249 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, May 10, 2020”

  1. In a previous post Dennis questioned my assertions about the CO2 uptake of trees being about 1000 times more cost effective than PV reduction of CO2 emissions. http://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-electric-power-monthly-april-2020-edition-with-data-for-february-2020/#comment-702418

    Where is the Tony Seba of trees and nature? When we can use cheap natural methods that not only reduce and sequester emissions by factors of one to three or more magnitudes, where are the big disruption and promoters of disruption in the US? Maybe it’s the profit problem. World, we have a problem?
    Having done analytical work on polysaccharides including the cellulosic types, I can assure everyone that there is a lot of carbon in the basic ring structures that make up trees and other plants. It has long been proven that they use atmospheric carbon to build their structures.

    But also interesting was Dennis’s bring forth the article concerning the Judith Curry’s of the anti-tree climate set.
    “There seems to be some debate about the magnitude of the effect of tree planting as a strategy, like most things the answer may be more complex than at first glance.

    See for example (from Jan 2019) the following summary

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z”

    Another real knee slapper by Nadine Unger is about trees making the Pliocene warm. Forget CO2, it was the trees. See below*

    Too bad they all seem to miss a very energetic thing that trees do, it’s all albedo and isoprene to that small subset of anti-tree researchers. But that too is confounded.
    No Dennis, this is well understood and has been studied and field tested for more than 4 decades.
    Even Ronnie Raygun tried to dupe the public by declaring that trees pollute more than we do, to reduce pollution controls on industry and automobiles.
    Amazing how just adding catalytic converters dropped the smog problem quickly. I guess the trees changed their minds, merely coincidence.

    This is an extremely interesting subject, one which I was aware of but did not pursue the chemistry in detail. The many studies of trees to reduce city heat island effects showed their canopies were cooler than surrounding temperature, definitely much cooler underneath them. As one researcher said about a relatively small tree, it was equivalent of a 6 kW air conditioner. Also the trees absorb huge amounts of pollution (often to their detriment).
    There is much more to say, but it all leads back to guess who (humans). To attempt to blame the trees is just another sick diversion to harm nature and make money for the FF and PV industry.
    Heaven help us if we started doing things correctly.

    As I said this is an extremely interesting topic involving atmospheric chemistry, but am into a number of projects at home and around the neighborhood now, so will have to expound on the details later. Thanks for bringing this up Dennis. it’s an area I want to study in depth.

    * Forest emissions, wildfires explain why ancient Earth was so hot
    Using sophisticated Earth system modeling, a team led by Nadine Unger of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) calculated that concentrations of tropospheric ozone, aerosol particles, and methane during the mid-Pliocene epoch were twice the levels observed in the pre-industrial era — largely because so much more of the planet was covered in forest.

    Those reactive compounds altered Earth’s radiation balance, contributing a net global warming as much as two to three times greater than the effect of carbon dioxide, according to the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

    These findings help explain why the Pliocene was two to three degrees C warmer than the pre-industrial era despite atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide that were approximately the same as today, Unger said.
    https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/ysof-few020514.php

    Just a quick observation and question. We had at least twice the forest cover in the not distant past, just a few hundred years ago. Similar to the Pliocene. And that forest level was repeated between glaciations, so why so cool if the forests are the big factor?

    1. Gone fishing,

      I am not an expert, the message of the Nature article is that the issue is complex, I think planting trees is a great idea, but wondered how many trees would be needed to offset global emissions of carbon. So I simply searched google scholar for recent articles to get an idea about recent research. Nature tends to be pretty mainstream as a science publication.

      From 1850 to 2018 about 440 Gt C cumulative emissions from fossil fuels and cement, 200 Gt C from land use change, atmospheric carbon increased by 257 Gt, and 383 Gt was absorbed by land and ocean plant growth. Seems clear more should be done than simply planting trees, but all avenues should be pursued in my opinion to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases.

      Over the past 240 years emissions from land use change (deforestation) has been about 200 Gt of carbon released to the atmosphere, while about 197 Gt of carbon has been taken up by the so called land sink. Since 1991 about 37.5 Gt of net carbon has been absorbed by plant growth on land, so this is a viable method, but so far has reduced atmospheric carbon by about 1.34 Gt/ year, while atmospheric carbon has grown by 4.1 Gt per year over that 28 year period (1991-2019).

      In 2018 about 2.63 Gt of carbon was emitted by coal burning power plants producing about 10000 TWh of electricity, wind and solar combined only reduced these emissions (assuming they replaced coal fired power) by 0.4 Gt. What is unclear is how easy it would be to raise the number of trees planted to increase the land uptake of carbon by a similar amount.

      An average tree takes up about 6 kg of carbon in a year and roughly 167 trees would take up about 1 metric tonne of carbon. Wind and solar output in 2018 displaced coal fired power which would have emitted 400 million metric tonnes of carbon, so we would need 400 million times 167 or about 66.8 billion trees planted to match the 2018 wind and solar output. The trees would continue absorbing this level of carbon for 40 years or so, the space for planting trees is not unlimited, so this approach may reach some physical limit.

      In any case, every approach should be used to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Wind and solar could potentially ramp pretty quickly.

      2. Dennis et al I ask- Is replacing trees, that were previously cut down and/or burnt by man, a net gain, or just a measure of getting back towards zero on that particular action?
        Consider tree replacement as a noble thing, especially if done with the intent of never harvesting that tree, but it will not take carbon back out the actively cycling ecosystem.
        Net zero once the tree is all grown up.
        All the tree photosynthetic products, from seeds to leaves to stems to trunk and roots are best left in place, to settle back into the soil.
        To clarify, I am all for planting trillions of trees, and I have planted several hundred with my own shovel, but this act does not buy us a magic ecological ticket to carbon good karma, I assert.

        I have seen people try to justify a plane flight by purchasing ‘green credits” that will supposedly go to plant some trees. What a delusional scheme, even if some of the intention is good.

        1. Hickory,

          Without the replanting, carbon in the atmosphere increases, since 1850 deforestation has led to about 200 Gt (billion metric tonnes) of carbon emissions. Over the same period has been nearly an equal uptake of carbon by the terrestrial environment. If we planted more trees or cut down fewer trees, or both we could remove carbon from the atmosphere at least in the short term, longer term, trees will die and release carbon so over the long term the effect might not be that great.

          Some studies have suggested 1.2 trillion trees could be planted without reducing acres used for farming and grazing. That would amount to an extra 7 Gt of carbon removed from the atmosphere each year (once the 1.2 trillion trees were planted). That would be significant, seems a good strategy as long as there are not other factors not being accounted for (this is under study). There are other reasons trees are helpful, retaining soil, producing oxygen, reducing pollution, probably a bunch of other factors I am ignoring (habitat for birds and other fauna).

          1. ”If we planted more trees or cut down fewer trees, or both we could remove carbon from the atmosphere at least in the short term, longer term, trees will die and release carbon so over the long term the effect might not be that great.” Yes, but in the long term, an other carbon sink comes into play : the chemical weathering, with the increased content of water rain in hydrocarbonic acid, which results in the formation of carbonates of something which eventually arrive on sea. The wetlands are also good in trapping carbon dioxide in the form of organic carbon (peat) and if the accumulation is enough during enough time and is not disturbed, we can even get lignite (the german lignite formed during Miocene in the coastal swamps which were covering west of Germany). The azollas are also good in trapping carbon dioxide, by hoping that the result of annual blooms is not oxidized in the water column before reaching ocean floor and be covered by sediments (which occured 49 millions years ago in the Arctic ocean, which was nearly isolated and whose floor was probably in euxinic conditions. That resulted in the different oil reserves of Arctic).

          2. Also, lets be clear- Photovoltaic Energy production does not remove carbon from the atmosphere (and thus to compare it to tree planting is a strange exercise).
            Rather, its is net carbon positive (adds carbon) by way of the energy used in its manufacture- including mining, smelting, transport, etc., and its eventual recycling/disposal.

            But also, PV is a source of energy production, and as such is the lesser of carbon evils when compared fossil fuels by a huge margin. That is the big carbon take home message.

            Another good aspect to PV is the free fuel, which does not deplete in our era.

            1. Hickory,

              Correct that PV does not remove carbon from the atmosphere. It does displace fossil fuel energy sources such as coal or natural gas used in fossil fuel power plants. In fact if oil used for land transport, plus natural gas used for space and water heat were replaced with electric transport and heat pumps (ground source heat pumps in colder climates), carbon emissions from fossil fuel could be reduced from 9.2 Gt C in 2018 to about 2.7 Gt C so about a 71% reduction of carbon emissions from fossil fuel. Combine this with planting 1.2 trillion trees, better farming practices that increases carbon in the soil, improved buildings, expansion of passive solar use for heat, improved urban design for more walking and biking and less car travel, higher opportunity for secondary education levels for young women (which reduces total fertility rate and thus reduces population growth), and we have the start of a transition to something different from BAU (which has always been changing slowly). No doubt new better ideas will develop over time as we learn more.

            2. Yes, Dennis we know all that but how much time (if any) do you think we have to implement necessary changes? You do realize that once climate change tipping points are reached it is too late? Our family has been supporting a girl in Uganda since she was in kindergarten; this year she will become a medical doctor. I asked her how many kids she was planning to have — she answered five. How much education would she and her peers need to really reduce Africa’s rapid population growth?

              ONLY 11 YEARS LEFT TO PREVENT IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE

              https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm

            3. Doug,

              We do the best we can with the time we are given. The research is not very clear on when tipping points might arise. Many of the scenarios use RCP8.5 which requires a very large amount of fossil fuel carbon emissions, approximately 5000 Gt C, it is unlikely that more than 1500 Gt of carbon will be emitted because much fossil fuel will never be profitable to extract. In fact scenarios with fossil fuel plus land use emissions of about 800 Gt C (optimistic) to 1200 Gt C (realistic with a bit of effort transitioning to alternatives to fossil fuel and applying energy efficiency measures) are reasonable.

              Plant 1.2 trillion trees (an estimate I found suggests this is a feasible number) and about 7 Gt C are removed from the atmosphere each year, over 100 years that reduces Carbon by 700 Gt. So we would in that case have net carbon emissions of 100 Gt to 500 Gt over the 1800 to 2120 period.

              That might be enough, but more could be done such as “green” cement that removes carbon from the atmosphere rather than adding to carbon emissions, and improved farming practices which may reduce carbon emissions from farming or make it net negative for carbon emissions. No doubt there are a number of natural and high tech solutions that I have not even considered.

              Will it happen? Depends on individual and collective action in the future, which is of course unknown.

            4. Yes Dennis. I acknowledge what you write here, and these are all very good steps for people to take.
              Hell, lets make 2 trillion trees while we are being constructive!

            5. I found an estimate suggesting 1.2 trillion was the maximum feasible under current conditions, the number may well decrease over time with climate change, a guess on my part.

          3. Dennis —
            Another idea is focusing on storing carbon in soil by preventing erosion. There is more carbon in the top ten centimeters of soil than in the atmosphere, despite thousands of years of bad farming practices.

            Any arid region that experiences flash floods is a prime target for anti-erosion measures. These can be as simple as building check dams at regular intervals in dry creek beds.

            1. Alimibiquated,

              I agree.

              There are many ideas of ways to improve, and new ideas will become apparent as we better understand the Earth system.

            2. Not much understanding to do. Americans could learn a lot from Malawi. But the west was settled by cowboys with a typical herder culture with little understanding of the needs of the land.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nKc5wEjWrY

              Look at this satellite image of Tuscon.

              https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tucson, AZ, USA/@32.1466335,-110.8217158,7636m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x86d665410b2ced2b:0x73c32d384d16c715!8m2!3d32.2226066!4d-110.9747108

              Cacti are the symbol of the state, but a century ago this was cattle country. You can see how nature is trying to recover from overgrazing and insane policies to encourage runoff, like this “Diversion Channel” make matter much worse. Every gully is filling with green as best it can.

              https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tucson, AZ, USA/@32.1763696,-110.9397384,239m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x86d665410b2ced2b:0x73c32d384d16c715!8m2!3d32.2226066!4d-110.9747108

              The same problem exists in many parts of the world. For example the hilly areas of the western and southern Arabian peninsula were lightly wooded and supported widespread agriculture for thousands of years before ecological collapse came and migrant herders took over. There is still plenty of rain as this video shows:

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7sNfbKLST0

              That’s more than enough water for the entire year and region, but is is allowed (even encouraged!) to flow out into the Red Sea, and a massive load of topsoil, several percent of which is carbon, with it.

