that were fixed by genes…”
😀
The forecasts for El Nino are meaningless as long as the researchers aren’t focussed on understanding the mechanism behind ENSO. They have no idea what sets the erratic period and can only anticipate the direction a few months in advance, if that.
Artic sea Ice thickness continued it’s decrease in September 2017 despite some increases in area.
Antarctic sea ice also low, leading to low global sea ice extent
In the Southern Hemisphere, after January 11 sea ice began tracking low, leading to a January average extent that was the second lowest on record. The lowest extent for this time of year was in 2017. Extent is below average in the Ross Sea and the West Amundsen Seas, while elsewhere extent remains close to average. The low ice extent is puzzling, given that air temperatures at the 925 hPa level are near average or below average (relative to the 1981 to 2010 period) over much of the Southern Ocean. The Weddell and Amundsen Seas were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit) below average. Slightly above-average temperatures were the rule in the northwestern Ross Sea.
Extent can be up to 85% open water for the same area of ice, just depends on how broken up and clustered the ice is at the time. Near minimum there is a lot of room to move around. Extent is a very poor indicator of ice area, unless the ice is all compacted together for some reason. It will only be a good measure once all the sea ice is gone.
Does that matter if you are looking at a trend – each year is likely to have similar dispersion on average, in fact I’d think as the ice got thinner and more mobile there would be a tendency for the ratio of extent to area to increase a bit if anything. Also I thought thickness was calculated as volume over extent (i.e. internal clear water areas counted as zero thickness ice for the average) but could be wrong.
As far as explaining variation in measurement and using accurate ways to portray the actual area or volume of ice, yes it matters quite a bit. Extent is more a measure of dispersion than ice area once the region is not fully covered with ice and deteriorates as the region has less ice cover.
The Arctic Ocean is mostly a bound system, bound by continental land surfaces so for part of the year extent may model area. Once the open water reaches a significant percentage of the region, extent can vary wildly dependent upon storms and currents.
You will see from this quickly made graph that even in the highly bound system of the Arctic errors of 40 to 75% are normal when measuring extent versus actual ice area. It’s good if one wants to show that there is more ice than actually exists. Then compound that area say with errors in thickness and a volume from extent would be completely erroneous.
Imaging the possible error in an unbound system such as Antarctica which has no outer boundary for the ice other than melt as it floats north.
From a scientific view, the extent has a very large systemic error even when using averages over a month (which the data in the graph represents).
The primary use of ice extent is for shipping danger limits, not for area measurements. But it is an easy to obtain measurement with historical significance that works when the ice cover is near 100 percent as it used to be, not now or in the future.
The x axis is years 1979 to 2016
George, the actual data obtained is ice thickness which is then multiplied by ice area (from ice concentration measurements).
There is no direct way to measure volume, the measures of ice height and thickness are from buoys and satellites as well as direct measurement of thickness from ships, submarines, satellites and buoys. Since the density of ice is fairly consistent, the height above water gives the thickness. Salt, water ponding, snow cover all cause errors in measurements which must be accounted and adjusted.
I can’t see using the height of open water since waves occur which are higher than the ice height or thickness. Maybe they have an algorithm to filter that data or just ignore that data.
A one meter thick block of ice only sticks 10 cm above the surface, easily overwashed by waves.
It’s all going to melt just like the lake near me is doing now, so it’s all just a wash (awash?). 🙂
NEW STUDY BRINGS ANTARCTIC ICE LOSS INTO SHARPER FOCUS
“In all, the study found an overall ice discharge for the Antarctic continent of 1,929 gigatons per year in 2015, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 40 gigatons. That represents an increase of 36 gigatons per year, plus or minus 15, since 2008. A gigaton is one billion tons. The study found that ice flow from West Antarctica — the Amundsen Sea sector, the Getz Ice Shelf and Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic Peninsula — accounted for 89 percent of the increase.”
Fun having both poles warm up at the same time isn’t it? All this without the help of black carbon to warm up the ice down south.
Now if we could only think of a use for all that ice crashing into the ocean. How about shipping it up to Chile for a water source? Put sails on the bergs and run up robotically, Elon Musk’s people should be able to handle that. Then solar and wind powered pumps and EV trucks could distribute it.
Now if we could only think of a use for all that ice crashing into the ocean. How about shipping it up to Chile for a water source?
Nah! The Chileans can supply all the water they need by harvesting only 4% of their available fog in the Atacama desert.
MIT develops advanced fog harvesting material that pulls 5x more water from thin air
And a bit of historic trivia: The first “conventional” solar still plant was built in 1872 by the Swedish engineer Charles Wilson in the mining community of Las Salinas in what is now northern Chile (Region II). This still was a large basin-type still used for supplying fresh water using brackish feedwater to a nitrate mining community. The plant used wooden bays which had blackened bottoms using logwood dye and alum. The total area of the distillation plant was 4,700 square meters. On a typical summer day this plant produced 4.9 kg of distilled water per square meter of still surface, or more than 23,000 liters per day. This first stills plant was in operation for 40 years!
You ruin all the fun we could have had using Elon’s magic tech toys. No robotic glaciers sailing into port and being scavenged onto autonomous EV tractor trailers 🙁
Don’t despair! I’m sure we can get Elon to start a fog harvesting company. BTW on a more serious note, as the atmosphere warms and holds more water vapor maybe with the help of wind and solar it can be harvested and frozen into large blocks of ice and stored somewhere. That might be a geoengineering project worth pursuing…you could even use Elon’s magic toys to transport it to places it might be needed. 😉
“maybe with the help of wind and solar it can be harvested and frozen into large blocks of ice and stored somewhere”
We used to call those glaciers. 🙁
Barbarians are violent, selfish, lawless and dangerous by nature. They are sometimes intelligent but are simpletons in their approach to life. If they want it they take it, if they can they kill and destroy or find ways to get what is others or enslave and use/abuse others of their own kind. The future is something one does not really think about or be responsible for in the barbarian mind, it’s all about what can be taken now.
Below are a series of films about the new barbarianism flourishing on parts of this planet. I say it falls short, the barbarians are among us and human actions toward the other species and the ecosystems of the planet make most of us simpleton barbarians. I say the collective everyday actions of humans makes them the New Barbarians whether they wear suits, drive nice cars, have nice houses or are out clearing rain forests and killing the animals there, or dumping pollutants in air, water, food and soil. It’s the simple barbaric view of life, a mindset that refuses the broad complexity and interrelationship of life and environment. They are easily picked out by their unthinking attachment to groups; political groups, religious groups, corporate groups and armed forces. They follow the loud and incessant self-appointed leaders and experts who themselves take narrow views of reality. Barbarians have a fixed mindset. They live as far outside moral and ethical modes as is possible in their circumstance. They are highly judgmental and critical of others. The New Barbarian bends truth and reality to achieve his/her own ends irrespective of others rights or needs.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Barbarians are violent, selfish, lawless and dangerous by nature. They are sometimes intelligent but are simpletons in their approach to life.
The original meaning of the word barbarian was simply those who didn’t speak Greek. later used to refer to all foreigners. In the waning days of the Roman Empire the Romans had simply become xenophobic…
LOL! Hey! Hey! Hey! just because my own ancestors the Huns were called barbarians by the Romans doesn’t mean they were unsophisticated savages. Check out the quality of their work…
Now it’s the barbarian next door, on the street, in a government or corporate position of authority, or elsewhere in a neighborhood near you.
“a “barbarian” may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, and insensitive person.”
I have known good Hungarians, bad Hungarians, smart and dumb Hungarians. Mostly they are just people that make great chicken dishes (I can almost taste it now, that little Hungarian restaurant in a small city I lived near, a hole in the wall place, hard to find, fantastic food). Makes me hungry just thinking of it. Is it lunchtime? Bye.
Slavic is related to words like Czech slovo, meaning word. Slavs can speak.
On the other hand you have Czech němec, meaning German. The original meaning is “no speak”. A lot of people who speak Slavic or Germanic languages have the Slavic name for German in various forms, like Niemiec, Nemec, Nemetzky, Nimitz, Niemitz, Nimtz etc.
In America we even have Nimitz class aircraft carriers, which I guess are the barbarian class.
Oh, I forgot Nemeth and Namath. Joe Namath was a Hungarian barbarian.
Yeah, but the real Hungarians obviously thought he was German. 😉
Very cool, thanks. And no, I wasn’t aware of this observation.
I remember photographing a supernova in the constellation of Leo, watched it for several weeks. I estimated the brightness as greater than the whole galaxy that contained it.
Happened 100 million years ago, so it was all over before I saw it.
High in the early night sky at the shoulder of Orion is that famous red star, Betelgeuse. Burning it’s candle on both ends, this giant star will go supernova. Will it harm life on earth or just give us a heavenly display? http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/supernove-distance
Every once in a while I come across a talk that really opens my mind to the truly incredible complexity of the workings of our marine geochemical and biological processes. This talk by Claudi Benitez-Nelson at this year’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) MarineSciences Meeting is one such talk. It connects quite a few dots. Among other things, it made me rethink how I had viewed the role of marine cyanobacteria in the C, N, P cycles up until now!
Claudi Benitez-Nelson, College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Marine Science Program and Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences at the University of South Carolina, will deliver “The building blocks of life: From oceanic to molecular scales and back again.” John Dabiri, Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, will present “Biological Propulsion in (and of?) the Ocean.”
Very good talk, thanks. Combine that with the sulfur cycle and the very important role of pyrite.
It seems to me that 1.5K point for permafrost melt is going to be quite important. What I can’t quite understand is that we are below that number but there are plenty of reports of the melt having started: maybe the Arctic amplification means an actual lower average is sufficient and once things start in a locally warm year they keep going? I haven’t seen a similar number for release of Arctic shelf free methane but that looks like it might be something with increased focus now given the recent evidence of how fast some of the peripheral sea ice can dissappear if the conditions set up right. I guess Arctic sea temperatures are much more localised and less correlated to global averages, and I’d imagine not known very accurately.
That’s because the 1.5K is a global average, but warming has been greater at high latitudes, so more permafrost melting.
The tipping point has been stated as 1.5K global average increase, not 1.5K local increase. Higher local temperatures would cause a thaw it would, or should, refreeze unless the highs are sustained.
Faustian bargain?! You can’t bargain with tipping points! Once you pass them you enter uncharted territory in a new stable state that may have unknown cascading consequences throughout multiple connected systems.
The Claudi Benitez-Nelson AGU MarineSciences Meeting talk I posted upthread is just one example of how little we actually understand about the system. We keep twiddling with the control knobs of those various systems at our peril.
As one of the commenters in the link you posted, so succinctly said:
Judy Cameron2 weeks ago – Shared publicly
The latest episode of Radio Ecoshock has an interview with Bjørn Samset, who is mentioned in the article I posted a link to.
Not a bad interview—
Let me see if I understand,– Are we not still the U.S.A.? One of the most resource rich country’s in the world (If not the most richly blessed with resource). Why should we be bargaining with anyone else for anything? Course that’s just my humble opinion here.
Maybe you should start by upgrading your reading comprehension skills…
Reality is a harsh mistress Pops.
Did you know that nearly 75% of Merikans age 17 to 24 are ineligible for the military due to obesity, other health problems, criminal backgrounds or lack of education. USA is indeed a nice piece of real estate, but it’s full of a lot of very low caliber folks. Sales of short buses are through the roof. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/19/pentagon-buildup-troop-recruiting-shortage-351365
A Faustian bargain could be that all those resources that make you so smug and entitled are destroying the environment, which means you are condemning your children and further descendants, concerning which you appear very pleased with yourself, to something quite unpleasant (maybe not quite as bad as being sucked down into hell while screaming for mercy, but who knows – as Mephistopheles says: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of out” – he was referring to having to spend time with people like you).
Resource rich? Tell me that when we stop importing large amounts of oil. Wonder why Bethlehem Steel had to import iron ore before it went bust. Maybe we should stop importing food. Better not, 15 percent of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 50 percent of fresh fruits, 20 percent of fresh vegetables and 80 percent of seafood.
“While the U.S. runs a sizable trade surplus in services (more than $230 billion last year), it’s dwarfed by the $771 billion trade deficit in goods: U.S. goods exports amounted to more than $1.6 trillion last year, but the country imported nearly $2.4 trillion worth of goods.May 18, 2015”
Resource rich? Sure, we have a lot of solar energy we don’t use.
INTERESTING BIT FROM DISCUSSION AT BITSOFSCIENCE.ORG
What we conclude about the global temperature trend:
1. A large part of atmospheric warming is still masked by (shorter-lived) cooling factors and by climate system inertia – therefore the CO2-coupled ‘Real’ Global Temperature is (much) higher than currently observed temperatures.
2. Recent global temperature records were not ‘peaks’, but rather corrections to a climatic temperature trend line that is (much) higher than the statistical trend line.
3. If atmospheric CO2 is stabilized around the current level (404 ppm) there is an uncertain, but possibly large amount of ‘pipeline warming’. This warming in the pipeline may lead to an additional temperature rise of more than 1 degree Celsius – additional warming that will manifest itself after stabilization of the CO2 concentration. The final temperature rise of the current CO2 concentration could be up to 2 or 3 times as high as the warming that is currently observed(!)
4. The current atmospheric CO2 level is a dangerous overshoot – to stay below internationally agreed climate targets (both 1.5 & 2 degrees) the CO2 concentration (that is currently still rising year by year) should not be stabilized but should in fact be lowered.
5. If we keep measuring climate change by the observed rise in live temperatures and the Earth & climate system responses this temperature rise causes (including extreme weather events) we keep underestimating the real scientific climate urgency.
Even if the warning is made simple and clear with no “maybe’s” or “possibly’s” I am not sure many would care or listen. Take for example the region around Mt. Vesuvius in Italy. There are many millions of people and one of the densest population centers in the world within a few miles of the very active volcano. Historically it has erupted dozens of times since it destroyed Pompeii and Herculeum, many of them severe. Yet people keep congregating in large numbers around it and within it’s reach.
Efforts by the government of Naples to get people to move out of the city by giving them a large sum of money were rewarded with only small response.
If people can live within reach of imminent well defined and documented doom, how can one get people to respond to larger but more diffuse long term threats with no documentation other than shaky predictions and poorly understood science?
Capital Weather Gang Arctic temperatures soar 45 degrees above normal, flooded by extremely mild air on all sides
By Jason Samenow February 22 at 10:30 AM
On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. “How weird is that?” tweeted Robert Rohde, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “Well it’s Arctic winter. The sun set in October and won’t be seen again until March. Perpetual night, but still above freezing.”
It was only 75F here yesterday (NOAA says 77 nearby) at 41N, windows open for the first time this season. Lake opened up quite quickly, good for the birds. A few flowers have popped up.
Prediction from the past, 2014.
One of the leading authorities on the physics of northern seas is predicting an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2020.
That’s about two decades sooner than various models for climatic warming have indicated the Arctic might fully open.
“No models here,” Peter Wadhams, professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge in England, told the Arctic Circle Assembly on Sunday. “This is data.”
Wadhams has access to data not only on the extent of ice covering the Arctic, but on the thickness of that ice. The latter comes from submarines that have been beneath the ice collecting measurements every year since 1979.
This data shows ice volume “is accelerating downward,” Wadhams said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to stop it from going down to zero.
Back in 2014, a noted professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge made a prediction at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland.
“By 2020, one would expect the summer sea ice to disappear. By summer, we mean September. … (but) not many years after, the neighboring months would also become ice-free.”
Wadhams later clarified that by “ice-free” he didn’t exactly mean the Arctic was going to look like the Baltic Sea in summer.
The scientific definition of “ice-free” is complicated. It is basically based on the amount of ice found in a number of grids when looking at the Arctic from space.
An “ice-free” Arctic, as defined by scientists, would remain full of floating ice in the summer, but the ice would be broken up enough that a ship could push through it.
Wadhams’ pronouncement was angrily challenged by one of the scientists modeling sea ice decline, but the elderly physicist stuck to his guns. He admitted he is predicting a very early opening of the Arctic, but this is “not a model”.
“I wasn’t issuing any threats to anyone.”
I think Wadhams will have the last laugh on those deskbound climate modelers who have been treating him like an old crank. He will probably be right within two or three years, better than their 30 years. Outdone by brains, data and a simple graph.
” ‘The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.’
‘The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.’
‘Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible.’
‘Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems.’
Quoted form ‘Energy and Equity’, Ivan Illich, 1978.”
That’s me on the bike in the pic (which is not uploading with this comment). I don’t own a car.
Race ya! ^u’
The pic (I am thinking that POB dislikes links coupled with pic uploads.)…
Spring Garden Road? – Didn’t think that would be your sort of area. On the picture they have to be less than 50 kB, but I’ve had a couple that got rejected for some other reasons.
Yes, Spring Garden. How did you know?
I’m somewhat temporarily here in the city and was initially in small-town Shelburne, not too far south of here.
I relocated to the province around the same time and possibly for similar reasons as JH Kunstler did to his town.
The sub 50KB image you see was tried with my main comment, so it did get through, just not with the main comment.
I’ve had a couple of extended visits there, went to a gym in Park Lane a couple of times – I remember particularly as I watched the Shuttle crash from an exercise bike the last time. It’s a lovely town, though I guess the weather is a factor. I don’t know Shelburne. I seem to remember a story that Noel Harrison, son of Rex and a minor actor and singer – Windmill’s of Your Mind – lived off grid for a long time down the coast there somewhere.
They may still have the gym in there.
The weather is ok here– better than Montreal, Ottawa or the interior– if not as good as out west in Vancouver or Victoria.
I haven’t owned a motor vehicle in ~30 years. I don’t miss not having a motor vehicle at all. Most of the places I go to are within a mile or two so I can bike or walk (winter). I think it’s insane that most everyone has to use a motor vehicle to get wherever they are going. That may explain the high rate of obesity here, northern Michigan, at ~40%. It certainly saves a lot of money not owning a motor vehicle.
It’s mostly eating habits.
To lose a pound of fat takes about 35 miles of extra walking. If a person walks 4 miles per day that is only 400 calories burned, less than a bagel with cream cheese.
If a person is 50 pounds overweight all it takes is about 240 calories per day over their calorie burn for two years to get there. That is only one bagel a day.
So every bagel means an extra 2.5 miles of walking to burn it off. Now if one adds cream cheese that is 4.3 miles to burn it off. If one eats that extra at every meal, it’s fat city or walk 13 miles per day not counting snacks or deserts/soda.
Better to just eat a lot of vegetables, stay off the starches and sugars. Keeps the cardiovascular system healthier too.
Cost per mile to walk is a fun way to look at it. Some foods only cost a nickel per mile while others can be over one dollar per mile.
Beans are 5 to 9 cents per mile while steak is about a dollar per mile. Tomatoes can be as much as $6 per mile. Watermelon comes out to 84 cents a mile and cantaloupes at about $1 per mile.
A Clif bar costs about 63 cents per mile walked.
Milk is about 11 cents per mile and cheese about 20 cents per mile.
Walnuts come in at about 25 cents per mile.
BTW, the energy used by an EV to take several people a mile costs about a nickel or less. What a bargain!
Your figures seem to make sense. I bust my ass on the bike every day, etc., and am still gaining weight.
Attached is a glam-shot of my lunch today, by the way– home made hummus with kale and peanut butter instead of tahini and multigrain taco chips. It wasn’t bad. What am I doing taking pics of my lunch? It was for a woman friend overseas… The things women make men do sometimes… Now I am at a cafe and enjoying a green tea latte with a cheap scone.
Starches and sugars are the major problem. Good after a day of extreme sports or laboring hard all day, but not good in the general modern life.
Agreed
Refined starches and sugars are bad, but whole grains provide lots of badly needed fiber. Refined oil isn’t good for us either. I know, the low fat vs low carb argument is just crazy, it’s like religion, politics, or climate change. The whole plant based diets seem the best (see What the Health on Netfilx).
My sentiments too, and likewise with not owning a motor vehicle in a very long time. I spent a pleasant night in Ann Arbor some time ago, incidentally.
Media Hacks? Any coverage in other Countries? GE Still own NBC?
“The work started last August to set up a dome-shaped cover. It is part of preparations for removing nuclear fuel from the reactor’s storage pool. A total of 566 spent and unused fuel units remain in the storage pool of the No. 3 reactor. On Wednesday, workers installed the last part of the cover, which is 17 meters high and 22 meters wide, and weighs 55 tons.” https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-22/tepco-one-step-closer-removing-nuclear-fuel-fukushimas-ruined-reactors
China leading the way
Sales of electric vehicles for 2017 was 468,000, a very uplifting figure. Trouble is sales in petrol and diesel cars was also up, so in 2017 more diesel and petrol cars were sold in China than any other year.
When you think that in 2000 AD China sold only 0.6 million cars and 2 million vehicles in total, the rise of vehicle production is greater than anything seen ever in the world. When friends went to China in 1995, bicycles were everywhere and the were few cars outside the major cities.
China added as many vehicles to it’s roads in one year as all the vehicles in the UK.
In 2025 China will produce 3/4 million electric vehicles, but will still add between 29 and 31 million diesel and petrol vehicles to it’s roads.
With the differential rate of increase in production between ICE and EV types, it could be all vehicles sold in China will be EV’s in 10 to 12 years. Probably more like 15 to 20 years as the rate of production increase will probably slow with time. That too would be a fantastic change.
There are some serious constraints to producing even 2 million electric vehicles this year.
Fish, I don’t normally agree with Peter but this time he has a point. By your logic, it follows that because they thought that platinum was scarce, but wasn’t, then any other metal they think might be scarce will enjoy the exact same fate… that is it will turn out not to be scarce at all.
The scarcity or abundance of cobalt and/or lithium has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the scarcity or abundance plutonium.
However, if you believe that eventually cobalt will be found in abundance outside the Democratic Republic of Congo, then you should make that case without mentioning platinum at all.
The case for lithium is far better. It is produced in 8 countries while cobalt is produced in just three, DRC, Russia, and Australia. However only small amounts are produced in Russia, (5,600 MT) and Australia, (5,000 MT) while the DRC produces 64,000 million tons per year.
So you see because of the severe political problems in the DRC, the exports of cobalt from that country is looking precarious indeed.
“The scarcity or abundance of cobalt and/or lithium has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the scarcity or abundance plutonium. ”
Really, you think I am that stupid? I guess you missed the point of the example.
Oh good god, don’t get so fucking defensive. From your post, I gathered the exact thoughts that I expressed. There was absolutely no other way to interpret your post.
The example was that everyone thought that plutonium would be very scarce. It was not. And you gave that example as to why Peter was wrong about cobalt. There was no other way to interpret your post.
So get over it!
Not plutonium Ron, platinum. It was an example of how people assume that because only so much is being mined now, that is the limit of things. Hardly ever true.
If you read the article Peter posted you might realize it is highly biased and not fact driven.
Since you don’t believe me look up the global USGS reports on lithium and cobalt reserves. I did, lots of places, lots of reserves.
There are always minor delays when mining has to be expanded due to increases in demand. Too much production kills the price.
Ron, the civilized world is not going to crash because of lack of energy, materials, food, alternatives or ability. If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.
Gonefishing
The article simply stated that there are problems with dramatically increasing the supply of Cobalt. It is not biased just because it shakes your happy electric fantasy land.
Do you really think an increase by one hundred times is actually doable?
Sorry, got the metal wrong but the point remains the same.
While it is true that there are some minerals or even metals we will never run out of, that is not the general case. Cobalt is one metal that we will very likely run out of. Or to be more accurate, we will run out of the stuff we can mine.
In 2015 the world had 7,100,000 metric tons of cobalt reserves. That year 124,000 metric tons of cobalt were mined. (See Appendix C for a more accurate definition of mineable reserves) That is less than 58 years of production.
Ron, the civilized world is not going to crash because of lack of energy, materials, food, alternatives or ability. If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.
Well hell, I do wish I had your deep insight into what the future holds. I can only say that I believe you are dead wrong. Of course, the crash will be caused by people’s behavior. But that behavior, especially their tendency to overpopulate the planet, is just part of human nature. Too many people will cause the destruction of the environment and the scarcity of the supplies needed to survive… especially food.
Do you really think an increase by one hundred times is actually doable?
Peter, I think that there will not be a problem at all. I think in 5 to 7 years there will be at least 3 different types of batteries available for EV’s not just lithium types. I also know that there is a type right now that dramatically reduces the amount of cobalt needed.
“It is not biased just because it shakes your happy electric fantasy land”
No problem, but it’s sad you have no broad based knowledge of present technology and have an inadequate vision of future tech already being developed. Makes for a dark and unrealistic view.
“If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.” ~ GoneFishing
The, as you write, ‘greed, stupidity and selfish agenda’, are systemic– by law/’government’-as-usual/BAU. Civilization, the way it is configured, appears self-crashing.
“It’s the system, stupid.”
(Not you, personally, just the expression to embellish the point.)
Meanwhile, some want to eat that ‘electric fantasy’ cake and have it too, as per/via The System…
Nevertheless, your demo’d irrationality in previous threads under a previous article has the effect of casting serious doubt over your apparent contentions about what might be possible– IOW, if irrationality has a certain level of effect over your thinking.
Caelan, civilization does not exist. Government does not exist. It’s all in their heads, just mental constructs, so stop yammering about the non-existent and start dealing with reality. People exist, water exists, computers and EV’s exist.
existence – the fact or state of living or having objective reality
The “system” does not exist. It is a set of mental constructs and agreements, but has no real existence in the world and is just an adult form of pretend.
Now nature exists, at least in the abstract, is that the “system” you meant?
“The, as you write, ‘greed, stupidity and selfish agenda’, are systemic– by law/’government’-as-usual/BAU. Civilization, the way it is configured, appears self-crashing.”
Those are characteristics of people, which they of course transfer to their mental constructs. It’s a big game of pretend, a self-induced mass delusion that is bounded by interactions with reality. If you can find a fast and easy way to change these machinations we call society and civilization, then please tell us. It would make eliminating the destruction of the natural world so much easier.
“Nevertheless, your demo’d irrationality in previous threads under a previous article has the effect of casting serious doubt over your apparent contentions about what might be possible– IOW, if irrationality has a certain level of effect over your thinking.”
Personally, I find it difficult to think of anyone more irrational than you.
Maybe you need to learn some better ways to socially interact, they seem fairly non-existent in your case. Or do you always sulk and whine when someone gets pissed off at your actions? It’s a learning process for most.
Of course if I am irrational (or merely appear so to you), then I have a lot of company – the whole human race.
So let’s all be irrational and make better decisions in the present (the past or future does not exist either, we can think about it but it will not be the future (I mean present) we envision ).
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality”
Iris Murdoch
Oh this internet/screen/distance thingy and your previous demo’s are what you would call ‘social interaction’ and/or ‘better ways to socially interact ‘? Oho.
And this after ostensibly suggesting or at least insinuating that there is no ‘interaction’ (per se?) that gives us, say, EV’s, civilization, so-called government or whatnot?
Imagine the universe working that way, with no gravity or other forces. Universe? What universe?
Maybe you would do well to look into the word, ‘interaction’, incidentally, seeing as you seem to be leveraging it a little dichotomously.
Once you’re done, let us know and then we can continue on if you wish with this imaginary interaction.
There are some systems in which a price rise does not result in an increase in production simply because the resource is clapped out. The gold market last decade for example. The gold price rose at an average of about 17% per annum year after year but gold production fell.
Cobalt production is heavily related to nickel and copper demand since it is found with those elements.
You will find the real information from the USGS reports and will be surprised at how widespread the sources for lithium and cobalt are across the world. Neither are rare elements.
I meant the actual reports from the USGS.
Using the figures you presented there is 731 years of production at current known reserve levels.
Enough for 320 million cars if we never discover another source of cobalt and never recycle any. No need though, other battery chemistries and structures will take over from lithium cobalt, several in the pipeline now.
>Power-sector [greenhouse gas] emissions now sit 28 percent below their 2005 peak, which puts the U.S. only 4 percentage points away from achieving its former Clean Power Plan target of 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, according to BNEF.
China invested billions in solar and wind last year, why do you think it’s emissions went up?
German emissions are down significantly over the course of the past decades. The economy is growing, and cheap oil means oil consumption is up. They also need to get out of the coal business, but are dragging their feet for political reasons. Meanwhile, however, the coal companies are going broke and diesel cars are about to get banned in the cities. Also the new government (if it ever convenes) may well do something about coal. Meanwhile renewable installations continue apace.
China is also growing very quickly. No country in the world has improved energy efficiency faster, and no country has added more carbon free generation. Also the are switching to electric cars. Also they are investing in huge carbon sequestration projects in the desert West.
So come back in five years. If you’re interested in watching the ticker tape, watch American “financial news” TV where every 0.1% change in the stock market is reported on breathlessly.
Yep, German CO2 emissions are about 23% below their 1990 level.
Yep, ICE’s still rule and the Chinese market is fast developing for both ICE and EV. But as time goes on and oil becomes scarcer, EV’s and hydrogen powered vehicles will become the norm. Predictions vary from 2030 to 2050, but several here predict oil production will be on the descent long before 2050.
By 2040 China should have a very large renewable energy grid and a very large fleet of highly efficient EV’s, electric motorcycles and electric bicycles. Same with India. Barring major wars and such.
Not too sure about the US, but they will be forced to change their habits too. The big question is what is going to happen in African countries in the next two decades. They are in line for major development of energy and infrastructure.
That is a good sign, but let’s wind the clock back a few years to 2011. Back when they thought that no more CO2 producing infrastructure could be produced after 2017 or up goes the temperature past 2C. Guess what, it’s 2018 and lots of CO2 producing infrastructure is being built around the world. I notice too that the graph in the article tops out at 32 GtCO2, we were at 36 GtCO2 back in 2014. Not good news, especially since 2017 numbers are expected to rise compared to last year. We are still following the 6C trajectory on the graph.
Yesterday, the 2011 edition of the World Energy Outlook was published by the International Energy Agency. This annual publication is generally seen as the most authoritative source of predictions regarding future energy demand and developments. This year’s edition focuses strongly on the need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, as demonstrated by the following quotes from the executive summary:
##Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system
##In the New Policies Scenario, the world is on a trajectory that results in a level of emissions consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of more than 3.5°C.
##Without these new policies, we are on an even more dangerous track, for a temperature increase of 6°C or more.
##Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permissible by 2035 in the 450 Scenario are already “locked-in” by our existing capital stock
##If stringent new action is not forthcoming by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035, leaving no room for additional power plants, factories and other infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon, which would be extremely costly.
The last point essentially means that global CO2 emissions must peak in 2017 to limit global warming to 2°C, the globally agreed target. This means that no new power plants, factories and other carbon emitting infrastructure can be built after 2017, anywhere in the world, including China, India and other fast growing nations. It also means that policies must be implemented to ensure that emissions actually start declining after 2017. See the graph below, from the presentation to the press:
Not so long before that 1K was being stated as the limit before dangerous warming. And I think all those estimates above omitted any consideration of failing land sinks or potential permafrost and subsea methane releases which are becoming increasingly apparent.
Now George, we don’t want to terrify the children. 🙂
So between you and me, I agree, most of the more than 40 feedbacks are underestimated or not included at all in many predictions. I will stick with the several Arctic specialists that call for major changes in the climate system as the Arctic reaches open water summers. We are already seeing the precursors of those changes.
The thought of monsoons shifting and failing is just too devastating for people and huge numbers of other species for me to dwell on. Desert drying and desert growth is an ongoing situation.
Oh well, on a more positive note the northern migration is starting here. Mergansers and Swans just showed up and with them a bald eagle was hunting the open water on the lake. Lots of bird song in the forests this morning. Plenty of species still alive and we need to throttle back and change our activities to help give them more of a chance.
World Birth and Death Rates
Estimated 2011
Birth Rate——————————— Death Rate
• 19 births/1,000 population———— • 8 deaths/1,000 population
• 131.4 million births per year———– • 55.3 million people die each year
• 360,000 births per day—————– • 151,600 people die each day
• 15,000 births each hour—————- • 6,316 people die each hour
• 250 births each minute—————– • 105 people die each minute
• Four births each second of every day- • Nearly two people die each second
Past and future estimated population growth in millions. Notice that the rate of population growth actually increased between 2010 and 2020. Population estimates
1910 AD 1,750
1920 AD 1,860— 110
1930 AD 2,070— 210
1940 AD 2,300— 230
1950 AD 2,557— 257
1960 AD 3,042— 485
1970 AD 3,712— 670
1980 AD 4,453— 741
1990 AD 5,291— 838
2000 AD 6,094— 803
2010 AD 6,868— 774
2020 AD 7,656— 788
2030 AD 8,321— 665
2040 AD 8,874— 553
2050 AD 9,306— 432
So the rate of population growth is actually increasing during this present decade. But they expect it to start falling again next decade. The big question is why is it increasing now?
* 1910 marks the beginning of more accurate population census counts: United Nations and U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Source from Historical Estimates.
Meanwhile we’re maintaining healthy growth in atmospheric CO2:
January 2018: 408.05 ppm
January 2017: 406.07 ppm
And, not wanting to be left behind:
• The world’s oceans reached their highest temperatures recorded yet in 2017.
• Ocean waters were significantly warmer than in 2015, the previous record holder.
Don’t worry Ron, once the world converts to digital sex the population will diminish. 🙂
Basically it’s three factors, the length of life has been increasing, the rate of children reaching maturity has increased and the global fertility rate hasn’t fallen quite far enough yet . The total fertility rate has fallen from 4.9 in the 1950’s to about 2.3 currently.
Don’t worry Ron, once the world converts to digital sex the population will diminish.
Don’t bet on it! We already have technology for creating synthetic organisms from digitally encoded and edited DNA…
Just download your DNA apply CRISPR send it via email to your digital sex partner, male or female, won’t matter, mix it with theirs and create a new genome you like. transcribe, insert in egg which had nucleus removed, and voila! Good Luck! 😉
Missed the joke, eh?
Digital sex just went viral… 😉
> The big question is why is it increasing now?
Because the death rate is falling so quickly. The population pyramid is no longer growing at the bottom, but growing at the top.
I’ve set it at 1965. Push the +5 button repeatedly to see how the shape of the pyramid changes. You can see the bulge slowly moving up from the 0-4 age group and dispersing among the higher age groups.
Then try a country like Bangladesh, where the birth rate fell dramatically in the 80s. It’s population is still booming, but the growth is all in the higher age groups.
Alimbiquated has nailed it.
There’s a bulge moving thru the overall population statistics like the bulge in a snake that’s swallowed a rat.
I’m somewhat optimistic that with the continued spread of dirt cheap communications, the birth rate in very poor countries will continue to fall, and fall even faster than anticipated by most people who model human population.
I never thought I would say anything much in favor of television, but in recent times I have come to understand that when extremely poor people watch tv and see how other people in other societies live better, they shortly figure out that it’s better to have two pairs of pants or two dresses, and two pairs of shoes, and one or two kids at the most, and enough to eat, than to have half a dozen kids and one dress and one pair of pants and no shoes.