              The problem is that there is no carbon rich soil to catch the water in place. If the Saudis had the brains that god gave a pet rock they would have used their oil money to build millions of check dams in every wadi on the peninsula, one every hundred yards. Nature would have put more carbon back in the soil than they could pump out. (Well maybe not, haven’t done the math).

              Love this video about the region, but it was a limited project.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=529YqY2BdoY

              The Ethiopians have figured it out, which is why they they have one of the world’s strongest economies. Look at some of the areas worst hit by famine these days, and you see terraces everywhere.

              https://www.google.com/maps/place/Aksum, Ethiopia/@14.130739,38.7425241,547m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x166bfcbea0c26cfb:0x74d0dc83a015ace1!8m2!3d14.1340317!4d38.7472905

              I’ll end today’s sermon with a nice film about surviving the coming collapse. Hint: Fertile topsoil is more important than gold. And you don’t need petroleum based fertilizers once you have a system in place. Chickenshit is better.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01N-kBSdiZI

            3. Alimbiquated,

              I am very far from expert in these matters, but I imagine there is much that can be done better, I have sometimes suggested that a year of ecology should be a requirement for a secondary education, and perhaps at university as well.

          4. How to use trees to capture carbon.
            1. Plant them where they grow naturally well (no water required).
            2. Harvest the entire plant (by hand- no power tools) once its peak growth rate has declined (varies by species and environmental conditions).
            3. Take the harvested wood and isolate from all oxidation- that being burning, and both fungal and bacterial action. Do it without any external source of energy. Put deep in the earth, deep under water, or in space perhaps (not sure how you can get in it space without energy).

            Follow this plan and you have sequestered some carbon. But this does not account for the gradual loss of essential plant minerals from the system. And no, you can’t just add some fertilizer back, unless you have a method to do it without carbon expenditure.

            If you allow the tree to naturally decay, or you use it for fuel, or you use it for lumber that is not permanent (forever permanent), than you have only temporarily altered the atmospheric carbon balance. That doesn’t score you any carbon points.
            Straightforward 9th grade science (at least it used to be in last century)

            1. Are there folks who advocate the use of PV and are against planting trees? I mean I could significantly increase the output of my PV system on my home by cutting down a couple of old mature trees that are nearing the end of their lives (70 year old silver maples) but I won’t do it. I value the trees more than the watts. So, who are these people who are choosing PV over trees? Are they real? Is the discussion about centrally located utility scale PV farms in environmentally sensitive areas? Well, that argument should be made regarding any developement in those areas. My attraction to PV was based on a couple of things. Its distributed nature. Its potential for low emissions if every step of the manufacturing process is scrutinized. It then has the potential to be a useful tool. But certainly not a magic bullit. Just one of an array of solutions that begin with efficiency.

            2. Best to chop down the trees, you can always walk your dog and stroll hand-in-hand with loved ones under a canopy of solar panels. 😉

            3. I had the trees trimmed last year and the guy who did it was about 35. He looked at me and said, “You know these trees aren’t going to last long, you might want to think about removing them”. I asked him how long is not long. He said well maybe five or ten years. I just laughed and told him that they would probably outlive me and I will enjoy them while they are there.

            4. A while ago I calculated the potential output if the local Wallymart mall and car park were covered in solar, ie roof mount and over-parking for shade. The output was in the megawatts. Now, I hear the naysayers rushing in to shout about it not working at night and what about the batteries with their cost. Well, we use a lot of hydro here so instead of pouring water 24/7 the water would only need to run 16/7 (note I am talking about the amount required to cover the solar installation not the total hydro output).

              No trees cut down. No batteries used. Now add in the other Wallymart/Sams, Costlyco, La Comer (it’s new so why the hell didn’t they build in solar?), Soriannas etc, that is a big chunk of power.

              NAOM

            5. The Wallymart parking lot here in HB is about one third covered with panels. The local Costlyco parking lot has about 20 Tesla charging spaces and sometimes there is a line to use them.

            6. The major objective is to maximize profit. If putting solar over buildings and parking lots brought in a significant increase in paying customers, solar pv would spread rapidly. However, it will not, so unless mandated with subsidies, very few places will install PV.

            7. Here, businesses pay the full rate for electricity, currently $2.948 MXN, while us domestic users pay $0.833 for the first 150kWh & $1.008 for the next 200kWh before we switch to the higher rate. If I can calculate a real term saving for installing solar, despite being a very low usage consumer, I am sure that the commercial guys could get payback within a few years then – ‘PROFIT’.

              NAOM

            8. SW,

              No the view that PV is a solution to all problems is a straw man, easy to criticize, but not an argument that anyone is making. Planting trees is a great idea. Can it get the job done without any other policy options? Probably not, but nobody has made that argument so I will not go with the straw man route that others like to use.

        2. If they are going to take the plane flight whatever then I would rather they paid the offset. If they would not take the flight if there was no offset then I would tend to agree.

          NAOM

          1. I imagine there are a number of us who have used electricity produced with fossil fuel, driven ICE vehicles also powered by fossil fuel, or even used air transportation. Perhaps there are a few that have only walked or ridden bicycles their entire lives, and never have used electricity or heat created with fossil fuel, but I doubt the number is great for the people who participate on this blog.

        3. Hickory,

          It is to make ourselves feel better that “we did something”. The good old psychological glitches that all non-aware humans suffer from.

          Human beings are hedonists by nature. Industrial civilization has exponentially grown the different avenues to endless pleasure/experiences. BAU is a key element to our pleasure, our dopamine, sertonin and endorphin levels are completely dependent on it like a fucking drug.

          Just look at what has happened in the covid-19 lockdowns. Domestic violence and child abuse have gone up. Depression levels have gone up. Wait till we get the statistics for these things few years down the line. Even though a majority of us still had access to food, clothing, shelter, health and our family through technology.

          And alot of you won’t probably be alive to witness the end of BAU and god knows wtf will occur afterwards.
          Some of you elders here suffer from what i believe is a guilt complex. You have grand children and the knowledge you have makes you fear the kind of future they might have. So your optimistic bias overrides your logical brain and touts renewables or whatever fuck else to continue BAU. That is the same as flying and planting a fucking tree to compensate. It only gives you a sense of comfort and completely ends your responsibility. The human brain is heavily glitched.

          Truth is we are all fucking responsible for fucking this planet. Anyone and everyone depending on the global capitalistic economy and large scale farming for survival is part of the problem (INCLUDING ME). But i admit it. Who else is going to admit they are part of the problem. Or you going to draw some projected charts and go on a flight of fancy for a rosey future for your kids and grandkids.

          I don’t normally rant on this forum and try to be reasonably level headed. But some of you suffer highly of optimism bias/cognitive dissonance which i believe stems from a guilt complex of what your generation has done for the future generation of your immediate family. Since that is an unpleasant state, the knee jerk reaction of your brain is that you create a hopeful technologically advanced scenario which projects BAU will continue and your kids and grandkids will live relatively comfortable lives like yourself and will not hugely suffer.

          For a young person like me who will live through a lot of these things probably (who knows i might die tomorrow). Your views are beyond absurd with respect. An in depth study of the human condition and evolutionary behaviour will reveal where we are headed. Just like 99.999% of all the species that have came and gone. The laws of nature guarantee we will be extinct. And with the exponential growth of our population. That same or a steeper exponential curve will decline it.

          1. Basically, electro-mechanical extractive industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet.

            1. Our best route is to consider our legacy. We can encourage and protect life on this planet, making an ever growing wealth of living creatures. Or we can continue to act like unsupervised children, leaving a broken and wrecked place for any that follow. Live long and prosper.

          2. Iron Mike-
            you will find that you, just like all the people older and younger than you, will only have three methods to affect the outcome of the world.
            1. What you consume/what you spend money on/ how much stuff you gather to yourself. Generally, people going back many thousands of years gather far in excess of what they need. Be mindful and try to live small, very small. Regardless of what you can afford.

            2. How you vote. Do you vote for those who put economic growth (business profit and expansion) above all else. Or do you vote with the common good in mind- which includes values like sustainability, ecological conservation, and longterm planning.

            3. How long you linger here. If you don’t linger too long, you can do less damage.

            These are the same decisions people face , no matter your decade or century of birth. Except if they have no vote or no pocket with money.

          3. Iron Mike,

            See

            https://core.ac.uk/reader/162153056

            In the near-term future demographic changes are to a large extent pre-determined by population age structures resulting from past fertility, mortality and migration trends. But in the longer perspective, all components of demographic change can be influenced by policy and initiatives. CEPAM results demonstrate that aside from trying to directly influence fertility and mortality, policies to enhance education can have important indirect consequences for improving the longevity of people and reducing high fertility. Illustrating that point, the two extremes of global educational pathways produce two wildly different worlds, over 5.5 billion apart

            Contrasting Trajectories: 7.88 billion (Rapid Development/SSP1) compared to 13.4 billion (Stalled Development/SSP3) by end of the century.

            Chart below (Figure 11.1)

      3. Trees absorb carbon a lot longer than 40 years, some into the hundreds.

        1. Gone fishing,

          The rates are based on first 40 years, not sure if rates change after that, obviously there are no average trees, some trees may live longer, perhaps trees that live longer may grow more slowly, not my area of expertise. In any case it is a rate problem, at some point we run out of places to plant trees. I agree many trees live much longer than 40 years, others may live for less than 40 years. Some trees live 50 to 75 years, oaks and maples about 200 years and there are a few that can live thousands of years.

          Another interesting article

          https://news.mongabay.com/2019/05/tall-and-old-or-dense-and-young-which-kind-of-forest-is-better-for-the-climate/

          In many places, trees are harvested after about 40 years, so that might be the basis of the 40 year number. The article above suggests this might not be best practice from a climate mitigation perspective, though it may depend on the particular forest. The focus of the piece is Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest which stores the highest mount of carbon per acre in the World, more even than the Amazon on a per acre basis.

          1. Birchs live 50-60 years. Wilows something between 30 or 100 years. Poplars up to 150 years. Alders, up to 100-150 years. They are considered as pionnering treas in temperate areas. In a second wave, arrive the oaks (500 years), the maples (500-600 years), the ashes (200 years), the elms (500 years), largeleaf lindens (1000 years), the prunus (120 years, oups), the rowans (120 years, re-oups), the pines (500 years), the larchs (up to 1000 years). And in the same period arrive the common beachs (up to 1000 years), the hollys (300 years) and the yews (1500 years) when the ecological system is mature.

            1. Cool to know. Thanks, Jean-François. I will be teaching myself a little about trees this summer.

    2. Gonefishing,

      Good question. Part of the answer is that we’re farther down the long-term cooling trend for the whole planet that got underway after around 38 million years ago during the Oligocene. It was about 3 million years ago, near the very end of the Pliocene, that the ice sheets really began to grow, and about a million years ago that there began a large increase in the extent of the northern ones.

      There are a variety of proposals to account for the global cooling that began in early Oligocene time and my guess is that at least parts of them apply, but I don’t carry that picture in my head. (hangs head)

      nearly time for Port

      1. As mountains build and carbon is sequestered underground and as part of rocks, thresholds of temperature are reached that favor the more solid phase of water. Then orbital changes force albedo changes.

    3. My area in North Carolina is quickly leveling all forests in order to expand all sorts of farming: cattle farming, PV farming, pig and chicken farming. Perhaps some of these livestock farms are using PV as well – we can only hope.

    4. Actually restoring peat bogs would be even better (actually do both) at storing carbon. And for a long time. Some bogs in Ireland are 9000 years old and still growing (14m deep).

      See Fenton https://www.fenton.scot/peat_bogs.htm for more details.

      For planting trees you have to plant the right trees in the right places. Just more commercial forestry (cut down again in 40 years) is no good.
      For off-setting, do not take the flight but stay home and plant the trees anyway.

  3. The power switch: tracking Britain’s record coal-free run

    Coal is currently generating 0% of Britain’s power. The coal-free run has lasted 30 days and 20 hours so far.

    Source: Drax Electric Insights. Last updated at 8:15pm on 10 May

    In less than four hours from the time of posting of this comment, Britain will have gone for a whole month without uising any coal to generate electricity!

    1. So now they burn natural gas and biomass which provides over half their electricity.

      “Including biomass boilers and green gas, the REA says bioenergy provides 96% of non-domestic renewable heat in the UK and meets 7.4% of the country’s total energy needs.”

      When you burn a tree, you not only put the carbon back into the atmosphere it took plus particulates, you lose the sequestering of CO2 that it and it’s descendants would provide. Plus the soil around it gives back carbon to the atmosphere and is eroded by rainfall. Plus much other life dies along with it.

      1. GF,

        Who cares about forests and trees and the ecosystems they support. They all should be cut down to make way for “clean” energy. After all BAU is the most important thing in life fuck everything else.

          1. “There is no going back to normal because “normal” was the problem.”

          2. Iron Mike –
            If the best argument you can muster is an ad hominem attack which is a lie, you don’t have any good arguments.

            It’s obvious that gone fishing is playing some silly game here pretending that solar panels somehow prevent tree planting. Why someone would invest so much time and energy in something so pointless is an interesting question.

            Why he has several “holler back girl” cheerleaders is an even more interesting question.

            1. Nowhere in that comment did I claim that solar panels are made out of sand. I just pointed out how nonsensical the false equivalence between burning coal and building renewable energy is.

            2. Iron Mike,

              Can you tell us what was wrong in Alimbiquated’s comment.

              About 95% of the Earth’s crustal rocks are made of silica or silicate and aluminosilicate minerals, as reflected in oxygen, silicon, and aluminium being the three most common elements in the crust (in that order).[73] Measured by mass, silicon makes up 27.7% of the Earth’s crust

              from

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon

              Can you point out where “sand” appears in his comment?

              I assume you are aware that sand and silicon are not synonymous?

            3. Alim said “It’s obvious that gone fishing is playing some silly game here pretending that solar panels somehow prevent tree planting.”

              How is that so obvious? It’s Dennis and others spreading that prevarication, which you are so easily are suckered by. All I showed was that trees reduce CO2 one thousand times cheaper than PV and don’t need to be rebuilt over and over again. They also perform a multitude of “services” unlike PV, which just produces electricity for a time.

              Since you brought it up, forests and PV are incompatible. That should be obvious.

            4. Gone fishing,

              PV does not need to be in forest areas, last I checked, forests do not grow everywhere. One could argue that there should be no human construction of any kind everywhere on the planet as it always disturbs the natural environment.

              PV can be installed on existing buildings, can you suggest how fossil fuel emissions are reduced to near zero? Do you believe that energy efficiency can accomplish that? I think that and planting trees and changing farming practices and eating fewer animals are good steps.

              Personally I think we need to do more. You say negative things all the time about wind and solar. Perhaps you are being sarcastic, it is not clear what your alternative is.

        2. The beauty of spring is amazing. Had a hot March but just got a late freeze two days ago. I looked across the lake at the vegetation and the brilliant greens now look like the start of fall. Not good.

        3. Generally biofuel is not a great approach in my view.

          Using BP Statistical review of world energy data, biofuels, waste, and geothermal combined had 142 Mtoe of energy consumed in 2018 of 13865 Mtoe consumed by the World for all primary energy in 2018, about 1% of total primary energy use. The growth rate has been about 7% per year from 2000 to 2018. It would be better if this growth rate was zero in my opinion for biomass. Unfortunately the BP stats does not separate geothermal. For biofuels production the rate of increase from 2010 to 2018 about 4.9% per year.
          Note that for biofuels production in 2018, the total was 0.7% of World primary energy consumption. Primary energy use grew at a 1.5% annual rate from 2010 to 2018. Biofuels should grow at less than the rate of growth of primary energy.
          For comparison, wind grew at about 15% per year and solar at about 30% per year over the 2010 to 2018 period. Perhaps you believe that is a bad thing as well. If that is the case, I would disagree.

      2. Gone fishing,

        Trees can be replanted and often are. I agree an improperly managed forest can be detrimental, but forests can be left alone and they will burn naturally when they become overgrown, which also destroys wildlife. Selectively cut forests can reduce fie risk, disturb wildlife less than a clearcut, but is not the cheapest way to remove the wood.

        Again not an expert on the subject, often their are differing scientific viewpoints on best practices. Perhaps you have researched this as you seem to have wide ranging knowledge. I have not.

  4. Gonefishing,

    Your take on the nature article is much different from mine, I just think it says that the subject might be more complex than originally thought. I also think it is ok for scientists to express their views, I agree many approaches are valid. Not against planting trees, just wonder how much of a difference it will make.

    In 2018 there were roughly 10 Gt of carbon emitted by fossil fuel combustion and cement production. Using a previous estimate of about 167 average trees to take up 1 metric tonne of carbon, this implies 1.67 trillion trees planted would offset the 10 Gt of carbon emissions. Currently there are about 3 trillion trees on the planet, not sure how many more can be planted.

    One study suggests 1.2 trillion trees could be planted, so this may be a viable approach. Article at link below

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions

    There are potential albedo implications and possible atmospheric chemistry implications, though some chemists disagree. 🙂

    1. Not going to argue when there is a one thousand to one economic advantage and probably 10,000 to 1 advantage when all the other “services” are examined.

      Where is the Tony Seba of natural methods? Follow the greed and money.

      1. Gone fishing,

        Ok, I support planting trees, but think we should do more. I am not for a one solution approach, seems planting trees, improving energy efficiency, reducing consumption, reducing total fertility ratios, improving education, and replacing fossil fuel use (that use which is absolutely necessary) with wind, solar, hydro, and EVs (smaller efficient vehicles would be best) all should be part of a possible path forward.

        Not much point in arguing when we agree, though you may not agree that we agree.

      3. Gone fishing,

        Supposedly about 1.2 trillion trees could be planted, not enough by itself to offset fossil fuel emissions, changes in farming practices would also help, as would eliminating fossil fuel use as much as possible. We could start with solar on buildings and parking lots, and wind power, perhaps some solar on low biodiversity parts of the southwest such as salt flats.

        To me, both approaches, along with strong measures to promote improved energy efficiency make sense.

        1. L.O.L. I see you’re still wearing you rose tinted glasses Dennis. When do you expect to see these changes in farming practices?

          NEW GLOBAL STUDY REVEALS THE ‘STAGGERING’ LOSS OF FORESTS CAUSED BY INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

          “A new analysis of global forest loss — the first to examine not only where forests are disappearing, but also why — reveals just how much industrial agriculture is contributing to the loss. The answer: some 5 million hectares — the area of Costa Rica — every year. And despite years of pledges by companies to help reduce deforestation, the amount of forest cleared to plant oil palm and other booming crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015.”

          https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/scientists-reveal-how-much-world-s-forests-being-destroyed-industrial-agriculture

        2. Dennis, it’s a global problem. Solar panels in the salt flats won’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the global collapse of our ecological system goes.

          Just curious, what’s your solution for global deforestation? Or the extinction of species? Or falling water tables all over the world? Or for ocean fisheries disappearing? Or for desertification? Or for rivers drying up? Or for ocean dead zones which are increasing dramatically? And a dozen other things that you and everyone else who think we can find a fix for everything wrong with the earth?

          The below link is just one of about a hundred I could pull up in about an hour if I tried.

          Dead zones in our oceans have increased dramatically since 1950

          Two years ago Chile experienced phenomena that some called “toxic tides”.

          First came 23 million salmon dying off its coast.

          Then thousands of dead sardines washed up at the coastal town of Toltén.

          After that came beached clams, dead jellyfish, birds and even mammals.

          Dennis, can I borrow your rose-tinted glasses. I need them really bad.

          1. Ron,

            I lack omniscience, the problems will be addressed one at a time, a vegetarian diet would help in some cases, but potentially would lead to other unintended consequences. Population will peak and decline, water can be conserved, farming practices can improve. Farmlad made suggestions on farming, OFM might have some ideas on what might be feasible, Gone fishing has suggested a vegetarian diet (I agree and started 40 years ago), better education is a key for reducing population growth. I see lots of problems and lots of potential solutions, they simply need to be implemented. No idea how to accomplish that as I do not rule the world (thank goodness!)

            Doug,

            Consider this chart, is defortestion or use of fossil fuels the bigger problem for carbon emissions? I would say the magnitude of the fossil fuel problem is roughly 5 times bigger(10/2). Not to say both are not problems, but I start with the bigger problems first.

            Data from link below

            https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/

            1. Dennis,

              Whether or not something is a problem for “carbon emissions” is not the only metric. Deforestation is a problem because without forests, the planet becomes a desert and we all die. Hard to say whether fossil fuels or deforestation is a bigger problem, but comparing them based on carbon is a rather lame metric.

              I think what Ron, and Iron Mike, and Doug are trying to point out is that, up till now, all trends point to global disaster in many areas. And humans have never showed great propensity to deal with disasters, except for those which are immediate and short term.

              We can handle things like wars. We put down our pens for a few years and everyone gets together to build weapons. We can also handle things like Ozone depletion. We pass a few laws, change some industrial inputs, and we are good to go.

              But slow moving, difficult to solve problems resulting from collective action which require real pain and sacrifice… We have essentially never solved one of those problems as a species. We are good at solving the acute, but appear to have no ability at all to solve the complex and chronic.

              So then we see all of these trends that Ron mentioned. Deforestation, ocean overfishing, aquifer depletion, desertification, ocean deadzones, agriculture land destruction, etc, etc and we see that each and every one of these problems falls into the group of “problems of a type that humans have never solved”. Chronic, long term, based on group action, with no immediate payoff to anyone making the sacrifice to solve them, and game theory always favoring those who step out of line with the solution. They have been called vicious problems.

              And your answer to this is “we will have more and better ideas to solve these problems in the future, different problems require different solutions.” With respect, you base this assertion on no evidence at all. When I see humanity solve even a single one of these vicious problems, then I might change my tune. But we haven’t yet, and as of now there is no reason to believe that we are capable of doing so. As far as I can tell, that capability just isn’t in our collective genetic code.

            2. Nico,

              Just a simple measure of deforestation, I agree it is a problem, I just think carbon emissions are a big problem that should be addressed. I also have stated that I think every avenue should be pursued.

              Lots of changes have occurred over time in human society, look long term, does human social organization appear the same today as 500 years ago or 2000 years ago? Look at average World Total Fertility rates (TFR), they went from 5 births per woman in 1965 to 2.5 births per woman in 2005. About half of the World’s population lives in nations with and average TFR of 2.1 births per woman or lower. Other nations will make this transition as women have better access to education and more equal rights. In fact these changes are of great importance in changing the environmental destruction of the World, perhaps they will never occur, bit have already improved in many nations over the past 100 to 200 years.

              As always, neither of us knows what the future will bring, there have been both positive and negative changes over time, perhaps humans will learn from past mistakes and improve behavior. Technological change has forced humans to behave a bit better as all out Worldwide conflicts have been reduced due to fear of devastating consequences, there is much room for improvement, no doubt about it.

              I tend to focus on one problem at a time, that does not mean I do not recognize that there are many problems.

              I happen to believe climate change is a big one and carbon emissions are a major factor in reducing that problem.

              I agree deforestation is a problem, it is not clear what the solution is, certainly reducing paper use would help, not utilizing wood based biofuels (except possibly construction wood waste), or biofuels that cause deforestation is another potential policy. I think biofuel use should be discouraged rather than encouraged.

              When I speak of alternatives to fossil fuel I am thinking wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and pumped hydro (where it is possible to minimize environmental damage), and perhaps next generation nuclear (allowing safe automatic shut down of small modular power plants with no backup power.)

              Fossil fuel use is likely to peak and decline, we will need higher energy efficiency with better building design, more efficient technology (cars, IT, appliances, machines, etc), heat pumps (ground and air source) and development of wind, solar, and other energy sources to replace fossil fuel. As these replacement industries come to scale they will be cheaper to utilize than the fossil fuel they replace, ICEVs will go the way of the horse and horse and carriage.

              The only thing that is constant is change.

            3. I agree Nico, with the gist of your statement.
              But as OFM has pointed out many times, that the situation we face globally is not all one shade of grey over the whole planet.

              The world is variable.
              Some places have plenty of water, and others almost none. Some are sunny, some cloudy, some with food in abundance and some a tough scramble just to get one meal a day. Some with a semi-functional government, and others a failed state.
              Globally, I see no chance of a coordinated and successful response to Overshoot, and all its many destructive ramifications [including a fast march towards the 6th mass extinction event- how far we’ll get on that path is up in the air, hopefully not too much farther].