There’s an old true story documented in a book I have around someplace about a propaganda film the old USSR commies produced which included some shots the millions of cars the capitalist hogs forced poor American workers to produce.
Of course it was never actually broadcast in the old USSR, because the film showed the parking lot at Detroit factories that build cars……. with thousands and thousands of cars obviously driven there by the workers.
I wonder if they shot the guy who put this footage into the film in the first place. He must have been a real Russian patriot, determined to demonstrate to anybody who actually saw this footage that American ( Western ) working people were obviously filthy rich by Russian standards.
Most likely they just put him to sweeping the floors and cleaning toilets if his bosses liked him. Otherwise……. Siberia.
If the genetic scientists find the right DNA switches we might see the top of the population pyramid get really fat as lifespan is extended. Think about that one.
Then we’ll all starve to death, or kill each other off.
I’m starting to think that mankind’s only hope is sequestering carbon in topsoil, like these Belgians at OZG.
You can switch to English. They say they can turn a stretch of Sahel clay soil into a forest in 7-10 years, mostly just by digging swales (trenches basically) on contour and scattering a few seeds.
They publish satellite views of their projects and get paid by someone to sequester the carbon.
Soil can hold 10% carbon and already holds about three times as much as the atmosphere. Not all of that is organic, of course. Anyway in my book, fixing the wrecked soils of North Africa, the Mideast Southwestern US, and Western China are probably the best hope we have. It’s cheap and easy, and the tech exists.
I guess the only people who will take action is the Chinese.
I’m with you on this—–
I don’t think anybody has posted this yet. The news itself has been covered upthread, but this has a great graphic image, plus text explaining how to read it.
Ancient Italian Fossils Reveal Risk of Parasitic Infections Due to Climate Change
“We found that pulses in sea-level rise occurred on the scale of hundreds of years, and that correlated to rises in parasitic trematodes in the core samples,” Huntley said. “What concerns me is that these rises are going to continue to happen and perhaps at accelerated rates. This poses grave concerns for public health and ecosystem services. These processes could increase parasitism in not only estuarine systems but also in freshwater settings. Such habitats are home to the snail hosts of blood flukes, which infect and kill a million or more people globally each year. What’s scary is it could potentially affect the generations of our kids or grandkids.”
SEA-LEVEL LEGACY: 20 CM MORE RISE BY 2300 FOR EACH 5-YEAR DELAY IN PEAKING EMISSIONS
“Man-made climate change has already pre-programmed a certain amount of sea-level rise for the coming centuries, so for some it might seem that our present actions might not make such a big difference — but our study illustrates how wrong this perception is,” explains lead author Matthias Mengel from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Every delay in peaking emissions by five years between 2020 and 2035 could mean additional 20 cm of sea-level rise in the end — which is the same amount the world’s coasts have experienced since the beginning of the pre-industrial era.”
I’m quite sure there’s some good money to be made of EVs, which perhaps contributes to the enthusiasm many people have for them, but they won’t change the end game.
Not so fast! I take issue with some of Tim Murphy’s points, the following paragraph being my primary area of disagreement:
“We know that supplies of petroleum are tightening, that the trend in costs is against us, and that burning oil in cars isn’t a good idea in climate terms. Faced with this, the powers-that-be could do one of two things. They could start to wean us off cars, by changing work and habitation patterns, and investing in public transport. Alternatively, they can promise us electric vehicles, conveniently ignoring the fact that we don’t, and won’t, have enough electricity generating capacity to make this plan viable, and that we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks. At the moment, every indication is that they’re going to opt for the easy answer – not the right one.”
The first sentence is okay, we can agree to that. The next two sentences I have a problem with. Who are “the powers that be”? The governments or the industries that hold sway over them? I see no indication that the “powers that be” want to wean anybody off cars, even in the centrally planned economy of China.
From my perspective, in my tiny island nation, the response to rising levels of traffic and travel delays in the capital city has been to undertake road improvement works and attempts at improving traffic flow through certain intersections. An attempt was made to improve the bus system but, just this past week one of the headlines was JUTC faces $7b in losses (JMD 7 billion = USD 55 million). This is as the public transport situation on this island seems to be evolving into one where those who cant afford a car, cram themselves into a shared car to get where they want to go. The goal of many people seems to be either to be able to profit from the shared ride arrangement by owning or operating one or to have one’s own private car and not have to use shared rides. At the same time, there seems to be an abundant supply of “new” cars, many of which are actually used cars from the Japanese Domestic Market. I’ve even noticed what I consider to be a ridiculous situation of a used car dealership opened in the last three months or so in a depressed rural community with about five cars in stock! So much for “weaning us off cars”!
In the face of it, since there seem to be no moves afoot to “wean us off cars”, what are our alternatives? Surely just barging ahead with an increase in the number of ICE powered cars is not sustainable? I would rather see an attempt to replace every ICE powered car with an EV than nothing. At least there is the possibility that we will be able to charge EVs with renewables and nuclear. In the absence of EVs, what is going to provide fuel for ICEs when oil supplies can’t keep up with demand? Biofuels?
On to the next two sentences in the quoted paragraph. A little over a year ago, I posted about some rough calculations I did back in April, 2016 on the amount of additional electricity that would have been required if all vehicle miles traveled in the US in the year 2014 were done using EVs with the equivalent power consumption of a Tesla Model S. The original figure was 17.2% with accommodation for charging losses taking that to 18.9%.
In May 2017 Tony Seba and his team published a report , RethinkX (PDF). From page 52 of that report:
Electricity demand in the U.S. will increase by 18% compared to
BAU
Charging A-EVs will increase electricity demand. Our estimates show that
the A-EV fleet required under TaaS will use 733 billion kWh of electricity per
year in 2030. This represents an 18% increase in total electricity demand
in the U.S. in 2030, 120 compared to the business-as-usual projections of
the U.S. EIA (see Figure 19). While A-EVs will account for a relatively small
share of electricity demand in the U.S., three quarters of growth in electricity
demand will come from the expanding A-EV fleet. It is important to note that
the increase in demand (kWh) does not imply a need to increase the capacity
(kW) of the existing infrastructure. This is because the existing power system
is built for peak demand, not efficiency. By scheduling A-EV charging in
off-peak periods, we believe that the existing infrastructure can absorb
an 18% increase in demand without material investments in generation
infrastructure.
On Monday, the EIA should be releasing a new edition of their Electric Power Monthly, with data for December 2017. This will complete the data for 2017 so, in my report I plan to show the updated graph for annual electricity production percentage share from the various sources. The trend in monthly percentage shares is pointing to an annual contribution from solar of slightly less than 2% and more than 6% from wind. Looking at the annual data up to the end of 2016, the contribution from non-hydro renewables has risen from 2.15% in 2005 to 8.42% in 2016 with the year to date figure for 2017 standing at 9.62%. If the adoption rate of solar were to stay the same or increase a much larger share of US electricity production would be coming from solar by the time the EV fleet gets to a size that is significant. Murphy’s assertion that “we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks” doesn’t appear to have much merit.
The problem as I see it is that time is not on our side. Between depletion and the need to arrest CO2 emissions, we could find ourselves a day late and a dollar short on achieving a transition away from fossil fuels. IMO more renewables and EVs might have an add on effect of highlighting the need to conserve energy resources and reduce the unsustainable growth. I have this concept of a solar energy diet that is different from the one found using internet search engines. I view my solar energy diet as the amount of energy that can be harvested using my own resources or on my behalf using shared resources. For me to claim the right to use more energy, I have to participate in harvesting more, either as an individual or as a collective with other people. It’s a rather sobering concept.
Also, there is the utter falsity of this statement:
“we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks.”
Islandboy – I think you agree with what the author is broadly saying, I certainly do – the efficient way would be to develop renewable power generation and reduce miles driven overall by offering attractive alternatives; the inefficient way is to promote EVs while expanding fossil fuel power generation to meet the demand and spending money on infrastructure that supports rising personal vehicle use, but mostly this second course is what is being pursued.
Also from what I see this is spot on:
…We seem incapable of thinking or planning in any terms that aren’t predicated on perpetual growth. We resort to self-delusion instead.
First, we thought that we could create growth by making debt ever cheaper, and ever easier to obtain. Even after 2008, we seem to have learned nothing from this exercise in credit adventurism.
Since the global financial crisis (GFC), we’ve added monetary adventurism to the mix. In the process, we’ve crushed returns on investment, crippling our ability to provide pensions. We’ve accepted the bizarre idea that we can run a “capitalist” economic system without returns on capital. We’ve also accepted value dilution, increasingly resorting to selling each other services that are priced locally, that add little value, and that, in reality, are residuals of the borrowed money that we’ve been pouring into the economy.
The first imperative, then, is recognition that the economy is an energy system, not a financial one, …
“The first imperative, then, is recognition that the economy is an energy system, not a financial one, …”
Which is why I believe that there should be as much investment in renewable energy solutions as is humanly possible. If the energy system that forms the basis of the economy fails, I fear the results will be ugly.
If the “funny money” that is being used to keep things going ATM is used to build a sustainable, renewable energy economy then it will have done some good. Unfortunately the LTO debacle is an indication that this is not what is being done in some cases.
“Which is why I believe that there should be as much investment in renewable energy solutions as is humanly possible.” ~ islandboy
Like food? If so, I agree.
Once we can get the superlocal food thing humming along nicely, we won’t have to go to work, or as much, such as when the jobs or pensions continue to dry up; or worry as much about decaying roadway infrastructure, or when the trucks stop running or their electric replacements don’t work as promised. Etcetera.
And that kind of setup will last ‘forever’ and won’t cannibalize as much of the leftover fossil fuels, whereas industrial buildup will just lead to a whole lot of other forms of pollution, resource wars, and relatively-useless trinkets-for-the-relatively-so-called-wealthy left lying around, maybe before their ~30-year lifespans. Etcetera.
“The mandate went on to confirm that this was indeed its intention by calling for 1.325 gigawatts of energy storage without specifying how many hours the gigawatts were to last for. Apparently this was unimportant. According to recent reports California is about to call for two gigawatts more ‘storage’, with gigawatt-hours again unspecified. It‘s questionable whether California even understands what energy storage is.
Now there’s no question that high levels of intermittent renewables generation will require fast-frequency-response capabilities to ensure grid stability during the day, but what is California doing about seasonal storage, which makes up 99% of its total storage problem?
Absolutely nothing. It has yet to recognize its existence.“
The push for electric vehicles threatens to become a classic instance of burning the lifeboats. Here’s why.
First, let’s dot some i’s and cross some T’s!
There is little doubt that, “Houston we have a problem” with a global economy that continues to push an ‘Infinite Growth’ paradigm on a finite planet. I think the majority of readers here already have a grasp of basic notions of thermodynamics and population dynamics. If anyone should need a quick refresher watch Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_8b6ej0U3g
However this statement from the link is an example of totally missing the boat, pun intended!
We know that supplies of petroleum are tightening, that the trend in costs is against us, and that burning oil in cars isn’t a good idea in climate terms. Faced with this, the powers-that-be could do one of two things. They could start to wean us off cars, by changing work and habitation patterns, and investing in public transport. Alternatively, they can promise us electric vehicles, conveniently ignoring the fact that we don’t, and won’t, have enough electricity generating capacity to make this plan viable, and that we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks. At the moment, every indication is that they’re going to opt for the easy answer – not the right one.
Bold mine
So to be very clear, there is no doubt whatsoever that a direct substitution of privately owned EVs for ICE vehicles, especially if they are powered by fossil fuel powered electric power generating plants is just a continuation of BAU and won’t save our sorry little asses from a global meltdown type end of civilization event.
Disclaimer: I even have a nagging hunch that we are already well past the point of no return on saving our current global civilization and there will be a major reset and die off in humanity’s near term future. Case in point, I consider the idea that we will somehow support 10 billion humans on this planet to be pure science fiction. I could of course be wrong…
However, I find this notion that we will somehow attempt to power EV’s with fossil fuels, to be a sign of total lack of imagination and lack of understanding as to how technology has been progressing. Now, as Tom Murphy so elegantly explained even if we do use every physical efficiency trick and alternative energy to power our civilization, we will still have to deal with the laws of thermodynamics.
What we needed to do 50 years ago was embark on a massive program to keep human population from going past 3 billion. That ship has obviously sailed and as far as I can tell, there never was a plan to put any lifeboats on that ship!
Cheers!
Fred, do not believe Tom Murphy’s wild exponential extrapolations about civilization.
They do not even fit current reality.
As far as EV’s go they can be built, run until the wheels fall off and be recycled on just the energy we now use to refine oil. With some better design, they could become an energy source.
There is no real need to continue on the path of present civilization. Only greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance stand in the way.
Time to reduce my sloth. Have a great day, sunny and warm up here in February.
Fred, do not believe Tom Murphy’s wild exponential extrapolations about civilization.
I don’t! I take them with more than a few grains of salt. Realities have changed considerably since he gave that talk almost 8 years ago and I’m sure they will continue to do so, but regardless, I don’t buy the possibility of continued growth either.
As far as EV’s go they can be built, run until the wheels fall off and be recycled on just the energy we now use to refine oil. With some better design, they could become an energy source.
For sure! Doesn’t mean we don’t need a completely different steady state economic model within which to achieve such goals! Politcs still trumps physics… remember that clip of Yuval Noah Harari’s Davos talk you posted the other day. I think you agreed we were fucked! Even though technology is not deterministic, we can’t afford to be complacent, eh?
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
There is no real need to continue on the path of present civilization. Only greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance stand in the way.
Right! Please wake me up when you see evidence that the majority of Merikans are starting to embark on that other path.. Right now we still have to get past Trump, MAGA, Pruitt’s EPA and the NRA, which admittedly, is pretty much synonymous with greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance standing in the way.
“Right now we still have to get past Trump…” Decades of whitewater kayaking taught me to go around obstacles and use the large forces to one’s advantage.
Since you are slinging quotes:
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” ~Bertrand Russell
“The problem with America is stupidity. I’m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself.” Unknown
” We are really not that smart, it’s just that a lot of other people make us feel that way.” GoneFishing
I don’t think removing the labels will make any difference at all…
Here’s a couple of examples of people not reading some rather obvious signs/labels to begin with…
Are there several repair shops within two blocks of that spot?
LOL! Trust me on this, that particular spot is not an exception. I got my CDL back in 90’s and I never once hit the top of my truck on a bridge or overhang of any sort. If there was no sign, I would get out of my truck and find a way to check the clearance. Unfortunately there are a lot of drivers that don’t.
“With some better design, they could become an energy source.”
You think EVs will produce more energy than they consume? Magic porridge pot?
I’m pretty sure GF meant enegry storage medium and not a literal source of energy… At least that was what I was thinking. But let him defend his own thoughts himself.
Nope no magic, just using tech ideas that have already been accomplished. As the Dutch college youngsters have done with lower efficiency PV panels making a street legal multiple passenger car that runs on it’s own solar footprint and when just sitting around, acts as source of power. They used 22 percent efficiency panels on the car as far as I can tell.
If we use the high end triple layer panels (around 40 percent efficient), EV’s can easily be built with smaller batteries and the vehicle can be used as a power source when sitting around. Meaning it will generally produce more power than it needs for average driving (12,500 miles per year). Overall, it will be a net positive energy car under normal conditions. Just don’t park it in the shade or garage (except at night).
Of course, one can always charge it up in the normal way if needed.
BTW, I think the Dutch car is now in production
I thought most here knew about this, it has been discussed here several times. Fred knows about this one, a five passenger solar car with a 1000 km range on a sunny day!
Although Stella Vie has a smaller battery and a solar array that is one square meter smaller, it still achieves a range of a 1000 kilometers on a sunny summer day in the Netherlands. The surplus energy generated by Vie can be supplied back to the house or electric grid. The smart charging and discharging system keeps track of energy prices and the user’s agenda in order to find the optimal time to charge or discharge. Stella Vie’s charging status can also easily be checked through its connection with a smart thermostat https://solarteameindhoven.nl/stella-vie/
There are always possibilities. This one is reality.
Yep, I did post about the Stella Vie some time ago. To be fair the source of energy is our own fusion furnace in the sky and that energy is captured by PV panels and the energy is stored in the batteries to be used as needed for powering the car or whatever else is necessary. So no magic here!
The only magic I know of is our economic system. It magically makes my money worth less over time. We steal from the future and the monetary system steals from the past.
The commercial venture to produce a version of the Stella Vie is called Lightyear. 4WD and up to 800 km range on direct sunlight, no power plants involved and it can even put power to the grid or home on it’s off days.
Dutch company Lightyear launches four-wheel drive solar-powered car able to drive for months without charging.
Currently, all cars of the world combined drive one light year, every year. That is 9.500.000.000.000 km. Every year. Powered by fossil fuels. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption of electric cars so that by 2030, one light year will have been driven electric. To that, we are providing a scalable solution.
From a fossil fueled powered light year to a solar powered light year.
And I have to very strongly agree with this observation!
Assumptions are the mother of all f*ck-ups
…But our biggest error was not realizing when an idea (battery electric ships) does not work for a certain use-case (intercontinental shipping), this does not mean it is a bad idea! Sometimes, you have to think outside the box!
Anyway. On the same day I read the article about battery-powered ships, Futurism wrote an article about Lightyear. In this item they referred to another article from last year by an engineer who concluded that solar powered cars would not work, since they would only have 1.28 horsepower available:
He made one big assumption about the way solar power is harnessed as well:
You do not have to use the power from the solar cells directly. You can store it in a battery, and then use it while driving. And here is the trick: How long do you drive your car, and how long is the sun shining every day?
That, combined with a genius engineering team, will provide you with a car that can drive up to 10.000 kilometres per year on the power of the Dutch sun.
The same kind of head up the ass thinking that is the source of the constant whining about solar and wind not working because the sun doesn’t shine at night or that sometimes there is no wind so we need fossil fuels as back up. No we absolutely do not. So get over it already!
“This one is reality.” ~ GoneFishing
For how long?
There are a lot of things we can do right now, but at what costs/tradeoffs?
I heard on the global climate change coverage from CPAC several good reviews of The Inconvenient Facts book with the geologist who wrote it. Has anyone here read this book yet?
Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know
by Gregory Wrightstone (Author)
You have been inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks and ”experts” saying that our climate is changing for the worse and it is our fault. Increases in droughts, heat waves, tornadoes and poison ivy – to name a few – are all blamed on our ”sins of emissions” from burning fossil fuels and increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet, you don’t quite buy into this human-caused climate apocalypse. You aren’t sure about the details because you don’t have all the facts and likely aren’t a scientist. Inconvenient Facts was specifically created for you. Writing in plain English and providing easily understood charts and figures, Gregory Wrightstone presents the science to assess the basis of the threatened Thermageddon.
The book’s 60 ”inconvenient facts” come from government sources, peer-reviewed literature or scholarly works, set forth in a way that is lucid and entertaining. The information likely will challenge your current understanding of many apocalyptic predictions about our ever dynamic climate.
You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it. The very framework of the climate-catastrophe argument will be confronted with scientific fact. Arm yourself with the truth.
You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it.
Yes, the planet is getting better and better every day. Deserts are shrinking, the rainforests are being restored because loggers are planting trees instead of cutting them. The ocean fisheries are being restored because the world has stopped eating seafood. Topsoil around the world is getting deeper because of some mysterious reason that we cannot explain. Water tables are rising around the world. Yes, the planet is improving because CO2 is rising.
And if you believe that shit then you are just too fucking stupid to get in out of the rain.
I’m pretty sure the author used to be a rabid “it’s cooling” denier. He’s now gone to the “it’s warming and it’s good” camp. Next should be “it’s not the the CO2”. At least if all the denier delusionists take this on board we can stop arguing about whether it’s warming up and there will be no need for you to keep issuing local weather forecasts of cold weather of proof of your dumbness (because following the logic that would mean things must be getting worse – not that logic features very highly for you).
This book was the topic of the day 6 days ago over at WUWT. The mouth breathing knuckle draggers don’t have much creativity of thought.
I can understand Al Gore not wanting us to know the stuff in that book.
Some of my neighbors keep doing their best to melt the ice on the planet. Drill and Drive is the new slogan. Also No Coal No Lights.
Also the Koch bros slogan “Your Warm, We’re Rich”
Keep on warming the planet, the hippos want to get back in the Thames. 🙂
Britain is set for the coldest February week in five years as freezing air arrives from Russia.
On Saturday temperatures fell as low as -5.5C in Anglesey, north Wales and the cold spell is expected to intensify from Sunday night into Monday.
The Met Office has issued an amber cold weather alert, which warns of increased health risks to vulnerable and elderly people.
It has also issued two yellow weather warnings for snow.
Snow showers are expected in large parts of the UK on Monday and Tuesday, which could cause travel delays and cancellations, power cuts and problems with mobile phone services.
Meanwhile, big chunk of the US is experiencing April in February. Won’t go below freezing at all here at 41N for the next week.
Went for a long snow walk about 20 miles East of Bend—-
Not another human, or track of a human.
It is White here, after a snow challenged Winter.
It’s actually quite a pleasant change here, not going to last long though. If the only way you can support your denier delusions is to look for “the coldest in five years” you really are getting desperate. The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there, so this is likely to be a more regular occurrance – more so for the extreme heat records, the cold here is not nearly as low as some of the winters we had in the sixties.
The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there…
Does that mean the Arctic Vortex has reproduced and there will be more cold to spread around the globe? 😉
we were right on the edge of the baby-vortex (in US) and a major warm front down southeast. we were joking here that we might have a record high and a record low in the same day as that line oscillated back and forth. Went from 70F at around 5am to 32F by 7pm. Its very often now that the high for any given day is at night before a pressure shift as the arctic keeps kissing us on the cheek. Tease.
The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there…
The split is due to the massive SSW event I warned you about several days ago.
Hi Bob,
Just for you, since you and some others like you don’t recognize sarcasm unless it’s LABELED, here’s the first sentence of the link I posted about the UK cold spell.
“Parts of south-east England could end up colder than the North Pole this weekend, as forecasters predict that the Arctic could inch above freezing point during the polar night for the first time in recorded history.”
And the SSW effect is almost certainly going to be attributable, with some statistical significance, to a warmer Arctic and lower energy gradient from the tropics once the scientists can do the analysis (by which time some new, previously rare or unobserved phenomena involving the ice melt and Arctic amplification will have taken over the headlines).
If this isn’t abrupt climate change what would it have to look like to be counted as such? One problem is that the research has no chance of keeping up so it’s going to allow the vested idiots more ammunition to undermine the scientists. On the Arctic front the Bering and Chukchi have had attention but they always melt out anyway. On the other side the Greenland Sea is losing ice early and fast as well. In the past it has had some fast ice that remained through September but that got destroyed last year, so it could start going fully ice free, which will mean the warm sea front can advance north faster, which will mean earlier melt of the central basin etc.
“If this isn’t abrupt climate change what would it have to look like to be counted as such?”
Like this.
He gave us an example of what he means. Today, climate scientists predict that temperatures will rise a few degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years. Ice cores from Greenland show that – around 11,500 years ago – average temperatures in Greenland increased by about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, over the course of 10 years or so. Alley said this abrupt change was prompted – at least partially – by melting polar ice, which altered ocean circulation and weather patterns. As today’s climate warms, ice is again melting near Earth’s poles.
Worst case scenario would be something like changing ocean circulation in a way that made it dry in the monsoon belts in places where people are expecting the rain to water their crops. We know these abrupt [climate] changes in the north Atlantic were accompanied by drought in monsoonal regions, so if we were to trigger something in the North Atlantic, it might, in turn, trigger changes in the monsoon where a huge number of people need the rain.
We’re fairly confident that the Antartic and Greenland ice sheets will stay where they are for at least awhile, but if they were to dump ice in the ocean fairly quickly, you could have very rapid sea level rise.
OCEAN ACIDIFICATION IS CAUSING CORAL REEFS TO DISSOLVE
“As climate change causes the ocean to acidify, the world’s coral reefs are in threat, Scientific American and E&E News report. Scientists already knew that ocean acidification was preventing coral from producing the material that forms the building blocks of reefs. Now, a new study has shown that the same process is also causing the reefs themselves to dissolve.”
Yes, I already did know that but I hadn’t seen this comment of yours before posting the SciAm link down thread. What never ceases to amaze me is the general lack of knowledge about these topics demonstrated by the ruling classes…
Brian SkerryatMission Blue Voyage The ocean’s glory — and horror
Photographer Brian Skerry shoots life above and below the waves — as he puts it, both the horror and the magic of the ocean. Sharing amazing, intimate shots of undersea creatures, he shows how powerful images can help make change.
Oh I’ve seen change all right! In 35 years of diving I’ve seen lots of change, but not the kind I’d like to have seen.
The world is going back to the future where the cyanobacteria will rule again…
Climate change could drive marine food web collapse through altered trophic flows and cyanobacterial proliferation
Hadayet Ullah, Ivan Nagelkerken , Silvan U. Goldenberg, Damien A. Fordham
Published: January 9, 2018https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003446
Abstract Global warming and ocean acidification are forecast to exert significant impacts on marine ecosystems worldwide. However, most of these projections are based on ecological proxies or experiments on single species or simplified food webs. How energy fluxes are likely to change in marine food webs in response to future climates remains unclear, hampering forecasts of ecosystem functioning. Using a sophisticated mesocosm experiment, we model energy flows through a species-rich multilevel food web, with live habitats, natural abiotic variability, and the potential for intra- and intergenerational adaptation. We show experimentally that the combined stress of acidification and warming reduced energy flows from the first trophic level (primary producers and detritus) to the second (herbivores), and from the second to the third trophic level (carnivores). Warming in isolation also reduced the energy flow from herbivores to carnivores, the efficiency of energy transfer from primary producers and detritus to herbivores and detritivores, and the living biomass of detritivores, herbivores, and carnivores. Whilst warming and acidification jointly boosted primary producer biomass through an expansion of cyanobacteria, this biomass was converted to detritus rather than to biomass at higher trophic levels—i.e., production was constrained to the base of the food web. In contrast, ocean acidification affected the food web positively by enhancing trophic flow from detritus and primary producers to herbivores, and by increasing the biomass of carnivores. Our results show how future climate change can potentially weaken marine food webs through reduced energy flow to higher trophic levels and a shift towards a more detritus-based system, leading to food web simplification and altered producer–consumer dynamics, both of which have important implications for the structuring of benthic communities.
Bit of Trivia:
From — NINE WAYS CHINESE SCIENTISTS PUSHED THE ENVELOPE IN 2017
Supercomputer superpower China takes biggest lead over US in 25 years: China has claimed a bigger share of the world’s fastest machines, extending its lead over the United States in supercomputing supremacy. China now has 202 of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers on the TOP500 list compared with the US total of 143. The list, produced twice a year, rates supercomputers based on speed in a benchmark test by specialists from Germany and the US. China’s Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 are the two fastest supercomputers in the rankings, with Switzerland taking third place, Japan fourth and the US fifth.
TOKYO 2020 OLYMPICS CONFIRMS USE OF RAINFOREST TIMBER IN STADIUM BUILD
“Hana Heineken, a senior campaigner for Rainforest Action Network, said: “The overwhelming majority of wood used [in the Tokyo stadium] was uncertified plywood extracted from tropical rainforests in Indonesia, an epicentre of biodiversity that is suffering from one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation.” A further 3% of the panels used came from Malaysian plywood, supplied by companies such as Shin Yang, which has been linked to destructive and potentially illegal logging practices.”
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services erased 300 years of American dreaming this week when it revised its stated purpose from securing “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” to securing “the homeland” — and, of course, “honoring our values.” The shift is hard to miss: No longer will the country focus on letting people in. Instead, it will work to keep them out. But words are just words, right?
Wrong. How we talk influences how we think; that shouldn’t come as news to anyone. Linguists seized long ago on the theory that the terms we’ve been trained to describe the world with affect how we see that world. Eliminating an idea from the lexicon makes us less likely to devote mental space or energy to it. After all, if it’s not right in front of us, it’s easy for it to flee our often flitting minds.
Which reminds me, the Trump administration was also behind removing references to climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification from government websites such as the EPA’s. I’m hoping we repeal the the law of gravity next… Maybe Trump and his supporters will float away!
Which reminds me. Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a law revoking an Obama-era regulatory initiative that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun. All the stuff I have seen on youtube since the Valentine’s Day massacre suggests that the kids of that school intend to make this a big political issue going forward. Some of these kids will be of voting age by 2020 and most will be of voting age by 2022. As a resident of south Florida, what is your sense of the state of mind of your fellow Floridians? Is this time different?
Is this time different? I sure hope it is and I’m duly impressed by the attitude of the young people caught up in this battle and the adults supporting them. Will actual change ensue? I don’t know..
Yair . . .
I think the political pages of the ‘Allis Chalmers forum’ gives an insight into some American attitudes to firearm regulations . . . very educational to an interested observer.
Hi Fred,
I believe the political calculus has decisively shifted in favor of tighter gun control laws over the last few days. The R camp will mostly fight a desperate rear guard action to stop it, but the tides of war have shifted in favor of the D camp, politically.
This will not yet be obvious to a casual observer, and there’s nothing in particular I can point to as definitive proof.
But remember what Churchill said back in WWII.
The last few days and months imo are the days of “the end of the beginning”.
It’s well worth while to devote some thought to the ways we react, collectively, to tragic events, and finally do something, collectively, to change our ways.
Hardly anybody ( excepting public health professionals, cops, firemen, and the friends and families of the victims of automobile accidents), even notices a local headline announcing a crash that kills two or three people….. unless it happens on a highway they use personally.
It’s not unusual for a hundred people to die on a holiday on the highways of this country. You will not hear this statistic discussed at the water cooler or your favorite watering hole.
But a plane crash that kills a hundred people is headline news all over the world, and you can bet your last can of beans that you will hear it discussed over lunch and at the water cooler and at the watering hole after work for a couple of days at least, and sometimes for a month, depending on the circumstances.
This same calculus applies to mass murder by firearm. It’s super duper headline news for months, every time, and the MORE it’s covered, the more coverage it gets. Blood and guts obsess us, and the more coverage we see , the more we seem willing and eager to see, and bad news is the only thing that sells as well as sex.
Does this sort of willingness indicate yet another way in which we have defined deviancy down, so that things formerly unmentionable are now discussed over dinner in polite society?
I’m with Kilgore Trout, I think maybe so.
The more coverage mass murder gets, the greater the likelihood that yet another mentally deficient individual will sit with a phone or computer in his lap, and create a fantasy world between his ears wherein HE is finally the center of attention, blazing away.
Every once in a while, one of them acts out his fantasy. The thing that surprises me is not that it happens, but that it doesn’t happen more frequently.
Personally I don’t think these shootings can be stopped now, but with plenty of surveillance, no other word fits, we can prevent them from happening so often.
Intervention of any sort, starting with mental health treatment, cannot come to pass unless the people in need are brought to the attention of the relevant authorities, from mental health docs to the cop on the beat to the FBI.
The internet is maybe the greatest thing that ever happened in some ways, but in others, it’s hell. It’s the primary provider that supplies troubled individuals the raw material that sends them over the edge.
When we old farts were kids, Fred Flintstone’s kid Bam Bam banged the bad guys on the floor, Bam BAM, but they got up and walked away, chastised but alive, and we watched this sort of thing a few hours a week at the most.
Now a troubled kid can play games that are so violent real war can’t actually touch them, in a lot of respects, because in a real war, at least such violence, when it happens, is over quickly, and it’s back to hurry up and wait for days or even months. In the video games, it’s non stop,and the kids can play these games in their rooms days without end until they cease to even realize that they ARE games, and that in the real world, real people are going to die if they act out.
We aren’t going to do away with the net, period, and we aren’t going to get rid of guns anytime soon in this country, to the extent that a resourceful person with a few bucks in his pocket won’t be able to put his hands on one.
But hopefully with better laws and especially better enforcement, fewer nut case kids will be able to put their hands on a gun suitable for mass murder. Nut case and politically and religiously motivated adults are unfortunately generally experienced enough and smart enough to know how to cover their tracks until it’s too late to stop them unless they are already on the surveillance radar for some reason, and even then, they are apt to succeed.
Tens of millions of kids, quite a lot of them with mental issues, grew up in this country with easy access to guns with near zero incidences of mass murder prior to the coming of the net. Those innocent days are gone now. The people who purvey violence as addictive merchandise to make a buck are in my estimation just about as guilty, morally, as anybody when it comes to understanding the roots of this issue.
I don’t personally think we can stop this sort of tragedy from happening any time soon precisely because there’s so much instantly accessible violence built into our popular culture now, and it’s so easy for anybody who is unhappy and emotionally disturbed to live in a mad fantasy world between the ears. We can reduce the rate, that’s all imo. For now.
The balance will be hence forth shifting noticeably faster towards tighter gun control laws but we will continue to see mass murder headlines for at least a generation now that the meme is established. It might take longer than that to extinguish this meme, on second thought, say even two generations. It will take that long, or longer, for our society to give up its weapons. I see a near zero chance that we can get rid of the sort of sold for profit fantasy violence that’s the other half of the problem, but two generations will probably be enough to make a really good start on drying up the supply of firearms of the sort commonly used in mass shootings.
Now I tell it like it is, as best I can, regardless of where the chips may fall, because I want to be RIGHT in my analysis, rather than to simply play a partisan role on either side of any issue. So as far as MY guns go, anybody wants them can have them when you pry them out of my cold dead hands.
I’m telling it like it is when I say there are upwards of a hundred million people in this country, maybe a LOT more, who share my position in respect to the Second Amendment.
I’m commenting as an OBSERVER of the political scene, not as a partisan. An HONEST observer believes in full disclosure of his personal positions and any disclosure of any skin he may have in the game.
IF I had a kid spending most of his time playing such violent games, I would introduce him to some REAL violence, very quickly indeed, with my boot in his ass, or a club if necessary, and reintroduce him to the real world, even at risk of being jailed myself for doing the right thing.
All this relates to my argument that unless we get a SERIES of what I refer to as Pearl Harbor Wake Up Events , we won’t change our ways in time to prevent the destruction of what remains of the environment.
Methinks we should get damned busy sacrificing some goats and chickens to the Sky Daddy or Sky Mommy or Rock or Snake or Mountain or River we like best in hopes that He, She, or IT will send us a series of such events, one after another, spectacular enough that it will be IMPOSSIBLE even for the Koch brothers and Faux News to overlook and poo pooh them.
Maybe the best thing that could happen to this country next year would be that a super hurricane totally wipes out New Orleans and the port of Houston.
Or maybe the best thing that could happen to the world would be that the Russians for some reason just shut off the oil and gas for a few months just to show the rest of us who is REALLY in a position to fuck with them, and that they are in a position, if they so desire, to fuck with us with relative impunity.
The rest of us need Russian energy a hundred times more than the Russians need any thing they import from us.
My firm belief, based on long study of history and human nature, is that we’re ALL fucked, unless these WAKE UP events come to pass in sufficient numbers to awaken LEVIATHAN. Leviathan once aroused and cognizant of a real threat to HIS own existence will take such actions as are possible to prevent collapse.