              Yet in some locales, the situation will be better [less worse]. Less overpopulation, less environmental destruction, a smaller ‘footprint’/capita, more co-ordinated action.

              Its up to you to decide. Do I just want to focus on just the global problems, like many do. It is the easier path.
              Or do I also want to spend my time on constructive endeavors, and do my best to live in/create a more stable and sustainable zone while I am here.

              I make no recommendation. Eyes wide open.

            4. Yeah, there are lots of solutions out there. If we just had a soapbox tall enough, and we could yell loud enough, then we could make 7.8 billion people hear us tell them what to do. Then if they all would just follow our instructions…

              Read the below yesterday. They reflect my sentiments exactly. Bold mine.

              In most books that expose the horrors of our world, there is often a final chapter that states, ”if we can collectively pull ourselves together and do “Y,” we can save ourselves from ourselves and “X” will not happen.” But words drenched with hopium is only lulling us back to sleep. The implication is that somebody, somewhere, is somehow is somehow dealing with this monstrous mess and we need only make a few small adjustments in our personal lives to save our sinking ship. And of course, the worst stuff will never happen in our lifetime.

              The reality is that time has run out. We are well past global warming, climate change and even anthropogenic climate disruption. We are an irreversible state of runaway biosphere decay and no way back to what once was. And so I write this book with no hope-filled final chapter to lull anyone back to sleep. There is no to-do list filled with quick steps, painless fixes, and simple solutions. There is no strategic plan to perpetuate the belief in a happy ending anymore. The line in the sand has been drawn.

              It’s over.

              Deb Ozarko, Beyond Hope: Letting Go of a World in Collapse, page 15

            5. Ron,

              Ok The solution is party on. 🙂

              I am kind of stubborn, it is not that I expect there will be some grand solution, I just don’t think humans are the monolithic species you envision. Has there been any social change in your life time? What about since 1860 in the US?

              Pretty short time frames in the grand scheme in my opinion. Social change has an impact on human behavior.

          2. I can send you rose colored glasses in the mail Ron.
            But I’ve found them to be ineffective at changing my attitude.
            Maybe it would help you, but don’t get your hopes up.
            Overshoot is Overshoot, no two ways about it.

  5. The yearly European Geophysical Union (EGU) meeting took place last week in a virtual setting. Typically the meeting attracts close to 20,000 attendees, but now everything is online. I attended several of the sessions and took notes here:
    https://geoenergymath.com/2020/05/10/egu-2020-notes/

    Not much on peak oil topics (same as with the AGU) but lots of geoscience and climate topics :
    https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2020/sessionprogramme

  6. I was too late to the discussion in the previous thread, but I wanted to add my 2 cents here regarding deserts.

    Anyone who thinks that deserts are lifeless hasn’t spent enough time in the desert. They are beautiful places, brimming with life and more life. No, they aren’t hospitable to humans, which is why they tend to be targets for vast solar installations: “we need only cover 23,000 square miles of lifeless desert with solar panels, to produce all the energy the US needs!” (~23,700 square miles the result of islandboy’s number from previous thread, a square 154 miles to a side.) It would not at all be so palatable to say “we need only clear-cut 23,000 square miles of Yellowstone”. It is much easier to pretend that the desert is empty, and should be paved, rather than accept the fact that it too is teeming with life. But people are misinformed about the desert, generally for having not lived there. Those I know who grew up in and around desert land often have a deep spiritual connection to the desert and it’s living beauty.

    Thousands and thousands of species call US deserts home, living in complex and vibrant ecosystems that have persisted for millennia. And now, even without the mass intrusion of solar installations, those species are all already under threat. From housing developments, highways, shopping centers, industrial pollution, hydro electric dams, and all manner of mankind’s intrusions. It is truly despicable to me, as someone who loves the southwest desert and spends part of my year there every year, camping and enjoying the beauty, to hear that “all we need to do is bulldoze such and such percentage of it, and we can get plenty of energy.” Truly a horrendous sentiment.

    And bearing in mind, the point of that energy capture being to continue all the other activities that are destroying this natural wonder, to continue building houses and manufacturing cars, to continue expanding. This isn’t a matter of choosing “the lesser of two evils” as it so often made out to be. We COULD choose to all become less materially wealthy, to live in less comfort, and save some of the world we inhabit. The false dichotomy is that it is “fossil fuels or solar panels”. The third choice is reduction of our wealth and impact. By choosing to begin the process of winding down industrial society.

    But I have no hope this will happen. The solar cheerleaders will win, and much of what remains of our deserts will be destroyed. Some covered in panels, and the rest lost to the industrial waste of servicing those panels, and the ever expanding frontier of humanity into that sacred land.

        1. I agree with Niko, don’t knock deserts,

          Where I grew up in the Southern Interior of British Columbia (desert/semi-desert) was home to an incredible diversity of wildlife, including more than 300 species of birds, 7 species of snakes and 14 kinds of bats. Some species, like the ghostly pale pallid bat, are found nowhere else in Canada. Others, including more than 20 kinds of insects and spiders, are found nowhere else in the world. Many of these plant and animal species are at risk – nearly 25 percent of all the endangered and threatened vertebrate species in the province live here.

          And, when I was a kid almost every fence post was topped by a meadowlark — then the DDT arrived!

          http://www.desert.org/index.php/research/wildlife-camera-research.html

      2. Niko M,
        Most people do not realize that renewables are not renewable. They have to be built, then built over and over again. This means a global extractive industrial civilization must be maintained and all the support systems that go with it. That is not compatible with life on this planet.
        Currently, renewable energy is not being developed quickly enough to make much difference. Most people do not realize that if it is developed quickly not only will we spend decades with little “help” from renewable energy but the current power structure would need to be maintained during such growth. So “renewable” production is just adding another layer of extraction, production and pollution to the system.

        Many people are involved in planting trees. Most of the tree planting is to provide water and new soil. India, China, Ethiopia, etc, have major tree planting initiatives.
        The idea that trees should be planted as carbon sequestering systems is not really being pursued at scale, in fact trees are being cut down and burned on a large scale instead. I can only conclude that people are not really interested in removing CO2 from the atmosphere (unless it makes them lots of money). I also must conclude that the whole renewable energy scheme is not to enhance life on this planet but to continue a form of BAU and provide more manufactured items for people. In other words the system is being built to power the machines and produce waste.

        1. Gonefishing,

          As I have said, several approaches can be used, plant trees, sequester more carbon in soil with better farming practices, eat fewer animals, consume less stuff, build better buildings and cities that will require less energy use, utilize passive solar design, purchase products designed to last forever, cradle to grave manufacturing designed with recycling of as much material as possible in mind, and replacement of fossil fuel power plants with hydro, wind and solar power.

          Also reduce population growth to less than zero by educating more young women which leads to fewer births per woman, in a few hundred years human population can fall to under 1 billion and can go all the way to 100 million or whatever number is needed to reach a sustainable balance with the Earth system.

    2. It’s generally way too late for most things. In a few years there will be 8 billion humans on this planet and as it has been said here before, it looks like we are destined to eat the songbirds out of the trees. I daresay the deserts have long been affected by the ability of human beings to modify our environment to our liking. Humanity has been expanding it’s frontier into sacred lands from time immemorial. The fact that there are so many of us makes it even more ominous now.

      Fossil fuels have played a very large part in getting us to where we are now. It is oil that gave us the tallest building in the world in Dubai, with the Saudis determined to take that crown from Dubai with their stalled, 1km tall “Jeddah Tower”. The article at the link described that building as “the heart of Kingdom City, a 23-million square metre mixed-use development site which currently looks like a construction zone. ” I consider things like these mega skyscrapers and Dubai’s indoor ski slope, the heights of human hubris, made possible by the profits from oil.

      I seriously doubt that renewables will ever support the opulence and the extreme concentrated wealth that fossil fuels have. They are too dispersed and the energy density of the plants relative to their cost is too low. Humans really hit the energy jackpot with FF. One advantage of PV, as was highlighted in the previous thread is that it can be installed on existing buildings. I have done an informal survey of rooftop space in my neck of the woods and even here the potential is huge. Almost every time I have flown into south Florida, it has struck me how much vacant roof space exist there, how little PV is installed there!

      So on the topic of deserts, I stand corrected. I had no idea they are teeming with life. I was mistaken in thinking that because they are inhospitable for humans (without our machines and their energy sources) there would not be multitudes of organisms that are uniquely adapted to that environment. Having said that, I wonder how such hardy, resilient organisms would be seriously threatened by PV installations covering a fraction of their territory?

      The image below shows the Solana Generating Station near Gila bend, outlined in red. This uses solar thermal technology but, uses parabolic trough mirrors rather than a field of mirrors surrounding a central tower. All of the solar thermal of solar therma installations completed in the last decade or so in the US have had operational issues and have all failed to perform as expected. PV does not operate at the high temperatures that solar thermal does and tends to exceed the expectations for power output. As I said in the previous thread, cost declines in PV have made solar thermal extremely uncompetitive. From the looks of the image below even the three square mile solar plant is dwarfed by the agricultural developments nearby.

      1. Hi Island,

        It’s good to hear you have reevaluated your opinion of the American southwest deserts. My favorite desert spot is the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge about 40 miles south of Blythe and one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. It’s pretty much only accessible by shallow hulled boats and in early to mid October it’s just paradise. The summer is nice too, but can reach 115 to 12o degrees. That’s ok, but one just needs to spend 90 percent of the time in the water which is about the temperature of bath water. Having an ice chest of cold ones even makes it all better. The last couple of times I’ve been there, I never saw another human outside my party in the refuge. The next time your in L.A. and you have time. I will be happy to take you there to see the beauty.

        I’ve become a firm believer that Southern California homes have the ability to be energy independence or positive including transportation needs by full roof top solar coverage. What’s needed is a full energy management system of the HVAC, water heating, refrigeration, kitchen needs, battery backup, energy water storage for the HVAC(hot & cold) and EV inaugurated back up. All this should be required in new construction building codes and reroofing. I would much rather see the solar energy industry head in this direction than covering the desert with panels.

        Also, I can’t understand why EV’s don’t have solar panels on the roof that could add 5 or 6 miles of operation per day.

      2. Dept of Interior approves plan for largest solar project in US; 690 MW Gemini Solar with 380 MW battery system

        The estimated $1-billion Gemini Solar Project could be the eighth-largest solar power facility in the world when finished and is expected to generate enough electricity to power 260,000 homes in the Las Vegas area and potential energy markets in Southern California.

        https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/05/20200512-gemini.html

    3. Nico –
      funny thing is that you never seem to find time to wax so elequent on the wholesale destruciton of natural landscapes perpatrated by the oil industry.

      https://www.google.com/maps/place/Midland, TX, USA/@32.02893,-102.2623226,61169m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x86f9613991a5d10f:0x4715ede17f061bf9!8m2!3d31.9973456!4d-102.0779146

      The same applies to your holler back girls. The irony of this fake environmentalism on a fossil fuel blog is overwhelming.

    4. Nico,

      Are all areas of desert equally diverse in wildlife? I have travelled through the Sahara and I can assure you there are vast areas with very little flora or fauna, I am not as familiar with the desert Southwest, but my guess is that campgrounds are in areas with higher diversity of plants and animals. Have you covered all of the ground on foot? If so I would imagine some areas have very little life, those would be the areas where one should site PV solar plants.

      Out of curiosity, how do you get to your campsite? Do you live in a tent? Do you use electricity?

      Essentially if you exist, you are part of the problem.

      We could choose to site all solar on existing structures, that would be a more expensive solution, which is fine for the wealthy, it would also slow the process of transitioning away from fossil fuel.

      I also agree using less should be the first option, which each of us is free to choose. I also believe if we are going to allow people to make their own choices (in my opinion this is important) many will not choose to consume less. One approach is to redistribute income through progressive taxation and to institute a carbon tax which might create incentives for lower energy consumption.

      Education is a key for getting population under control.

      See

      https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2014/11/population-paradigm-wolfgang-lutz-education-effect/

      Going to school, he says, physically changes the brain, enhancing critical cognitive skills, including the ability to plan more carefully, learn from mistakes, and avoid risky behavior. These changes, coupled with the expanded employment opportunities that education opens, lead to more people living stable, healthier lives, and planning to invest more resources in fewer children.

      Secondary education is particularly important for women, he explains. “It empowers women within the family and society to exercise their reproductive rights, which almost universally leads to women wanting fewer children and having fewer children.”

      1. I am not as familiar with the desert Southwest, but my guess is that campgrounds are in areas with higher diversity of plants and animals. Have you covered all of the ground on foot? If so I would imagine some areas have very little life, those would be the areas where one should site PV solar plants.

        Sorry Dennis but that is simply not the case. I now livein the desert Southwest. There are a few places, like the salt flats, that have very little life. But by and large, the entire desert Southwest is covered with life. The campgrounds are mostly state parks with many of them on man-made lakes. But the camping parks make up a tiny, tiny, fraction of the total of the desert Southwest. You can drive for hundreds of miles and see nothing but desert scrub life, cactus, and such. And you will see plenty of road-runners, and other birds, lizards, snakes, rabbits, and other ground life. And lots of hawks flying over.

        There are several large solar and wind farms here. And in every case, the cactus, mesquite, and other desert life was simply bulldozed away to make way for the solar and wind farms. And if more are built, more desert life will be bulldozed away.

        1. Ron,

          Then build any utility scale PV on the salt flats, you have likely seen the areas where there are major roads, the desert in the Southwest is pretty large and I imagine it is diverse, the locations where the impact is lowest should be chosen. No doubt where there are homes, shopping malls and farms, there was similar environmental destruction. Just as there is destruction from mining coal, drilling for oil and natural gas, and pretty much any human activity.

          It is a matter of which does less environmental damage solar and wind or fossil fuels, also wind and solar is likely to do far less environmental damage than biofuels in my opinion.

          There are few perfect policies. A multi-pronged approach is likely to be best.

          1. Speaking of multi-pronged energy development.
            “Tucked into a corner of Southwest Florida about a half-hour from Fort Myers, Babcock Ranch is what developer Syd Kitson calls the most sustainable new community in America and the first solar-powered town in the country. Babcock Ranch started when Kitson, a former NFL player for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, purchased the 91,000-acre ranch in 2006. Shortly after, he sold 73,000 acres of the ranch to the state of Florida to be put into preservation, with plans to build his town on the remaining 18,000 acres. What followed was an eight-year-long slog of working through red tape in order to get the permits to build the first 350,000-panel solar field to power the future town”

            The first words of the video.
            “When I look out on these fields, I see the future. Three years ago this was nothing but fields, empty.”
            Solar City: Dawn of Solar in the Sunshine State
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUIzVPH9G6M

        2. You’ll have a lot other life in a solar installation. The shade of the panels will help many kind of plants, and it’s insects.

          I’ve seen a small solar plant here in Germany. Under the modules was wild gras and flowers growing, only cutted 2 times a year to prevent bushes to grow and overgrow the panels. It was brimming with insect life – all kind of wild bees, butterflies and so on.

          In the neighborhood was a corn farm. No life seen besides corn, all other things taken care of by chemical warfare.

          I can think that kind of desert life that lives in the shade of rocks will thrive under the shade of modules.

          1. Agrovoltaics- its an active field of study. In arid zones, or times of plant water stress, anyone who has grown plants or studied plant science knows full well that some degree of shading is often very helpful for plants growth/survivability. In the desert, locations on the north side of mountains are often the lush spots where wildlife spend much of their time (or underground).

            https://www.barrongafford.org/agrivoltaics.html
            https://sustainabilitycommunity.springernature.com/users/311875-helene-marrou/posts/53868-agrivoltaics-a-win-win-system-to-combine-food-and-energy-production
            https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2019/benefits-of-agrivoltaics-across-the-food-energy-water-nexus.html

    5. Niko- “By choosing to begin the process of winding down industrial society.”
      Quaint sentiment. Nice mission statement [which I agree to]
      Lead the way. Better get it done fast.

      btw- I cherish the deserts of the SW as much as anyone. First went to the lush Sonoran desert as a 17 yr old. Got a ride in a truck all the way from Pennsylvania in the early spring, and camped and hiked for 3 weeks studying the fascinating ecosystem. Got expelled from 12th grade for being ‘absent without leave’. So it goes.
      And I have been back and wandered widely many times since. Lived for a year in Tucson. So I know the wide zone pretty well between west Texas and the western edge of the Mojave and up in to far north of the great basin. There are wide swaths that are extremely desolate and sparse when it comes to wildlife. The “Big Four” of North American deserts: the Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan, which together cover some 500,000 square miles (some in mexico).
      If you’ve wandered around that zone much, you would know very well the kind of place that would be ideal for solar Pv on a large scale, and which areas are critical habitat to preserve untouched from grazing, oil development, military bases, and all human development.
      It has been calculated that 10,000 square miles would go a long way towards providing a large portion of the usa energy demand. It would be one strong leg of the energy stool. Thats 1/50th of this arid zone. You could accomplish that coverage by prioritizing the rooftops, the military bases, the 40,000 acres of BLM leased to the oil and gas industry, the land already trashed by mining operations, etc.
      Until you have achieved the “winding down industrial society”, you are going to need to do something about energy, and carbon.
      I’d advocate returning the 25% of prime land in the central USA, that is gown for corn ethanol, back to natural mixed forest/grassland habitat, as a much greater critical environmental concern and priority.

    6. Niko, of course all these choices are the lesser of two evils,
      unless and until you remove yourself from the ecosystem.
      I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news, but so it is.
      I hope any removal is voluntary removal, for all.

  7. When we think of natural mechanisms for carbon sequestrations we tend to focus almost exclusively on trees. This narrow mindset is blinding us to the bigger picture which is that all life forms are composed of a lot of carbon. And aside from the oceans most of this life is under our feet in the soil. Each percent of soil organic matter represents 100 tons of CO2 per hectare. Following some basic principles it is very possible to accomplish an increase of 1% soil organic matter on the vast majority of our crop and range land acreage within a 5 year period. The basic management actions include increasing diversity (crop rotations, multispecies cover crops, managing the grazing of our livestock to allow the grass time to grow and replenish its root stores before grazing it again. reduce chemical usage such as herbicides fungicides insecticides and anthelmintics .) And BTW this would reduce chemical runoff into our rivers lakes and oceans allowing for more diversity and therefore more total biological biomass in the planet’s water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgmssrVInP0&t=845s

    1. farmlad,

      Are those practices viable for modern industrial agriculture?

      1. Good Question. On almost all farms there is some low hanging fruit in minimizing soil carbon losses and even starting to sequester more carbon. But just like so many other situations the fault lies in the knowledge creativity and resources of the managers of said farm.

        Economically there is the additional expenses that are often required to implement changes but the payback comes in the form of better water infiltration and moisture holding capacity of the soil as well as better gas exchange when the soil carbon levels increase. This makes for healthier and more productive crops even though it is challenging to measure unless you do side by side comparisons and you are able to measure precisely and keep good records etc.

        Another challenge is the big Ag Chemical companies always have their reps out in the field selling the latest seeds chemicals and tech and there is not much money to be made doing the research and teaching farmers how they can manage for better soils that will in the future require less fertilizers and chemicals . Its like the healthcare world where there is lots of money to be made keeping sick people alive but its nip and tuck trying to help people become healthy.

        But yes there are thousands of farms and hundreds of thousands of hectares in agricultural production that are actively achieving increases in soil carbon and for most of that land the economics need to work or else they would quit. while at the same time most of the worlds agriculture land is continuing to loose soil carbon into the air at an alarming rate.
        Another hindrance to the adoption of many of the principles of soil health is the crop insurance program that is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars. For example If a farmer wants to inter seed a cover crop into the cash crop he would loose his insurance coverage for drought ext because this is not standard practice. So most of the row crop farms that are managing for healthier soils end up forgoing the insurance even though about 50% of the bill is footed by your tax dollars.
        https://www.bluedasher.farm/what-we-do
        http://brownsranch.us/
        https://johnkempf.com/losing-a-thousand-pounds-of-carbon-per-acre-per-year/

        1. Thanks farmlad,

          So would it be correct to say these types of practices would be better suited to smaller farms? It might be hard to get these practices implemented on the large “industrial scale” farms, or so it appears to the untrained eye.

          1. Not exactly. What is required is diversity. The Salatin farm mentioned by Alimbiquiated is a great example of this principle. They have many enterprises on the same acreage. They have pasture that is rotationally grazed by cattle and sheep in a holistic framework. Then they also move the layer hens and meat chickens and turkeys across the same acres and they forage for grasshoppers worms and fly larve which minimizes the flies that irritate the cows. In addition they have many other enterprises such as a mechanic shop a saw mill meat processing vegetable production and food prep all on the same farm with someone in charge of each.

            So on a farm of less that 1000 acres they employ dozens of enterprising individuals. And each morning when most people are heading into town for their jobs many of the Salatin farmers are driving from town out to the farm.

            So it doesn’t matter so much the size of the farm as the willingness for many farmers to cooperate to multiply the diversity and by consequence the productivity of enterprises on the same acres. Monoculture is not natural and is the big enemy of carbon sequestration in the soil.

        2. Are you familiar with Joe Salatin?
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwG8MzUDPBw

          He claims he can save money and increase the carbon content of the soil with better farming methods.

          One big problem in modern farming is that you can get nitrogen into the soil without adding carbon. Traditionally you needed nitrogen fixing organisms in the soil, and they provided (and depended on) a carbon right environment. since the advent of artificial fertilizers, farmers have been dumping more and more nitrogen in and ignoring the carbon content.

          But the carbon rich materials also happen to be very good at absorbing water. Falling carbon levels have led to desiccation, which farmers have counteracted with irrigation, often heavily subsidized. Fields have turned into hydroponic farms with all nutrients coming from the outside, and little attempt to control runoff. It’s very much a fight against nature subsidized by government grants to the powerful farm lobby.

  8. How Florida slowed coronavirus: Everyone stayed home before they were told to
    By Adam Playford, Kathleen McGrory, Steve Contorno, Caitlin Johnston and Zachary T. Sampson

    https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/10/how-florida-slowed-coronavirus-everyone-stayed-home-before-they-were-told-to/

    To a nation in the grips of coronavirus panic, Florida in mid-March looked destined to be the next hot zone.

    Spring breakers partying carefree on beaches. Senior citizens fraternizing in retirement communities. International travelers leaving germs around Disney World.

    Medical professionals saw a trajectory of cases that tracked alarmingly close to the early days of the outbreak in New York. They implored Gov. Ron DeSantis to swiftly shut down the state. He waited two weeks.

    After the state shut down, the predicted tsunami did not arrive. Temporary hospitals sit unused. Ventilators were never in short supply. The death count, though tragically nearing 1,800 today, remains short of what many feared.

    Why didn’t Florida see an explosion of cases?

    To answer that question, Tampa Bay Times reporters reviewed the methodology behind several prominent models and studied data tracing the virus’ spread into every corner of the state.

    Then the Times analyzed cell phone tracking data collected by three companies that paints a vivid picture of how Floridians reacted during the outbreak’s early days. Fifteen experts reviewed the work and shared their observations.

    The analysis indicates that while Florida’s politicians debated beach closings and stay-at-home orders, residents took matters into their own hands.

    By the time each county shut down, there had been large reductions in activity, the cell phone data shows. People in the worst-hit counties were overwhelmingly staying home weeks before DeSantis’ order went out — and even before the much-earlier orders issued by local governments.

    “I think the true heroes here are really the people of Florida,” said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metric science at the University of Washington. “They knew it was dangerous, they reduced their mobility and they’re staying home way above what you and I expected.”

    1. Well, imagine that. Florida didn’t even need libs to tell them how to survive the virus, now they reopened sooner than other states, all without having libs make unreasonable demands as to how they live there lives.

      1. Yes, liberals stayed at home because they were smart and knew what to do. The dumbass Trumpites ventured out and many got the virus.

        Rick, are all Trumpites as dumb as you seem to be. That’s a rhetorical question, don’t bother to answer.

      1. “In statistics, the interdecile range is the difference between the first and the ninth deciles (10% and 90%). ”

        I learnt something new today!

  10. Are we going to experience another “Roaring ’20s” once all the Corona virus hysteria goes away?

    ✅ Yes/?
    ❌ No/?

    2. Sort of.

      I think we’ll skip the 1920-2028 part and advance directly to 1929.