OTHERWISE………. Well, we will continue our complacent cow like ways until it’s too late to avoid a truly catastrophic economic and ecological crisis.
Most of us are fucked anyway, in my professional opinion, but there’s still a fair to good , maybe even excellent chance we can avoid a near total die off of our species over the next two or three generations.
There are no guarantees. Maybe we will set so many positive feedback loops in motion that even a country as rich and as thinly populated and powerful as the USA is fucked. Maybe die off on the grandest scale, the planetary scale, is already baked in.
A lot of very capable thinkers, including our host Ron, believe this is the case, that industrial civilization is a dead man walking.
But one or two mega famines, famines on the continental scale, one or two pandemics of any disease that kills like the Black Plague and breaks out world wide………… and we’re over the population hump in a hurry.
And depending on where such disasters might occur, and how far and fast they spread, they might wipe out a large enough slice of industrial civilization to prevent the climate going entirely nuts……. unless we have already passed the point where climate disaster is baked in.
One things for goddamned sure.History ain’t over, lol.
IF I had a kid spending most of his time playing such violent games, I would introduce him to some REAL violence, very quickly indeed, with my boot in his ass, or a club if necessary, and reintroduce him to the real world, even at risk of being jailed myself for doing the right thing.
While I am no fan of violent video games, there are hundreds of studies showing there is little to no causality between violent video games and actual real world shootings. It’s a myth much like vaccines causing autism.
The problem is easy access to guns! Not video games! Japanese kids play violent video games but don’t have access to guns. Not a lot of school shooting there, even if the violent games did make them more violent… Not to mention that it’s one thing to own a hunting rifle or a handgun and quite another to have an AR-15.
These four countries have nearly eliminated gun deaths – here’s what the US can learn
Australia
Japan
Norway
The UK
Yair . . .
“Not to mention that it’s one thing to own a hunting rifle or a handgun and quite another to have an AR-15. ”
And thereby is the problem. I have mentioned on here before how, on a pig hunt I have seen sensible young blokes turn into idiots as soon as they tie a sweat band around their head and tape two twenty round clips back to back.
Assault style weapons are mind altering. There is no place for them in a ‘normal’ society.
Hi Fred, Scrub
I basically agree with both of you.
But I have some rudimentary training in the mental health field, having been a certified teacher of the kids who have real troubles, but are still enrolled in public schools ,plus the training a nurse gets which is necessary to do preliminary screening. I also have family who are professionals in the field. We’re not ALL KJB thumpers with pistols in our hip pockets, lol.
The statistics mentioned are obviously good proof that if kids can’t obtain guns, they won’t commit mass murder except perhaps in very rare instances. I can’t think of a case when a kid managed to build a really powerful bomb, or poison a whole lot of people.
I once put brakes on a truck that had an expired safety sticker. The owner was perfectly upfront about telling me he had been driving it for two weeks without brakes, and only brought it to me the day the sticker expired. The next year we went to annual instead of semi annual safety inspections. Every body who eats a pickle dies, eventually, but this doesn’t prove pickles are poisonous, lol.
Adults who who commit mass murder are more often than not politically motivated, and can figure out ways to obtain weapons, even in places such as Western Europe….if they are still reasonably sane and have money and street smarts.
I haven’t seen any convincing evidence to the effect that so called NORMAL kids shoot up their schools. In every instance I know ( much) about, the kids involved were obviously showing signs, usually overlooked, of very serious mental problems, which are well known to spill over into actual open behavior sometimes.
A kid who is in trouble, emotionally, sitting alone, watching violent games, or reading violent novels, or reading the coverage of previous mass shootings over and over on the net, maybe fantasizing with one or two friends, who have similar problems, can slip off into a world in which his fantasy becomes his reality.
This sort of thing is actually VERY common, except it usually manifests itself in other ways. Any given person with such emotional problems may come to believe in a fantasy world, and start acting it out, although such behaviors only occasionally result in other people being hurt or killed.
One potential warning sign that a particular person or kid may need to be evaluated is that he becomes obsessed with violent games or books to the point he spends most or all of his time looking at them.
The people who so ardently defend their right to own a military style weapon do not do so, in my experience, because they are all that fond of them. They do so for the same reason that women who defend their right to an abortion fight like hell to maintain that right WITHOUT RESTRICTION.
They believe, with ample justification in my humble opinion, that every inch of ground they give up is an inch that can never be recovered, and that giving it up is a victory for their political opposition, whose long term plans involve eventually disarming them altogether.
My OPINION, as a pundit, is that the last few school shootings mark the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment in cultural terms, but it’s going to take a LONG time before we see much in the way of changing gun laws, except in various localities which are now about ready to pass new tougher laws.
Virtually all the guys and most of the girls I knew as a kid were comfortable with guns, and most of us spent some time shooting, even the girls in a lot of cases.
Our grandchildren are growing up in suburbs and seldom ever have an opportunity to hunt or shoot for fun, or even go fishing, except maybe on vacation. The writing is on the wall, it’s just a matter of time.
We will have single payer health insurance, we will repeal the laws that allow big pharma to charge us monopoly prices, we will eventually pass laws that result in righting other wrongs, just as we have passed laws against gender and racial discrimination and dumping poison in public waters .
But these things take a LOT of time.
“The problem is easy access to guns” and any access to military style weapons. Period.
Trumpster, I had to replace my apple butter boots with my apple butter waiters to protect myself from your record breaking post of crap. You must be feeling pretty good at the moment after that bowl full.
Cape Morris Jesup (Greenland’s northernmost observation station) is now reporting temperatures well above freezing today… +6.1°C at the latest observation.
I’ve seen pretty much every interview with Carter Page that I can find, and have read almost every story I can find on him. That Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) or federal security service (FSB) would decide he seems like a useful guy that could get sanctions overturned seems unrealistic. The guy is clearly not ‘intelligence material’. Useful idiot/red herring maybe. Briefed asset/agent of influence, no way. Therefore (and for other reasons) I suspect that the Russian election interference operation was most likely run by GRU. Too messy for FSB/SVR types. The complete lack of backstopping on the legends of field agents and total lack of operational security in the use of hackers/trolls is reminiscent of a military (GRU) led operation. An operation led by the foreign intelligence service or even a internal security agency emphasizes deniability as an outcome. In contrast an operation led by a military intelligence organization de-emphasizes deniability.
A few weeks ago, despite sanctions, the heads of the SVR, FSB and GRU visited the US as part of anti-terrorism cooperation. It is clear that both the FSB Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and the SVR Chief Sergey Naryshkin met with CIA Director Pompeo, but no one is saying who Lieutenant-General Igor Korobov of the GRU met with.
This is a very long hallway of smoke and mirrors and I don’t think even the top players knows where reality starts and stops. Russian and American intelligence services community must be having a shitfest.
My best guess, if anybody on the Russian side is getting anything done according to plan, is that Tillerson is the real Russian (SVR) asset and everything else going on (compromised/exposed election interference) is just a big clusterfuck distraction operation run (poorly) by GRU to muddy the waters.
Sorry, but Trump is the real Russian asset. Tillerson is a tool to increase the Russian position in the world energy stage. The Russians are running the Republican play book of racism, guns, abortion and disinformation Fox News of dividing and conquer. Russia is driving the hard right in isolating America from the west. Trump has had a verbal agreement with the Kremlin since before he announced running for office. He knew the playbook and started with it the first day with his Mexican immigration dog whistle. Trump is financially compromised by loans and money laundering. He only cares about himself and a few family members that are part of his crime supporters. Trump could care less about the 17 murdered in the high school shooting last week. It’s all part of undermining American society. Defunding the government agencies, transfering the countries wealth with tax cuts to the rich, firing judges, pulling out of globe agreements and attacking trade agreements all play to diminishing American world power and embolding Russian power. There really isn’t much daylight between Republicans and Russians in the view of a power structure.
OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster is a good example of how easy it was for the Russians to utilize years of Republican disinformation hate for their own benefit.
Trump is at best a useful idiot. No intelligence professional in their right mind would have ever given that man a brief. I doubt things are as simple as you portray them to be. There’s some triple helix/double Mobius foreign intelligence tradecraft afoot.
Tillerson has gutted the State Dept and meets world leaders without bringing his own translator. He’s far more than you claim him to be.
Trump is not an idiot. He just plays one for the American idiots. I’m aware of the gutting of the State Dept which is also playing to the Russians. Tillerson is clearly playing dumb and was a gold mine for the Russians. He could very well be deeper in this whole Russian mess than I believe. My alarm was flashing red when Trump made him Sec. of State. I’m not claiming to understand this whole mess. Like you it’s a best guess. But at least I don’t have my head in my ass like three quarters of Americans. Which is also a lot of the problem.
Books will be written about this subject well after I’m dead and gone with new information.
“OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster is a good example of how easy it was for the Russians to utilize years of Republican disinformation hate for their own benefit.”
Old Macdonald aka KGB Trumpster has forgotten more about history and politics that HB has or ever will know about the history of communism, and the ways it works.
But he’s dead right about some things, one of them being that Trump is compromised, and I have posted links occasionally to that effect.
What he’s totally wrong about is blaming the loyal opposition to his empress wannabe for her losing the election, given that anybody who has ever pulled his head out of his ass long enough to take an UNBIASED look at her as a candidate for president knows goddamned well why Trump won.
The D party could not have found a candidate more likely to lose that HRC, if it had dedicated every last resource to that proposition. The D Party managed the to throw away an election they should have won going away by running a candidate despised by pretty close to half the country before the first primary campaign started.
Adults look to their own faults when they lose.
Nincompoop partisans shoot the messenger when the messenger who delivers messages they don’t want to hear.
HRC was no more nor no less that a Republican Lite candidate for president, and her actual record proves it loud and clear.
She lost because she was so awesomely stupid , arrogant and reckless as to run her homebrewed secret email system. She lost because she stood by Bill as he serially abused a number of women.
She lost because she raked in tens of millions of dollars from shady to obviously dirty donors doing business with Uncle Sam while she was secretary of state.
Because she ran scams to make money including White Water and Cattle Gate, because of the Rose Law firm documents all disappearing, because she hung out with banksters making secret speeches at two hundred thousand bucks plus per hour, and above all, because she not so secretly DESPISES the people who are the true base of the Democratic Party, the working class people of this country, even as she takes their VOTES for granted.
Because she has made it clear every once in a while that she despises the men and women of this country who wear its uniform, even though she generally has supported sending them into harm’s way.
She lost because the best and brightest of the young people of this country, the best educated of them in particular, recognized her for the phony she is. They didn’t fool themselves by believing in the Great Right Wing Conspiracy because they WANTED to believe in it, the way so many otherwise reasonably intelligent Democrats believed in it. They took a look at her, and knew her for what she was, especially in the case of young women. I met a bunch of them at Sanders factions, and LISTENED to what they had to say about her.
HB brags about the money he makes in oil and the stock market. I’m willing to bet he can’t prove he donates very much to charity, or that he will pay a dime more in taxes than he must, even as he invests in an industry environmentalists consider the worst in the world, environmentally, the fossil fuel industry. I notice he hasn’t had much to say about the rates he expects to pay under the new R sponsored and passed tax laws.
And all the while, he hypocritically poses as a Democrat. Well, there are Democrats like that. They’re Republican Lite Democrats.
I support most of the positions of the Democratic Party establishment, and hardly any of the Republican Party establishment, but I try to comment as a non partisan, as best I know how.
It takes a partisan fool to defend his party when it’s obviously making a grave mistake, such as nominating a presidential candidate with a baggage train that reaches back to her earliest days in public life.
I will say THIS MUCH for the R establishment. It did everything it could to prevent Trump from winning the R nomination.
HRC’s octopus like grip on the machinery of the D party meant that virtually every serious possible candidate for the nomination took one look at the situation, and decided it was a lost cause, and nobody except Sanders even made a serious effort.
The Democratic Party, and the big D democrats in this country need to look to their own shortcomings if they want to understand WHY the Republicans are in control of this country.
Blaming people like me who point out the obvious truth is an absolutely useless waste of energy.
Incidentally I lost a number of friendly bets on HRC’s winning. Cost me a couple of bucks. I was surprised, I knew it would be close, except in a few deep blue states. It was. I follow Virginia politics very closely, and knew she had Virginia locked up. Northern Virginia and the coastal crescent with the larger cities all being in that end of the state now control Va politics.
Right along, I said I would stay home and get drunk and cry for my country rather than vote for either HRC or Trump. I voted Green.
I posted occasionally that Trump might actually win, because the D’s as an establishment were so boneheaded as to act as if the working classes are domestic servants and animals, and say so, publicly.
It’s perfectly true that the R’s act the same way, to an even greater extent, but at least they had sense enough to PRETEND otherwise on the campaign trail.
People like HB love to bad mouth the people of the south, and blame industry and capital for moving south to escape unjustifiably high wages for such unskilled work as assembling automobiles up north. Well, I’ve been in a couple of unions, and have the books around somewhere to prove it. My Dad in addition to being a farmer went to his forty hour a week part time job in town for fifty years, and he was on the plant negotiating committee there, and a life long member of the Teamsters. I know the history, and the contribution, of unions in this country. I also know they exist primarily so as to increase the incomes of their members, and to increase the political powers of their members. Anybody who pretends otherwise is a goddamned idiot, or a hypocritical lying partisan. Period. I’ve paid my dues to the NEA, the VEA, and the Operating Engineers. I paid dues into other unions as guest worker at times.
I wonder how many people who go around pissing and moaning about the automobile industry fleeing the northern states for the south where they can pay less and have better control of operations have EVER stopped to think about the following indisputable FACT.
The next step after moving south is moving overseas, unless a company is ALREADY in the south. It’s just a fucking matter of DEGREE, nothing is really any different in PRINCIPLE.
Now am I opposed to free trade?
That’s a very good question, and it would take a very long comment to answer it well.
Short answer, in principle, no , so long as it’s truly free, not subsidized on one side, and so long as it doesn’t weaken my country and put it in danger.
No apple grower in this country, nor any other American farmer, had access to Japanese supermarkets the way Japanese car companies had access to American car buyers for forty years.
No, so long as it doesn’t impoverish a quarter or more of our people, putting them on welfare or at best at work such as flipping hamburgers.
No, so long as it is not arguably one of the two or three KEY issues that result in the election of people like Trump.
History ain’t over folks. We spend endless time, justifiably, bemoaning the lack of adequate environmental regulations and the preservation of our public lands here in this forum.
We spend near zero time considering whether the Asian economic elephant in general, and the Chinese elephant in particular, will acquire so much economic power that we become THEIR de facto colony.
Well, we are ALREADY their de facto colony in a lot of respects. They buy logs from my neighborhood, and haul them to Asia, and make furniture out of them, and ship the furniture here to sell it. I don’t recall hearing much about any Asian furniture workers living even remotely as well as my neighbors used to live even when they were working for some of the lowest wages paid by any important industry in this country, and they had RELATIVELY decent working conditions, including as a rule basic health insurance, a paid vacation, and government people dropping by once in a while to make sure not very many of them got hurt on the job.
I know a lot of people today who were born to parents who were machine operators in furniture factories…… people who were born in hospitals with the bill paid in full by their group insurance……. right here in the upper end of the heart of Dixie.
No more.
You don’t have to be but so goddamned smart to understand that when you take away jobs by the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then the millions, you create a situation wherein the huge surplus of former workers are forced into a race to the bottom to work for any wage they can get under any circumstances.
THAT’s probably the BIGGEST single reason wages are and have been stagnant or actually declining in this country in recent decades.
Is anybody here fool enough to think the working classes of this country will support politicians who support the free trade that has been and continues to be a fucking disaster for them, PERSONALLY, or threatens them with disaster?
Now there are powerful arguments to be made for both sides of this particular question. I know that, as does anybody else who understands reality and is willing to ADMIT he understands.
But if folks who are rah rah supporters of free trade manage to open their eyes wide enough, long enough, they must realize that if they want the D’s back into control of the country, and thus in control of environmental policy, health care policy, privacy policy, etc, etc, the D’s must first regain control of elective offices from dog catcher and town manager to the Senate and the WH.
The R’s own the elective offices of the land by about a two to one margin.
Any general will tell you that sometimes you have to sacrifice some men and some ground to win the war.
It’s the same in politics.
I know that just about everybody in this forum is far more intelligent than they need be to understand my arguments.
I’m not saying anybody ought to AGREE with me, but only that he should think about what I have said.
If you want to win, you must understand that regardless of whether a voter is right or wrong on the facts in respect to a hot button issue, he or she will vote his or her BELIEFS.
I’ve yet to meet the first Democrat who has convinced former industrial workers of my acquaintance that free trade is in the interest of working class Americans.
KGB agent—
You just need a Tesla model S—
(sarc)
And of course, stay in the shallow end of that pool.
Another huge apple butter crap for the toilet
“I’m not saying anybody ought to AGREE with me, but only that he should think about what I have said.”
Then learn how to write and stay focused on the subject. You just spew hate and non sense. It’s quality not quantity that matters.
I’ve also forgotten more about writing than you will ever know, HB, and more still about human nature.
Feel free to x me out, but I’d rather you didn’t because I need you to play the fool for me.
Brevity is the soul of wit, it’s true, but an understanding of politics requires nuance, and nuance requires more than a few words, as a rule.
The thing about ME that pisses YOU off so bad is that I’m right, and you KNOW it, but your only recourse, other than admitting it, is that you aren’t willing to do so, is to respond as you do, by painting me as a Trump partisan.
As I’ve noted several times previously, adults look to their own shortcomings when they come up short.
Children look for excuses.
Enjoy your big tax cut……. That is, unless you’re really living in your mom’s basement.
You’ve NEVER posted anything yet that refutes any of my arguments, and you never will, because you lack the intellectual resources necessary to come up with anything.
Tell us, what suggestions have you posted that might help the Democrats regain control of the federal government?
Even ROTTEN suggestions are better than none at all, because they provoke discussion and thought. You haven’t posted even a ROTTEN suggestion.
I’m not well to do, and have never pretended otherwise, but at least I don’t go around pretending to be an environmentalist in the same forum that I brag about making a killing in the oil biz.
Thanks for your help. Between the two of us, I think our discussions are doing some good in terms of getting other forum members to think about doing what they need to do, and what they need to avoid doing, in order to WIN elections.
Spewing your sort of venom at half the potential voters in this country isn’t exactly LIKELY to convince that hundred million to vote D next election.
As I’ve noted before, if you were to talk about women the way you talk about southerners, you couldn’t get a date in a cat house with a roll of hundred dollar bills in your hand.
Jordan may be the next place to go in the ME. Food prices are zooming up, wealth disparity to the royalty is huge and there’s some refugee pressure, I’ve seen a couple of articles suggesting it will blow in under a month.
3 Stages of Life:
A Hole in Winter’s Heart: Temperatures Rise to Above Freezing at the North Pole in February
At this point, we were starting to see some seriously outlandish temperatures in the higher latitude regions. Cape Morris Jesup, which is the furthest north location on Greenland, by Friday the 23rd experienced a 6 C or 43 F temperatures on the shores of what should be a frozen solid Arctic Ocean just 400 miles from the North Pole.
The average high temperature in Cape Morris Jesup is -20 degrees Fahrenheit during February — making Friday’s reading a whopping 63 degrees F warmer than average. For reference, a similar departure for Washington, DC would produce a 105 degree day in February.
But it wasn’t just Cape Morris Jesup that was experiencing July-like conditions for the Arctic during February. For the expanding front of that ridiculously warm winter air by Sunday had expanded into a plume stretching tens of thousands of square miles and including a vast zone of temperatures spiking from 45 to 54+ degrees F above normal.
Robert Fanney
@robertscribbler
UPDATE: This is just outrageous. We have above freezing temps now spanning nearly all of the 80 N latitude zone from Svalbard, across the pole and to about 82 N on the East Siberian side… pic.twitter.com/ULMKigKnKG
The growing attention to environmental issues and the question of climate change makes Scott Pruitt’s job more important by the day.
President Trump chose him to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Pruitt hopes to unravel what he calls the “weaponization” of the EPA by the Obama administration.
Pruitt hopes to pursue that mission with a servant’s heart. After all, he’s the kind of guy you might meet in Bible study. The former Sunday school teacher and church deacon wants to use that faith background in his role as EPA administrator.
Pruitt believes God commands us to take care of the environment and that also means to use what He has provided. “The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we’ve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind.”
‘Cats@Home’ more like ‘Bats@Belfry’.
Having just crossed 70 degrees F in the mountains near me (41N) this past week, I wondered how often this actually happens.
This past Wednesday hit 70F/46F with 35/19 being the historical average at this station near 2000 feet altitude. Previous record high for that station in February was 65F in 1975, so this is a first. To give you an idea, 2000 feet asl is like being 600 miles north at sea level (well into Canada) as far as temperature goes. The highest temperature ever recorded there is 95F in June 2003.
Brief stall in Arctic sea ice extent growth in response to the anomalous weather conditions in the Arctic. Total sea ice extent remains a record low for the date (satellite era – from 1979).
Sea ice data from JAXA AMSR2 at https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop.ver1/vishop-extent.html
Do you know of any live cams showing these current arctic sea ice conditions?
That’s nothing. The ice on the lake in front of my place, what was left of it, vanished overnight. Birds are having a great time out there. Fish are terrified or at least anxious.
Back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s this region was a commercial ice cutting area. The region failed commercially due t rising temperatures before refrigeration killed the whole industry.
But just to show how stubborn ice can be here is a photo taken in 1912 of an ice house that burned, leaving the ice exposed but mostly not melted.
Cool picture and good example of (latent) heat of fusion.
Also demonstrates the heat of vaporization, as the fire tried to heat the liquid formed it would chill the fire as it evaporated. Hot and steamy on the outside, cold and crunchy on the inside. 🙂
Gives one the idea of how difficult it is to melt a glacier. Yet they are melting.
Gives one the idea of how difficult it is to melt a glacier. Yet they are melting.
Yep!
But here’s something else to think about. We have only hit about 1°C above preindustrial average global baseline temperatures. Yet we are already almost ice free in the Arctic ocean and we are experiencing temperatures 45°C above normal for this time of year, up near the north pole.
And we are probably going to blow past that 2°C supposedly safe threshold before the end of this century.
Good luck folks!
Yeah, I have thought a lot about that. As I said in a comment not that long ago, after calculating the ice/open water ratios in the Arctic Ocean over the warm season, there is a lot of extra heat going into the Arctic now. Came out as a 50 w/m2 annual average over the whole Arctic Ocean positive into the ocean. Will hit 80 w/m2 when ice free (in comparison to a fully ice covered Arctic).
Then there are warm streams of air and water coming up from the south also. Lots of heat going into the Arctic regions now and more later, not counting the GHG effect.
So it’s not a temperature thing now, it’s an albedo and equilibration phenomenon.
If it keep going like this just a few more years, GHG increase is irrelevant. May be irrelevant now.
What happens when the radiator of the hemisphere gets amplification with feedback?
What happens when the radiator of the hemisphere gets amplification with feedback?
When it comes to feedbacks, it’s the unknown unknowns that worry me the most…
That link I posted the other day to the talk about C,N,P ratios in diatoms and cyanobateria was followed by one on the fluid dynamics of large groups of marine organisms engaged in daily vertical migrations in the water column.
Made me think that Lorenz’s ‘Butterfly Effect’ might have been just as appropriately named ‘The Artemia salina Effect’.
.
This one has been extinct for a couple million years.
Habelia optata Length 2cm.
Illustration by Joanna Liang
Copyright Royal Ontario Museum
.
50 W/m^2
50 MW/km^2
50,000 GW/kkm^2
and the Arctic is a lot bigger than that.
Shit!
NAOM
Obviously, hippos in the Thames and alligators in New York. Even worse, Americans in Ottawa! 🙂
How far will it go?
The topic of range for EV’s has always been at the top of the list. Usually people don’t use much range, but they like to know they have that extra. So how far could a 2012 Chevy Volt go on electric power only? Pretty far. Read this one carefully, apparently the not used or discussed regen and mountain modes do really well also. https://insideevs.com/far-can-chevrolet-volt-really-go-ev-mode-81-8-miles/
I don’t think range is a problem anymore, unless you take very long road trips and there are no chargers available. Maybe that will change in the next few years.
I don’t think range is a problem anymore, unless you take very long road trips and there are no chargers available. Maybe that will change in the next few years.
Yep, it’s one of those persistent myths that no longer holds true. Based mostly on faulty assumptions!
Well, at least we’ll have left behind a few nice sentiments.
Give us peace. I recommend the “making of” video.
A STUDY EXAMPLE OF TWO INTERACTING POPULATIONS
The “EV” population was given a logistic growth with initial rate of 1.3/year. Initial population was one million. Logistic growth simulates an upper population boundary (carrying capacity limits or demand limits).
The opposing “ICE” population was given an exponential growth rate of 1.03/year. The growth was reduced by the growth of the EV population each year(market share loss). Initial population of one billion.
By year 30 the populations are equal and by year 45 the “ICE” population is less than 2 percent of the total population in this example.
The change in sea ice conditions north of Greenland is very interesting
A Large Area of Open Water Forms in the Melting Sea Ice North of Greenland During February
Summary: Modern Global Warming has been taking place for the past 300 years. It is the last of several multi-century warming periods that have happened during the Neoglacial cooling of the past 3000 years. Analysis of Holocene climate cycles shows that the period 1600-2100 AD should be a period of warming. The evidence suggests that Modern Global Warming is within Holocene variability, but the cryosphere displays a non-cyclical retreat that appears to have undone thousands of years of Neoglacial ice advance. The last 70 out of 300 years of Modern Global Warming are characterized by human-caused, extremely unusual, rapidly increasing CO2 levels. In stark contrast with this rapidly accelerating anthropogenic forcing, global temperature and sea level appear to have continued their rising trend with no perceptible evidence of added acceleration. The evidence supports a higher sensitivity to CO2 in the cryosphere, suggesting a negative feedback by H2O, that prevents CO2 from having the same effect elsewhere.
No not the J Curry doublespeak and mixes of reality and delusion! The twists, the turns down the rabbit hole of sci-fi pretending to be sci-reality. No, not again.
That is non peer reviewed drivel; just because it makes you all comfortable and justified and not having to take responsibility for anything at all while putting the blame on others doesn’t make it right, so try growing a pair of balls and finding out what really is going on from the people actually doing the research.
LOL! Posted by Javier on Judith Curry’s blog!
Dim Joe, pray tell, how much of that crap did you actually manage to read?!
Gotta say though, that is about as finely refined high grade ‘Yak Dung’, as I’ve ever seen in print! Puts most of the coarser, ordinary grade, garden variety bullshit to shame by quite a few orders of magnitude!
Javier still gets the gold medal for the deepest bullshit ever produced anywhere, I’m duly impressed!
Fred, Regarding the Javier guest post, it’s the most subtly evil piece I have read in a while. Not only is he a student of the Gish Gallop but he also creates deceptive charts. This one Fig 111 of his is absolutely misleading.
1. Note how he places a straight line over the temperature record
2. Note how he places hints on the CO2 to show it is curving upward
3. Note how he compresses the y-axis for the CO2
Then he says that there is no agreement between the two, relying completely on tricks of optical illusion.
I’m glad we ran Javier off of this blog, and hope he doesn’t return.
This is how Javier’s chart should have been plotted. It doesn’t prove that there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature, but it is honest, and doesn’t intend to mislead as Javier’s chart does.
I’m glad we ran Javier off of this blog, and hope he doesn’t return.
I agree with you, Paul! I also think what he does borders on evil. Don’t know his true motivation but I have suspected for a long time that he went over to the dark side for monetary gain.
The ones that subtly manipulate the data are the worst.
Hi Paul,
An alternative way to plot the data is to look at natural log of atmospheric CO2 vs Global Land Ocean Temperature (data from Berkeley Earth).
The slope times natural log of 2 (0.693) gives an estimate of the transient climate response, in this case 2.35 C, a rough estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity could be obtained by looking at natural log of atmospheric CO2 vs global land temperature.
Interestingly, if we use data from ice cores from 1880-1959 spliced to atmospheric measurements from 1960-2015, we also get a TCR estimate of about 2.35 C. Note how the slopes from the chart below and the chart above are very similar, and the R squared is fairly close as well.
If Javier comes back, point him to that chart.
It would have no effect other than producing more science affliction.
Is Joe Diamond a Javier sock puppet?
NAOM
I got the scientific paper from the state of climate science global warming discussion forums: Global Warming and Weather Discussion. In summary it is a very interesting look at what many of us thought all along, that ocean currents and the sun are the real things causing climate change.
It is not a scientific paper, it’s made up bullshit.
In summary it is a very interesting look at what many of us thought all along, that ocean currents and the sun are the real things causing climate change.
ROFLMAO!! You are a real hoot, buddy. Pure comedy gold!
Love to hear your theory on the precise mechanisms involved in how ocean currents are currently, (pun intended) CAUSING climate change… Do give us a link when you publish your data in a reputable peer reviewed scientific journal. And no, Judith Curry’s blog doesn’t count.
IMHO he just proved my question above with his response, same MO.
NAOM
Yep.
Here one with an 1880 to 1920 baseline for Dim Joe and Bob Frisky
Big Oil is finally contemplating the unthinkable, and until recently what was also unimaginable for them.
What if every car solar across the globe was an electric vehicle? What would that do to their trillion-dollar business model?
Well, they’ve looked at it. They’ve crunched the numbers. But they are not telling.
At least that is the sense you get BP’s latest Energy Outlook, now a major annual event that gives an insight into how quickly Big Oil is prepared to concede that the energy transition will occur.
reneweconomy.com.au has become one of my essential every (week) day reads along with the local news, pealoilbarrell, insideevs and utilitydive. Lots of great stuff there!
Seems quite an unrealistic scenario to me, since peak production rates of EV’s would have to hit near 170 million cars and trucks a year to produce enough replacements for ICE’s, plus loss of EV’s over the 22 year span, plus growth of demand in a growing population/lifestyle world.
I think the best we could hope for is equality of ICE and EV by the 2050’s and the end of the ICE by 2065 to 2070. Unless of course there are tremendous societal changes and downward population pressure in the meantime, which is a large possibility considering current situations. If we follow the BAU transistion and figure out how to grow enough food in a warming/changing world, then EV’s along with some other alternatives will eventually replace the ICE.
On the other hand, if oil becomes much harder to produce and production starts dwindling soon, there will be large pressures for alternative transport as well as pressure to increase the efficiency of ICE vehicles. We can easily produce 4 seat vehicles that get 60 to 80 mpg. That is very likely to occur, giving more time to produce EV’s and other transport alternatives.
As the current situation stands, ICE’s will burn up to 25 trillion gallons of fuel before they are gone, even with a high rate of alternative transport replacement. That could be cut in half with an extreme push of efficiency and appropriate raising of the price of fossil fuels.
The graph below is from Seba’s RethinkX report (page 36). It does not paint a pretty picture. As a matter of fact, it portends a cataclysmic disruption of the transportation and fuel industries. I am by no means saying that it is going to happen but, I certainly do not believe that BAU can continue much longer. I have said before that in my life. I have seen enough disruptions to be confident of one thing, change is certain. Seba has made a career out of studying disruptions so, I am inclined to take his work more seriously than those who parrot “more of the same” year after year. Even if Seba is off by a mile, his projections being off by a mile still spell the end of the auto industry as we know it. My personal feeling is that, between Peak Oil and disruption, by 2030 we are all going to be wondering how things happened so fast, those of us who are still alive that is.
I will look at his report. He is a great presenter and salesman, but I don’t think anyone can predict the future at this point. There are way too many variables, unknowns and known negatives.
There is a huge difference between adding computers and phones to the world and changing the whole energy/transportation/social system in just a decade or two.
We have a choice of purposeful depopulation or natural depopulation. Either way it’s not going to be a fun ride.
Just a small taste of things to come. Disaster by depopulation http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2005_2/20-21.html
With 2030 you are a optimist!
Not really. Notice I said, ” those of us who are still alive that is”. I don’t believe stuff about 9 billion humans living on this planet. Not living in “peace and harmony” at any rate!
I might be alive— but not likely.
Your point is taken.
the key would be to kill a lot of people (to redistribute wealth and reestablish a healthy demand for labor) but not so many that it fundamentally disrupts complex global systems that allow for electric vehicles, development, production, and distribution.
didn’t know seba was such a fan of mass death.
I looked over the report and don’t think that the effect of fleet ownership will be as large as Seba shows. He is showing maximum effect, that would not cover the rush hours.
I do agree that corporate ownership of car fleets can make a significant reduction of cars (once autonomy becomes complete) if the companies do not become too greedy and keep prices low as possible. Most of the effect will be in the very high population density areas, which already have lower car ownership, but which could plunge even further.
Rush hour traffic can be reduced by ride sharing in densely populated areas, easily accomplished with autonomous vehicles and apps like Uber.
If average occupancy of rush hour cars increases from 1 to 2, the number of cars needed is cut in half. Increase to 4 and 1/4 of cars are needed.
Cars park remotely near city, then move passengers back home in evening or provide “uber” service in city during the day.
Probably something like the new electric VW minibus would be an ideal people mover, less wasted space and more passengers per vehicle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQut6ks3nSY
Wind and Battery power.
Germany on the 19th of February had a peak demand of 74Gw of power falling to around 60Gw in the small hours.
With temperatures of between -3 and -1 power demand was high.
Unfortunately wind when it was needed most was a let down again, producing only 0.75Gw.
For 5 days from the 16th of February the 90 Gw plus of installed wind and solar power failed to produce more than 10% of Germany’s needs.
The answer to this deficit, according to certain thinkers is to have lots of batteries in every home, office, factory and restaurant.
If you are of the view that battery storage is even part of the solution.
What I would like to know is, how many batteries would meet the shortfall in that 5 day period. Bearing in mind the batteries, including all electric car batteries would be flat after 1 day.
If Germany doubled it’s solar and wind power the batteries would last 2 days before being totally depleted.
One of the creators of the Renewable Energy Sources Act or EEG (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) was the late Hermann Scheer. He wrote several books including a couple that I bought. Congratulations Peter, your incessant comments about the failure of renewables in Germany has prompted me to dust off “The Energy Imperative: 100 Percent Renewable Now”. I will be reading it to find out exactly how Scheer thought Germany would make it through cold winter spells. When I have read it I will let you what Scheer’s thought were. The whole Energiewende was basically his idea.
Peter,
There are a number of answers to handling seasonal deficits of renewable power – it’s a mistake to think that there’s a single silver bullet. But, our space and time are limited, so here are two primary answers:
First, overbuilding. 90GW of wind and solar can only be expected to produce very roughly an average of maybe 15%, or 13GW, in Germany. That’s what Oldfarmermac was getting at. So, if you want wind and solar to cover 100% of about 65GW of demand (on average) you’ll need roughly 430GW of capacity. Now, no one ever expects to build to an average – in the US we overbuild capacity by a factor of about 2.5:1 (about 1,150GW of capacity for 450GW of average demand). If we just use a factor of 2:1 for our wind and solar (because it’s more capex intensive) then you’d build about 860GW of capacity. That’s 10x as much as they have now. If Germany’s 90GW of wind and solar produced about 6.5GW, then 860GW would produce about 60GW. That’s close to 90% of demand.