  11. The Silence of the Trees

    Isoprene is a natural product of many plants, including trees. It serves a number of purposes but for our interest it is emitted by certain species of trees to protect their leaves during periods of heat, primarily during daylight. Isoprene can quench the formation of tropospheric ozone, except in the presence of large quantities of NOx (an combustion pollutant). Then it combines with hydroxyl radicals and the NOx to form ozone.
    Key takeways.
    The emission of natural isoprene is proportional to temperatures, above the peak chlorophyll activity temperature.
    Isoprene protects the leaves from heat damage.
    Normally isoprene can quench and reduce the atmospheric formation of ozone, except in the presence of high concentrations of NOx
    Large quantities of NOx are generally only found in industrial and city areas, though they have been generally rising in atmospheric concentration due to human activities

    Human activity has turned a natural emission from plants into a health and GHG pollutant. Higher temperatures, more heat waves and the presence of NOx from transport and industrial activity are the major factors in isoprene being released and used to form ozone.

  12. Sorry all.

    Site was down because I forgot to renew the hosting. All should be ok now.

    1. No worries mate, I thought you must have thought I did something bad!!

      Cheers.

  14. Net Primary Productivity- The rate at which an ecosystem accumulates energy or biomass, excluding the energy it uses for the process of respiration. This typically corresponds to the rate of photosynthesis, minus respiration by the photosynthesizers.
    Simply, the greater the NPP, the lusher is the presence of life. On land it varies widely, depending primarily on amount of sun, rain, and fertility of the soil.
    The idea that deployment of utility scale photovoltaic power plants in the SW USA is smart because the insolation resource is world-class in that zone is obvious to anyone who has stood there for a few days. But it is also the region with the poorest NPP, by far, in the country.
    NPP of the flats outside of Las Vegas or Las Cruces or Yuma is less than 1/20th of that outside of Tuscaloosa, Harrisburg, or Raleigh.
    And no, I don’t advocate destroying a single Saguaro (grows only in the Sonoran desert as I assume you are aware), even for a golf-course or a used car lot.

    1. I guess they have not measured the NPP of cities, towns, shopping malls and industrial sites and suburbs. Should come out negative and be the first place to cover with silicon implants.
      No harm, no fowl.

      1. I guess you haven’t been to the beach lately, we’re already covered with implants

      2. GF, perhaps you don’t realize just how rude it is interject an inane comment, or some simple opinion, as a response to a posting about a scientific or technical matter, in a lame attempt to deflect the ‘inconvenient truth’ or relevance presented.
        If you think that NPP is not relevant to landuse and/or environmental protection concerns, then feel free to offer the rationale, or consider that it is often most appropriate to grace everyone else with your beautiful silence.
        I highly respect your silence, especially when considering the alternative.

        And I understand the major gist of your comments regarding wind and solar energy.
        You emphasize the point (over and over and over), that no deployment of these low carbon, fossil fuel alternatives, is worth any degree of environmental harm.
        So be it. You are certainly entitled to your opinion.
        But others see it differently, and are very interested in adaptation and innovation in food, energy, conservation, and related matters. For better or for worse.
        Keep in mind that not everyone is isolated and near the end of their game, and many have a future with family and friends to live for.
        And so a future beyond fossil fuel, where all the forests of the world are cut down for their stored energy, is not where they want to find themselves.
        They prefer to explore the options.
        And its ok to be positive about a few things once or twice a year. Or just silent if you can’t be constructive.

        I saw an abandoned road the other day, with small trees growing up through the cracks.
        Lovely. Good place to hold a farmers market.
        Or stroll along with a date.
        Imagine.

        1. So other than your false personal attacks upon me, you think that NPP should be excluded from developed areas. I guess that would be inconvenient to put PV in those places because it would not destroy living systems, which is your apparent goal.
          Only humans exist for some people, but then again they are probably an evolutionary dead end.

          If you value silence so much, be silent.

  15. Now that the government response has turned the world upside down and we are facing famines of biblical proportions, we should not stop being active and proactive about the climate catastrophe. Especially we should not just accept the shiny high profit tech “solutions” and recommendations because we are distracted.

    “remember when nuclear fusion was the answer? Or blocking out the sun? Our first guest Professor Duncan McLaren explains why technical delusions are so dangerous.”

    https://www.ecoshock.net/downloads/ES_200429_Show.mp3

    1. If there’s a climate catastrophe, it’s certainly been going on for a very long time. Global warming has been proceeding for roughly the past 1.6 million years. Climate change in general has been ongoing for hundreds of millions of years.

      1. Does Jason T. Not Know How To Melt Ice?

        Human selectivity or motivated perception, such as WRT diverting attention, such as with the help of various rhetorical tricks, away from certain kinds of activities that influence or create change, has, presumably, also been going on for a very long time.

        And some of the drivers of change, such as WRT climate, has been biological activity.

        It is also important to realize that everything that humans do is change. IOW, doing is changing…

        You get a pot from the cupboard, that’s change. You put it on the stove-top and turn the burner on, that’s change. You melt some ice in it, that’s change.

        Your global economic engine heats the globe and melts the ice. That’s change.

        Yes, the Earth’s climate has likely been changing for as long as the planet has had a climate. We get that. The concern, though, is that we’re now a species on it and affecting that change and subject to being affected by it.

        Let some of us not pretend that we can’t melt some ice.

        1. Like the climate, the Millennials will change too, and change the climate, hopefully in ways they can live with. This might involve being busy planting native stuff and getting more in touch with nature in general, as well as not pretending that they don’t or can’t effect change or be affected by it.

      3. Jason T.

        “Global warming has been proceeding for roughly the past 1.6 million years.”

        Can you tell me where you got 1.6 million years from? The current pattern of ice ages got underway about 3 million years ago, and around 1 million years ago the glacial/interglacial cycle timing changed from 41 thousand years per cycle to 100 000 years per cycle. That’s when the northern ice sheets, especially the one that covered Canada, got larger and lasted longer. I don’t understand what the 1.6 million years is supposed to refer to. Ice ages have gone right on happening.

        Earth has been in an overall cooling cycle for most of the last 38 million years, with one major break from 17 million to 15 million years in the Miocene that corresponds in time with the extrusion of the Columbia River Basalts in Washington and Oregon.

        1. But what about the fake technical “solutions”? So easily distracted.

          1. Gone fishing,

            Agree fusion is not likely to be a solution in my lifetime (ends around 2050 perhaps), blocking the sun is a dumb idea with many potential unintended consequences. Natural solutions are great, but it is not clear how these will reduce fossil fuel use in any practical way. So “fake” solutions such as PV solar and wind to displace some fossil fuel use (as much as is feasible), while also reducing energy use in general seems the most practical way forward. If you have another better way forward, it has eluded me.

            1. Dennis —

              Right on, EVs and solar power should help power some of the added billion people the UN expects the world population to reach by 2030. Too bad all these new people will need to eat and wear (plastic) clothes, etc. 😉

            2. With coal burning doubled in the last two decades and a steady rise of natural gas and oil burn, the way back to near zero is now much larger. Will the circus people call the economy hold that long? Will the environment and the living structure just stop functioning?
              What good are millions of wind turbines, thousands of square miles of PV and a billion EV’s if the rest is gone?

              In most Western cultures there is a tradition of saying “Happy New Year” as one year draws to a close and another beckons. As we stumble relentlessly into another anthropogenically warmed January, in a time of abrupt climate change, there will never be another “Happy New Year” for the biosphere or any of the awake sapiens or other earthlings.
              “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Aldo Leopold.
              “Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.” The Greatest Danger; Joanna Macy

              ““A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.”

              António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, told global leaders this week that “The world has less than two years to avoid “runaway climate change.” WTF does anyone think can or will be done in 2019 to avoid runaway climate change when we are already in it? I note that the UN said in 1989 that we had 10 years to avoid dangerous climate change. How can we have 1 year left 30 years after having only 10?
              We are being lied to at the edge of extinction, why would we be surprised?

              https://kevinhester.live/2018/12/31/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/

            3. “WTF does anyone think can or will be done in 2019 to avoid runaway climate change when we are already in it?”

              No sweat, put a few solar panels on your roof, turn up the aircon, watch a game on TV. Isn’t that what the Romans did?

            4. Doug,

              Or we could plant trees and do nothing else, I say choose many courses of action that are complementary, but hey we could do nothing at all and say woe is me nothing can work.

              That is an option as well, just not the one I would choose.

            5. Among other related things, I’ve written here about permaculture many times, Dennis. (I’ve also of course very recently mentioned nurturing nature.) But permaculture is not complementary with coercive government or business (such as that PV’s and EV’s currently derive from), so any effective ‘plan’ or ‘plans’ will necessarily disclude them and involve cooperatives and relatively-lateral hierarchies for examples– you know, anarchy? Less Elon Musk and more of the rest of the Tesla Team?
              We’ve also both discussed this kind of thing before, much as you might seem to want to pretend otherwise. (But maybe it’s because I like to trash aspects of your apparent lifestyle, like your stupid electric car?)

            6. World Coal consumption peaked in 2013, oil likely by 2025, and natural gas by 2030. Coal consumption below.

            7. Gone fishing,

              And your plan? Does it involve more than planting trees?

            9. Sure, Dennis, you know that already. It seems as if people can’t get past one example, trees, so why bother expounding about the rest? We need to get rid of homo technophilia to proceed forward. Otherwise it will just undo and overcome all efforts.

            10. Gone fishing,

              I agree with the tree idea, have suggested (based on a single peer reviewed article suggesting 1.2 trillion trees feasible and roughly 167 “average” trees removing about 1 metric tonne of carbon per year that the 1.2 trillion trees would remove about 7.2 Gt of carbon per year from the atmosphere, at about 30 cents per tree it would be only $360 billion. So we agree here. What’s next? Efficiency would be a good start, though that might require some technology, so if you want to forego any technology, what is your suggestion?

            11. Have you included the symbiotic relationship of vegetation with mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria that build large amounts of carbon in the soil. Once we move away from meat culture, large tracts of polluted sterilized “soil” can be turned back to nature.
              Add to that the understory plants and you can double to triple the amount of carbon sequestration available with little money and no industrial-techno systems to grow them or keep them running.

            12. Paralanguage Lost

              Dennis, your comment here seems indicative of terribly reductive, misleading and/or misplaced views where nature (commodified/monetized/categorized/monoculturalized?); ‘blind’ numbers; repeated references to a nature-meddling human ‘economic’ system (were we indoctrinated by it, say, by a university degree and televised mouthpieces for it?); and notions of technology (what/how it can be versus what/how it is now) and even science appear concerned.

              For example, trees, (and whatever else we have reductive notions about) don’t appear to need science and peer reviewed articles; a human pseudoeconomic system’s monetary funding; or to know how much of some single element like carbon they are removing from the atmosphere to do what they do quite well.

              So why do we?
              (Lost in, and reduced to, our intellectually crude and clunky cages as we appear.)

              Maybe that’s the 1 million-dollar question.

              But then why should questions be framed like that?

              Elegantro

            13. Gonefishing,

              No not included. Any estimate for a feasible mount of carbon that might be sequestered, by the changes you allude to, or a link to a paper summarizing. I am all for natural solutions that are possible to implement. Note however, that it is unlikely that most people will stop eating meat (though I agree it is a good idea), so not clear how much can be accomplished there, though changes on existing farms may be possible.

              In addition, perhaps you will agree some energy use will be needed in the future. Is there a low or no technology way to provide that? Or is your plan no use of energy. 🙂

            14. Doug,

              I believe you have said in the past (correctly in my view) that nobody knows what the path of future population will be. See

              http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15226/

              for projections that are different from the UN projections, in the most optimistic scenario (SSP1) population peaks in 2050 at 8.65 billion and falls to 7.23 billion in 2100. Their medium (best guess) scenario peaks in 2070 at 9.68 billion and falls to 9.28 billion in 2100.

              also see link below for detailed data

              http://dataexplorer.wittgensteincentre.org/wcde-v2/

              Let’s hope better education leads to something close to the SSP1 scenario.

              Neither of us knows what the future will bring.

              Perhaps you saw the future very clearly when you were 18, from my perspective the future was very different than I imagined it might be. I think my ability to predict the future is little better now than it was when I was young. Perhaps this is not the case for you.

            15. Gone fishing,

              Below a medium scenario for fossil fuel emissions, no ramp up of alternatives to fossil fuel is assumed, if that should occur the downslope would be steeper.

            16. Why would the downslope be steeper? Most likely people will just use more energy and produce more people to use it. Also, ther will be 4 billion more economically enhanced people by then, using more energy. Plus buildout of renewable energy with storage/control/transmission takes a lot of materials and energy. So FF would have to stay in place while RE builds up.