The 2nd answer is “wind-gas”. If you overbuild wind and solar by 2:1 that means that you have a vast amount of surplus power to use for storage. That means you don’t need high efficiency. On the other hand, you do want to minimize capex – capex is the problem with batteries. So, convert surplus power to H2, store it cheaply underground, and burn it cheaply in ICEs or turbines (not expensive fuel cells) for a round trip efficiency of perhaps 25%, and low capex. That would give enough backup to cover supply deficiencies of very roughly 25%, which is far higher than we would see from a 50% deficit for 5 days – that’s a supply deficiency of about 1% of annual demand. Alternatively, overbuilding of just 1.25:1 would still give you a lot of surpluse power, likely more than enough to handle seasonal shortages.
Does that help?
Peters point shouldn’t be discounted.
It is important to deal with this issue headon in order to be taken seriously in the effort to promote renewables.
To pretend they can handle to cold winters all the time of the north is naive in my mind.
I wouldn’t be giving up my backup coal, oil, or gas burner ever- if I lived in places with coldness.
It even got to 28 degrees right on the coast of central Calif this past week (Half Moon Bay), which is very rare. But you can freeze in very rare.
That would be true if you were to try to live on solar power alone.
Fortunately, there are a number of other renewables: wind, hydro, geothermal, and others. If you look at places like Canada, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, you’ll see them. Wind in particular is a bit stronger in the winter and at night, so it complements solar nicely.
Hi Hickory,
So we can have a bit of natural gas backup for the 1% of load hours that might not be covered for a widely dispersed highly interconnected large area covered by a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal power with battery backup, vehicle to grid, demand pricing, and thermal storage (both cold and hot depending upon season). Heat and store hot water in cold weather during times of high wind and solar and make ice in warm weather during high wind and solar periods.
Also biofuels could be used for backup in cold weather, or wind gas (using excess wind power to produce a combustible gas).
Island
If any country can do it Germany can, but the lack of storage including hydro, pumped storage and batteries is the Achilles heal of renewable power.
Hydro and pumped storage rely on rainfall and assuming the same rainfall in the coming 50 years will be the same as the last 50 years would be a mistake.
I Look forward to his hearing about his ideas
Hi Peter,
Not to quibble too much, but Germany is a country with relatively lousy wind and solar resources.
German engineers and German workers are unquestionably right up there among the very best in the world. Some people believe they may be the best. I won’t dispute that argument, having worked with some of them .
But they don’t have much in the way of natural resources to work with.
If the Germans were able to relocate themselves to a country with wind and solar resources comparable to the state of Texas, they would be eighty percent of the way to going totally renewable in another decade or two and they would likely manage to reorganize their economy to get their need for liquid fuels down to almost nothing by then as well.
What they would have to have, they could probably manufacture using renewable energy.
OFM
You may very well be right, but they have to work with what they have got. Studying wind speeds in Europe, when there are large high pressure systems over central Europe wind speeds are low across the entire continent.
Also at night time particularly in winter it is dark at 4pm from Warsaw to Lisbon.
At the moment we have very cheap storage. It is called coal and gas.
The cost of replacing those with batteries for an entire country is about 100 years of coal and gas cost. Considering how much gas there is and consumption could decline due to wind and solar. Gas will remain a very cheap storage medium.
Suppose you go back a few years and read up on the projections made by companies and governments about the future price of gas and oil, and see how well they have matched up with reality.
Gas depletes. It’s just a question of when, not if, of the price of it going thru the roof.
Tell me now. Do you really think the Russians, or the Germans, have forgotten WWII? If you were a German today, how comfortable would you be, knowing that someday the Russians may just TURN OF THE EXPORT of oil and gas?
It’s pure bullshit to claim they CAN’T. Nobody whatsover has the power to stop them, if it suits the agenda of who ever happens to be running the show at the time. It’s true this would create HUGE problems for the Russian economy, but they could easily survive short term, for a year or two, without importing ANYTHING.
Western Europeans will be dying by the tens of thousands within a couple of weeks if anything disrupts the delivery of imported oil and gas during a tough winter.
And furthermore, the Germans fully expect to earn a large portion of their future national income by exporting their renewable energy hardware and expertise in installing and maintaining it.
At least a couple more countries every year, from here on out, will go from exporting energy to importing energy.
Depletion never sleeps.
You persistently avoid conservation, optimisation, efficiency, heat storage, cold storage etc from you trolling. Batteries are not the only possibility and even they will be very different in 10 years time.
Internal insulation is very expensive, very disruptive and the payback is so long as to see hardly any benefit. I know someone who had it done and their bills are down by only £100 per year.
Facts are not trolling you silly person
Peter says: “Internal insulation is very expensive, very disruptive and the payback is so long as to see hardly any benefit.”
Over here in Norte Americano we understand physics and have also learned how to use vapor barriers. Insulation is about 50 cents a square foot for R-13. That’s $500/1000 square feet t and saves 67 million BTU per heating season per 1000 square feet in my area. Might only be half that in London but about the same in Edinburgh.
Payback time is typically about 5 years, so for a homeowner it would make sense and natural gas prices are likely to rise over time which would shorten the pay back period.
Maybe off shore oil and natural gas platforms could be repurposed as offshore wind farms instead of being decommissioned. Not sure if it would be cheaper than new construction.
It seems there have been studies that suggest that a widely interconnected grid for all of Europe with widely dispersed wind and solar installations (put the wind and solar farms in those locations with the best wind or solar resources) is likely to require very little backup.
More study of this is needed at the continental scale.
Dennis
Solid wall insulation is expensive, as they have to built a stud wall to make a gap.
With regard to wind power distribution. Euan did a study on the subject and taking wind power right across Europe had little effect of leveling out production.
Cracking the storage problem is essential
No, there are many ways to insulate a solid walled house. I used to live in one and looked into it. Stripping plaster, applying water barriers, apply studding and insulation then plasterboard is not a huge task and within the bounds of DIY. Solid walls often need rectification for other faults and this can be a big part of the solution. With much of UK old stock housing the problem is one of the area involved making it a worthless task unless joined with remedial work. Loft insulation, underfloor insulation, triple glazing, insulated doors and porches can be the solution there.
Insulation can be fixed externally also being used as part of remedial work plus new insulating materials such as aerogel are coming to market that can help resolve these problems.
NAOM
So you looked into it did you.
Always easy and cheap looking into it.
Our neighbours have just fitted triple glazing to their home.
£40,000 and that was the cheapest of 3 quotes.
I don’t know why you are getting so up tight about single brick walls as these are rarely found except in outhouses. Typical older properties have a double brick, non cavity wall with, typically, an English or Flemish bond. These have many problems besides insulation and require expensive remedial work. Applying insulation as part of the remedial work can bring costs down for both jobs.
NAOM
Hi Peter,
A proper study looks at wind and solar for the continent as a whole and devises optimal solutions.
Euan is far from an expert on the subject, and the same caveat applies to me as well.
A proper study looks at wind and solar for the continent as a whole and devises optimal solutions.
Heck, a proper study would include Morocco, which is a stone’s throw from Gibraltar. If you exclude MENA then you’re paying a serious premium for energy security. That’s ok, but it’s not a physics problem, it’s a political problem.
Euan is far from an expert on the subject
Euan is seriously biased against renewables. IIRC I went through his assumptions on storage recently and discovered that they were pretty flawed. It took very careful digging to figure it out – such a problem wouldn’t be clear to someone who accepts his analyses at face value.
Hi Peter,
So how many poor people are going to die as energy gets to be even more expensive than it is already?
The Industrial Revolution was born via water power, but it didn’t get out of diapers until coal and steam came along.
Your coal is already gone. You’re buying gas and oil from overseas, mostly from countries that are not exactly your cultural soul mates, or your friends.
There are ways to insulate older houses, no matter how they are constructed, that are reasonably economical, in relation to the long term savings in energy cost. Whether the owners and the people who live in such houses are willing to accept the necessary compromises is up to them.
Last year saw record low solar costs broken not once, but four times, and over a short period of time, raising questions as to whether it is realistic to expect this remarkable trend to continue. But momentum is widespread, and not only gaining in a few sun-drenched markets like Saudi Arabia.
While solar is grabbing headlines for its recent performance, the prize for the world’s cheapest electricity generation in 2017 went to wind. In November, Enel Green Power made the lowest-ever bid for electricity generation in a Mexican wind auction.
While wind’s recent cost fall-offs have not been as universally stellar as solar’s (mostly because wind is a more mature sector), wind power prices have still been precipitous over the past couple years, particularly in countries with the most favorable conditions and policies.
Just in case anyone is wondering why I think there is an almighty shitstorm brewing in the electricity generating business.
I think there Island Boy is probably right, that there’s a shit storm brewing in the electricity biz.
Ten or twenty years from now, the guys who own coal and gas fired generating capacity are going to need subsidies to enable them to stay in business……… and these subsidies will likely be generated by taxes imposed on wind and solar farm owners.
They’re going to have to have the subsidies in order to survive, and we’re collectively one way or another going to pay these subsidies…….. because it will be cheaper to pay them than it will to build out enough storage capacity to shut the fossil fuel generating industry down altogether , at least within the easily foreseeable future.
There’s no need to go all religious nut case about the last ten or twenty percent of our electricity being generated by burning some gas and maybe a little coal for a while.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
and where was solar at 5pm when everyone needs electricity?
We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaics) with electrochemical storage (batteries and fuel cells), incorporated into a large grid system (72 GW). The purpose is twofold: 1) although a single renewable generator at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites, with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours. And 2) we seek minimal cost, calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs. Our model evaluated over 28 billion combinations of renewables and storage, each tested over 35,040 h (four years) of load and weather data. We find that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacity—at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse renewable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost. At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we find that the electric system can be powered 90%–99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs comparable to today’s—but only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.
Hi Peter,
Troll or just honest skeptic, either way, you DO have a point, and one that simply CANNOT be refuted, as of NOW, and for some time to come, probably decades at least. Maybe forever. There are no GUARANTEES we can go all the way renewable on electricity, although I believe given time, enough investment, and enough technical progress it’s a doable job.
We will need a substantial amount of coal fired generation for some time to come, and likewise a lot of gas fired generation even longer, although hopefully we can phase out nearly all the coal, eventually , in favor of gasfired plus wind and solar power.
I try to get renewables advocates to acknowledge this obvious fact when discussing renewable energy in various forums, because otherwise, it makes those of us who believe in renewables look a little silly, or worse, uninformed or even less than honest to a casual reader.
But there are still compelling and entirely sufficient reasons to go renewable, to the extent we can, as fast as we can practically manage the job.
Depletion is obvious, although it may be a few more years until gas prices shoot up and stay up again, and we NEED gas as an industrial feed stock to manufacture dozens of more or less ESSENTIAL goods such as fertilizers.
And it’s pretty much a given that as time passes, renewable electricity is going to be CHEAPER, when it’s available, than gas and coal fired electricity. It is already, in many places a lot of the time.
So when I talk to people who do not yet know very much about renewable electricity, I tell them it’s like having a big gas hog truck that costs an arm and a leg to drive, and nothing else, to be using ONLY gas and coal fired juice.
I have such a truck, lol. It weighs sixteen tons legally loaded, it has six wheels, and tires are four hundred bucks each, minimum. It gets six mpg if you drive it very gently and don’t have to climb any hills. And when it’s time to replace it, it will cost sixty grand at least for a new one comparable to it.
So the solution is that I also own a car that gets thirty mpg, and it has only four tires, and I can get good ones for a hundred bucks each, lol. I drive the car when I can, and the truck when I must, if the car is giving problems.
The COMBINATION of wind, solar, coal, and gas fired electricity is now, in many places, already the cheapest overall way to get one’s electrical fix, and it will soon be the most economical combination in many other places.
It’s not just the dollars and cents question RIGHT NOW. It’s also employment for local people, local tax collections, national military and economic security, and insurance against the ever rising ( long term ) price of coal and gas.
Every kilowatt hour produced at a new wind or solar farm THIS YEAR means we will be buying that much LESS coal and gas EVERY YEAR for the life of the wind or solar farm, and wind and solar farms are NEVER going to actually wear out, like a coal or gas fired plant. And the less coal and gas we use to generate electricity, the cheaper it will be for everybody else who needs everything from food to new cars, because coal and gas are used in manufacturing just about everything somewhere along the way.
Furthermore, wind and solar farms can be refurbished cheaply, because everything is modular, and can be replaced as necessary without ever having to shut down the entire operation. The things that WILL need replacing are getting to be more reliable, and more economical , year after year. Hardly anything will ever need replacing at a solar farm, except the panels themselves, and they are already the cheapest part, with the land, mounts, wiring, roads, grid connections, and all that sort of thing representing most of the expense. These things do NOT wear out. The stuff on top of the towers at a wind farm, the generators, gear boxes, and turbine blades, can also be replaced every twenty years or so, one at a time, as they fail. If a tower is questionable, it will be possible to just put a smaller gen set on it, and it will be good for another twenty years.
There will be a ZERO fuel bill, for that twenty years.
I have spent an enormous amount of time over the last three or four years looking into the OFF THE BOOKS cost of burning coal and gas, and my conclusion, matched by many many people who are health care professionals, is that we will save as much or more as we are spending to subsidize renewable electricity on health care costs alone.
What’s going to happen is that within ten to twenty years is that we will find it necessary to start subsidizing the owners of coal and gas fired power plants so they can be kept maintained and up and ready to go to cover the times when the wind and sun let us down.
You may be hearing this for the first time.
We will eventually be subsidizing the conventional fossil fuel plant owners so they can stay in business. And we will HAVE to keep SOME OF THEM in business until the time comes when we can have enough electricity available at all times from renewable sources. That may be fifty years or even longer.
I don’t know how long it will be before this happens, but it’s going to happen, just as surely as coal mines play out and gas wells eventually produce so little gas that it’s not economical to maintain the well anymore.
within ten to twenty years is that we will find it necessary to start subsidizing the owners of coal and gas fired power plants so they can be kept maintained and up and ready to go
Most of the US already does that.
Let me say that again:
Most of the US already pays generators to maintain standby capacity. Those payments go to all forms of generation, based on statistical analyses of their likely ability to provide capacity at times of peak demand. Yes, they go to all forms of generation, including wind and solar – it all depends on the production profile, and how it matches up with need for capacity at critical times.
Mac….did you hear me?
Hi Nick,
You have a good point. I probably should added more nuance.
Yes, we are already subsidizing stand by capacity, I know that, but that subsidy is built into the rate structure, and has been, since the earliest days of the grid. It goes to the OWNERS of the EXISTING generating grid, who have until very recently been the owners of both the generating plants AND the distribution system itself, with the exception of rural areas where a lot of the transmission lines are owned by co ops that buy their juice from the owners of generating plants, and get it delivered to the locality over lines that belong to some other entity.
So the average or typical man or woman on the street doesn’t think of this as a subsidy, any more than you would think of a hotel having more rooms available than are needed MOST OF THE TIME as a subsidy, or a bus company having more buses than are usually needed except for a few peak hours as subsidy.
We’re used to that, and defining subsidies this way, we subsidize just about EVERYTHING that’s public or semi public such as roads, water and sewer, hospitals, schools, police, fire department, in order to have adequate supply or coverage at times when demand is high.
The typical person on the street defines subsidies differently, as money provided to the owners of some particular industry at the expense of other industries, or at the expense of tax payers.
So Joe and Suzy Sixpack see that the wind, solar, and electric car industries are subsidized at the expense of the taxpayer, at their expense, and at the expense of the owners of the conventional generating industry.
I’m talking about future times, already here in some places. The owners of gas and coal fired plants are going to lose so much market share that they will not be able to remain in business, unless they are propped up one way or another.
You and I would likely agree that paying them very high rates for standing by and producing at times of very high demand is effectively the same thing as just giving them a tax break, or writing them a check in order to keep them in the black. The typical man on the street would not see the extra high peak demand rate as a subsidy, since the words involved mean something different to HIM.
My point remains the same, at some time in the not too distant future, we are going to have to pay out quite a lot of money, one way or another, to keep the conventional generating industry on it’s feet, as it loses more and more revenue to the wind and solar industries.
We have no choice whatsoever in this matter, for now, and won’t for another twenty or thirty years, maybe even longer, because the necessary renewable capacity doesn’t exist, and the necessary storage capacity doesn’t exist, and won’t exist any sooner. It will take that long to build it.
It’s the humble opinion of this dumb old farmer kgb agent that it would be best if we talk about these things in an even handed fashion, rather than simply emphasizing the positive and studiously avoiding the negative, like goddamned commissioned salesmen.
One sided presentations are simply no good, when you’re talking to people who don’t know anything about a complicated subject, and that’s just about every body on the street, when it comes to renewable energy.
If they read comments such as the ones posted here by the gung ho renewables fans among us, and then read equally simple minded one sided comments posted somewhere else by fossil fuel advocates, they are going to come down on the side of the fossil fuel advocates almost every time.
It’s naive to expect otherwise. How many sales pitches are thrown at you every day of your life? How many , out of each thousand, have actually ever proven out? The one thing above everything else the pr and advertising industries have succeeded in doing is to teach us to ignore them, although pr and advertising still obviously DO WORK.
They don’t work well when the goal is to get people to give up the ( to them) tried, true, safe and economical in favor of the new, expensive, and obviously unreliable, to them.
I have always strongly suspected that you are professionally qualified in some field relating to pr or advertising, because you very seldom devote more than a bare line or two to the downsides of the things you promote.
That makes you a salesman, rather than a person I would recommend as an unbiased expert. I wouldn’t refer a friend to you for advice for this reason, although I generally am in the same book as you, and very often on the same page.
On subsidies for generation: I believe that capacity charges are paid to the owners of the generation plant, not to utilities per se. I really think that the existing charges handle the problem you’re discussing. The problem is really that such charges are not universal: they exist in a majority of the US, but not all, and pretty much not at all in Europe.
On persuasion: PR professionals deal with potential objections. You’re thinking of amateur PR people, or bad salesmen. Good PR people & salespeople are much harder to identify from that point of view. Actually, there are several problems here.
One is that people assume that there are hidden agendas. When I argue with Mike about water not being a problem for LTO he’s surprised, because he knows I advocate at other times and places for a high priority transition away from oil. He can’t imagine that I’d simply want to point out what’s realistic and what’s not, without it being part of a grand agenda.
Another problem is simply difficulty in communication in a limited space. When I say we should transition ASAP, you seem to read into that the idea that we should do it literally overnight. I simply mean that we should make it a much higher priority, not that we should shut down all FFs next Tuesday.
The other is that you and I simply disagree somewhat. I think that the costs of FF are very high, and that the risks of renewables and EVs are small. I think your intuition is somewhat different.
Wow! Tks for that one!
Yes they are magnificent creatures. However it had never for a moment occurred to me that a ray or any cartilaginous fish might be even remotely self aware. Shows how little we know and how biased we are.
Ironically as I read the article I was eating sushi which I had picked up on the way home from work. I try really hard not to eat any Tuna but sometimes do allow myself an occasional bite of farmed salmon, yellow tail, eel, shrimp and on rare occasions some octopus…
Dang, looks like I might have to rethink even some of my fish eating habits…
Yea, commercial fishing in the Marianas, we used to eat live, beating yellowfin tuna hearts.
But those are days long past, in a land far, far away—–
I suspect you know the difference but for some of the less ichtiologically well versed. Yellow Fin Tuna is a large pelagic oceanic fish while Yellow Tail, depending on species is more of a tropical reef fish. I do not eat any Tuna species.
Actually—
The fish you were referring to is actually a Japanese Amberjack, although someone in California or Mexico would referrer to them as Yellowtail (not yellow fin tuna, which are true tuna) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_amberjack
Nope! I do know the Amberjack is sometimes referred to as a Yellowtail. However The fish I was referring to is this one from my own back yard.
The yellowtail snapper, Ocyurus chrysurus, is an abundant species of snapper native to the western Atlantic Ocean including the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Although they have been found as far north as Massachusetts, their normal range is along Florida south to the West Indies and Brazil. This species is mostly found around coral reefs, but may be found in other habitats. They occur at depths of from near the surface to 180 metres (590 ft), though mostly between 10 and 70 m (33 and 230 ft). This species can reach a length of 86.3 cm (34.0 in), though most do not exceed 40 cm (16 in). The greatest weight recorded for this species is 4.1 kg (9.0 lb). It is a commercially important species and has been farmed.
Source Wikipedia
All the extreme cold in Norway (which the scientists here will blame on global warming, undoubtedly) is causing many problems for the batteries of electric vehicles there. I guess we will need to go back to the drawing board before we say petro powered vehicles are dead for good, unless those pushing electric vehicles believe this sort of significant unreliability is acceptable?
Guess what?!
People in Norway do drive their EVs in winter! They know that range is diminished but it really isn’t a big deal at all. And there are ways to counteract those losses.
Gasoline vehicles and electric vehicles both lose in cold weather
In cold weather, all cars get less efficient. For gasoline-powered cars, factors like cold engine oil and increased idling can reduce fuel economy in freezing conditions by 20% or more. Overall, electric cars are more efficient than gasoline cars because an electric motor is much more efficient in turning stored electricity into motion than an internal combustion engine is in converting the chemical energy of gasoline to mechanical energy.
You can see (or feel) this inefficiency when considering the energy lost in the form of heat that leaves a gasoline car through the tailpipe and radiator. That heat is energy from the gasoline that is wasted. About 60% of the energy from gasoline is turned into heat, while only about 20% goes to drive the wheels. However, when temperatures dip, this “waste” heat is used to warm the cabin.
A battery electric car lacks a wasteful (but warm) engine, so an electric heating system (either a resistive heater or heat pump) is needed to keep the inside climate toasty on a chilly day. This electricity for heating will come from the same battery that’s used to power the electric drivetrain, so the effective range will drop in cold weather (assuming the driver chooses to use the heater).
Hint, dress in layers, preheat your EV and it’s batteries and don’t use the heater so much. Having watched the Norwegians during the recent winter Olympics I have a hunch they know how to deal with sub freezing weather.
Not to mention, you can preheat an EV while still plugged in in an enclosed garage and not kill yourself with carbon monoxide.
I don’t think Americans in general will be as eager to adopt EV’s as you believe. We’re comfortable with the gas-powered cars we’re all used to; and most people don’t like any kinds of change.
That’s why nobody uses computers or smart phones.
People hate that new fangled stuff. 🙂
So true!
.
Buying a Tesla Model 3? Better watch this as Rickard does his first day assessment on his new Model 3. At least he likes the cup holders and the door entry.
Step by step they get closer to the realization that 100 percent renewable energy is achievable. Between storage, smart systems and realizing that not every place needs power 24/7 or needs full power availability they will soon come to realize that we don’t need anything but renewable energy to run the civil systems.
One of the unexpected downsides of the reduced cold war was the decline of submarines for studying Arctic Sea Ice. Here Peter Wadhams discusses the technology and methods of accurately measuring Arctic Sea Ice in a 2004 paper. He started using sidescan sonar from submarines back in 1988. In this case the scanning was done by AUV.
Current methods of ice thickness monitoring have been reviewed by Wadhams (2000). Essentially, the only direct satellite-borne technique is the radar altimeter, which measures freeboard and which has not yet been fully validated in comparative experiments; other satellite-based techniques using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or passive microwave involve inference from other measured parameters. Airborne techniques (laser altimetry for freeboard, electromagnetic sounding for thickness) are expensive for obtaining data over large areas, while through-ice techniques (hole drilling, surface sounding) are purely local. This leaves under-ice mapping as the most readily available and commonly used technique, involving the use of upward-looking sonar from moorings or from submarines. Once again, moorings offer data only at fixed locations, even though these may be critical choke points (e.g., Fram Strait), so only submarines have offered true synoptic ice-thickness mapping. The continued availability of submarines (U.S. and British) is therefore essential to the task of monitoring Arctic ice thickness through the present period of rapid change. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the deployment of British submarines in the Arctic has become more sporadic, and the U.S. civilian Scientific Ice Expeditions (SCICEX) program, which also produced many valuable data on Arctic sea ice from submarines, has been reduced in scope.
What if I was to tell you about an investment that would not only reduce carbon pollution but pay everyone back and more. It’s efficiency gains, the reduction of energy use to get the same intended result in a process or action. Nothing to sniff at, especially on a national or global scale.
Way back in 2005 Nature published a series about regional climate change. Here is your chance to see how much our views have changed or not changed since then.
And by the end, he was still pacing the halls, talking to the paintings.
Donald Trump is close to having no one.
He’s got his literal family—though his son-in-law is reeling from the controversy over his security clearance, there have been enough off moments in public to feed speculation about the state of his relationship with the first lady, and Donald Trump Jr. said in India last week that given all the president is dealing with, he feels “it’s almost trite to call him just to say hello.”
With Hope Hicks leaving the White House, longtime body man Keith Schiller long gone, there is no metaphorical family, no core group of aides who’ve been through the ringer together, come out beaten but bound forever, trusting each other, trusting the president and having him trust them.
Every president gets lonely. It’s a lonely job. But the president who spent his life desperately seeking attention and getting all of it anyone could ever want might be the loneliest one ever.”
It appears that every last old rat has either abandoned ship or will be doing so shortly.
It’s looking more and more likely to me that enough dirt is going to stick that the R party will have to turn its back on Trump and try to rid itself of him. The odds are still in favor of the R’s trying to protect him and ride out his term doing all the robbing and stealing they can while the robbing and stealing is still good, but Mueller Ain’t Going Away. 😉
This one is ESPECIALLY for HB, and for those lost souls with their hearts in the right place but their heads up their ass who can’t understand WHY HRC lost the election.
It’s because they expected enough people to continue to cut her the same amount of slack they cut her husband Bill, and the true believers, the ones who spent so much time screaming about republicans and Roy Moore, etc, DID cut her that much slack.
A hell of a lot of people with long memories who were sort of sick of her anyway decided that if it was ok for Democrats to vote for men who abuse women, and for women ( a particular woman) who run interference for them, well, they would just play by the same rules.
But young women didn’t, and young men didn’t, and working class people who were afraid for their jobs didn’t, and any one of these things was enough, considering how close the election actually was, in terms of the states that put Trump over the top, was enough to cost her the election.
The point remains the same. You just don’t support a candidate who from the word go already has half the country holding her in the utmost contempt.
HB has said here he doesn’t need the votes of southerners, and by extension, anybody who he looks down on, even as he pretends to be a Democrat.
But the Democratic PARTY needs those votes.
Control of the Virginia legislature this last time around came down to less than a thousand votes either way.
The twenty first century version of the sweat shop:
The Pacific side Arctic ice continues to get clobbered – Bering almost gone and now Chukchi falling fast (also Greenland Sea on the other side dropping quickly). It’s supposed to cool down a lot next week, but it’s all relative as the Arctic anomaly stays above 2K).
Columbia ensemble is indicating growing chance of El Nino next year.
Cascading tipping points anyone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G25dGJ3yUYk
Climate Tipping Points from Cascading Feedbacks
From my chair, it looks like we can kiss our stable nurturing climate goodby. Humans have poked and prodded and perturbed our Earth systems to the breaking point, and these systems are now breaking. Business as usual guarantees an unstable climate and gut-wrenching consequences for all life on this planet.
Paul Beckwith
Link to Potsdam Institute:
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/services/infodesk/tipping-elements/kippelemente
Tipping Elements – the Achilles Heels of the Earth System
Tipping elements are components of the Earth system of supra-regional scale which – in terms of background climate – are characterized by a threshold behavior. Once operating near a threshold, these components can be tipped into a qualitatively different state by small external perturbations. To compare them with the human body, tipping elements could be described as organs which drastically alter or stop their usual function if certain requirements, such as oxygen supply, are not sufficiently fulfilled.
The threshold behavior is often based on self-reinforcing processes which, once tipped, can continue without further forcing. It is thus possible that the new state of a tipping element persists, even if the background climate falls back behind the threshold. The transition resulting from the exceedance of a system-specific tipping point can be either abrupt or gradual. Its large-scale environmental impacts could endanger the livelihood of millions of people.
Again I have to have my serious doubts. These guys aren’t doing the basic homework which shows CO2 released through only a single volcanic eruption is much more than man can generate on purpose in years. Protecting ecosystems from tipping points is a worthwhile goal, but how to get the volcanoes to cooperate?
Julian, you have it completely backwards. Volcanoes (surface and under ocean) plus volcanic outgassing and volcanic lakes emit 0.645 billion tons CO2 per year. Mankind’s actions emit 29 billion tons CO2 per year.
Which number is bigger? We win by about 45 times, yippee! People are stronger than volcanos (numbers count).
In fact, even if we include the rare, very large volcanic eruptions, like 1980’s Mount St. Helens or 1991’s Mount Pinatubo eruption, they only emitted 10 and 50 million tons of CO2 each, respectively. It would take three Mount St. Helens and one Mount Pinatubo eruption every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting. That is not happening.
So put your volcano fairy tale in the garbage where it belongs and fact check before commenting.
I’ve had other reality and intellectually challenged humans bring up this point. What don’t they understand, or are they just mentally challenged?
Mostly it’s a troll thing. Then others repeat it as if it’s fact since they can’t be bothered to check valid internet sources.
These guys aren’t doing the basic homework which shows CO2 released through only a single volcanic eruption is much more than man can generate on purpose in years.
I think you are either a paid troll or you are the one who didn’t do his homework way back in high school chemistry and physics class. Your statement is false!
You don’t have a clue what you are talking about, while the people you are criticizing actually did their homework and much more. Which is why they have advanced degrees.
As for your doubts, they hardly qualify as serious.
Hi Julian,
Some youths are apparently suing Washington for failure to act on climate change. I just posted a comment about it with a link.
Is that great news or what? Hey, let’s celebrate. ^u^
In any case, looks like so-called government has their work cut out for them, ay?
Climate change may very well = death to large-scale centralized governpimps.
Oh happy days.
Hi Caelan,
I’m a long long way from a worshiper of big government and big technology, but you are sure as hell going to wish you had the both of them back if you live long enough to experience life without them.
If typhoid or yellow fever or malaria or malnutrition or something similar doesn’t get you, then your local big man will have you whipped and put to work as a slave, or else just have you murdered out of hand as a rabble raising pain in the ass.
Free speech is something that only really exists when you have a government committed to protecting it.
Hi Glen,
Large-scale centralized so-called government as it currently manifests is untenable, so your arguments for it are kind of moot, yes?
When I was on a city bus once, a ‘local big man’ was harassing a ‘local smaller man’ and so I went over and told the local big man that if he kept at it, he’d have to deal with both me and the other guy. Worked like a charm.
When I was in a garage band, while we were out at a donut shop, a local big man for some reason just didn’t like our guitarist, so he followed us out and threatened him just outside the shop. When he made his move, our guitarist went swinging and might have broken his nose, because I got some of his blood on my nice shirt in the process of breaking it up and saving the local big man from even more injury from our guitarist.
Reality– nature– almost never seems to work the way we might think. Haha, good for it.
Hi Caelan,
Another of the many things you apparently don’t know is the difference between a bully and big man, a mob boss, a strong man. A pack leader.
Such a man never fights alone, except for amusement. It’s beneath his dignity. He just nods at one or another of his home boys, who happily proceeds to beat the crap out of anybody who irritates him. In case you wonder, you get to be one of his homies by proving you can beat the crap out of anybody around.
If he thinks you represent a serious threat, you can expect to find yourself jailed, sold into slavery, or simply murdered out of hand, as suits his whim.
Of course societies ruled by such men do occasionally evolve into ones that limit the power of the head man……. but by that time they have the rudiments of a central government.
Actually I think you do know these things,but deny them and complain about everything as a matter of habit.
People like you aren’t at all rare.
Ohhh III seee… Thank you for elaborating on my cute little anecdotes below my actual point and clearing things up for me…
So it’s instead more like Hollywood, then? Like that evil alternative universe Star Trek episode thing? Where Sulu has this giant scar on his face and Spock has a round beard?
Anyway, looks like The Federation is long past its rudiments, ay? Oh dear… What to do what to do what to do…
I wonder what happens next! Fill us in, Glen, fill us in! Don’t keep us in suspense! ^u^
The Unpredictable Species
What Makes Humans Unique
😀
The forecasts for El Nino are meaningless as long as the researchers aren’t focussed on understanding the mechanism behind ENSO. They have no idea what sets the erratic period and can only anticipate the direction a few months in advance, if that.
Artic sea Ice thickness continued it’s decrease in September 2017 despite some increases in area.
Southern Hemisphere not much better.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Antarctic sea ice also low, leading to low global sea ice extent
In the Southern Hemisphere, after January 11 sea ice began tracking low, leading to a January average extent that was the second lowest on record. The lowest extent for this time of year was in 2017. Extent is below average in the Ross Sea and the West Amundsen Seas, while elsewhere extent remains close to average. The low ice extent is puzzling, given that air temperatures at the 925 hPa level are near average or below average (relative to the 1981 to 2010 period) over much of the Southern Ocean. The Weddell and Amundsen Seas were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit) below average. Slightly above-average temperatures were the rule in the northwestern Ross Sea.
Extent can be up to 85% open water for the same area of ice, just depends on how broken up and clustered the ice is at the time. Near minimum there is a lot of room to move around. Extent is a very poor indicator of ice area, unless the ice is all compacted together for some reason. It will only be a good measure once all the sea ice is gone.
Does that matter if you are looking at a trend – each year is likely to have similar dispersion on average, in fact I’d think as the ice got thinner and more mobile there would be a tendency for the ratio of extent to area to increase a bit if anything. Also I thought thickness was calculated as volume over extent (i.e. internal clear water areas counted as zero thickness ice for the average) but could be wrong.
As far as explaining variation in measurement and using accurate ways to portray the actual area or volume of ice, yes it matters quite a bit. Extent is more a measure of dispersion than ice area once the region is not fully covered with ice and deteriorates as the region has less ice cover.
The Arctic Ocean is mostly a bound system, bound by continental land surfaces so for part of the year extent may model area. Once the open water reaches a significant percentage of the region, extent can vary wildly dependent upon storms and currents.
You will see from this quickly made graph that even in the highly bound system of the Arctic errors of 40 to 75% are normal when measuring extent versus actual ice area. It’s good if one wants to show that there is more ice than actually exists. Then compound that area say with errors in thickness and a volume from extent would be completely erroneous.
Imaging the possible error in an unbound system such as Antarctica which has no outer boundary for the ice other than melt as it floats north.
From a scientific view, the extent has a very large systemic error even when using averages over a month (which the data in the graph represents).
The primary use of ice extent is for shipping danger limits, not for area measurements. But it is an easy to obtain measurement with historical significance that works when the ice cover is near 100 percent as it used to be, not now or in the future.
The x axis is years 1979 to 2016
George, the actual data obtained is ice thickness which is then multiplied by ice area (from ice concentration measurements).