            17. Gone fishing,

              As renewable energy use increases it replaces fossil fuel energy use. The model assumes population follows the medium UN population scenario and that exergy use per capita decreases with improved energy efficiency, also most thermal losses are eliminated so less primary energy is needed. (Earlier you pointed to Jabocsen estimates of 42% less energy, but that is “end use” energy, roughly equivalent to exergy.) Some estimates predict a population peak in 2070, other more optimistic estimates with a focus on secondary education for women worldwide, put the peak at 2050 for World population. Population at 7.2 billion in 2100 and falling at a rate of 1.2 billion from 2050 to 2100. It is assumed exergy use per capita levels off at 2020 rate, though I think we can do better and decrease per capita use.

            18. Gone fishing,

              Under a scenario with 1.2 trillion trees planted by 2040, if we assume 167 trees remove 1 metric tonne of carbon from atmosphere per year, and 60 billion trees are planted each year from 2021 to 2040, we get 507 Gt of carbon removed from atmosphere from 2021 to 2100. The slow, fast, and average scenarios in chart below have cumulative carbon emissions of 1100 Gt, 844 Gt, and 973 Gt respectively (including 200 Gt land use change for each). If we also assume 1.2 trillion trees planted by 2040, we subtract 507 Gt C for the trees and would get 595 Gt C, 337 Gt C, and 466 Gt C for the net cumulative carbon emissions of the 3 scenarios from 1800 to 2100. Some older research has suggested 1000 Gt C might keep us under 2 C of climate change, newer research would likely have a higher number.

              Sorry for small chart, click on chart for bigger chart, Mt=millions of metric tonnes.

            19. Dennis stated:
              “As renewable energy use increases it replaces fossil fuel energy use.”
              Ehhh, sort of of,probably not.
              Maybe someday in the future. Right now it is just adding some energy to the increasing system after needing FF burn to mine and build it.

              We all have hope. We don’t have time.

            20. “As renewable energy use increases it replaces fossil fuel energy use.” ~ Dennis Coyne

              Or, how about…

              “As fossil fuel energy declines to critical levels (WRT EROEI/ECOE), non-renewable renewable energy harvesting technologies (with a tip-of-the-hat to Tim Watkins for the specific term) are increasingly desperately looked at and half-baked attempts made at implementation, but by then, it is too late.”?

            21. Gone fishing and Caelan,

              And the alternative? Are you proposing no energy use? Easy to criticize proposed solutions, propose a better alternative.

            23. An alternative optimistic scenario where a rapid transition to alternatives to fossil fuel are employed along with higher energy efficiency (whichever approach minimizes environmental damage). Combine this with natural methods, or if natural methods can accomplish an equivalent reduction, use that alone, a combination would seem to be the more viable approach in my opinion.

            24. Looks like you would be using total global renewable energy to make that fast transition.m. What is powering society while you reduce fossil fuel use and build a whole global energy and storage structure, retool and rebuild industries to use electric power including chemical industry, build a whole new transport system, change all the buildings to low energy use, clean up the old extractive industries and find ways to clean up agriculture? As well as provide for the energy growth of electronics, air cons, and developing nations. Several billion people expect a bigger piece of the pie.

            25. Good Advice For Practice

              “What is powering society while you [etc.]…” ~ Gonefishing

              The formatting of Dennis’ questions seems to sometimes ‘require’ some kinds of ‘monolithic’ ‘proposals’, ‘plans’ or ‘solutions’ while our comments/responses contain/infer many of the answers that, through his questions, he seems to nevertheless be deliberately ignoring.

              Dennis, sometimes a plan is simply not following through on a previous one where it makes no sense to. IOW, sometimes you just have to let go.

              “Here’s good advice for practice: go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee.” ~ Martin H. Fischer

              Sounds like a plan. ‘u^

            26. Gonefishing,

              Combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and fossil fuels would provide energy during the transition, resources not used to produce fossil fuels are resources available for other industries, resources not used to produce ICEVs are used for EVs and batteries. I believe you have pointed out that the fossil fuel industry utilizes a huge amount of resources for the entire process, I believe you were correct, have you changed your mind? Also not that as a new industry (wind and solar relative to fossil fuel) scales up it becomes more efficient and reduces costs and resource use per unit produced.

              As I said the “fast transition scenario” is too optimistic and the “no transition scenario” too pessimistic in my view. My expectation is something between those two scenarios.

              Note that the fossil fuel decline in the first (higher carbon emission) scenario was simply due to supply constraints and high fossil fuel prices leading to some substitution of wind, solar, and nuclear to provide energy as they will be cheaper than fossil fuel. Eventually they would reach a scale where they might replace most fossil fuel use because they were the cheapest source of energy and would drive most fossil fuel from the energy market (think horse to ICEV transition from 1900 to 1930).

            27. Caelan,

              A plan is how one gets from point A to point B.

              Back to nature sounds like a good plan for a World population of 100 million. Not the world I live in.

              Also, saying don’t do A implies we should do something else and I suppose one can claim that “not A” is a plan.

              However we have A, and B, others are saying not A and not B,
              lets say A is BAU and B is some alternative which utilizes zero carbon for energy, and C is some anarchical utopia where we live in some new social order where humans behave perfectly and no coercion of any sort is necessary.

              One might argue that option C only exists in the imagination, and of course the same is true of option B. The difference is that there has been some work describing how we might get from A to B (at least nearly so). I have not seen how 7.4 billion people get from A to C, but perhaps missed it in the circular links.

            28. Dennis said
              “Combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and fossil fuels would provide energy during the transition, resources not used to produce fossil fuels are resources available for other industries, resources not used to produce ICEVs are used for EVs and batteries. ”
              Lots of hand waving going on there.

              During a fast renewable energy growth transistion (the only one that our leaders think might work for some reason) the energy used for the transistion would be equal or greater than the amount produced by the added “renewables”. Since your scenario showed a steady drop in fossil fuels, there is an energy shortfall.
              Who takes the short end of the stick?
              Lots of people will have to reduce their use of energy and materials, so why not just do that anyway and stop trying to keep BAU going like the Energizer Bunny.
              Maybe all that “extra” energy will just fatten up the energy system.
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G42-RcSnkAU

            29. Dennis, there are entire websites, movements, activities and locales, etc., dedicated to such things as transition, relocalization, resilience, permaculture, ecological agriculture, rewilding, ecovillages, etc., many that are obviously long past the planning stages and well into the doing and that don’t revolve around the crony-capitalist plutarchy modus operandi or make it necessary. In fact, it’s rather the opposite of course.

              You should already know this.

              That said, each person takes what they can from that and designs their own plans and activities, etc., for themselves and their own set of circumstances, if relative to the circumstances of others and the rest of the planet’s ecosphere potentially affected by them.

            31. Apes Meet Giant Black Smartphone

              Hey Dennis, we’ve been going apeshit and trashing the planet and undermining ourselves with (the ‘other sides of the cuts-both-ways’ of) ‘our’ ‘technologies’ for a very long time. (Probably at least since The Monolith first appeared at The Dawn of Man and we didn’t know WTF it was. 😀 )

              The sooner we can actually wrap our relatively-primitive craniums around this ‘technology’ thing– like, in much less than a half-assed/apeshit way– the sooner we can realize what it in fact is and how it affects our planet, the biota on it, and ourselves and the sooner we can approach and leverage it in ways that actually work– win-win– for everyone and everything. That’s the challenge. So far, so bad.

              Some of that seems a little like Jason T.’s apparent problem in a funny way.

            33. Take a guess.
              Over the span of about 10 years, you and I appear to have shared the comment sections of two main sites and, cursorily, even a couple of others. Given this, that you would seem to have little idea about where I’m coming from seems rather curious.

              See also here.

            34. Caelan,

              Nice circle to nowhere.

              Have never seen your plan, how about a link to that?

            35. The circle appears your own, Dennis.

              There are plenty of links that you won’t select.

              Can’t help you there.

  18. Pennsylvania Plan To Reopen The State:

    “We have a 6 phase plan to reopen the state. The plan will be a phased plan that we will plan to utilize in phases. The phases will be planned and the planning will be phased. We will move quickly and slowly to open but remain closed. I have created a staff of staffers who will plan the phase and planning while phasing their phases.”

  19. Gaslighting the Coronavirus

    “Confirmed novel coronavirus cases number less than 3,147,626 worldwide, which is 0.04% of the world’s population. This barely adds up to a cough and a sneeze. As this virus has spread throughout the world the increase in cases has slowed, but the number of confirmed cases could yet double or even triple, adding up to as much as three coughs and three sneezes. But then the World Health Organization enters the fray.

    The WHO makes gratuitous use of appellations such as ‘world’ and ‘health’ but is actually a semi-private entity lavishly financed by Bill Gates and Big Pharma, which is owned by a handful of highly inbred oligarchic entities that include Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and State Street, which in turn own each other in various convoluted ways.

    WHO’s main function is to scare people into getting vaccinated and accepting expensive drug regimens (barely half of which do any good at all), thus funneling resources toward Big Pharma.

    The World Health Organization establishes thresholds to determine whether to declare an influenza epidemic that range between 2.5% and 5%. The novel coronavirus misses the mark by a thousand-fold, yet the WHO has declared it to be the cause of a global pandemic.

    If this seems like an extreme overreaction, that is because this is an extreme overreaction.

    Some conspiratorially-minded people may surmise that this is a conspiracy, but it isn’t. It is yet another blatant attempt to confiscate a chunk of the world’s wealth by requiring it to buy something worthless, just like this same set of medical/financial interests did with the relatively worthless Tamiflu antiviral medication during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 which caused a mere 18,036 deaths worldwide. This is a specific group pursuing its own group interests.

    There are other disparate interests that are pursuing their own aims by fighting (or attempting, or pretending to fight) the awful-terrible-horrible novel coronavirus global plague that could easily carry off 0.005% of the world’s population and as much as 0.05% of the planet’s septuagenarians.”

  20. The Pandemic Is Turning the Natural World Upside Down

    “Research has shown that ambient noise from ships and other maritime traffic can increase stress-hormone levels in marine creatures, which can affect their reproductive success. Whales have even shown they can adapt to the din, pausing their singing when cargo ships are near and resuming when they move away.

    The unexpected ecological moment brought on by the pandemic reminds Fournet of an accidental experiment that unfolded in the days after 9/11, when ship traffic in North American waters ground to a halt. Researchers working in Canada’s Bay of Fundy—already making recordings and taking samples before the terrorist attacks—eventually found that over the course of just a few days, when the noisy waters calmed, right whales in the bay experienced a drop in their stress-level hormones.

    Fournet is thinking now of North Pacific humpback whales, who have begun to move northward this month and will soon be swimming with newborn calves in southeast Alaska, a region also popular with cruise ships for views of local wildlife. ‘This will be the quietest entry that humpback whales have had in southeastern Alaska in decades’, Fournet said. ‘Nature is taking a breath when the rest of us are holding ours.’ “

  21. There’s plenty of nonsense about the coronavirus online. Here are some of the biggest COVID-19 myths out there and the science to explain why they aren’t true.

    13 CORONAVIRUS MYTHS BUSTED BY SCIENCE (which includes: Vitamin C supplements will stop you from catching COVID-19)

    Researchers have yet to find ANY EVIDENCE that vitamin C supplements can render people immune to COVID-19 infection. In fact, for most people, taking extra vitamin C does not even ward off the common cold, though it may shorten the duration of a cold if you catch one.

    That said, vitamin C serves essential roles in the human body and supports normal immune function. As an antioxidant, the vitamin neutralizes charged particles called free radicals that can damage tissues in the body. It also helps the body synthesize hormones, build collagen and seal off vulnerable connective tissue against pathogens.

    So yes, vitamin C should absolutely be included in your daily diet if you want to maintain a healthy immune system. But megadosing on supplements is unlikely to lower your risk of catching COVID-19, and may at most give you a “modest” advantage against the virus, should you become infected. No evidence suggests that other so-called immune-boosting supplements — such as zinc, green tea or echinacea — help to prevent COVID-19, either.