There is no direct way to measure volume, the measures of ice height and thickness are from buoys and satellites as well as direct measurement of thickness from ships, submarines, satellites and buoys. Since the density of ice is fairly consistent, the height above water gives the thickness. Salt, water ponding, snow cover all cause errors in measurements which must be accounted and adjusted.
I can’t see using the height of open water since waves occur which are higher than the ice height or thickness. Maybe they have an algorithm to filter that data or just ignore that data.
A one meter thick block of ice only sticks 10 cm above the surface, easily overwashed by waves.
Monitoring sea ice thickness in the Arctic using
satellite microwave sensors
http://injapan.no/arctic2016-day2/files/2015/06/ASIW2016.06.03_Tateyama_%C3%B6z%C3%B2z%C3%B9p.pdf
It’s all going to melt just like the lake near me is doing now, so it’s all just a wash (awash?). 🙂
NEW STUDY BRINGS ANTARCTIC ICE LOSS INTO SHARPER FOCUS
“In all, the study found an overall ice discharge for the Antarctic continent of 1,929 gigatons per year in 2015, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 40 gigatons. That represents an increase of 36 gigatons per year, plus or minus 15, since 2008. A gigaton is one billion tons. The study found that ice flow from West Antarctica — the Amundsen Sea sector, the Getz Ice Shelf and Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic Peninsula — accounted for 89 percent of the increase.”
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2686/new-study-brings-antarctic-ice-loss-into-sharper-focus/
Fun having both poles warm up at the same time isn’t it? All this without the help of black carbon to warm up the ice down south.
Now if we could only think of a use for all that ice crashing into the ocean. How about shipping it up to Chile for a water source? Put sails on the bergs and run up robotically, Elon Musk’s people should be able to handle that. Then solar and wind powered pumps and EV trucks could distribute it.
Now if we could only think of a use for all that ice crashing into the ocean. How about shipping it up to Chile for a water source?
Nah! The Chileans can supply all the water they need by harvesting only 4% of their available fog in the Atacama desert.
https://inhabitat.com/mit-develops-advanced-fog-harvesting-material-that-pulls-5x-more-water-from-thin-air/
MIT develops advanced fog harvesting material that pulls 5x more water from thin air
And a bit of historic trivia:
The first “conventional” solar still plant was built in 1872 by the Swedish engineer Charles Wilson in the mining community of Las Salinas in what is now northern Chile (Region II). This still was a large basin-type still used for supplying fresh water using brackish feedwater to a nitrate mining community. The plant used wooden bays which had blackened bottoms using logwood dye and alum. The total area of the distillation plant was 4,700 square meters. On a typical summer day this plant produced 4.9 kg of distilled water per square meter of still surface, or more than 23,000 liters per day. This first stills plant was in operation for 40 years!
You ruin all the fun we could have had using Elon’s magic tech toys. No robotic glaciers sailing into port and being scavenged onto autonomous EV tractor trailers 🙁
Don’t despair! I’m sure we can get Elon to start a fog harvesting company. BTW on a more serious note, as the atmosphere warms and holds more water vapor maybe with the help of wind and solar it can be harvested and frozen into large blocks of ice and stored somewhere. That might be a geoengineering project worth pursuing…you could even use Elon’s magic toys to transport it to places it might be needed. 😉
“maybe with the help of wind and solar it can be harvested and frozen into large blocks of ice and stored somewhere”
We used to call those glaciers. 🙁
The U.S. Electricity System in 15 Maps
http://www.theenergycollective.com/aqgilbert/2322195/us-electricity-system-15-maps
Barbarians are violent, selfish, lawless and dangerous by nature. They are sometimes intelligent but are simpletons in their approach to life. If they want it they take it, if they can they kill and destroy or find ways to get what is others or enslave and use/abuse others of their own kind. The future is something one does not really think about or be responsible for in the barbarian mind, it’s all about what can be taken now.
Below are a series of films about the new barbarianism flourishing on parts of this planet. I say it falls short, the barbarians are among us and human actions toward the other species and the ecosystems of the planet make most of us simpleton barbarians. I say the collective everyday actions of humans makes them the New Barbarians whether they wear suits, drive nice cars, have nice houses or are out clearing rain forests and killing the animals there, or dumping pollutants in air, water, food and soil. It’s the simple barbaric view of life, a mindset that refuses the broad complexity and interrelationship of life and environment. They are easily picked out by their unthinking attachment to groups; political groups, religious groups, corporate groups and armed forces. They follow the loud and incessant self-appointed leaders and experts who themselves take narrow views of reality. Barbarians have a fixed mindset. They live as far outside moral and ethical modes as is possible in their circumstance. They are highly judgmental and critical of others. The New Barbarian bends truth and reality to achieve his/her own ends irrespective of others rights or needs.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
The New Barbarianism
https://www.csis.org/features/new-barbarianism
Barbarians are violent, selfish, lawless and dangerous by nature. They are sometimes intelligent but are simpletons in their approach to life.
The original meaning of the word barbarian was simply those who didn’t speak Greek. later used to refer to all foreigners. In the waning days of the Roman Empire the Romans had simply become xenophobic…
LOL! Hey! Hey! Hey! just because my own ancestors the Huns were called barbarians by the Romans doesn’t mean they were unsophisticated savages. Check out the quality of their work…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Hunnish_-_Bracelet_-_Walters_571082_-_Detail_Front.jpg
Now it’s the barbarian next door, on the street, in a government or corporate position of authority, or elsewhere in a neighborhood near you.
“a “barbarian” may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, and insensitive person.”
I have known good Hungarians, bad Hungarians, smart and dumb Hungarians. Mostly they are just people that make great chicken dishes (I can almost taste it now, that little Hungarian restaurant in a small city I lived near, a hole in the wall place, hard to find, fantastic food). Makes me hungry just thinking of it. Is it lunchtime? Bye.
Slavic is related to words like Czech slovo, meaning word. Slavs can speak.
On the other hand you have Czech němec, meaning German. The original meaning is “no speak”. A lot of people who speak Slavic or Germanic languages have the Slavic name for German in various forms, like Niemiec, Nemec, Nemetzky, Nimitz, Niemitz, Nimtz etc.
In America we even have Nimitz class aircraft carriers, which I guess are the barbarian class.
Oh, I forgot Nemeth and Namath. Joe Namath was a Hungarian barbarian.
Yeah, but the real Hungarians obviously thought he was German. 😉
One for Doug (though he has probably seen it).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/21/a-self-taught-astronomer-spotted-something-no-scientist-had-ever-seen/?utm_term=.f8cadb434a51
NAOM
notanoilman,
Very cool, thanks. And no, I wasn’t aware of this observation.
I remember photographing a supernova in the constellation of Leo, watched it for several weeks. I estimated the brightness as greater than the whole galaxy that contained it.
Happened 100 million years ago, so it was all over before I saw it.
High in the early night sky at the shoulder of Orion is that famous red star, Betelgeuse. Burning it’s candle on both ends, this giant star will go supernova. Will it harm life on earth or just give us a heavenly display?
http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/supernove-distance
Every once in a while I come across a talk that really opens my mind to the truly incredible complexity of the workings of our marine geochemical and biological processes. This talk by Claudi Benitez-Nelson at this year’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) MarineSciences Meeting is one such talk. It connects quite a few dots. Among other things, it made me rethink how I had viewed the role of marine cyanobacteria in the C, N, P cycles up until now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6aKqhZ_r5c
Science plenary lectures from the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
Claudi Benitez-Nelson, College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Marine Science Program and Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences at the University of South Carolina, will deliver “The building blocks of life: From oceanic to molecular scales and back again.” John Dabiri, Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, will present “Biological Propulsion in (and of?) the Ocean.”
Very good talk, thanks. Combine that with the sulfur cycle and the very important role of pyrite.
13 Youths ‘in a Position of Danger’ Sue Washington State Over Climate Crisis
Arctic Sea Ice September monthly values of Volume, Area and Thickness on one graph.
Oh look, the area covered by ice is almost unchanged.
No reason to do anything! Keep consuming useless shit!
/sarc
Yes, in September 5 and 3 are about equal. So next September anyone believing that should send me 2/5 of their wealth and they will notice no loss.
Quantifying our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels
http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/quantifying-our-faustian-bargain-with.html
It seems to me that 1.5K point for permafrost melt is going to be quite important. What I can’t quite understand is that we are below that number but there are plenty of reports of the melt having started: maybe the Arctic amplification means an actual lower average is sufficient and once things start in a locally warm year they keep going? I haven’t seen a similar number for release of Arctic shelf free methane but that looks like it might be something with increased focus now given the recent evidence of how fast some of the peripheral sea ice can dissappear if the conditions set up right. I guess Arctic sea temperatures are much more localised and less correlated to global averages, and I’d imagine not known very accurately.
That’s because the 1.5K is a global average, but warming has been greater at high latitudes, so more permafrost melting.
The tipping point has been stated as 1.5K global average increase, not 1.5K local increase. Higher local temperatures would cause a thaw it would, or should, refreeze unless the highs are sustained.
Faustian bargain?! You can’t bargain with tipping points! Once you pass them you enter uncharted territory in a new stable state that may have unknown cascading consequences throughout multiple connected systems.
The Claudi Benitez-Nelson AGU MarineSciences Meeting talk I posted upthread is just one example of how little we actually understand about the system. We keep twiddling with the control knobs of those various systems at our peril.
As one of the commenters in the link you posted, so succinctly said:
Judy Cameron2 weeks ago – Shared publicly
“We’re fucked :(“
“We’re fucked :(“
And there is no way out.
Listen to 38-42 minute portion of this talk with Yuval Harari.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhF7Skyx0F8
The latest episode of Radio Ecoshock has an interview with Bjørn Samset, who is mentioned in the article I posted a link to.
Not a bad interview—
Let me see if I understand,– Are we not still the U.S.A.? One of the most resource rich country’s in the world (If not the most richly blessed with resource). Why should we be bargaining with anyone else for anything? Course that’s just my humble opinion here.
Maybe you should start by upgrading your reading comprehension skills…
Reality is a harsh mistress Pops.
Did you know that nearly 75% of Merikans age 17 to 24 are ineligible for the military due to obesity, other health problems, criminal backgrounds or lack of education. USA is indeed a nice piece of real estate, but it’s full of a lot of very low caliber folks. Sales of short buses are through the roof.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/19/pentagon-buildup-troop-recruiting-shortage-351365
A Faustian bargain could be that all those resources that make you so smug and entitled are destroying the environment, which means you are condemning your children and further descendants, concerning which you appear very pleased with yourself, to something quite unpleasant (maybe not quite as bad as being sucked down into hell while screaming for mercy, but who knows – as Mephistopheles says: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of out” – he was referring to having to spend time with people like you).
Resource rich? Tell me that when we stop importing large amounts of oil. Wonder why Bethlehem Steel had to import iron ore before it went bust. Maybe we should stop importing food. Better not, 15 percent of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 50 percent of fresh fruits, 20 percent of fresh vegetables and 80 percent of seafood.
“While the U.S. runs a sizable trade surplus in services (more than $230 billion last year), it’s dwarfed by the $771 billion trade deficit in goods: U.S. goods exports amounted to more than $1.6 trillion last year, but the country imported nearly $2.4 trillion worth of goods.May 18, 2015”
Resource rich? Sure, we have a lot of solar energy we don’t use.
INTERESTING BIT FROM DISCUSSION AT BITSOFSCIENCE.ORG
What we conclude about the global temperature trend:
1. A large part of atmospheric warming is still masked by (shorter-lived) cooling factors and by climate system inertia – therefore the CO2-coupled ‘Real’ Global Temperature is (much) higher than currently observed temperatures.
2. Recent global temperature records were not ‘peaks’, but rather corrections to a climatic temperature trend line that is (much) higher than the statistical trend line.
3. If atmospheric CO2 is stabilized around the current level (404 ppm) there is an uncertain, but possibly large amount of ‘pipeline warming’. This warming in the pipeline may lead to an additional temperature rise of more than 1 degree Celsius – additional warming that will manifest itself after stabilization of the CO2 concentration. The final temperature rise of the current CO2 concentration could be up to 2 or 3 times as high as the warming that is currently observed(!)
4. The current atmospheric CO2 level is a dangerous overshoot – to stay below internationally agreed climate targets (both 1.5 & 2 degrees) the CO2 concentration (that is currently still rising year by year) should not be stabilized but should in fact be lowered.
5. If we keep measuring climate change by the observed rise in live temperatures and the Earth & climate system responses this temperature rise causes (including extreme weather events) we keep underestimating the real scientific climate urgency.
http://www.bitsofscience.org/observed-vs-real-global-temperature-series-conclusion-7180/
Even if the warning is made simple and clear with no “maybe’s” or “possibly’s” I am not sure many would care or listen. Take for example the region around Mt. Vesuvius in Italy. There are many millions of people and one of the densest population centers in the world within a few miles of the very active volcano. Historically it has erupted dozens of times since it destroyed Pompeii and Herculeum, many of them severe. Yet people keep congregating in large numbers around it and within it’s reach.
Efforts by the government of Naples to get people to move out of the city by giving them a large sum of money were rewarded with only small response.
If people can live within reach of imminent well defined and documented doom, how can one get people to respond to larger but more diffuse long term threats with no documentation other than shaky predictions and poorly understood science?
And in other MSM News:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/02/21/arctic-temperatures-soar-45-degrees-above-normal-flooded-by-extremely-mild-air-on-all-sides/?utm_term=.c7780bcbcb66
Capital Weather Gang
Arctic temperatures soar 45 degrees above normal, flooded by extremely mild air on all sides
By Jason Samenow February 22 at 10:30 AM
On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. “How weird is that?” tweeted Robert Rohde, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “Well it’s Arctic winter. The sun set in October and won’t be seen again until March. Perpetual night, but still above freezing.”
It was only 75F here yesterday (NOAA says 77 nearby) at 41N, windows open for the first time this season. Lake opened up quite quickly, good for the birds. A few flowers have popped up.
Prediction from the past, 2014.
One of the leading authorities on the physics of northern seas is predicting an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2020.
That’s about two decades sooner than various models for climatic warming have indicated the Arctic might fully open.
“No models here,” Peter Wadhams, professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge in England, told the Arctic Circle Assembly on Sunday. “This is data.”
Wadhams has access to data not only on the extent of ice covering the Arctic, but on the thickness of that ice. The latter comes from submarines that have been beneath the ice collecting measurements every year since 1979.
This data shows ice volume “is accelerating downward,” Wadhams said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to stop it from going down to zero.
Back in 2014, a noted professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge made a prediction at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland.
“By 2020, one would expect the summer sea ice to disappear. By summer, we mean September. … (but) not many years after, the neighboring months would also become ice-free.”
Wadhams later clarified that by “ice-free” he didn’t exactly mean the Arctic was going to look like the Baltic Sea in summer.
The scientific definition of “ice-free” is complicated. It is basically based on the amount of ice found in a number of grids when looking at the Arctic from space.
An “ice-free” Arctic, as defined by scientists, would remain full of floating ice in the summer, but the ice would be broken up enough that a ship could push through it.
Wadhams’ pronouncement was angrily challenged by one of the scientists modeling sea ice decline, but the elderly physicist stuck to his guns. He admitted he is predicting a very early opening of the Arctic, but this is “not a model”.
“I wasn’t issuing any threats to anyone.”
The modelers, he told Alaska Dispatch News later, are very sensitive about their models. But he added that it’s hard to deny the actual data. He had plotted the ice decline as a graph curving steadily and increasingly downward since the 1970s and hitting zero in 2020.
https://www.adn.com/arctic/article/expert-predicts-ice-free-arctic-2020-same-day-un-releases-climate-report/2014/11/02/
I think Wadhams will have the last laugh on those deskbound climate modelers who have been treating him like an old crank. He will probably be right within two or three years, better than their 30 years. Outdone by brains, data and a simple graph.
Why Bicycles are Faster than Cars
That’s me on the bike in the pic (which is not uploading with this comment). I don’t own a car.
Race ya! ^u’
The pic (I am thinking that POB dislikes links coupled with pic uploads.)…
Spring Garden Road? – Didn’t think that would be your sort of area. On the picture they have to be less than 50 kB, but I’ve had a couple that got rejected for some other reasons.
Yes, Spring Garden. How did you know?
I’m somewhat temporarily here in the city and was initially in small-town Shelburne, not too far south of here.
I relocated to the province around the same time and possibly for similar reasons as JH Kunstler did to his town.
The sub 50KB image you see was tried with my main comment, so it did get through, just not with the main comment.
I’ve had a couple of extended visits there, went to a gym in Park Lane a couple of times – I remember particularly as I watched the Shuttle crash from an exercise bike the last time. It’s a lovely town, though I guess the weather is a factor. I don’t know Shelburne. I seem to remember a story that Noel Harrison, son of Rex and a minor actor and singer – Windmill’s of Your Mind – lived off grid for a long time down the coast there somewhere.
They may still have the gym in there.
The weather is ok here– better than Montreal, Ottawa or the interior– if not as good as out west in Vancouver or Victoria.
I haven’t owned a motor vehicle in ~30 years. I don’t miss not having a motor vehicle at all. Most of the places I go to are within a mile or two so I can bike or walk (winter). I think it’s insane that most everyone has to use a motor vehicle to get wherever they are going. That may explain the high rate of obesity here, northern Michigan, at ~40%. It certainly saves a lot of money not owning a motor vehicle.
It’s mostly eating habits.
To lose a pound of fat takes about 35 miles of extra walking. If a person walks 4 miles per day that is only 400 calories burned, less than a bagel with cream cheese.
If a person is 50 pounds overweight all it takes is about 240 calories per day over their calorie burn for two years to get there. That is only one bagel a day.
So every bagel means an extra 2.5 miles of walking to burn it off. Now if one adds cream cheese that is 4.3 miles to burn it off. If one eats that extra at every meal, it’s fat city or walk 13 miles per day not counting snacks or deserts/soda.
Better to just eat a lot of vegetables, stay off the starches and sugars. Keeps the cardiovascular system healthier too.
Cost per mile to walk is a fun way to look at it. Some foods only cost a nickel per mile while others can be over one dollar per mile.
Beans are 5 to 9 cents per mile while steak is about a dollar per mile. Tomatoes can be as much as $6 per mile. Watermelon comes out to 84 cents a mile and cantaloupes at about $1 per mile.
A Clif bar costs about 63 cents per mile walked.
Milk is about 11 cents per mile and cheese about 20 cents per mile.
Walnuts come in at about 25 cents per mile.
BTW, the energy used by an EV to take several people a mile costs about a nickel or less. What a bargain!
Your figures seem to make sense. I bust my ass on the bike every day, etc., and am still gaining weight.
Attached is a glam-shot of my lunch today, by the way– home made hummus with kale and peanut butter instead of tahini and multigrain taco chips. It wasn’t bad. What am I doing taking pics of my lunch? It was for a woman friend overseas… The things women make men do sometimes… Now I am at a cafe and enjoying a green tea latte with a cheap scone.
Starches and sugars are the major problem. Good after a day of extreme sports or laboring hard all day, but not good in the general modern life.
Agreed
Refined starches and sugars are bad, but whole grains provide lots of badly needed fiber. Refined oil isn’t good for us either. I know, the low fat vs low carb argument is just crazy, it’s like religion, politics, or climate change. The whole plant based diets seem the best (see What the Health on Netfilx).
My sentiments too, and likewise with not owning a motor vehicle in a very long time. I spent a pleasant night in Ann Arbor some time ago, incidentally.
Media Hacks? Any coverage in other Countries? GE Still own NBC?
“The work started last August to set up a dome-shaped cover. It is part of preparations for removing nuclear fuel from the reactor’s storage pool. A total of 566 spent and unused fuel units remain in the storage pool of the No. 3 reactor. On Wednesday, workers installed the last part of the cover, which is 17 meters high and 22 meters wide, and weighs 55 tons.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-22/tepco-one-step-closer-removing-nuclear-fuel-fukushimas-ruined-reactors
China leading the way
Sales of electric vehicles for 2017 was 468,000, a very uplifting figure. Trouble is sales in petrol and diesel cars was also up, so in 2017 more diesel and petrol cars were sold in China than any other year.
https://www.marklines.com/en/statistics/flash_sales/salesfig_china_2017
When you think that in 2000 AD China sold only 0.6 million cars and 2 million vehicles in total, the rise of vehicle production is greater than anything seen ever in the world. When friends went to China in 1995, bicycles were everywhere and the were few cars outside the major cities.
http://www.theurbancountry.com/2013/02/photos-chinas-history-of-bicycles.html
Today China has the second highest number of Vehicles in the world and in the next 6/7 years have the most. Quite an achievement in 25 years.
On the crowded roads of Great Britain there are around 26 million cars.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35312562
China added as many vehicles to it’s roads in one year as all the vehicles in the UK.
In 2025 China will produce 3/4 million electric vehicles, but will still add between 29 and 31 million diesel and petrol vehicles to it’s roads.
With the differential rate of increase in production between ICE and EV types, it could be all vehicles sold in China will be EV’s in 10 to 12 years. Probably more like 15 to 20 years as the rate of production increase will probably slow with time. That too would be a fantastic change.
There are some serious constraints to producing even 2 million electric vehicles this year.
Here are just 2
https://jalopnik.com/the-problem-that-could-derail-the-electric-car-revoluti-1796728488
It does not take much imagination that increasing mining output by a hundred fold will be difficult if not impossible.
Peter, where do you find this stuff? It sure reads like fake news to me.
Here is a lesson from the past about predicting shortages of metals. Even the rarest was not a problem when demand skyrocketed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-09-26/platinum-s-lesson-for-lithium-ion-batteries
Fish, I don’t normally agree with Peter but this time he has a point. By your logic, it follows that because they thought that platinum was scarce, but wasn’t, then any other metal they think might be scarce will enjoy the exact same fate… that is it will turn out not to be scarce at all.
The scarcity or abundance of cobalt and/or lithium has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the scarcity or abundance plutonium.
However, if you believe that eventually cobalt will be found in abundance outside the Democratic Republic of Congo, then you should make that case without mentioning platinum at all.
The case for lithium is far better. It is produced in 8 countries while cobalt is produced in just three, DRC, Russia, and Australia. However only small amounts are produced in Russia, (5,600 MT) and Australia, (5,000 MT) while the DRC produces 64,000 million tons per year.
So you see because of the severe political problems in the DRC, the exports of cobalt from that country is looking precarious indeed.
“The scarcity or abundance of cobalt and/or lithium has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the scarcity or abundance plutonium. ”
Really, you think I am that stupid? I guess you missed the point of the example.
Oh good god, don’t get so fucking defensive. From your post, I gathered the exact thoughts that I expressed. There was absolutely no other way to interpret your post.
The example was that everyone thought that plutonium would be very scarce. It was not. And you gave that example as to why Peter was wrong about cobalt. There was no other way to interpret your post.
So get over it!
Not plutonium Ron, platinum. It was an example of how people assume that because only so much is being mined now, that is the limit of things. Hardly ever true.
If you read the article Peter posted you might realize it is highly biased and not fact driven.
Since you don’t believe me look up the global USGS reports on lithium and cobalt reserves. I did, lots of places, lots of reserves.
There are always minor delays when mining has to be expanded due to increases in demand. Too much production kills the price.
Ron, the civilized world is not going to crash because of lack of energy, materials, food, alternatives or ability. If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.
Gonefishing
The article simply stated that there are problems with dramatically increasing the supply of Cobalt. It is not biased just because it shakes your happy electric fantasy land.
https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/critical-metals-investing/cobalt-investing/top-cobalt-producing-countries-congo-china-canada-russia-australia/
Do you really think an increase by one hundred times is actually doable?
Sorry, got the metal wrong but the point remains the same.
While it is true that there are some minerals or even metals we will never run out of, that is not the general case. Cobalt is one metal that we will very likely run out of. Or to be more accurate, we will run out of the stuff we can mine.
USGS World Cobalt Reserves and Production
In 2015 the world had 7,100,000 metric tons of cobalt reserves. That year 124,000 metric tons of cobalt were mined. (See Appendix C for a more accurate definition of mineable reserves) That is less than 58 years of production.
Ron, the civilized world is not going to crash because of lack of energy, materials, food, alternatives or ability. If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.
Well hell, I do wish I had your deep insight into what the future holds. I can only say that I believe you are dead wrong. Of course, the crash will be caused by people’s behavior. But that behavior, especially their tendency to overpopulate the planet, is just part of human nature. Too many people will cause the destruction of the environment and the scarcity of the supplies needed to survive… especially food.
Do you really think an increase by one hundred times is actually doable?
Peter, I think that there will not be a problem at all. I think in 5 to 7 years there will be at least 3 different types of batteries available for EV’s not just lithium types. I also know that there is a type right now that dramatically reduces the amount of cobalt needed.
“It is not biased just because it shakes your happy electric fantasy land”
No problem, but it’s sad you have no broad based knowledge of present technology and have an inadequate vision of future tech already being developed. Makes for a dark and unrealistic view.
“If it does civilization will crash because of greed, stupidity and selfish agenda. Some of the stronger human characteristics.” ~ GoneFishing
The, as you write, ‘greed, stupidity and selfish agenda’, are systemic– by law/’government’-as-usual/BAU. Civilization, the way it is configured, appears self-crashing.
“It’s the system, stupid.”
(Not you, personally, just the expression to embellish the point.)
Meanwhile, some want to eat that ‘electric fantasy’ cake and have it too, as per/via The System…
Nevertheless, your demo’d irrationality in previous threads under a previous article has the effect of casting serious doubt over your apparent contentions about what might be possible– IOW, if irrationality has a certain level of effect over your thinking.
Caelan, civilization does not exist. Government does not exist. It’s all in their heads, just mental constructs, so stop yammering about the non-existent and start dealing with reality. People exist, water exists, computers and EV’s exist.
existence – the fact or state of living or having objective reality
The “system” does not exist. It is a set of mental constructs and agreements, but has no real existence in the world and is just an adult form of pretend.
Now nature exists, at least in the abstract, is that the “system” you meant?
“The, as you write, ‘greed, stupidity and selfish agenda’, are systemic– by law/’government’-as-usual/BAU. Civilization, the way it is configured, appears self-crashing.”
Those are characteristics of people, which they of course transfer to their mental constructs. It’s a big game of pretend, a self-induced mass delusion that is bounded by interactions with reality. If you can find a fast and easy way to change these machinations we call society and civilization, then please tell us. It would make eliminating the destruction of the natural world so much easier.
“Nevertheless, your demo’d irrationality in previous threads under a previous article has the effect of casting serious doubt over your apparent contentions about what might be possible– IOW, if irrationality has a certain level of effect over your thinking.”
Personally, I find it difficult to think of anyone more irrational than you.
Maybe you need to learn some better ways to socially interact, they seem fairly non-existent in your case. Or do you always sulk and whine when someone gets pissed off at your actions? It’s a learning process for most.
Of course if I am irrational (or merely appear so to you), then I have a lot of company – the whole human race.
https://qz.com/922924/humans-werent-designed-to-be-rational-and-we-are-better-thinkers-for-it/
So let’s all be irrational and make better decisions in the present (the past or future does not exist either, we can think about it but it will not be the future (I mean present) we envision ).
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality”
Iris Murdoch
Oh this internet/screen/distance thingy and your previous demo’s are what you would call ‘social interaction’ and/or ‘better ways to socially interact ‘? Oho.
And this after ostensibly suggesting or at least insinuating that there is no ‘interaction’ (per se?) that gives us, say, EV’s, civilization, so-called government or whatnot?
Imagine the universe working that way, with no gravity or other forces. Universe? What universe?
Maybe you would do well to look into the word, ‘interaction’, incidentally, seeing as you seem to be leveraging it a little dichotomously.
Once you’re done, let us know and then we can continue on if you wish with this imaginary interaction.
There are some systems in which a price rise does not result in an increase in production simply because the resource is clapped out. The gold market last decade for example. The gold price rose at an average of about 17% per annum year after year but gold production fell.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/oil-price-outlook-december-2017/#comment-624833
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264930/global-cobalt-reserves/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-the-largest-lithium-reserves-worldwide/
http://www.mining.com/massive-oyu-tolgoi-mine-double-gold-production-2018/
Cobalt production is heavily related to nickel and copper demand since it is found with those elements.
You will find the real information from the USGS reports and will be surprised at how widespread the sources for lithium and cobalt are across the world. Neither are rare elements.
Graphic on 2016 global cobalt production:
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/5/1199/1197/Cobalt%20Global%20Production%202016%20USGS.png
Graphic on 2016 global cobalt reserves:
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/5/1200/1198/Cobalt%20Global%20Reserves%202016%20USGS.png
Source USGS
I meant the actual reports from the USGS.
Using the figures you presented there is 731 years of production at current known reserve levels.
Enough for 320 million cars if we never discover another source of cobalt and never recycle any. No need though, other battery chemistries and structures will take over from lithium cobalt, several in the pipeline now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-batteries-recycling-analysis/metal-recyclers-prepare-for-electric-car-revolution-idUSKBN1DH1DS
Interesting report on US carbon dioxide emissions.
https://thinkprogress.org/carbon-emissions-decline-with-renewables/
My favorite line:
>Power-sector [greenhouse gas] emissions now sit 28 percent below their 2005 peak, which puts the U.S. only 4 percentage points away from achieving its former Clean Power Plan target of 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, according to BNEF.
China invested billions in solar and wind last year, why do you think it’s emissions went up?
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/climate-change-carbon-emissions-rising-environment/
and Germany also for 2 years running
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-use-and-emissions-likely-rise-yet-again-2017
Blah blah, spare me the one year uptick stories.
German emissions are down significantly over the course of the past decades. The economy is growing, and cheap oil means oil consumption is up. They also need to get out of the coal business, but are dragging their feet for political reasons. Meanwhile, however, the coal companies are going broke and diesel cars are about to get banned in the cities. Also the new government (if it ever convenes) may well do something about coal. Meanwhile renewable installations continue apace.
China is also growing very quickly. No country in the world has improved energy efficiency faster, and no country has added more carbon free generation. Also the are switching to electric cars. Also they are investing in huge carbon sequestration projects in the desert West.
So come back in five years. If you’re interested in watching the ticker tape, watch American “financial news” TV where every 0.1% change in the stock market is reported on breathlessly.
Yep, German CO2 emissions are about 23% below their 1990 level.
and yet
https://klaveness.com/global-seaborne-coal-imports-up-6-1-in-2017/?related=10
The reason China is using more and more oil is because for every one electric vehicle sold they sell 96 diesel and petrol cars.
https://www.platts.com/latest-news/oil/singapore/cnpc-forecasts-chinese-2018-oil-demand-to-grow-27906041
Yep, ICE’s still rule and the Chinese market is fast developing for both ICE and EV. But as time goes on and oil becomes scarcer, EV’s and hydrogen powered vehicles will become the norm. Predictions vary from 2030 to 2050, but several here predict oil production will be on the descent long before 2050.
By 2040 China should have a very large renewable energy grid and a very large fleet of highly efficient EV’s, electric motorcycles and electric bicycles. Same with India. Barring major wars and such.
Not too sure about the US, but they will be forced to change their habits too. The big question is what is going to happen in African countries in the next two decades. They are in line for major development of energy and infrastructure.
That is a good sign, but let’s wind the clock back a few years to 2011. Back when they thought that no more CO2 producing infrastructure could be produced after 2017 or up goes the temperature past 2C. Guess what, it’s 2018 and lots of CO2 producing infrastructure is being built around the world. I notice too that the graph in the article tops out at 32 GtCO2, we were at 36 GtCO2 back in 2014. Not good news, especially since 2017 numbers are expected to rise compared to last year. We are still following the 6C trajectory on the graph.
Yesterday, the 2011 edition of the World Energy Outlook was published by the International Energy Agency. This annual publication is generally seen as the most authoritative source of predictions regarding future energy demand and developments. This year’s edition focuses strongly on the need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, as demonstrated by the following quotes from the executive summary:
##Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system
##In the New Policies Scenario, the world is on a trajectory that results in a level of emissions consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of more than 3.5°C.
##Without these new policies, we are on an even more dangerous track, for a temperature increase of 6°C or more.
##Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permissible by 2035 in the 450 Scenario are already “locked-in” by our existing capital stock
##If stringent new action is not forthcoming by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035, leaving no room for additional power plants, factories and other infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon, which would be extremely costly.
The last point essentially means that global CO2 emissions must peak in 2017 to limit global warming to 2°C, the globally agreed target. This means that no new power plants, factories and other carbon emitting infrastructure can be built after 2017, anywhere in the world, including China, India and other fast growing nations. It also means that policies must be implemented to ensure that emissions actually start declining after 2017. See the graph below, from the presentation to the press:
graph in this site:
http://www.factorinfinity.com/news/iea-global-co2-emissions-must-peak-2017
Not so long before that 1K was being stated as the limit before dangerous warming. And I think all those estimates above omitted any consideration of failing land sinks or potential permafrost and subsea methane releases which are becoming increasingly apparent.
Now George, we don’t want to terrify the children. 🙂
So between you and me, I agree, most of the more than 40 feedbacks are underestimated or not included at all in many predictions. I will stick with the several Arctic specialists that call for major changes in the climate system as the Arctic reaches open water summers. We are already seeing the precursors of those changes.
The thought of monsoons shifting and failing is just too devastating for people and huge numbers of other species for me to dwell on. Desert drying and desert growth is an ongoing situation.
Oh well, on a more positive note the northern migration is starting here. Mergansers and Swans just showed up and with them a bald eagle was hunting the open water on the lake. Lots of bird song in the forests this morning. Plenty of species still alive and we need to throttle back and change our activities to help give them more of a chance.
Zero population growth is just so much bullshit.
Birth & Death Rates
World Birth and Death Rates
Estimated 2011
Birth Rate——————————— Death Rate
• 19 births/1,000 population———— • 8 deaths/1,000 population
• 131.4 million births per year———– • 55.3 million people die each year
• 360,000 births per day—————– • 151,600 people die each day
• 15,000 births each hour—————- • 6,316 people die each hour
• 250 births each minute—————– • 105 people die each minute
• Four births each second of every day- • Nearly two people die each second
Past and future estimated population growth in millions. Notice that the rate of population growth actually increased between 2010 and 2020.
Population estimates
1910 AD 1,750
1920 AD 1,860— 110
1930 AD 2,070— 210
1940 AD 2,300— 230
1950 AD 2,557— 257
1960 AD 3,042— 485
1970 AD 3,712— 670
1980 AD 4,453— 741
1990 AD 5,291— 838
2000 AD 6,094— 803
2010 AD 6,868— 774
2020 AD 7,656— 788
2030 AD 8,321— 665
2040 AD 8,874— 553
2050 AD 9,306— 432
So the rate of population growth is actually increasing during this present decade. But they expect it to start falling again next decade. The big question is why is it increasing now?
* 1910 marks the beginning of more accurate population census counts: United Nations and U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Source from Historical Estimates.
Meanwhile we’re maintaining healthy growth in atmospheric CO2:
January 2018: 408.05 ppm
January 2017: 406.07 ppm
And, not wanting to be left behind:
• The world’s oceans reached their highest temperatures recorded yet in 2017.
• Ocean waters were significantly warmer than in 2015, the previous record holder.
Methane and N2O are still climbing.
http://methanelevels.org/
Don’t worry Ron, once the world converts to digital sex the population will diminish. 🙂
Basically it’s three factors, the length of life has been increasing, the rate of children reaching maturity has increased and the global fertility rate hasn’t fallen quite far enough yet . The total fertility rate has fallen from 4.9 in the 1950’s to about 2.3 currently.
Don’t worry Ron, once the world converts to digital sex the population will diminish.
Don’t bet on it! We already have technology for creating synthetic organisms from digitally encoded and edited DNA…
Just download your DNA apply CRISPR send it via email to your digital sex partner, male or female, won’t matter, mix it with theirs and create a new genome you like. transcribe, insert in egg which had nucleus removed, and voila! Good Luck! 😉
Missed the joke, eh?
Digital sex just went viral… 😉
> The big question is why is it increasing now?
Because the death rate is falling so quickly. The population pyramid is no longer growing at the bottom, but growing at the top.
Here’s a splendid illustration of that.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/1965/
I’ve set it at 1965. Push the +5 button repeatedly to see how the shape of the pyramid changes. You can see the bulge slowly moving up from the 0-4 age group and dispersing among the higher age groups.
Then try a country like Bangladesh, where the birth rate fell dramatically in the 80s. It’s population is still booming, but the growth is all in the higher age groups.
Alimbiquated has nailed it.
There’s a bulge moving thru the overall population statistics like the bulge in a snake that’s swallowed a rat.
I’m somewhat optimistic that with the continued spread of dirt cheap communications, the birth rate in very poor countries will continue to fall, and fall even faster than anticipated by most people who model human population.
I never thought I would say anything much in favor of television, but in recent times I have come to understand that when extremely poor people watch tv and see how other people in other societies live better, they shortly figure out that it’s better to have two pairs of pants or two dresses, and two pairs of shoes, and one or two kids at the most, and enough to eat, than to have half a dozen kids and one dress and one pair of pants and no shoes.
There’s an old true story documented in a book I have around someplace about a propaganda film the old USSR commies produced which included some shots the millions of cars the capitalist hogs forced poor American workers to produce.
Of course it was never actually broadcast in the old USSR, because the film showed the parking lot at Detroit factories that build cars……. with thousands and thousands of cars obviously driven there by the workers.
I wonder if they shot the guy who put this footage into the film in the first place. He must have been a real Russian patriot, determined to demonstrate to anybody who actually saw this footage that American ( Western ) working people were obviously filthy rich by Russian standards.
Most likely they just put him to sweeping the floors and cleaning toilets if his bosses liked him. Otherwise……. Siberia.
If the genetic scientists find the right DNA switches we might see the top of the population pyramid get really fat as lifespan is extended. Think about that one.
Then we’ll all starve to death, or kill each other off.
I’m starting to think that mankind’s only hope is sequestering carbon in topsoil, like these Belgians at OZG.
http://www.ozg.be/project-green-wall
You can switch to English. They say they can turn a stretch of Sahel clay soil into a forest in 7-10 years, mostly just by digging swales (trenches basically) on contour and scattering a few seeds.
They publish satellite views of their projects and get paid by someone to sequester the carbon.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?ll=14.291236002307459%2C-0.5812328548012147&z=17&mid=1AvM4rMIuqGSl-GzXGo2KoPCCec4
Soil can hold 10% carbon and already holds about three times as much as the atmosphere. Not all of that is organic, of course. Anyway in my book, fixing the wrecked soils of North Africa, the Mideast Southwestern US, and Western China are probably the best hope we have. It’s cheap and easy, and the tech exists.
I guess the only people who will take action is the Chinese.
I’m with you on this—–
I don’t think anybody has posted this yet. The news itself has been covered upthread, but this has a great graphic image, plus text explaining how to read it.
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/First-ever-photo-of-exploding-star-UC-Berkeley-12703504.php
Stuck my foot in it my four thirty five pm comment. Wrong link.
This is the correct link.
https://www.inverse.com/article/41577-climate-change-bering-strait-sea-ice-melt-copernicus-sentinel
Ancient Italian Fossils Reveal Risk of Parasitic Infections Due to Climate Change
“We found that pulses in sea-level rise occurred on the scale of hundreds of years, and that correlated to rises in parasitic trematodes in the core samples,” Huntley said. “What concerns me is that these rises are going to continue to happen and perhaps at accelerated rates. This poses grave concerns for public health and ecosystem services. These processes could increase parasitism in not only estuarine systems but also in freshwater settings. Such habitats are home to the snail hosts of blood flukes, which infect and kill a million or more people globally each year. What’s scary is it could potentially affect the generations of our kids or grandkids.”
https://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2017/0720-ancient-italian-fossils-reveal-risk-of-parasitic-infections-due-to-climate-change/
Rise in severity of hottest days outpaces global average temperature increase
Irvine, Calif., Jan. 24, 2018 – While our planet’s average annual temperature has increased at a steady pace in recent decades, there has been an alarming jump in the severity of the hottest days of the year during that same period, with the most lethal effects in the world’s largest cities.
https://news.uci.edu/2018/01/24/rise-in-severity-of-hottest-days-outpaces-global-average-temperature-increase/
SEA-LEVEL LEGACY: 20 CM MORE RISE BY 2300 FOR EACH 5-YEAR DELAY IN PEAKING EMISSIONS
“Man-made climate change has already pre-programmed a certain amount of sea-level rise for the coming centuries, so for some it might seem that our present actions might not make such a big difference — but our study illustrates how wrong this perception is,” explains lead author Matthias Mengel from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Every delay in peaking emissions by five years between 2020 and 2035 could mean additional 20 cm of sea-level rise in the end — which is the same amount the world’s coasts have experienced since the beginning of the pre-industrial era.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220123039.htm
Only 20 cm and not until 2300, best climate news we have had in a long time. Thanks Doug.
sarc
The push for electric vehicles threatens to become a classic instance of burning the lifeboats. Here’s why.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2018/02/23/120-the-need-for-new-ideas/
a classic instance of burning the lifeboats
A classic! And true————
un-Denial has been following up on Tim Morgan articles lately.
https://un-denial.com/2018/02/23/by-tim-morgan-the-need-for-new-ideas/
I’m quite sure there’s some good money to be made of EVs, which perhaps contributes to the enthusiasm many people have for them, but they won’t change the end game.
Not so fast! I take issue with some of Tim Murphy’s points, the following paragraph being my primary area of disagreement:
“We know that supplies of petroleum are tightening, that the trend in costs is against us, and that burning oil in cars isn’t a good idea in climate terms. Faced with this, the powers-that-be could do one of two things. They could start to wean us off cars, by changing work and habitation patterns, and investing in public transport. Alternatively, they can promise us electric vehicles, conveniently ignoring the fact that we don’t, and won’t, have enough electricity generating capacity to make this plan viable, and that we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks. At the moment, every indication is that they’re going to opt for the easy answer – not the right one.”
The first sentence is okay, we can agree to that. The next two sentences I have a problem with. Who are “the powers that be”? The governments or the industries that hold sway over them? I see no indication that the “powers that be” want to wean anybody off cars, even in the centrally planned economy of China.
From my perspective, in my tiny island nation, the response to rising levels of traffic and travel delays in the capital city has been to undertake road improvement works and attempts at improving traffic flow through certain intersections. An attempt was made to improve the bus system but, just this past week one of the headlines was JUTC faces $7b in losses (JMD 7 billion = USD 55 million). This is as the public transport situation on this island seems to be evolving into one where those who cant afford a car, cram themselves into a shared car to get where they want to go. The goal of many people seems to be either to be able to profit from the shared ride arrangement by owning or operating one or to have one’s own private car and not have to use shared rides. At the same time, there seems to be an abundant supply of “new” cars, many of which are actually used cars from the Japanese Domestic Market. I’ve even noticed what I consider to be a ridiculous situation of a used car dealership opened in the last three months or so in a depressed rural community with about five cars in stock! So much for “weaning us off cars”!
In the face of it, since there seem to be no moves afoot to “wean us off cars”, what are our alternatives? Surely just barging ahead with an increase in the number of ICE powered cars is not sustainable? I would rather see an attempt to replace every ICE powered car with an EV than nothing. At least there is the possibility that we will be able to charge EVs with renewables and nuclear. In the absence of EVs, what is going to provide fuel for ICEs when oil supplies can’t keep up with demand? Biofuels?
On to the next two sentences in the quoted paragraph. A little over a year ago, I posted about some rough calculations I did back in April, 2016 on the amount of additional electricity that would have been required if all vehicle miles traveled in the US in the year 2014 were done using EVs with the equivalent power consumption of a Tesla Model S. The original figure was 17.2% with accommodation for charging losses taking that to 18.9%.
In May 2017 Tony Seba and his team published a report , RethinkX (PDF). From page 52 of that report:
Electricity demand in the U.S. will increase by 18% compared to
BAU
Charging A-EVs will increase electricity demand. Our estimates show that
the A-EV fleet required under TaaS will use 733 billion kWh of electricity per
year in 2030. This represents an 18% increase in total electricity demand
in the U.S. in 2030, 120 compared to the business-as-usual projections of
the U.S. EIA (see Figure 19). While A-EVs will account for a relatively small
share of electricity demand in the U.S., three quarters of growth in electricity
demand will come from the expanding A-EV fleet. It is important to note that
the increase in demand (kWh) does not imply a need to increase the capacity
(kW) of the existing infrastructure. This is because the existing power system
is built for peak demand, not efficiency. By scheduling A-EV charging in
off-peak periods, we believe that the existing infrastructure can absorb
an 18% increase in demand without material investments in generation
infrastructure.
On Monday, the EIA should be releasing a new edition of their Electric Power Monthly, with data for December 2017. This will complete the data for 2017 so, in my report I plan to show the updated graph for annual electricity production percentage share from the various sources. The trend in monthly percentage shares is pointing to an annual contribution from solar of slightly less than 2% and more than 6% from wind. Looking at the annual data up to the end of 2016, the contribution from non-hydro renewables has risen from 2.15% in 2005 to 8.42% in 2016 with the year to date figure for 2017 standing at 9.62%. If the adoption rate of solar were to stay the same or increase a much larger share of US electricity production would be coming from solar by the time the EV fleet gets to a size that is significant. Murphy’s assertion that “we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks” doesn’t appear to have much merit.
The problem as I see it is that time is not on our side. Between depletion and the need to arrest CO2 emissions, we could find ourselves a day late and a dollar short on achieving a transition away from fossil fuels. IMO more renewables and EVs might have an add on effect of highlighting the need to conserve energy resources and reduce the unsustainable growth. I have this concept of a solar energy diet that is different from the one found using internet search engines. I view my solar energy diet as the amount of energy that can be harvested using my own resources or on my behalf using shared resources. For me to claim the right to use more energy, I have to participate in harvesting more, either as an individual or as a collective with other people. It’s a rather sobering concept.
Also, there is the utter falsity of this statement:
Islandboy – I think you agree with what the author is broadly saying, I certainly do – the efficient way would be to develop renewable power generation and reduce miles driven overall by offering attractive alternatives; the inefficient way is to promote EVs while expanding fossil fuel power generation to meet the demand and spending money on infrastructure that supports rising personal vehicle use, but mostly this second course is what is being pursued.
Also from what I see this is spot on:
“The first imperative, then, is recognition that the economy is an energy system, not a financial one, …”
Which is why I believe that there should be as much investment in renewable energy solutions as is humanly possible. If the energy system that forms the basis of the economy fails, I fear the results will be ugly.
If the “funny money” that is being used to keep things going ATM is used to build a sustainable, renewable energy economy then it will have done some good. Unfortunately the LTO debacle is an indication that this is not what is being done in some cases.
Like food? If so, I agree.
Once we can get the superlocal food thing humming along nicely, we won’t have to go to work, or as much, such as when the jobs or pensions continue to dry up; or worry as much about decaying roadway infrastructure, or when the trucks stop running or their electric replacements don’t work as promised. Etcetera.
And that kind of setup will last ‘forever’ and won’t cannibalize as much of the leftover fossil fuels, whereas industrial buildup will just lead to a whole lot of other forms of pollution, resource wars, and relatively-useless trinkets-for-the-relatively-so-called-wealthy left lying around, maybe before their ~30-year lifespans. Etcetera.
Battery storage* in perspective – solving 1% of the problem
The push for electric vehicles threatens to become a classic instance of burning the lifeboats. Here’s why.
First, let’s dot some i’s and cross some T’s!
There is little doubt that, “Houston we have a problem” with a global economy that continues to push an ‘Infinite Growth’ paradigm on a finite planet. I think the majority of readers here already have a grasp of basic notions of thermodynamics and population dynamics. If anyone should need a quick refresher watch Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_8b6ej0U3g
However this statement from the link is an example of totally missing the boat, pun intended!
We know that supplies of petroleum are tightening, that the trend in costs is against us, and that burning oil in cars isn’t a good idea in climate terms. Faced with this, the powers-that-be could do one of two things. They could start to wean us off cars, by changing work and habitation patterns, and investing in public transport. Alternatively, they can promise us electric vehicles, conveniently ignoring the fact that we don’t, and won’t, have enough electricity generating capacity to make this plan viable, and that we’d certainly need to burn in power stations at least as much oil as we’d take out of fuel tanks. At the moment, every indication is that they’re going to opt for the easy answer – not the right one.
Bold mine
So to be very clear, there is no doubt whatsoever that a direct substitution of privately owned EVs for ICE vehicles, especially if they are powered by fossil fuel powered electric power generating plants is just a continuation of BAU and won’t save our sorry little asses from a global meltdown type end of civilization event.
Disclaimer: I even have a nagging hunch that we are already well past the point of no return on saving our current global civilization and there will be a major reset and die off in humanity’s near term future. Case in point, I consider the idea that we will somehow support 10 billion humans on this planet to be pure science fiction. I could of course be wrong…
However, I find this notion that we will somehow attempt to power EV’s with fossil fuels, to be a sign of total lack of imagination and lack of understanding as to how technology has been progressing. Now, as Tom Murphy so elegantly explained even if we do use every physical efficiency trick and alternative energy to power our civilization, we will still have to deal with the laws of thermodynamics.
What we needed to do 50 years ago was embark on a massive program to keep human population from going past 3 billion. That ship has obviously sailed and as far as I can tell, there never was a plan to put any lifeboats on that ship!
Cheers!
Fred, do not believe Tom Murphy’s wild exponential extrapolations about civilization.
They do not even fit current reality.
As far as EV’s go they can be built, run until the wheels fall off and be recycled on just the energy we now use to refine oil. With some better design, they could become an energy source.
There is no real need to continue on the path of present civilization. Only greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance stand in the way.
Time to reduce my sloth. Have a great day, sunny and warm up here in February.
Fred, do not believe Tom Murphy’s wild exponential extrapolations about civilization.
I don’t! I take them with more than a few grains of salt. Realities have changed considerably since he gave that talk almost 8 years ago and I’m sure they will continue to do so, but regardless, I don’t buy the possibility of continued growth either.
As far as EV’s go they can be built, run until the wheels fall off and be recycled on just the energy we now use to refine oil. With some better design, they could become an energy source.
For sure! Doesn’t mean we don’t need a completely different steady state economic model within which to achieve such goals! Politcs still trumps physics… remember that clip of Yuval Noah Harari’s Davos talk you posted the other day. I think you agreed we were fucked! Even though technology is not deterministic, we can’t afford to be complacent, eh?
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
There is no real need to continue on the path of present civilization. Only greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance stand in the way.
Right! Please wake me up when you see evidence that the majority of Merikans are starting to embark on that other path.. Right now we still have to get past Trump, MAGA, Pruitt’s EPA and the NRA, which admittedly, is pretty much synonymous with greed, stupidity, sloth and ignorance standing in the way.
“Right now we still have to get past Trump…” Decades of whitewater kayaking taught me to go around obstacles and use the large forces to one’s advantage.
Since you are slinging quotes:
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” ~Bertrand Russell
“The problem with America is stupidity. I’m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself.” Unknown
” We are really not that smart, it’s just that a lot of other people make us feel that way.” GoneFishing
I don’t think removing the labels will make any difference at all…
Here’s a couple of examples of people not reading some rather obvious signs/labels to begin with…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USu8vT_tfdw
Are there several repair shops within two blocks of that spot?
LOL! Trust me on this, that particular spot is not an exception. I got my CDL back in 90’s and I never once hit the top of my truck on a bridge or overhang of any sort. If there was no sign, I would get out of my truck and find a way to check the clearance. Unfortunately there are a lot of drivers that don’t.
“With some better design, they could become an energy source.”
You think EVs will produce more energy than they consume? Magic porridge pot?
I’m pretty sure GF meant enegry storage medium and not a literal source of energy… At least that was what I was thinking. But let him defend his own thoughts himself.
Nope no magic, just using tech ideas that have already been accomplished. As the Dutch college youngsters have done with lower efficiency PV panels making a street legal multiple passenger car that runs on it’s own solar footprint and when just sitting around, acts as source of power. They used 22 percent efficiency panels on the car as far as I can tell.
If we use the high end triple layer panels (around 40 percent efficient), EV’s can easily be built with smaller batteries and the vehicle can be used as a power source when sitting around. Meaning it will generally produce more power than it needs for average driving (12,500 miles per year). Overall, it will be a net positive energy car under normal conditions. Just don’t park it in the shade or garage (except at night).
Of course, one can always charge it up in the normal way if needed.
BTW, I think the Dutch car is now in production
I thought most here knew about this, it has been discussed here several times. Fred knows about this one, a five passenger solar car with a 1000 km range on a sunny day!
Although Stella Vie has a smaller battery and a solar array that is one square meter smaller, it still achieves a range of a 1000 kilometers on a sunny summer day in the Netherlands. The surplus energy generated by Vie can be supplied back to the house or electric grid. The smart charging and discharging system keeps track of energy prices and the user’s agenda in order to find the optimal time to charge or discharge. Stella Vie’s charging status can also easily be checked through its connection with a smart thermostat
https://solarteameindhoven.nl/stella-vie/
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-futuristic-solar-powered-dutch-family-car.html
There are always possibilities. This one is reality.
Yep, I did post about the Stella Vie some time ago. To be fair the source of energy is our own fusion furnace in the sky and that energy is captured by PV panels and the energy is stored in the batteries to be used as needed for powering the car or whatever else is necessary. So no magic here!
The only magic I know of is our economic system. It magically makes my money worth less over time. We steal from the future and the monetary system steals from the past.
The commercial venture to produce a version of the Stella Vie is called Lightyear. 4WD and up to 800 km range on direct sunlight, no power plants involved and it can even put power to the grid or home on it’s off days.
Dutch company Lightyear launches four-wheel drive solar-powered car able to drive for months without charging.
Currently, all cars of the world combined drive one light year, every year. That is 9.500.000.000.000 km. Every year. Powered by fossil fuels. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption of electric cars so that by 2030, one light year will have been driven electric. To that, we are providing a scalable solution.
From a fossil fueled powered light year to a solar powered light year.
http://www.lightyear.one
http://fb.me/lightyear.one
http://twitter.com/lightyear_cars
Spent some time exploring the LightYear web site:
https://www.lightyear.one/assumptions-are-the-mother-of-all-f-ups/
And I have to very strongly agree with this observation!
Assumptions are the mother of all f*ck-ups
…But our biggest error was not realizing when an idea (battery electric ships) does not work for a certain use-case (intercontinental shipping), this does not mean it is a bad idea! Sometimes, you have to think outside the box!
Anyway. On the same day I read the article about battery-powered ships, Futurism wrote an article about Lightyear. In this item they referred to another article from last year by an engineer who concluded that solar powered cars would not work, since they would only have 1.28 horsepower available:
He made one big assumption about the way solar power is harnessed as well:
You do not have to use the power from the solar cells directly. You can store it in a battery, and then use it while driving. And here is the trick: How long do you drive your car, and how long is the sun shining every day?
That, combined with a genius engineering team, will provide you with a car that can drive up to 10.000 kilometres per year on the power of the Dutch sun.
The same kind of head up the ass thinking that is the source of the constant whining about solar and wind not working because the sun doesn’t shine at night or that sometimes there is no wind so we need fossil fuels as back up. No we absolutely do not. So get over it already!
For how long?
There are a lot of things we can do right now, but at what costs/tradeoffs?
I heard on the global climate change coverage from CPAC several good reviews of The Inconvenient Facts book with the geologist who wrote it. Has anyone here read this book yet?
Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know
by Gregory Wrightstone (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Facts-science-that-doesnt/dp/1545614105
You have been inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks and ”experts” saying that our climate is changing for the worse and it is our fault. Increases in droughts, heat waves, tornadoes and poison ivy – to name a few – are all blamed on our ”sins of emissions” from burning fossil fuels and increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet, you don’t quite buy into this human-caused climate apocalypse. You aren’t sure about the details because you don’t have all the facts and likely aren’t a scientist. Inconvenient Facts was specifically created for you. Writing in plain English and providing easily understood charts and figures, Gregory Wrightstone presents the science to assess the basis of the threatened Thermageddon.
The book’s 60 ”inconvenient facts” come from government sources, peer-reviewed literature or scholarly works, set forth in a way that is lucid and entertaining. The information likely will challenge your current understanding of many apocalyptic predictions about our ever dynamic climate.
You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it. The very framework of the climate-catastrophe argument will be confronted with scientific fact. Arm yourself with the truth.
You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it.
Yes, the planet is getting better and better every day. Deserts are shrinking, the rainforests are being restored because loggers are planting trees instead of cutting them. The ocean fisheries are being restored because the world has stopped eating seafood. Topsoil around the world is getting deeper because of some mysterious reason that we cannot explain. Water tables are rising around the world. Yes, the planet is improving because CO2 is rising.
And if you believe that shit then you are just too fucking stupid to get in out of the rain.
I’m pretty sure the author used to be a rabid “it’s cooling” denier. He’s now gone to the “it’s warming and it’s good” camp. Next should be “it’s not the the CO2”. At least if all the denier delusionists take this on board we can stop arguing about whether it’s warming up and there will be no need for you to keep issuing local weather forecasts of cold weather of proof of your dumbness (because following the logic that would mean things must be getting worse – not that logic features very highly for you).
This book was the topic of the day 6 days ago over at WUWT. The mouth breathing knuckle draggers don’t have much creativity of thought.
I can understand Al Gore not wanting us to know the stuff in that book.
Global sea ice records broken (yet again)
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2018/02/global-sea-ice-records-broken-yet-again.html
Some of my neighbors keep doing their best to melt the ice on the planet. Drill and Drive is the new slogan. Also No Coal No Lights.
Also the Koch bros slogan “Your Warm, We’re Rich”
Keep on warming the planet, the hippos want to get back in the Thames. 🙂
But on the brighter side, rechargeable Nickel-3DZinc batteries.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/415
It’s going to be rather cold in Merrie Olde Englande for the next few days. I guess that proves there ain’t no warming.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/23/uk-faces-significant-snowfall-due-to-freezing-air-from-siberia
UK weather: Spring ‘postponed’ as big freeze hits UK
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43167583
Britain is set for the coldest February week in five years as freezing air arrives from Russia.
On Saturday temperatures fell as low as -5.5C in Anglesey, north Wales and the cold spell is expected to intensify from Sunday night into Monday.
The Met Office has issued an amber cold weather alert, which warns of increased health risks to vulnerable and elderly people.
It has also issued two yellow weather warnings for snow.
Snow showers are expected in large parts of the UK on Monday and Tuesday, which could cause travel delays and cancellations, power cuts and problems with mobile phone services.
Meanwhile, big chunk of the US is experiencing April in February. Won’t go below freezing at all here at 41N for the next week.
Went for a long snow walk about 20 miles East of Bend—-
Not another human, or track of a human.
It is White here, after a snow challenged Winter.
It’s actually quite a pleasant change here, not going to last long though. If the only way you can support your denier delusions is to look for “the coldest in five years” you really are getting desperate. The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there, so this is likely to be a more regular occurrance – more so for the extreme heat records, the cold here is not nearly as low as some of the winters we had in the sixties.
The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there…
Does that mean the Arctic Vortex has reproduced and there will be more cold to spread around the globe? 😉
we were right on the edge of the baby-vortex (in US) and a major warm front down southeast. we were joking here that we might have a record high and a record low in the same day as that line oscillated back and forth. Went from 70F at around 5am to 32F by 7pm. Its very often now that the high for any given day is at night before a pressure shift as the arctic keeps kissing us on the cheek. Tease.
The reason is that the Arctic Vortex has completely split in two, and I think that is mostly due to the warming up there…
The split is due to the massive SSW event I warned you about several days ago.
Hi Bob,
Just for you, since you and some others like you don’t recognize sarcasm unless it’s LABELED, here’s the first sentence of the link I posted about the UK cold spell.
“Parts of south-east England could end up colder than the North Pole this weekend, as forecasters predict that the Arctic could inch above freezing point during the polar night for the first time in recorded history.”
And the SSW effect is almost certainly going to be attributable, with some statistical significance, to a warmer Arctic and lower energy gradient from the tropics once the scientists can do the analysis (by which time some new, previously rare or unobserved phenomena involving the ice melt and Arctic amplification will have taken over the headlines).
If this isn’t abrupt climate change what would it have to look like to be counted as such? One problem is that the research has no chance of keeping up so it’s going to allow the vested idiots more ammunition to undermine the scientists. On the Arctic front the Bering and Chukchi have had attention but they always melt out anyway. On the other side the Greenland Sea is losing ice early and fast as well. In the past it has had some fast ice that remained through September but that got destroyed last year, so it could start going fully ice free, which will mean the warm sea front can advance north faster, which will mean earlier melt of the central basin etc.
“If this isn’t abrupt climate change what would it have to look like to be counted as such?”
Like this.
He gave us an example of what he means. Today, climate scientists predict that temperatures will rise a few degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years. Ice cores from Greenland show that – around 11,500 years ago – average temperatures in Greenland increased by about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, over the course of 10 years or so. Alley said this abrupt change was prompted – at least partially – by melting polar ice, which altered ocean circulation and weather patterns. As today’s climate warms, ice is again melting near Earth’s poles.
Worst case scenario would be something like changing ocean circulation in a way that made it dry in the monsoon belts in places where people are expecting the rain to water their crops. We know these abrupt [climate] changes in the north Atlantic were accompanied by drought in monsoonal regions, so if we were to trigger something in the North Atlantic, it might, in turn, trigger changes in the monsoon where a huge number of people need the rain.
We’re fairly confident that the Antartic and Greenland ice sheets will stay where they are for at least awhile, but if they were to dump ice in the ocean fairly quickly, you could have very rapid sea level rise.
http://earthsky.org/earth/richard-alley-on-abrupt-climate-change
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/23/gates-set-to-plead-guilty-to-conspiracy-and-false-statement-charges-423403
Mueller Ain’t Going Away
Fred — you probably know this but….
OCEAN ACIDIFICATION IS CAUSING CORAL REEFS TO DISSOLVE
“As climate change causes the ocean to acidify, the world’s coral reefs are in threat, Scientific American and E&E News report. Scientists already knew that ocean acidification was preventing coral from producing the material that forms the building blocks of reefs. Now, a new study has shown that the same process is also causing the reefs themselves to dissolve.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/ocean-acidification-causing-coral-reefs-dissolve
Yes, I already did know that but I hadn’t seen this comment of yours before posting the SciAm link down thread. What never ceases to amaze me is the general lack of knowledge about these topics demonstrated by the ruling classes…
And then there is this:
https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_skerry_reveals_ocean_s_glory_and_horror#t-318391
Brian SkerryatMission Blue Voyage
The ocean’s glory — and horror
Photographer Brian Skerry shoots life above and below the waves — as he puts it, both the horror and the magic of the ocean. Sharing amazing, intimate shots of undersea creatures, he shows how powerful images can help make change.
Oh I’ve seen change all right! In 35 years of diving I’ve seen lots of change, but not the kind I’d like to have seen.
The world is going back to the future where the cyanobacteria will rule again…
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003446
Climate change could drive marine food web collapse through altered trophic flows and cyanobacterial proliferation
Hadayet Ullah, Ivan Nagelkerken , Silvan U. Goldenberg, Damien A. Fordham
Published: January 9, 2018https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003446
Abstract
Global warming and ocean acidification are forecast to exert significant impacts on marine ecosystems worldwide. However, most of these projections are based on ecological proxies or experiments on single species or simplified food webs. How energy fluxes are likely to change in marine food webs in response to future climates remains unclear, hampering forecasts of ecosystem functioning. Using a sophisticated mesocosm experiment, we model energy flows through a species-rich multilevel food web, with live habitats, natural abiotic variability, and the potential for intra- and intergenerational adaptation. We show experimentally that the combined stress of acidification and warming reduced energy flows from the first trophic level (primary producers and detritus) to the second (herbivores), and from the second to the third trophic level (carnivores). Warming in isolation also reduced the energy flow from herbivores to carnivores, the efficiency of energy transfer from primary producers and detritus to herbivores and detritivores, and the living biomass of detritivores, herbivores, and carnivores. Whilst warming and acidification jointly boosted primary producer biomass through an expansion of cyanobacteria, this biomass was converted to detritus rather than to biomass at higher trophic levels—i.e., production was constrained to the base of the food web. In contrast, ocean acidification affected the food web positively by enhancing trophic flow from detritus and primary producers to herbivores, and by increasing the biomass of carnivores. Our results show how future climate change can potentially weaken marine food webs through reduced energy flow to higher trophic levels and a shift towards a more detritus-based system, leading to food web simplification and altered producer–consumer dynamics, both of which have important implications for the structuring of benthic communities.
Bit of Trivia:
From — NINE WAYS CHINESE SCIENTISTS PUSHED THE ENVELOPE IN 2017
Supercomputer superpower China takes biggest lead over US in 25 years: China has claimed a bigger share of the world’s fastest machines, extending its lead over the United States in supercomputing supremacy. China now has 202 of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers on the TOP500 list compared with the US total of 143. The list, produced twice a year, rates supercomputers based on speed in a benchmark test by specialists from Germany and the US. China’s Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 are the two fastest supercomputers in the rankings, with Switzerland taking third place, Japan fourth and the US fifth.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2126163/nine-ways-chinese-scientists-pushed-envelope-2017
Do as I say, not as I do.
TOKYO 2020 OLYMPICS CONFIRMS USE OF RAINFOREST TIMBER IN STADIUM BUILD
“Hana Heineken, a senior campaigner for Rainforest Action Network, said: “The overwhelming majority of wood used [in the Tokyo stadium] was uncertified plywood extracted from tropical rainforests in Indonesia, an epicentre of biodiversity that is suffering from one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation.” A further 3% of the panels used came from Malaysian plywood, supplied by companies such as Shin Yang, which has been linked to destructive and potentially illegal logging practices.”
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/02/23/tokyo-olympics-confirms-use-rainforest-timber-stadium-build/
Well, it is East Asia——
As a long term resident in the past, look for the train wreck ahead.
Take a look:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/02/southeast-asia-getting-killed-by-logging-and-mining/#more-77244
…
And in other cheerful news from good ole SciAm…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/corals-are-dissolving-away1/
Corals Are Dissolving Away
New data show that ocean acidification not only stops corals from building, it tears them down
Well, DUH! UH!
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
― Emma Lazarus
What?! Fuck that shit!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/02/23/the-trump-administration-isnt-just-changing-words-its-changing-the-country/
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services erased 300 years of American dreaming this week when it revised its stated purpose from securing “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” to securing “the homeland” — and, of course, “honoring our values.” The shift is hard to miss: No longer will the country focus on letting people in. Instead, it will work to keep them out. But words are just words, right?
Wrong. How we talk influences how we think; that shouldn’t come as news to anyone. Linguists seized long ago on the theory that the terms we’ve been trained to describe the world with affect how we see that world. Eliminating an idea from the lexicon makes us less likely to devote mental space or energy to it. After all, if it’s not right in front of us, it’s easy for it to flee our often flitting minds.
Which reminds me, the Trump administration was also behind removing references to climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification from government websites such as the EPA’s. I’m hoping we repeal the the law of gravity next… Maybe Trump and his supporters will float away!
Which reminds me. Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a law revoking an Obama-era regulatory initiative that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun. All the stuff I have seen on youtube since the Valentine’s Day massacre suggests that the kids of that school intend to make this a big political issue going forward. Some of these kids will be of voting age by 2020 and most will be of voting age by 2022. As a resident of south Florida, what is your sense of the state of mind of your fellow Floridians? Is this time different?
Is this time different? I sure hope it is and I’m duly impressed by the attitude of the young people caught up in this battle and the adults supporting them. Will actual change ensue? I don’t know..
Yair . . .
I think the political pages of the ‘Allis Chalmers forum’ gives an insight into some American attitudes to firearm regulations . . . very educational to an interested observer.
Hi Fred,
I believe the political calculus has decisively shifted in favor of tighter gun control laws over the last few days. The R camp will mostly fight a desperate rear guard action to stop it, but the tides of war have shifted in favor of the D camp, politically.
This will not yet be obvious to a casual observer, and there’s nothing in particular I can point to as definitive proof.
But remember what Churchill said back in WWII.
The last few days and months imo are the days of “the end of the beginning”.
It’s well worth while to devote some thought to the ways we react, collectively, to tragic events, and finally do something, collectively, to change our ways.
Hardly anybody ( excepting public health professionals, cops, firemen, and the friends and families of the victims of automobile accidents), even notices a local headline announcing a crash that kills two or three people….. unless it happens on a highway they use personally.
It’s not unusual for a hundred people to die on a holiday on the highways of this country. You will not hear this statistic discussed at the water cooler or your favorite watering hole.
But a plane crash that kills a hundred people is headline news all over the world, and you can bet your last can of beans that you will hear it discussed over lunch and at the water cooler and at the watering hole after work for a couple of days at least, and sometimes for a month, depending on the circumstances.
This same calculus applies to mass murder by firearm. It’s super duper headline news for months, every time, and the MORE it’s covered, the more coverage it gets. Blood and guts obsess us, and the more coverage we see , the more we seem willing and eager to see, and bad news is the only thing that sells as well as sex.
Does this sort of willingness indicate yet another way in which we have defined deviancy down, so that things formerly unmentionable are now discussed over dinner in polite society?
I’m with Kilgore Trout, I think maybe so.
The more coverage mass murder gets, the greater the likelihood that yet another mentally deficient individual will sit with a phone or computer in his lap, and create a fantasy world between his ears wherein HE is finally the center of attention, blazing away.
Every once in a while, one of them acts out his fantasy. The thing that surprises me is not that it happens, but that it doesn’t happen more frequently.
Personally I don’t think these shootings can be stopped now, but with plenty of surveillance, no other word fits, we can prevent them from happening so often.
Intervention of any sort, starting with mental health treatment, cannot come to pass unless the people in need are brought to the attention of the relevant authorities, from mental health docs to the cop on the beat to the FBI.
The internet is maybe the greatest thing that ever happened in some ways, but in others, it’s hell. It’s the primary provider that supplies troubled individuals the raw material that sends them over the edge.
When we old farts were kids, Fred Flintstone’s kid Bam Bam banged the bad guys on the floor, Bam BAM, but they got up and walked away, chastised but alive, and we watched this sort of thing a few hours a week at the most.
Now a troubled kid can play games that are so violent real war can’t actually touch them, in a lot of respects, because in a real war, at least such violence, when it happens, is over quickly, and it’s back to hurry up and wait for days or even months. In the video games, it’s non stop,and the kids can play these games in their rooms days without end until they cease to even realize that they ARE games, and that in the real world, real people are going to die if they act out.
We aren’t going to do away with the net, period, and we aren’t going to get rid of guns anytime soon in this country, to the extent that a resourceful person with a few bucks in his pocket won’t be able to put his hands on one.
But hopefully with better laws and especially better enforcement, fewer nut case kids will be able to put their hands on a gun suitable for mass murder. Nut case and politically and religiously motivated adults are unfortunately generally experienced enough and smart enough to know how to cover their tracks until it’s too late to stop them unless they are already on the surveillance radar for some reason, and even then, they are apt to succeed.
Tens of millions of kids, quite a lot of them with mental issues, grew up in this country with easy access to guns with near zero incidences of mass murder prior to the coming of the net. Those innocent days are gone now. The people who purvey violence as addictive merchandise to make a buck are in my estimation just about as guilty, morally, as anybody when it comes to understanding the roots of this issue.
I don’t personally think we can stop this sort of tragedy from happening any time soon precisely because there’s so much instantly accessible violence built into our popular culture now, and it’s so easy for anybody who is unhappy and emotionally disturbed to live in a mad fantasy world between the ears. We can reduce the rate, that’s all imo. For now.
The balance will be hence forth shifting noticeably faster towards tighter gun control laws but we will continue to see mass murder headlines for at least a generation now that the meme is established. It might take longer than that to extinguish this meme, on second thought, say even two generations. It will take that long, or longer, for our society to give up its weapons. I see a near zero chance that we can get rid of the sort of sold for profit fantasy violence that’s the other half of the problem, but two generations will probably be enough to make a really good start on drying up the supply of firearms of the sort commonly used in mass shootings.
Now I tell it like it is, as best I can, regardless of where the chips may fall, because I want to be RIGHT in my analysis, rather than to simply play a partisan role on either side of any issue. So as far as MY guns go, anybody wants them can have them when you pry them out of my cold dead hands.
I’m telling it like it is when I say there are upwards of a hundred million people in this country, maybe a LOT more, who share my position in respect to the Second Amendment.
I’m commenting as an OBSERVER of the political scene, not as a partisan. An HONEST observer believes in full disclosure of his personal positions and any disclosure of any skin he may have in the game.
IF I had a kid spending most of his time playing such violent games, I would introduce him to some REAL violence, very quickly indeed, with my boot in his ass, or a club if necessary, and reintroduce him to the real world, even at risk of being jailed myself for doing the right thing.
All this relates to my argument that unless we get a SERIES of what I refer to as Pearl Harbor Wake Up Events , we won’t change our ways in time to prevent the destruction of what remains of the environment.
Methinks we should get damned busy sacrificing some goats and chickens to the Sky Daddy or Sky Mommy or Rock or Snake or Mountain or River we like best in hopes that He, She, or IT will send us a series of such events, one after another, spectacular enough that it will be IMPOSSIBLE even for the Koch brothers and Faux News to overlook and poo pooh them.
Maybe the best thing that could happen to this country next year would be that a super hurricane totally wipes out New Orleans and the port of Houston.
Or maybe the best thing that could happen to the world would be that the Russians for some reason just shut off the oil and gas for a few months just to show the rest of us who is REALLY in a position to fuck with them, and that they are in a position, if they so desire, to fuck with us with relative impunity.
The rest of us need Russian energy a hundred times more than the Russians need any thing they import from us.
My firm belief, based on long study of history and human nature, is that we’re ALL fucked, unless these WAKE UP events come to pass in sufficient numbers to awaken LEVIATHAN. Leviathan once aroused and cognizant of a real threat to HIS own existence will take such actions as are possible to prevent collapse.
OTHERWISE………. Well, we will continue our complacent cow like ways until it’s too late to avoid a truly catastrophic economic and ecological crisis.
Most of us are fucked anyway, in my professional opinion, but there’s still a fair to good , maybe even excellent chance we can avoid a near total die off of our species over the next two or three generations.
There are no guarantees. Maybe we will set so many positive feedback loops in motion that even a country as rich and as thinly populated and powerful as the USA is fucked. Maybe die off on the grandest scale, the planetary scale, is already baked in.
A lot of very capable thinkers, including our host Ron, believe this is the case, that industrial civilization is a dead man walking.
But one or two mega famines, famines on the continental scale, one or two pandemics of any disease that kills like the Black Plague and breaks out world wide………… and we’re over the population hump in a hurry.
And depending on where such disasters might occur, and how far and fast they spread, they might wipe out a large enough slice of industrial civilization to prevent the climate going entirely nuts……. unless we have already passed the point where climate disaster is baked in.
One things for goddamned sure.History ain’t over, lol.
IF I had a kid spending most of his time playing such violent games, I would introduce him to some REAL violence, very quickly indeed, with my boot in his ass, or a club if necessary, and reintroduce him to the real world, even at risk of being jailed myself for doing the right thing.
While I am no fan of violent video games, there are hundreds of studies showing there is little to no causality between violent video games and actual real world shootings. It’s a myth much like vaccines causing autism.
The problem is easy access to guns! Not video games! Japanese kids play violent video games but don’t have access to guns. Not a lot of school shooting there, even if the violent games did make them more violent… Not to mention that it’s one thing to own a hunting rifle or a handgun and quite another to have an AR-15.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gun-deaths-eliminated-america-learn-japan-australia-uk-norway-florida-shooting-latest-news-a8216301.html
These four countries have nearly eliminated gun deaths – here’s what the US can learn
Australia
Japan
Norway
The UK
Yair . . .
“Not to mention that it’s one thing to own a hunting rifle or a handgun and quite another to have an AR-15. ”
And thereby is the problem. I have mentioned on here before how, on a pig hunt I have seen sensible young blokes turn into idiots as soon as they tie a sweat band around their head and tape two twenty round clips back to back.
Assault style weapons are mind altering. There is no place for them in a ‘normal’ society.
Hi Fred, Scrub
I basically agree with both of you.
But I have some rudimentary training in the mental health field, having been a certified teacher of the kids who have real troubles, but are still enrolled in public schools ,plus the training a nurse gets which is necessary to do preliminary screening. I also have family who are professionals in the field. We’re not ALL KJB thumpers with pistols in our hip pockets, lol.
The statistics mentioned are obviously good proof that if kids can’t obtain guns, they won’t commit mass murder except perhaps in very rare instances. I can’t think of a case when a kid managed to build a really powerful bomb, or poison a whole lot of people.
I once put brakes on a truck that had an expired safety sticker. The owner was perfectly upfront about telling me he had been driving it for two weeks without brakes, and only brought it to me the day the sticker expired. The next year we went to annual instead of semi annual safety inspections. Every body who eats a pickle dies, eventually, but this doesn’t prove pickles are poisonous, lol.
Adults who who commit mass murder are more often than not politically motivated, and can figure out ways to obtain weapons, even in places such as Western Europe….if they are still reasonably sane and have money and street smarts.
I haven’t seen any convincing evidence to the effect that so called NORMAL kids shoot up their schools. In every instance I know ( much) about, the kids involved were obviously showing signs, usually overlooked, of very serious mental problems, which are well known to spill over into actual open behavior sometimes.
A kid who is in trouble, emotionally, sitting alone, watching violent games, or reading violent novels, or reading the coverage of previous mass shootings over and over on the net, maybe fantasizing with one or two friends, who have similar problems, can slip off into a world in which his fantasy becomes his reality.
This sort of thing is actually VERY common, except it usually manifests itself in other ways. Any given person with such emotional problems may come to believe in a fantasy world, and start acting it out, although such behaviors only occasionally result in other people being hurt or killed.
One potential warning sign that a particular person or kid may need to be evaluated is that he becomes obsessed with violent games or books to the point he spends most or all of his time looking at them.
The people who so ardently defend their right to own a military style weapon do not do so, in my experience, because they are all that fond of them. They do so for the same reason that women who defend their right to an abortion fight like hell to maintain that right WITHOUT RESTRICTION.
They believe, with ample justification in my humble opinion, that every inch of ground they give up is an inch that can never be recovered, and that giving it up is a victory for their political opposition, whose long term plans involve eventually disarming them altogether.
My OPINION, as a pundit, is that the last few school shootings mark the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment in cultural terms, but it’s going to take a LONG time before we see much in the way of changing gun laws, except in various localities which are now about ready to pass new tougher laws.
Virtually all the guys and most of the girls I knew as a kid were comfortable with guns, and most of us spent some time shooting, even the girls in a lot of cases.
Our grandchildren are growing up in suburbs and seldom ever have an opportunity to hunt or shoot for fun, or even go fishing, except maybe on vacation. The writing is on the wall, it’s just a matter of time.
We will have single payer health insurance, we will repeal the laws that allow big pharma to charge us monopoly prices, we will eventually pass laws that result in righting other wrongs, just as we have passed laws against gender and racial discrimination and dumping poison in public waters .
But these things take a LOT of time.
“The problem is easy access to guns” and any access to military style weapons. Period.
Trumpster, I had to replace my apple butter boots with my apple butter waiters to protect myself from your record breaking post of crap. You must be feeling pretty good at the moment after that bowl full.
Well—
http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/files/2018/01/TAS_Arctic_NCEP_OctDec17_composite.gif
Cape Morris Jesup (Greenland’s northernmost observation station) is now reporting temperatures well above freezing today… +6.1°C at the latest observation.
http://www.dmi.dk/groenland/maalinger/vejret-lige-nu/stations/vis/4301
and no Sun for another month—-
https://www.wired.com/story/democratic-memo-rebuttal-carter-page-trump/
This speaks for itself.
I’ve seen pretty much every interview with Carter Page that I can find, and have read almost every story I can find on him. That Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) or federal security service (FSB) would decide he seems like a useful guy that could get sanctions overturned seems unrealistic. The guy is clearly not ‘intelligence material’. Useful idiot/red herring maybe. Briefed asset/agent of influence, no way. Therefore (and for other reasons) I suspect that the Russian election interference operation was most likely run by GRU. Too messy for FSB/SVR types. The complete lack of backstopping on the legends of field agents and total lack of operational security in the use of hackers/trolls is reminiscent of a military (GRU) led operation. An operation led by the foreign intelligence service or even a internal security agency emphasizes deniability as an outcome. In contrast an operation led by a military intelligence organization de-emphasizes deniability.
A few weeks ago, despite sanctions, the heads of the SVR, FSB and GRU visited the US as part of anti-terrorism cooperation. It is clear that both the FSB Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and the SVR Chief Sergey Naryshkin met with CIA Director Pompeo, but no one is saying who Lieutenant-General Igor Korobov of the GRU met with.
This is a very long hallway of smoke and mirrors and I don’t think even the top players knows where reality starts and stops. Russian and American intelligence services community must be having a shitfest.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-spy-chiefs-washington/29010324.html
My best guess, if anybody on the Russian side is getting anything done according to plan, is that Tillerson is the real Russian (SVR) asset and everything else going on (compromised/exposed election interference) is just a big clusterfuck distraction operation run (poorly) by GRU to muddy the waters.
Sorry, but Trump is the real Russian asset. Tillerson is a tool to increase the Russian position in the world energy stage. The Russians are running the Republican play book of racism, guns, abortion and disinformation Fox News of dividing and conquer. Russia is driving the hard right in isolating America from the west. Trump has had a verbal agreement with the Kremlin since before he announced running for office. He knew the playbook and started with it the first day with his Mexican immigration dog whistle. Trump is financially compromised by loans and money laundering. He only cares about himself and a few family members that are part of his crime supporters. Trump could care less about the 17 murdered in the high school shooting last week. It’s all part of undermining American society. Defunding the government agencies, transfering the countries wealth with tax cuts to the rich, firing judges, pulling out of globe agreements and attacking trade agreements all play to diminishing American world power and embolding Russian power. There really isn’t much daylight between Republicans and Russians in the view of a power structure.
OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster is a good example of how easy it was for the Russians to utilize years of Republican disinformation hate for their own benefit.
Trump is at best a useful idiot. No intelligence professional in their right mind would have ever given that man a brief. I doubt things are as simple as you portray them to be. There’s some triple helix/double Mobius foreign intelligence tradecraft afoot.
Tillerson has gutted the State Dept and meets world leaders without bringing his own translator. He’s far more than you claim him to be.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/02/19/meanwhile-over-in-turkey/
Trump is not an idiot. He just plays one for the American idiots. I’m aware of the gutting of the State Dept which is also playing to the Russians. Tillerson is clearly playing dumb and was a gold mine for the Russians. He could very well be deeper in this whole Russian mess than I believe. My alarm was flashing red when Trump made him Sec. of State. I’m not claiming to understand this whole mess. Like you it’s a best guess. But at least I don’t have my head in my ass like three quarters of Americans. Which is also a lot of the problem.
Books will be written about this subject well after I’m dead and gone with new information.
“OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster is a good example of how easy it was for the Russians to utilize years of Republican disinformation hate for their own benefit.”
Old Macdonald aka KGB Trumpster has forgotten more about history and politics that HB has or ever will know about the history of communism, and the ways it works.
But he’s dead right about some things, one of them being that Trump is compromised, and I have posted links occasionally to that effect.
What he’s totally wrong about is blaming the loyal opposition to his empress wannabe for her losing the election, given that anybody who has ever pulled his head out of his ass long enough to take an UNBIASED look at her as a candidate for president knows goddamned well why Trump won.
The D party could not have found a candidate more likely to lose that HRC, if it had dedicated every last resource to that proposition. The D Party managed the to throw away an election they should have won going away by running a candidate despised by pretty close to half the country before the first primary campaign started.
Adults look to their own faults when they lose.
Nincompoop partisans shoot the messenger when the messenger who delivers messages they don’t want to hear.
HRC was no more nor no less that a Republican Lite candidate for president, and her actual record proves it loud and clear.
She lost because she was so awesomely stupid , arrogant and reckless as to run her homebrewed secret email system. She lost because she stood by Bill as he serially abused a number of women.
She lost because she raked in tens of millions of dollars from shady to obviously dirty donors doing business with Uncle Sam while she was secretary of state.
Because she ran scams to make money including White Water and Cattle Gate, because of the Rose Law firm documents all disappearing, because she hung out with banksters making secret speeches at two hundred thousand bucks plus per hour, and above all, because she not so secretly DESPISES the people who are the true base of the Democratic Party, the working class people of this country, even as she takes their VOTES for granted.
Because she has made it clear every once in a while that she despises the men and women of this country who wear its uniform, even though she generally has supported sending them into harm’s way.
She lost because the best and brightest of the young people of this country, the best educated of them in particular, recognized her for the phony she is. They didn’t fool themselves by believing in the Great Right Wing Conspiracy because they WANTED to believe in it, the way so many otherwise reasonably intelligent Democrats believed in it. They took a look at her, and knew her for what she was, especially in the case of young women. I met a bunch of them at Sanders factions, and LISTENED to what they had to say about her.
HB brags about the money he makes in oil and the stock market. I’m willing to bet he can’t prove he donates very much to charity, or that he will pay a dime more in taxes than he must, even as he invests in an industry environmentalists consider the worst in the world, environmentally, the fossil fuel industry. I notice he hasn’t had much to say about the rates he expects to pay under the new R sponsored and passed tax laws.
And all the while, he hypocritically poses as a Democrat. Well, there are Democrats like that. They’re Republican Lite Democrats.
I support most of the positions of the Democratic Party establishment, and hardly any of the Republican Party establishment, but I try to comment as a non partisan, as best I know how.
It takes a partisan fool to defend his party when it’s obviously making a grave mistake, such as nominating a presidential candidate with a baggage train that reaches back to her earliest days in public life.
I will say THIS MUCH for the R establishment. It did everything it could to prevent Trump from winning the R nomination.
HRC’s octopus like grip on the machinery of the D party meant that virtually every serious possible candidate for the nomination took one look at the situation, and decided it was a lost cause, and nobody except Sanders even made a serious effort.
The Democratic Party, and the big D democrats in this country need to look to their own shortcomings if they want to understand WHY the Republicans are in control of this country.
Blaming people like me who point out the obvious truth is an absolutely useless waste of energy.
Incidentally I lost a number of friendly bets on HRC’s winning. Cost me a couple of bucks. I was surprised, I knew it would be close, except in a few deep blue states. It was. I follow Virginia politics very closely, and knew she had Virginia locked up. Northern Virginia and the coastal crescent with the larger cities all being in that end of the state now control Va politics.
Right along, I said I would stay home and get drunk and cry for my country rather than vote for either HRC or Trump. I voted Green.
I posted occasionally that Trump might actually win, because the D’s as an establishment were so boneheaded as to act as if the working classes are domestic servants and animals, and say so, publicly.
It’s perfectly true that the R’s act the same way, to an even greater extent, but at least they had sense enough to PRETEND otherwise on the campaign trail.
People like HB love to bad mouth the people of the south, and blame industry and capital for moving south to escape unjustifiably high wages for such unskilled work as assembling automobiles up north. Well, I’ve been in a couple of unions, and have the books around somewhere to prove it. My Dad in addition to being a farmer went to his forty hour a week part time job in town for fifty years, and he was on the plant negotiating committee there, and a life long member of the Teamsters. I know the history, and the contribution, of unions in this country. I also know they exist primarily so as to increase the incomes of their members, and to increase the political powers of their members. Anybody who pretends otherwise is a goddamned idiot, or a hypocritical lying partisan. Period. I’ve paid my dues to the NEA, the VEA, and the Operating Engineers. I paid dues into other unions as guest worker at times.
I wonder how many people who go around pissing and moaning about the automobile industry fleeing the northern states for the south where they can pay less and have better control of operations have EVER stopped to think about the following indisputable FACT.
The next step after moving south is moving overseas, unless a company is ALREADY in the south. It’s just a fucking matter of DEGREE, nothing is really any different in PRINCIPLE.
Now am I opposed to free trade?
That’s a very good question, and it would take a very long comment to answer it well.
Short answer, in principle, no , so long as it’s truly free, not subsidized on one side, and so long as it doesn’t weaken my country and put it in danger.
No apple grower in this country, nor any other American farmer, had access to Japanese supermarkets the way Japanese car companies had access to American car buyers for forty years.
No, so long as it doesn’t impoverish a quarter or more of our people, putting them on welfare or at best at work such as flipping hamburgers.
No, so long as it is not arguably one of the two or three KEY issues that result in the election of people like Trump.
History ain’t over folks. We spend endless time, justifiably, bemoaning the lack of adequate environmental regulations and the preservation of our public lands here in this forum.
We spend near zero time considering whether the Asian economic elephant in general, and the Chinese elephant in particular, will acquire so much economic power that we become THEIR de facto colony.
Well, we are ALREADY their de facto colony in a lot of respects. They buy logs from my neighborhood, and haul them to Asia, and make furniture out of them, and ship the furniture here to sell it. I don’t recall hearing much about any Asian furniture workers living even remotely as well as my neighbors used to live even when they were working for some of the lowest wages paid by any important industry in this country, and they had RELATIVELY decent working conditions, including as a rule basic health insurance, a paid vacation, and government people dropping by once in a while to make sure not very many of them got hurt on the job.
I know a lot of people today who were born to parents who were machine operators in furniture factories…… people who were born in hospitals with the bill paid in full by their group insurance……. right here in the upper end of the heart of Dixie.
No more.
You don’t have to be but so goddamned smart to understand that when you take away jobs by the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then the millions, you create a situation wherein the huge surplus of former workers are forced into a race to the bottom to work for any wage they can get under any circumstances.
THAT’s probably the BIGGEST single reason wages are and have been stagnant or actually declining in this country in recent decades.
Is anybody here fool enough to think the working classes of this country will support politicians who support the free trade that has been and continues to be a fucking disaster for them, PERSONALLY, or threatens them with disaster?
Now there are powerful arguments to be made for both sides of this particular question. I know that, as does anybody else who understands reality and is willing to ADMIT he understands.
But if folks who are rah rah supporters of free trade manage to open their eyes wide enough, long enough, they must realize that if they want the D’s back into control of the country, and thus in control of environmental policy, health care policy, privacy policy, etc, etc, the D’s must first regain control of elective offices from dog catcher and town manager to the Senate and the WH.
The R’s own the elective offices of the land by about a two to one margin.
Any general will tell you that sometimes you have to sacrifice some men and some ground to win the war.
It’s the same in politics.
I know that just about everybody in this forum is far more intelligent than they need be to understand my arguments.
I’m not saying anybody ought to AGREE with me, but only that he should think about what I have said.
If you want to win, you must understand that regardless of whether a voter is right or wrong on the facts in respect to a hot button issue, he or she will vote his or her BELIEFS.
I’ve yet to meet the first Democrat who has convinced former industrial workers of my acquaintance that free trade is in the interest of working class Americans.
KGB agent—
You just need a Tesla model S—
(sarc)
And of course, stay in the shallow end of that pool.
Another huge apple butter crap for the toilet
“I’m not saying anybody ought to AGREE with me, but only that he should think about what I have said.”
Then learn how to write and stay focused on the subject. You just spew hate and non sense. It’s quality not quantity that matters.
I’ve also forgotten more about writing than you will ever know, HB, and more still about human nature.
Feel free to x me out, but I’d rather you didn’t because I need you to play the fool for me.
Brevity is the soul of wit, it’s true, but an understanding of politics requires nuance, and nuance requires more than a few words, as a rule.
The thing about ME that pisses YOU off so bad is that I’m right, and you KNOW it, but your only recourse, other than admitting it, is that you aren’t willing to do so, is to respond as you do, by painting me as a Trump partisan.
As I’ve noted several times previously, adults look to their own shortcomings when they come up short.
Children look for excuses.
Enjoy your big tax cut……. That is, unless you’re really living in your mom’s basement.
You’ve NEVER posted anything yet that refutes any of my arguments, and you never will, because you lack the intellectual resources necessary to come up with anything.
Tell us, what suggestions have you posted that might help the Democrats regain control of the federal government?
Even ROTTEN suggestions are better than none at all, because they provoke discussion and thought. You haven’t posted even a ROTTEN suggestion.
I’m not well to do, and have never pretended otherwise, but at least I don’t go around pretending to be an environmentalist in the same forum that I brag about making a killing in the oil biz.
Thanks for your help. Between the two of us, I think our discussions are doing some good in terms of getting other forum members to think about doing what they need to do, and what they need to avoid doing, in order to WIN elections.
Spewing your sort of venom at half the potential voters in this country isn’t exactly LIKELY to convince that hundred million to vote D next election.
As I’ve noted before, if you were to talk about women the way you talk about southerners, you couldn’t get a date in a cat house with a roll of hundred dollar bills in your hand.
North Pacific Forecast
https://alaskapacificblob.wordpress.com/2018/02/21/north-pacific-forecast/
Jordan may be the next place to go in the ME. Food prices are zooming up, wealth disparity to the royalty is huge and there’s some refugee pressure, I’ve seen a couple of articles suggesting it will blow in under a month.
3 Stages of Life:
A Hole in Winter’s Heart: Temperatures Rise to Above Freezing at the North Pole in February
At this point, we were starting to see some seriously outlandish temperatures in the higher latitude regions. Cape Morris Jesup, which is the furthest north location on Greenland, by Friday the 23rd experienced a 6 C or 43 F temperatures on the shores of what should be a frozen solid Arctic Ocean just 400 miles from the North Pole.
The average high temperature in Cape Morris Jesup is -20 degrees Fahrenheit during February — making Friday’s reading a whopping 63 degrees F warmer than average. For reference, a similar departure for Washington, DC would produce a 105 degree day in February.
But it wasn’t just Cape Morris Jesup that was experiencing July-like conditions for the Arctic during February. For the expanding front of that ridiculously warm winter air by Sunday had expanded into a plume stretching tens of thousands of square miles and including a vast zone of temperatures spiking from 45 to 54+ degrees F above normal.
https://robertscribbler.com/2018/02/25/a-hole-in-winters-heart-temperatures-rise-to-above-freezing-at-the-north-pole-in-february/
Robert Fanney
@robertscribbler
UPDATE: This is just outrageous. We have above freezing temps now spanning nearly all of the 80 N latitude zone from Svalbard, across the pole and to about 82 N on the East Siberian side… pic.twitter.com/ULMKigKnKG
Open water north of Greenland
https://mobile.twitter.com/seaice_de/status/967679640402874369/photo/1
Unraveling the ‘Weaponization’ of the EPA is Top Priority for Scott Pruitt
02-22-2018 David Brody
http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/february/unraveling-the-weaponization-of-the-epa-is-top-priority-for-scott-pruitt
The growing attention to environmental issues and the question of climate change makes Scott Pruitt’s job more important by the day.
President Trump chose him to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Pruitt hopes to unravel what he calls the “weaponization” of the EPA by the Obama administration.
Pruitt hopes to pursue that mission with a servant’s heart. After all, he’s the kind of guy you might meet in Bible study. The former Sunday school teacher and church deacon wants to use that faith background in his role as EPA administrator.
Pruitt believes God commands us to take care of the environment and that also means to use what He has provided. “The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we’ve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind.”
‘Cats@Home’ more like ‘Bats@Belfry’.
Having just crossed 70 degrees F in the mountains near me (41N) this past week, I wondered how often this actually happens.
This past Wednesday hit 70F/46F with 35/19 being the historical average at this station near 2000 feet altitude. Previous record high for that station in February was 65F in 1975, so this is a first. To give you an idea, 2000 feet asl is like being 600 miles north at sea level (well into Canada) as far as temperature goes. The highest temperature ever recorded there is 95F in June 2003.
https://weather.com/news/weather/news/2018-02-19-how-rare-are-70s-in-february-in-northeast-map
Brief stall in Arctic sea ice extent growth in response to the anomalous weather conditions in the Arctic. Total sea ice extent remains a record low for the date (satellite era – from 1979).
Sea ice data from JAXA AMSR2 at
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop.ver1/vishop-extent.html
Do you know of any live cams showing these current arctic sea ice conditions?
Google is your friend…
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_webcam
That’s nothing. The ice on the lake in front of my place, what was left of it, vanished overnight. Birds are having a great time out there. Fish are terrified or at least anxious.
Back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s this region was a commercial ice cutting area. The region failed commercially due t rising temperatures before refrigeration killed the whole industry.
But just to show how stubborn ice can be here is a photo taken in 1912 of an ice house that burned, leaving the ice exposed but mostly not melted.
Cool picture and good example of (latent) heat of fusion.
Also demonstrates the heat of vaporization, as the fire tried to heat the liquid formed it would chill the fire as it evaporated. Hot and steamy on the outside, cold and crunchy on the inside. 🙂
Gives one the idea of how difficult it is to melt a glacier. Yet they are melting.
Gives one the idea of how difficult it is to melt a glacier. Yet they are melting.
Yep!
But here’s something else to think about. We have only hit about 1°C above preindustrial average global baseline temperatures. Yet we are already almost ice free in the Arctic ocean and we are experiencing temperatures 45°C above normal for this time of year, up near the north pole.
And we are probably going to blow past that 2°C supposedly safe threshold before the end of this century.
Good luck folks!
Yeah, I have thought a lot about that. As I said in a comment not that long ago, after calculating the ice/open water ratios in the Arctic Ocean over the warm season, there is a lot of extra heat going into the Arctic now. Came out as a 50 w/m2 annual average over the whole Arctic Ocean positive into the ocean. Will hit 80 w/m2 when ice free (in comparison to a fully ice covered Arctic).
Then there are warm streams of air and water coming up from the south also. Lots of heat going into the Arctic regions now and more later, not counting the GHG effect.
So it’s not a temperature thing now, it’s an albedo and equilibration phenomenon.
If it keep going like this just a few more years, GHG increase is irrelevant. May be irrelevant now.
What happens when the radiator of the hemisphere gets amplification with feedback?
What happens when the radiator of the hemisphere gets amplification with feedback?
When it comes to feedbacks, it’s the unknown unknowns that worry me the most…
That link I posted the other day to the talk about C,N,P ratios in diatoms and cyanobateria was followed by one on the fluid dynamics of large groups of marine organisms engaged in daily vertical migrations in the water column.
Made me think that Lorenz’s ‘Butterfly Effect’ might have been just as appropriately named ‘The Artemia salina Effect’.
.
This one has been extinct for a couple million years.
Habelia optata Length 2cm.
Illustration by Joanna Liang
Copyright Royal Ontario Museum
.
50 W/m^2
50 MW/km^2
50,000 GW/kkm^2
and the Arctic is a lot bigger than that.
Shit!
NAOM
Obviously, hippos in the Thames and alligators in New York. Even worse, Americans in Ottawa! 🙂
How far will it go?
The topic of range for EV’s has always been at the top of the list. Usually people don’t use much range, but they like to know they have that extra. So how far could a 2012 Chevy Volt go on electric power only? Pretty far. Read this one carefully, apparently the not used or discussed regen and mountain modes do really well also.
https://insideevs.com/far-can-chevrolet-volt-really-go-ev-mode-81-8-miles/
Of course the Chevy Bolt can get over 300 miles on a charge.
https://electrek.co/2017/02/17/chevy-bolt-ev-300-miles-range/
I don’t think range is a problem anymore, unless you take very long road trips and there are no chargers available. Maybe that will change in the next few years.
I don’t think range is a problem anymore, unless you take very long road trips and there are no chargers available. Maybe that will change in the next few years.
Yep, it’s one of those persistent myths that no longer holds true. Based mostly on faulty assumptions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELyGrIQTqjw
Daily Mail Electric Car Rant | Fully Charged
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcRW3FMuttY
Well, at least we’ll have left behind a few nice sentiments.
Give us peace. I recommend the “making of” video.
A STUDY EXAMPLE OF TWO INTERACTING POPULATIONS
The “EV” population was given a logistic growth with initial rate of 1.3/year. Initial population was one million. Logistic growth simulates an upper population boundary (carrying capacity limits or demand limits).
The opposing “ICE” population was given an exponential growth rate of 1.03/year. The growth was reduced by the growth of the EV population each year(market share loss). Initial population of one billion.
By year 30 the populations are equal and by year 45 the “ICE” population is less than 2 percent of the total population in this example.
The change in sea ice conditions north of Greenland is very interesting
A Large Area of Open Water Forms in the Melting Sea Ice North of Greenland During February
https://robertscribbler.com/2018/02/26/a-large-area-of-open-water-forms-in-the-melting-sea-ice-north-of-greenland-during-february/
Say goodbye to the thick stuff
http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickness-and-volume/
Nature Unbound VIII – Modern global warming
Summary: Modern Global Warming has been taking place for the past 300 years. It is the last of several multi-century warming periods that have happened during the Neoglacial cooling of the past 3000 years. Analysis of Holocene climate cycles shows that the period 1600-2100 AD should be a period of warming. The evidence suggests that Modern Global Warming is within Holocene variability, but the cryosphere displays a non-cyclical retreat that appears to have undone thousands of years of Neoglacial ice advance. The last 70 out of 300 years of Modern Global Warming are characterized by human-caused, extremely unusual, rapidly increasing CO2 levels. In stark contrast with this rapidly accelerating anthropogenic forcing, global temperature and sea level appear to have continued their rising trend with no perceptible evidence of added acceleration. The evidence supports a higher sensitivity to CO2 in the cryosphere, suggesting a negative feedback by H2O, that prevents CO2 from having the same effect elsewhere.
No not the J Curry doublespeak and mixes of reality and delusion! The twists, the turns down the rabbit hole of sci-fi pretending to be sci-reality. No, not again.
That is non peer reviewed drivel; just because it makes you all comfortable and justified and not having to take responsibility for anything at all while putting the blame on others doesn’t make it right, so try growing a pair of balls and finding out what really is going on from the people actually doing the research.
LOL! Posted by Javier on Judith Curry’s blog!
Dim Joe, pray tell, how much of that crap did you actually manage to read?!
Gotta say though, that is about as finely refined high grade ‘Yak Dung’, as I’ve ever seen in print! Puts most of the coarser, ordinary grade, garden variety bullshit to shame by quite a few orders of magnitude!
Javier still gets the gold medal for the deepest bullshit ever produced anywhere, I’m duly impressed!
Fred, Regarding the Javier guest post, it’s the most subtly evil piece I have read in a while. Not only is he a student of the Gish Gallop but he also creates deceptive charts. This one Fig 111 of his is absolutely misleading.
1. Note how he places a straight line over the temperature record
2. Note how he places hints on the CO2 to show it is curving upward
3. Note how he compresses the y-axis for the CO2
Then he says that there is no agreement between the two, relying completely on tricks of optical illusion.
I’m glad we ran Javier off of this blog, and hope he doesn’t return.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/figure-111.png
This is how Javier’s chart should have been plotted. It doesn’t prove that there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature, but it is honest, and doesn’t intend to mislead as Javier’s chart does.
I’m glad we ran Javier off of this blog, and hope he doesn’t return.
I agree with you, Paul! I also think what he does borders on evil. Don’t know his true motivation but I have suspected for a long time that he went over to the dark side for monetary gain.
The ones that subtly manipulate the data are the worst.
Hi Paul,
An alternative way to plot the data is to look at natural log of atmospheric CO2 vs Global Land Ocean Temperature (data from Berkeley Earth).
The slope times natural log of 2 (0.693) gives an estimate of the transient climate response, in this case 2.35 C, a rough estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity could be obtained by looking at natural log of atmospheric CO2 vs global land temperature.
Interestingly, if we use data from ice cores from 1880-1959 spliced to atmospheric measurements from 1960-2015, we also get a TCR estimate of about 2.35 C. Note how the slopes from the chart below and the chart above are very similar, and the R squared is fairly close as well.
If Javier comes back, point him to that chart.
It would have no effect other than producing more science affliction.
Is Joe Diamond a Javier sock puppet?
NAOM
I got the scientific paper from the state of climate science global warming discussion forums: Global Warming and Weather Discussion. In summary it is a very interesting look at what many of us thought all along, that ocean currents and the sun are the real things causing climate change.
It is not a scientific paper, it’s made up bullshit.
In summary it is a very interesting look at what many of us thought all along, that ocean currents and the sun are the real things causing climate change.
ROFLMAO!! You are a real hoot, buddy. Pure comedy gold!
Love to hear your theory on the precise mechanisms involved in how ocean currents are currently, (pun intended) CAUSING climate change… Do give us a link when you publish your data in a reputable peer reviewed scientific journal. And no, Judith Curry’s blog doesn’t count.
IMHO he just proved my question above with his response, same MO.
NAOM
Yep.
Here one with an 1880 to 1920 baseline for Dim Joe and Bob Frisky
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/
What if every car sold in the world was an electric vehicle?
reneweconomy.com.au has become one of my essential every (week) day reads along with the local news, pealoilbarrell, insideevs and utilitydive. Lots of great stuff there!
Seems quite an unrealistic scenario to me, since peak production rates of EV’s would have to hit near 170 million cars and trucks a year to produce enough replacements for ICE’s, plus loss of EV’s over the 22 year span, plus growth of demand in a growing population/lifestyle world.
I think the best we could hope for is equality of ICE and EV by the 2050’s and the end of the ICE by 2065 to 2070. Unless of course there are tremendous societal changes and downward population pressure in the meantime, which is a large possibility considering current situations. If we follow the BAU transistion and figure out how to grow enough food in a warming/changing world, then EV’s along with some other alternatives will eventually replace the ICE.
On the other hand, if oil becomes much harder to produce and production starts dwindling soon, there will be large pressures for alternative transport as well as pressure to increase the efficiency of ICE vehicles. We can easily produce 4 seat vehicles that get 60 to 80 mpg. That is very likely to occur, giving more time to produce EV’s and other transport alternatives.
As the current situation stands, ICE’s will burn up to 25 trillion gallons of fuel before they are gone, even with a high rate of alternative transport replacement. That could be cut in half with an extreme push of efficiency and appropriate raising of the price of fossil fuels.
The graph below is from Seba’s RethinkX report (page 36). It does not paint a pretty picture. As a matter of fact, it portends a cataclysmic disruption of the transportation and fuel industries. I am by no means saying that it is going to happen but, I certainly do not believe that BAU can continue much longer. I have said before that in my life. I have seen enough disruptions to be confident of one thing, change is certain. Seba has made a career out of studying disruptions so, I am inclined to take his work more seriously than those who parrot “more of the same” year after year. Even if Seba is off by a mile, his projections being off by a mile still spell the end of the auto industry as we know it. My personal feeling is that, between Peak Oil and disruption, by 2030 we are all going to be wondering how things happened so fast, those of us who are still alive that is.
I will look at his report. He is a great presenter and salesman, but I don’t think anyone can predict the future at this point. There are way too many variables, unknowns and known negatives.
There is a huge difference between adding computers and phones to the world and changing the whole energy/transportation/social system in just a decade or two.
We have a choice of purposeful depopulation or natural depopulation. Either way it’s not going to be a fun ride.
Just a small taste of things to come.
Disaster by depopulation
http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2005_2/20-21.html
With 2030 you are a optimist!
Not really. Notice I said, ” those of us who are still alive that is”. I don’t believe stuff about 9 billion humans living on this planet. Not living in “peace and harmony” at any rate!
I might be alive— but not likely.
Your point is taken.
the key would be to kill a lot of people (to redistribute wealth and reestablish a healthy demand for labor) but not so many that it fundamentally disrupts complex global systems that allow for electric vehicles, development, production, and distribution.
didn’t know seba was such a fan of mass death.
I looked over the report and don’t think that the effect of fleet ownership will be as large as Seba shows. He is showing maximum effect, that would not cover the rush hours.
I do agree that corporate ownership of car fleets can make a significant reduction of cars (once autonomy becomes complete) if the companies do not become too greedy and keep prices low as possible. Most of the effect will be in the very high population density areas, which already have lower car ownership, but which could plunge even further.
Rush hour traffic can be reduced by ride sharing in densely populated areas, easily accomplished with autonomous vehicles and apps like Uber.
If average occupancy of rush hour cars increases from 1 to 2, the number of cars needed is cut in half. Increase to 4 and 1/4 of cars are needed.
Cars park remotely near city, then move passengers back home in evening or provide “uber” service in city during the day.
Probably something like the new electric VW minibus would be an ideal people mover, less wasted space and more passengers per vehicle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQut6ks3nSY
Wind and Battery power.
Germany on the 19th of February had a peak demand of 74Gw of power falling to around 60Gw in the small hours.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2018&week=8
With temperatures of between -3 and -1 power demand was high.
Unfortunately wind when it was needed most was a let down again, producing only 0.75Gw.
For 5 days from the 16th of February the 90 Gw plus of installed wind and solar power failed to produce more than 10% of Germany’s needs.
The answer to this deficit, according to certain thinkers is to have lots of batteries in every home, office, factory and restaurant.
If you are of the view that battery storage is even part of the solution.
What I would like to know is, how many batteries would meet the shortfall in that 5 day period. Bearing in mind the batteries, including all electric car batteries would be flat after 1 day.
https://www.spiritenergy.co.uk/tesla-battery-solar?source=googleads&ppc_keyword=tesla%20battery%20installer&gclid=EAIaIQobChMItMue-K7G2QIVzrDtCh3GzAZ7EAAYAiAAEgJnhPD_BwE
If Germany doubled it’s solar and wind power the batteries would last 2 days before being totally depleted.
One of the creators of the Renewable Energy Sources Act or EEG (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) was the late Hermann Scheer. He wrote several books including a couple that I bought. Congratulations Peter, your incessant comments about the failure of renewables in Germany has prompted me to dust off “The Energy Imperative: 100 Percent Renewable Now”. I will be reading it to find out exactly how Scheer thought Germany would make it through cold winter spells. When I have read it I will let you what Scheer’s thought were. The whole Energiewende was basically his idea.
Peter,
There are a number of answers to handling seasonal deficits of renewable power – it’s a mistake to think that there’s a single silver bullet. But, our space and time are limited, so here are two primary answers:
First, overbuilding. 90GW of wind and solar can only be expected to produce very roughly an average of maybe 15%, or 13GW, in Germany. That’s what Oldfarmermac was getting at. So, if you want wind and solar to cover 100% of about 65GW of demand (on average) you’ll need roughly 430GW of capacity. Now, no one ever expects to build to an average – in the US we overbuild capacity by a factor of about 2.5:1 (about 1,150GW of capacity for 450GW of average demand). If we just use a factor of 2:1 for our wind and solar (because it’s more capex intensive) then you’d build about 860GW of capacity. That’s 10x as much as they have now. If Germany’s 90GW of wind and solar produced about 6.5GW, then 860GW would produce about 60GW. That’s close to 90% of demand.
The 2nd answer is “wind-gas”. If you overbuild wind and solar by 2:1 that means that you have a vast amount of surplus power to use for storage. That means you don’t need high efficiency. On the other hand, you do want to minimize capex – capex is the problem with batteries. So, convert surplus power to H2, store it cheaply underground, and burn it cheaply in ICEs or turbines (not expensive fuel cells) for a round trip efficiency of perhaps 25%, and low capex. That would give enough backup to cover supply deficiencies of very roughly 25%, which is far higher than we would see from a 50% deficit for 5 days – that’s a supply deficiency of about 1% of annual demand. Alternatively, overbuilding of just 1.25:1 would still give you a lot of surpluse power, likely more than enough to handle seasonal shortages.
Does that help?
Peters point shouldn’t be discounted.
It is important to deal with this issue headon in order to be taken seriously in the effort to promote renewables.
To pretend they can handle to cold winters all the time of the north is naive in my mind.
I wouldn’t be giving up my backup coal, oil, or gas burner ever- if I lived in places with coldness.
It even got to 28 degrees right on the coast of central Calif this past week (Half Moon Bay), which is very rare. But you can freeze in very rare.
That would be true if you were to try to live on solar power alone.
Fortunately, there are a number of other renewables: wind, hydro, geothermal, and others. If you look at places like Canada, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, you’ll see them. Wind in particular is a bit stronger in the winter and at night, so it complements solar nicely.
Hi Hickory,
So we can have a bit of natural gas backup for the 1% of load hours that might not be covered for a widely dispersed highly interconnected large area covered by a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal power with battery backup, vehicle to grid, demand pricing, and thermal storage (both cold and hot depending upon season). Heat and store hot water in cold weather during times of high wind and solar and make ice in warm weather during high wind and solar periods.
Also biofuels could be used for backup in cold weather, or wind gas (using excess wind power to produce a combustible gas).
Island
If any country can do it Germany can, but the lack of storage including hydro, pumped storage and batteries is the Achilles heal of renewable power.
Hydro and pumped storage rely on rainfall and assuming the same rainfall in the coming 50 years will be the same as the last 50 years would be a mistake.
I Look forward to his hearing about his ideas
Hi Peter,
Not to quibble too much, but Germany is a country with relatively lousy wind and solar resources.
German engineers and German workers are unquestionably right up there among the very best in the world. Some people believe they may be the best. I won’t dispute that argument, having worked with some of them .
But they don’t have much in the way of natural resources to work with.
If the Germans were able to relocate themselves to a country with wind and solar resources comparable to the state of Texas, they would be eighty percent of the way to going totally renewable in another decade or two and they would likely manage to reorganize their economy to get their need for liquid fuels down to almost nothing by then as well.
What they would have to have, they could probably manufacture using renewable energy.
OFM
You may very well be right, but they have to work with what they have got. Studying wind speeds in Europe, when there are large high pressure systems over central Europe wind speeds are low across the entire continent.
Also at night time particularly in winter it is dark at 4pm from Warsaw to Lisbon.
At the moment we have very cheap storage. It is called coal and gas.
The cost of replacing those with batteries for an entire country is about 100 years of coal and gas cost. Considering how much gas there is and consumption could decline due to wind and solar. Gas will remain a very cheap storage medium.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/natural-gas/natural-gas-reserves.html
Coal is seriously not cheap.
See my comment above about storage.
Hi Peter,
Suppose you go back a few years and read up on the projections made by companies and governments about the future price of gas and oil, and see how well they have matched up with reality.
Gas depletes. It’s just a question of when, not if, of the price of it going thru the roof.
Tell me now. Do you really think the Russians, or the Germans, have forgotten WWII? If you were a German today, how comfortable would you be, knowing that someday the Russians may just TURN OF THE EXPORT of oil and gas?
It’s pure bullshit to claim they CAN’T. Nobody whatsover has the power to stop them, if it suits the agenda of who ever happens to be running the show at the time. It’s true this would create HUGE problems for the Russian economy, but they could easily survive short term, for a year or two, without importing ANYTHING.
Western Europeans will be dying by the tens of thousands within a couple of weeks if anything disrupts the delivery of imported oil and gas during a tough winter.
And furthermore, the Germans fully expect to earn a large portion of their future national income by exporting their renewable energy hardware and expertise in installing and maintaining it.
At least a couple more countries every year, from here on out, will go from exporting energy to importing energy.
Depletion never sleeps.
You persistently avoid conservation, optimisation, efficiency, heat storage, cold storage etc from you trolling. Batteries are not the only possibility and even they will be very different in 10 years time.
NAOM
notaman
Conservation. We already do that in this country
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/20/older-person-dying-winter-fuel-poverty
In the UK over half of houses are either single brick or should not be cavity insulated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-42165358
Internal insulation is very expensive, very disruptive and the payback is so long as to see hardly any benefit. I know someone who had it done and their bills are down by only £100 per year.
Facts are not trolling you silly person
Peter says: “Internal insulation is very expensive, very disruptive and the payback is so long as to see hardly any benefit.”
Over here in Norte Americano we understand physics and have also learned how to use vapor barriers. Insulation is about 50 cents a square foot for R-13. That’s $500/1000 square feet t and saves 67 million BTU per heating season per 1000 square feet in my area. Might only be half that in London but about the same in Edinburgh.
Peter,
See
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/home-insulation/cavity-wall
Payback time is typically about 5 years, so for a homeowner it would make sense and natural gas prices are likely to rise over time which would shorten the pay back period.
Maybe off shore oil and natural gas platforms could be repurposed as offshore wind farms instead of being decommissioned. Not sure if it would be cheaper than new construction.
It seems there have been studies that suggest that a widely interconnected grid for all of Europe with widely dispersed wind and solar installations (put the wind and solar farms in those locations with the best wind or solar resources) is likely to require very little backup.
More study of this is needed at the continental scale.
Dennis
Solid wall insulation is expensive, as they have to built a stud wall to make a gap.
https://www.moneysupermarket.com/gas-and-electricity/solid-wall-insulation/
With regard to wind power distribution. Euan did a study on the subject and taking wind power right across Europe had little effect of leveling out production.
Cracking the storage problem is essential
No, there are many ways to insulate a solid walled house. I used to live in one and looked into it. Stripping plaster, applying water barriers, apply studding and insulation then plasterboard is not a huge task and within the bounds of DIY. Solid walls often need rectification for other faults and this can be a big part of the solution. With much of UK old stock housing the problem is one of the area involved making it a worthless task unless joined with remedial work. Loft insulation, underfloor insulation, triple glazing, insulated doors and porches can be the solution there.
Insulation can be fixed externally also being used as part of remedial work plus new insulating materials such as aerogel are coming to market that can help resolve these problems.
NAOM
So you looked into it did you.
Always easy and cheap looking into it.
Our neighbours have just fitted triple glazing to their home.
£40,000 and that was the cheapest of 3 quotes.
Yep, better than rushing in and throwing money away. Lots of other steps provided better solutions. I also had other limitations that I cannot go into here such as not being able to totally control work specifications. One that was not available at the time was the following:
http://www.british-gypsum.com/products/gyproc-thermaline-pir-mr?tab0=0
http://www.british-gypsum.com/~/media/Files/British-Gypsum/Brochures-and-Leaflets/Installation-Guides/Installation-Guide-DriLyner-TL.pdf
No studding required.
I don’t know why you are getting so up tight about single brick walls as these are rarely found except in outhouses. Typical older properties have a double brick, non cavity wall with, typically, an English or Flemish bond. These have many problems besides insulation and require expensive remedial work. Applying insulation as part of the remedial work can bring costs down for both jobs.
NAOM
Hi Peter,
A proper study looks at wind and solar for the continent as a whole and devises optimal solutions.
Euan is far from an expert on the subject, and the same caveat applies to me as well.
See
http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/6/449/htm
Replacing windows can indeed be expensive.
It is up to the owner to make those decisions.
A proper study looks at wind and solar for the continent as a whole and devises optimal solutions.
Heck, a proper study would include Morocco, which is a stone’s throw from Gibraltar. If you exclude MENA then you’re paying a serious premium for energy security. That’s ok, but it’s not a physics problem, it’s a political problem.
Euan is far from an expert on the subject
Euan is seriously biased against renewables. IIRC I went through his assumptions on storage recently and discovered that they were pretty flawed. It took very careful digging to figure it out – such a problem wouldn’t be clear to someone who accepts his analyses at face value.
Hi Peter,
So how many poor people are going to die as energy gets to be even more expensive than it is already?
The Industrial Revolution was born via water power, but it didn’t get out of diapers until coal and steam came along.
Your coal is already gone. You’re buying gas and oil from overseas, mostly from countries that are not exactly your cultural soul mates, or your friends.
There are ways to insulate older houses, no matter how they are constructed, that are reasonably economical, in relation to the long term savings in energy cost. Whether the owners and the people who live in such houses are willing to accept the necessary compromises is up to them.
Energy market tipping point is coming, and fast
Last year saw record low solar costs broken not once, but four times, and over a short period of time, raising questions as to whether it is realistic to expect this remarkable trend to continue. But momentum is widespread, and not only gaining in a few sun-drenched markets like Saudi Arabia.
While solar is grabbing headlines for its recent performance, the prize for the world’s cheapest electricity generation in 2017 went to wind. In November, Enel Green Power made the lowest-ever bid for electricity generation in a Mexican wind auction.
While wind’s recent cost fall-offs have not been as universally stellar as solar’s (mostly because wind is a more mature sector), wind power prices have still been precipitous over the past couple years, particularly in countries with the most favorable conditions and policies.
Just in case anyone is wondering why I think there is an almighty shitstorm brewing in the electricity generating business.
I think there Island Boy is probably right, that there’s a shit storm brewing in the electricity biz.
Ten or twenty years from now, the guys who own coal and gas fired generating capacity are going to need subsidies to enable them to stay in business……… and these subsidies will likely be generated by taxes imposed on wind and solar farm owners.
They’re going to have to have the subsidies in order to survive, and we’re collectively one way or another going to pay these subsidies…….. because it will be cheaper to pay them than it will to build out enough storage capacity to shut the fossil fuel generating industry down altogether , at least within the easily foreseeable future.
There’s no need to go all religious nut case about the last ten or twenty percent of our electricity being generated by burning some gas and maybe a little coal for a while.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
and where was solar at 5pm when everyone needs electricity?
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=conventional&year=2018&week=8
None
I have never paid nothing for nothing before
It is not the cost that is the issue, if it ain’t there when you need it, it is a liability.
Hi Peter,
That’s why a combination of wind and solar is best.
See
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759
Abstract
We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaics) with electrochemical storage (batteries and fuel cells), incorporated into a large grid system (72 GW). The purpose is twofold: 1) although a single renewable generator at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites, with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours. And 2) we seek minimal cost, calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs. Our model evaluated over 28 billion combinations of renewables and storage, each tested over 35,040 h (four years) of load and weather data. We find that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacity—at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse renewable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost. At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we find that the electric system can be powered 90%–99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs comparable to today’s—but only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.
Hi Peter,
Troll or just honest skeptic, either way, you DO have a point, and one that simply CANNOT be refuted, as of NOW, and for some time to come, probably decades at least. Maybe forever. There are no GUARANTEES we can go all the way renewable on electricity, although I believe given time, enough investment, and enough technical progress it’s a doable job.
We will need a substantial amount of coal fired generation for some time to come, and likewise a lot of gas fired generation even longer, although hopefully we can phase out nearly all the coal, eventually , in favor of gasfired plus wind and solar power.
I try to get renewables advocates to acknowledge this obvious fact when discussing renewable energy in various forums, because otherwise, it makes those of us who believe in renewables look a little silly, or worse, uninformed or even less than honest to a casual reader.
But there are still compelling and entirely sufficient reasons to go renewable, to the extent we can, as fast as we can practically manage the job.
Depletion is obvious, although it may be a few more years until gas prices shoot up and stay up again, and we NEED gas as an industrial feed stock to manufacture dozens of more or less ESSENTIAL goods such as fertilizers.
And it’s pretty much a given that as time passes, renewable electricity is going to be CHEAPER, when it’s available, than gas and coal fired electricity. It is already, in many places a lot of the time.
So when I talk to people who do not yet know very much about renewable electricity, I tell them it’s like having a big gas hog truck that costs an arm and a leg to drive, and nothing else, to be using ONLY gas and coal fired juice.
I have such a truck, lol. It weighs sixteen tons legally loaded, it has six wheels, and tires are four hundred bucks each, minimum. It gets six mpg if you drive it very gently and don’t have to climb any hills. And when it’s time to replace it, it will cost sixty grand at least for a new one comparable to it.
So the solution is that I also own a car that gets thirty mpg, and it has only four tires, and I can get good ones for a hundred bucks each, lol. I drive the car when I can, and the truck when I must, if the car is giving problems.
The COMBINATION of wind, solar, coal, and gas fired electricity is now, in many places, already the cheapest overall way to get one’s electrical fix, and it will soon be the most economical combination in many other places.
It’s not just the dollars and cents question RIGHT NOW. It’s also employment for local people, local tax collections, national military and economic security, and insurance against the ever rising ( long term ) price of coal and gas.
Every kilowatt hour produced at a new wind or solar farm THIS YEAR means we will be buying that much LESS coal and gas EVERY YEAR for the life of the wind or solar farm, and wind and solar farms are NEVER going to actually wear out, like a coal or gas fired plant. And the less coal and gas we use to generate electricity, the cheaper it will be for everybody else who needs everything from food to new cars, because coal and gas are used in manufacturing just about everything somewhere along the way.
Furthermore, wind and solar farms can be refurbished cheaply, because everything is modular, and can be replaced as necessary without ever having to shut down the entire operation. The things that WILL need replacing are getting to be more reliable, and more economical , year after year. Hardly anything will ever need replacing at a solar farm, except the panels themselves, and they are already the cheapest part, with the land, mounts, wiring, roads, grid connections, and all that sort of thing representing most of the expense. These things do NOT wear out. The stuff on top of the towers at a wind farm, the generators, gear boxes, and turbine blades, can also be replaced every twenty years or so, one at a time, as they fail. If a tower is questionable, it will be possible to just put a smaller gen set on it, and it will be good for another twenty years.
There will be a ZERO fuel bill, for that twenty years.
I have spent an enormous amount of time over the last three or four years looking into the OFF THE BOOKS cost of burning coal and gas, and my conclusion, matched by many many people who are health care professionals, is that we will save as much or more as we are spending to subsidize renewable electricity on health care costs alone.
What’s going to happen is that within ten to twenty years is that we will find it necessary to start subsidizing the owners of coal and gas fired power plants so they can be kept maintained and up and ready to go to cover the times when the wind and sun let us down.
You may be hearing this for the first time.
We will eventually be subsidizing the conventional fossil fuel plant owners so they can stay in business. And we will HAVE to keep SOME OF THEM in business until the time comes when we can have enough electricity available at all times from renewable sources. That may be fifty years or even longer.
I don’t know how long it will be before this happens, but it’s going to happen, just as surely as coal mines play out and gas wells eventually produce so little gas that it’s not economical to maintain the well anymore.
within ten to twenty years is that we will find it necessary to start subsidizing the owners of coal and gas fired power plants so they can be kept maintained and up and ready to go
Most of the US already does that.
Let me say that again:
Most of the US already pays generators to maintain standby capacity. Those payments go to all forms of generation, based on statistical analyses of their likely ability to provide capacity at times of peak demand. Yes, they go to all forms of generation, including wind and solar – it all depends on the production profile, and how it matches up with need for capacity at critical times.
Mac….did you hear me?
Hi Nick,
You have a good point. I probably should added more nuance.
Yes, we are already subsidizing stand by capacity, I know that, but that subsidy is built into the rate structure, and has been, since the earliest days of the grid. It goes to the OWNERS of the EXISTING generating grid, who have until very recently been the owners of both the generating plants AND the distribution system itself, with the exception of rural areas where a lot of the transmission lines are owned by co ops that buy their juice from the owners of generating plants, and get it delivered to the locality over lines that belong to some other entity.
So the average or typical man or woman on the street doesn’t think of this as a subsidy, any more than you would think of a hotel having more rooms available than are needed MOST OF THE TIME as a subsidy, or a bus company having more buses than are usually needed except for a few peak hours as subsidy.
We’re used to that, and defining subsidies this way, we subsidize just about EVERYTHING that’s public or semi public such as roads, water and sewer, hospitals, schools, police, fire department, in order to have adequate supply or coverage at times when demand is high.
The typical person on the street defines subsidies differently, as money provided to the owners of some particular industry at the expense of other industries, or at the expense of tax payers.
So Joe and Suzy Sixpack see that the wind, solar, and electric car industries are subsidized at the expense of the taxpayer, at their expense, and at the expense of the owners of the conventional generating industry.
I’m talking about future times, already here in some places. The owners of gas and coal fired plants are going to lose so much market share that they will not be able to remain in business, unless they are propped up one way or another.
You and I would likely agree that paying them very high rates for standing by and producing at times of very high demand is effectively the same thing as just giving them a tax break, or writing them a check in order to keep them in the black. The typical man on the street would not see the extra high peak demand rate as a subsidy, since the words involved mean something different to HIM.
My point remains the same, at some time in the not too distant future, we are going to have to pay out quite a lot of money, one way or another, to keep the conventional generating industry on it’s feet, as it loses more and more revenue to the wind and solar industries.
We have no choice whatsoever in this matter, for now, and won’t for another twenty or thirty years, maybe even longer, because the necessary renewable capacity doesn’t exist, and the necessary storage capacity doesn’t exist, and won’t exist any sooner. It will take that long to build it.
It’s the humble opinion of this dumb old farmer kgb agent that it would be best if we talk about these things in an even handed fashion, rather than simply emphasizing the positive and studiously avoiding the negative, like goddamned commissioned salesmen.
One sided presentations are simply no good, when you’re talking to people who don’t know anything about a complicated subject, and that’s just about every body on the street, when it comes to renewable energy.
If they read comments such as the ones posted here by the gung ho renewables fans among us, and then read equally simple minded one sided comments posted somewhere else by fossil fuel advocates, they are going to come down on the side of the fossil fuel advocates almost every time.
It’s naive to expect otherwise. How many sales pitches are thrown at you every day of your life? How many , out of each thousand, have actually ever proven out? The one thing above everything else the pr and advertising industries have succeeded in doing is to teach us to ignore them, although pr and advertising still obviously DO WORK.
They don’t work well when the goal is to get people to give up the ( to them) tried, true, safe and economical in favor of the new, expensive, and obviously unreliable, to them.
I have always strongly suspected that you are professionally qualified in some field relating to pr or advertising, because you very seldom devote more than a bare line or two to the downsides of the things you promote.
That makes you a salesman, rather than a person I would recommend as an unbiased expert. I wouldn’t refer a friend to you for advice for this reason, although I generally am in the same book as you, and very often on the same page.
On subsidies for generation: I believe that capacity charges are paid to the owners of the generation plant, not to utilities per se. I really think that the existing charges handle the problem you’re discussing. The problem is really that such charges are not universal: they exist in a majority of the US, but not all, and pretty much not at all in Europe.
On persuasion: PR professionals deal with potential objections. You’re thinking of amateur PR people, or bad salesmen. Good PR people & salespeople are much harder to identify from that point of view. Actually, there are several problems here.
One is that people assume that there are hidden agendas. When I argue with Mike about water not being a problem for LTO he’s surprised, because he knows I advocate at other times and places for a high priority transition away from oil. He can’t imagine that I’d simply want to point out what’s realistic and what’s not, without it being part of a grand agenda.
Another problem is simply difficulty in communication in a limited space. When I say we should transition ASAP, you seem to read into that the idea that we should do it literally overnight. I simply mean that we should make it a much higher priority, not that we should shut down all FFs next Tuesday.
The other is that you and I simply disagree somewhat. I think that the costs of FF are very high, and that the risks of renewables and EVs are small. I think your intuition is somewhat different.
One for Fred
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/feb/27/mirrors-have-revealed-something-new-about-manta-rays-and-it-reflects-badly-on-us
Got batted out of the water by one of those, they is big.
NAOM
Magpies and Mirror
Earthlings
Wow! Tks for that one!
Yes they are magnificent creatures. However it had never for a moment occurred to me that a ray or any cartilaginous fish might be even remotely self aware. Shows how little we know and how biased we are.
Ironically as I read the article I was eating sushi which I had picked up on the way home from work. I try really hard not to eat any Tuna but sometimes do allow myself an occasional bite of farmed salmon, yellow tail, eel, shrimp and on rare occasions some octopus…
Dang, looks like I might have to rethink even some of my fish eating habits…
Yea, commercial fishing in the Marianas, we used to eat live, beating yellowfin tuna hearts.
But those are days long past, in a land far, far away—–
I suspect you know the difference but for some of the less ichtiologically well versed. Yellow Fin Tuna is a large pelagic oceanic fish while Yellow Tail, depending on species is more of a tropical reef fish. I do not eat any Tuna species.
Actually—
The fish you were referring to is actually a Japanese Amberjack, although someone in California or Mexico would referrer to them as Yellowtail (not yellow fin tuna, which are true tuna)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_amberjack
Nope! I do know the Amberjack is sometimes referred to as a Yellowtail. However The fish I was referring to is this one from my own back yard.
The yellowtail snapper, Ocyurus chrysurus, is an abundant species of snapper native to the western Atlantic Ocean including the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Although they have been found as far north as Massachusetts, their normal range is along Florida south to the West Indies and Brazil. This species is mostly found around coral reefs, but may be found in other habitats. They occur at depths of from near the surface to 180 metres (590 ft), though mostly between 10 and 70 m (33 and 230 ft). This species can reach a length of 86.3 cm (34.0 in), though most do not exceed 40 cm (16 in). The greatest weight recorded for this species is 4.1 kg (9.0 lb). It is a commercially important species and has been farmed.
Source Wikipedia
It ain’t no Amberjack or a Tuna.
.
Different fish–
But I like it!
Mexican Yellowtail:
https://www.mexican-fish.com/yellowtail/
All the extreme cold in Norway (which the scientists here will blame on global warming, undoubtedly) is causing many problems for the batteries of electric vehicles there. I guess we will need to go back to the drawing board before we say petro powered vehicles are dead for good, unless those pushing electric vehicles believe this sort of significant unreliability is acceptable?
https://www.bt.no/direkte/vaer/pinned/118455
Guess what?!
People in Norway do drive their EVs in winter! They know that range is diminished but it really isn’t a big deal at all. And there are ways to counteract those losses.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/electric-cars-cold-weather-temperatures
Gasoline vehicles and electric vehicles both lose in cold weather
In cold weather, all cars get less efficient. For gasoline-powered cars, factors like cold engine oil and increased idling can reduce fuel economy in freezing conditions by 20% or more. Overall, electric cars are more efficient than gasoline cars because an electric motor is much more efficient in turning stored electricity into motion than an internal combustion engine is in converting the chemical energy of gasoline to mechanical energy.
You can see (or feel) this inefficiency when considering the energy lost in the form of heat that leaves a gasoline car through the tailpipe and radiator. That heat is energy from the gasoline that is wasted. About 60% of the energy from gasoline is turned into heat, while only about 20% goes to drive the wheels. However, when temperatures dip, this “waste” heat is used to warm the cabin.
A battery electric car lacks a wasteful (but warm) engine, so an electric heating system (either a resistive heater or heat pump) is needed to keep the inside climate toasty on a chilly day. This electricity for heating will come from the same battery that’s used to power the electric drivetrain, so the effective range will drop in cold weather (assuming the driver chooses to use the heater).
Hint, dress in layers, preheat your EV and it’s batteries and don’t use the heater so much. Having watched the Norwegians during the recent winter Olympics I have a hunch they know how to deal with sub freezing weather.
Not to mention, you can preheat an EV while still plugged in in an enclosed garage and not kill yourself with carbon monoxide.
I don’t think Americans in general will be as eager to adopt EV’s as you believe. We’re comfortable with the gas-powered cars we’re all used to; and most people don’t like any kinds of change.
That’s why nobody uses computers or smart phones.
People hate that new fangled stuff. 🙂
So true!
.
Buying a Tesla Model 3? Better watch this as Rickard does his first day assessment on his new Model 3. At least he likes the cup holders and the door entry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX8pf5_pNoM&t=4647s
Step by step they get closer to the realization that 100 percent renewable energy is achievable. Between storage, smart systems and realizing that not every place needs power 24/7 or needs full power availability they will soon come to realize that we don’t need anything but renewable energy to run the civil systems.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180227111639.htm
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf
One of the unexpected downsides of the reduced cold war was the decline of submarines for studying Arctic Sea Ice. Here Peter Wadhams discusses the technology and methods of accurately measuring Arctic Sea Ice in a 2004 paper. He started using sidescan sonar from submarines back in 1988. In this case the scanning was done by AUV.
Current methods of ice thickness monitoring have been reviewed by Wadhams (2000). Essentially, the only direct satellite-borne technique is the radar altimeter, which measures freeboard and which has not yet been fully validated in comparative experiments; other satellite-based techniques using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or passive microwave involve inference from other measured parameters. Airborne techniques (laser altimetry for freeboard, electromagnetic sounding for thickness) are expensive for obtaining data over large areas, while through-ice techniques (hole drilling, surface sounding) are purely local. This leaves under-ice mapping as the most readily available and commonly used technique, involving the use of upward-looking sonar from moorings or from submarines. Once again, moorings offer data only at fixed locations, even though these may be critical choke points (e.g., Fram Strait), so only submarines have offered true synoptic ice-thickness mapping. The continued availability of submarines (U.S. and British) is therefore essential to the task of monitoring Arctic ice thickness through the present period of rapid change. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the deployment of British submarines in the Arctic has become more sporadic, and the U.S. civilian Scientific Ice Expeditions (SCICEX) program, which also produced many valuable data on Arctic sea ice from submarines, has been reduced in scope.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0426%282004%29021%3C1462%3ASSIOTW%3E2.0.CO%3B2
What if I was to tell you about an investment that would not only reduce carbon pollution but pay everyone back and more. It’s efficiency gains, the reduction of energy use to get the same intended result in a process or action. Nothing to sniff at, especially on a national or global scale.
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_service/Sustainability/PDFs/A_Compelling_Global_Resource.ashx
Way back in 2005 Nature published a series about regional climate change. Here is your chance to see how much our views have changed or not changed since then.
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/regionalclimatechange/index.html
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/28/trump-hope-hicks-217209
“Even Richard Nixon had Bebe Rebozo.
And by the end, he was still pacing the halls, talking to the paintings.
Donald Trump is close to having no one.
He’s got his literal family—though his son-in-law is reeling from the controversy over his security clearance, there have been enough off moments in public to feed speculation about the state of his relationship with the first lady, and Donald Trump Jr. said in India last week that given all the president is dealing with, he feels “it’s almost trite to call him just to say hello.”
With Hope Hicks leaving the White House, longtime body man Keith Schiller long gone, there is no metaphorical family, no core group of aides who’ve been through the ringer together, come out beaten but bound forever, trusting each other, trusting the president and having him trust them.
Every president gets lonely. It’s a lonely job. But the president who spent his life desperately seeking attention and getting all of it anyone could ever want might be the loneliest one ever.”
It appears that every last old rat has either abandoned ship or will be doing so shortly.
It’s looking more and more likely to me that enough dirt is going to stick that the R party will have to turn its back on Trump and try to rid itself of him. The odds are still in favor of the R’s trying to protect him and ride out his term doing all the robbing and stealing they can while the robbing and stealing is still good, but Mueller Ain’t Going Away. 😉
For those unaware there are new posts up.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/brazil-and-mexico-2017-summaries/
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-1-2018/
This one is ESPECIALLY for HB, and for those lost souls with their hearts in the right place but their heads up their ass who can’t understand WHY HRC lost the election.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/01/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-abuse-power
It’s because they expected enough people to continue to cut her the same amount of slack they cut her husband Bill, and the true believers, the ones who spent so much time screaming about republicans and Roy Moore, etc, DID cut her that much slack.
A hell of a lot of people with long memories who were sort of sick of her anyway decided that if it was ok for Democrats to vote for men who abuse women, and for women ( a particular woman) who run interference for them, well, they would just play by the same rules.
But young women didn’t, and young men didn’t, and working class people who were afraid for their jobs didn’t, and any one of these things was enough, considering how close the election actually was, in terms of the states that put Trump over the top, was enough to cost her the election.
The point remains the same. You just don’t support a candidate who from the word go already has half the country holding her in the utmost contempt.
HB has said here he doesn’t need the votes of southerners, and by extension, anybody who he looks down on, even as he pretends to be a Democrat.
But the Democratic PARTY needs those votes.
Control of the Virginia legislature this last time around came down to less than a thousand votes either way.
The twenty first century version of the sweat shop:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-driving-for-uber-or-lyft-sucks/