    Be wary of products being advertised as treatments or cures for the new coronavirus. Since the COVID-19 outbreak began in the United States, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have already issued warning letters to seven companies for selling fraudulent products that promise to cure, treat or prevent the viral infection.

    https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-myths.html

    1. Deutsche Welle has a slightly different take:

      COVID-19: How to boost the immune system with vitamins

      What got me started on my vitamin C odyssey was an article featuring some work that was done back in the eighties by this doctor, who had the vitamin C bug big time:

      Dr. Robert Cathcart, vitamin C pioneer

      Cathcart was preceded by Dr. Frederick Klenner in the forties, fifties and sixties. Klenner is reported to have published 28 scientific papers on the use of high dose vitamin C.

      More recently, in 2016 Dr. Paul Marik “discovered” that 6,000 mg of vitamin C in combination with hydrocortisone and Thiamine significantly decreased mortality rates (from 40% to 8%) of patients suffering from sepsis. Here is a two minute video in which:

      ICU nurses discuss vitamin C therapy for sepsis

      The doctor who is pushing the idea of vitamin C for treatment of COVID-19 is a Dr. Richard Z. Cheng. None of the late doctors stood to gain significant wealth from their advocacy of vitamin C and as far as I can tell, none of those that are alive do either. To quote Paul Marik from 12 min. 30 sec. into this Full interview with Dr. Paul Marik

      ” So it’s really cool I think because, you know nobody’s going to make any money from this, hopefully and it has the potential to save millions of lives, which I think is the coolest thing and you know what? We don’t realize is that most of the deaths are in poor resource poor countries who can’t afford expensive medications. You know like in the Philippines or in you know other countries and this is a intervention which should be readily available, cheap and it can, actually has the potential to save millions of lives.”

      Does that sound like someone who is motivated by greed or selfishness?
      What is it that all these doctors have observed?
      Is it that all their patients improve despite the large doses of vitamin C?
      What is going on here?

  22. Interesting developments in EV business

    BYD partners with RSA as Norway distributor
    “BYD is the only ‘real’ mobility company in the market producing innovative batteries, as well as Battery Electric Vehicles including passenger cars, LCVs, trucks, buses and rail systems.”

    https://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/byd-partners-with-rsa-as-norway-distributor/

    Nobina orders another 13 BYD electric buses for Sweden
    “the deployment in the region in the extreme north of Sweden offers the ideal opportunity to demonstrate the performance of battery-electric engineering in icy environments. This buses now ordered by Nobina will be operating close to the Arctic Circle at latitude 65.31º north.”

    https://www.electrive.com/2020/05/11/nobina-orders-another-13-byd-electric-buses-for-sweden/

  23. Cremations on an industrial scale in Mexico

    https://news.sky.com/story/mexico-city-underreporting-covid-19-deaths-sky-news-analysis-finds-11987235

    many poorer and corrupt countries in Asia, Africa and South America have no chance of stopping the virus. Lockdown means hunger for many so lockdown cannot work, testing is so low that only those ending up in hospital get tested. In India on any day one person gets tested, while 13,000 do not. Obviously the next day the person tested can get infected. So testing only enables doctors to write Covid 19 on the death certificate of those tested positive.

    With testing so low, one can only imagine the true scale on infections. Perhaps it is 10 or 20 times the reported 4 million.

    The WHO which is probably the most useless intergovernmental organization on the planet . Which told us all to continue flying around the world in February and March. Now tells us something that most intelligent people have know for weeks.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snA1RMr8RE4

    Countries that do not even have clean water and sewage systems, where people only eat if they work that day have no chance of stopping the virus spreading right though their populations. These people try and get to Europe, Australia and the US in their millions each year, they will ensure the virus will infect every single person.
    Only very isolated countries like New Zealand have any chance of remaining relatively virus free

    1. Translation = there’s not much we can do about COVID-19 except to wait for it to mutate and go away.

      Soon, the time will come when politicians will be forced to admit the lockdowns should’ve never happened in the first place because the irreparable damage to a significant chunk of the economy was far too steep of a price to pay for them.

      1. Translation = there’s not much we can do about COVID-19 except to wait for it to mutate and go away.

        That statement is so very stupid it could have only been uttered by Donald Trump, or someone who thinks just like him.

        If it mutates it does not just go away. If it mutates that just means that any vaccine created to kill it does not kill it anymore. To mutate most likely means it gets worse. One strain has already mutated and is killing children.

        Doing nothing would most likely mean it kills a huge percentage of the world’s population.

        A point obviously not understood by right-wing nut cases: Diseases carried by viruses as well as bacteria do eventually go away. But they only go away when the average infection rate per person is less than 1. That’s why masks, gloves, and social distancing works. The infection rate for this virus was once estimated to be around 4. That is each person with the virus infected 4 other people. That was the case when no precautions were taken.

        The infection rate per person is directly related to the precautions taken by each person to prevent spreading the infection to other people or from catching it themselves. Behaving as if there was no danger whatsoever of catching it or spreading it is something only someone dumb as a rock would do.

        1. Ron

          Your arguments are correct in theory but in reality containing the virus is impossible once widely spread.

          The U.K. has been in lockdown for 8 weeks. Yet over 400 died yesterday. Based on the best estimates that 0.8% of people die about 3 to 4 weeks after infection. That means, during week 5 of full lockdown some 50,000 people caught the virus in one day.

          People with no symptoms are passing it to family members. Carers go into the homes of perhaps 15 to 20 people in a single day. A rich country like the UK cannot get enough PPE, can you imagine what it’s like in Nigeria or India.

          The economy is breaking down. Airlines are going bust, Airports will not be viable, airline manufacturers will hardly sell any planes.
          Many people will not want to go to restaurants even when they can out of fear.

          What are the actual deaths by age group

          1-14 year old 0.001% of deaths
          15-24 year old 0.005% of deaths
          25-35 year old 0.008% of deaths
          36-49 year old 1% of deaths
          50-59 year old 5% if deaths
          60-69 year old 11% of deaths
          70-79 year old 20% of deaths
          80-89 year old 39% of deaths
          90 plus 20% of deaths

          90% of people who died had a preexisting condition. 70% were obese.

          In other words if you are under 50 with no preexisting condition, fit and healthy you will survive.
          Isolate the elderly and vulnerable until all the fit and healthy have developed immunity.
          Those who are obese have no option but to get fit and healthy, it will stop them getting heart attacks, strokes and many other things besides.

          UK has had 150,000 new cases in the last 2 weeks. We really have to face the fact that this virus is here to stay. Getting fit and healthy is our only real defense.

            1. Doug, if you want a thoughtful analysis of both UK and global coronavirus situation then watch/listen to Dr. John Campbell on YouTube.

            2. Thanks, but we (seem to) have a pretty good team of health care experts here in Canada keeping us appraised of the virus situation down to the local level and the latest advise on how to protect ourselves (and others). I don’t pretend to know squat about medical stuff so always appreciate good data and advise.

            3. This virus is playing hell with the people in elder care and long term medical care facilities. I have heard some real horror stories.

              Fresh air, sunshine, good diet, some exercise and a good low stress attitude are keys to fighting many diseases. But governments have decided to stretch this out for months more so we give the little buggers a lot more time to mutate and a lot more economic pain.
              Good luck.

          2. You omit that those who survive have a long recovery path ahead and will suffer for weeks, months or even the rest of their lives. Also you omit that those in the 36-49 group, for example, the death rate is very much higher than influenza. You also omit that, in that age group alone, 1% of deaths would kill about 129,000 people IN THAT AGE RANGE ALONE! Given the UK population and taking 5% as a typical overall death rate that would kill about 3,300,000 people and leave millions unable to work for months.

            I don’t see how the economy would survive that.

            NAOM

            1. notanoilman

              600,000 people die in the UK each and every year, did you know that? Do you know the age distribution of those deaths?

              The UK economy survives these deaths every year.

              Do not use 5% as an average that is rubbish. This virus effects different age groups totally differently.

              Now we know it does not kill children unless they have a serious health condition they should go back to school. Continuing to terrify them out of ignorance is perverse.

              Again, Obese people make up 70% of those going into hospital, these people who have selfishly got themselves as they are. They are the one putting nurses and doctors at risk.
              Most people with heart conditions either smoke, or drink too much or do no proper exercise or eat very little fruit and vegetables.

              How many would this virus killed if people were really healthy?

              Anyway, a vaccine will not be ready for a least a year and perhaps just like other coronavirus no vaccine has been found.

              So get fit and healthy and you will be fine

            2. “So get fit and healthy and you will be fine”

              Your willingness to kill off the old and the infirm shows a callousness that I can barely contain my disgust at.

              The Koreans have managed to keep their death rates remarkably low. The answer for the US and Britain is not to give up: it is to double down on testing and tracing to be ready for the next wave.

              It is also an economic imperative: if U.S. citizens can’t travel without undergoing a two-week quarantine at their destination, it will be a huge problem for business and diplomacy. And if South Koreans have to go into a two week quarantine after visiting, they’re not going to visit.

              If the US wants to avoid becoming an irrelevant backwater, they should be working to match the best outcomes.

            4. Pandemic 101 & Built-In Redundancies

              From what is understood, the attitudes and modus operandi of some in some governments and media haven’t really helped in many cases and places and have made things worse, possibly for years to come, or forever such as for some especially unfortunate.

              Lloyd, you are in Canada, yes? Presumably you’ve heard about this apparent especially tragic case in one of Quebec’s nursing homes?

              Well in any case, I have my doubts that some people actually care about the elderly, especially if it’s not one of their own, while, ironically, some who do care could be nevertheless painted as callous and uncaring, and while those who are supposed to care shirk their responsibilities.

              From what is also understood, redundancies are built into some, if not all, engineering and architectural works for examples. So why not have them built into the health care systems as well, if or where some aren’t or aren’t adequately? 1-in-100-year storms? So, 1-in-100-year pandemics? (And assuming, to be charitable, that covid19 qualifies here.)

              And, too, maybe make some who sign up for certain kinds of health care work sign an agreement whereby, under the event of a pandemic or other kind of health emergency along that line, they have to ‘isolate’ themselves with their patients (and continue their work if/where at all possible) at where they work (in redundant accommodation facilities), if they already do not. Make their rewards worth it.

              Seems to me those kinds of things are or should be in courses like ‘Pandemic 101’ of the health curricula. I also seem to recall that Tim Watkins over at ‘The Consciousness of Sheep’ writing something less-than-flattering about the results of the UK’s pandemic practice exercise of 2016.

              All this, naturally, assumes adequately functioning private and/or State health care systems and their supporting civilizations going forward. Failing those, I guess it’s back, if we’re ‘lucky’, a little more to how our ancestors used to do it.

              See also here.

            5. My, are you big with your omissions. You omit that my numbers ARE ON TOP of your 600,000. 5% would be very optimistic, in your scenario, as the health service would be overwhelmed and collapse. Coronavirus (CV) may not kill many children but they can still get very sick, look up Kawasaki Syndrome. The biggest threat with children is the transmission of CV and schools are a perfect spreading ground. Infected children will spread the CV to their parents and other people propagating the disease at a much higher rate. Also, many of the children infected will be sick but not sufficiently to need hospital treatment, that will affect their parents ability to work.

              “So get fit and healthy and you will be fine”
              No, just doesn’t work that way. There are many fit and healthy young people who have died from the disease and there are many pre-existing conditions that ‘getting fit and healthy’ does not help. Pre-existing conditions do not mean you are infirm, I won’t bother trying to give a list as it is too long.

              I suggest you stop reading the far right propaganda and start learning about the disease from the people who are treating it. Stop astroturfing this nonsense.

              NAOM

            6. The Virus That Cried Wolf Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The CoV

              “Numerous media reported that in connection with Covid19, more and more children would fall ill with so-called Kawasaki disease (a vascular inflammation). However, the UK’s Kawasaki Disease Foundation issued a press release stating that fewer, not more, Kawasaki cases are currently being reported than usual and that of the few cases reported, only about half had tested positive for corona virus.” ~ SWPR

              notanoilman, we cannot continue to remove ourselves from the natural world like this and in other counteradaptive ways and sterilize it, kill practically everything off and walk around all day in hazmat suits, gazing at and fondling our smartphones.

              It’s approaching true insanity if our species hasn’t already crossed that threshold.

              Death happens, it’s a fact of life. If no one died or less did, our planet would likely be overrun (as if it hasn’t already) in no time, maybe a matter of months. So death has to happen. Embrace it.

          3. I saw a 34 year old male die on the vent whose only comorb was a BMI of 32. Like a junior knight in the first crusade, I think I’ll hang back a bit and see how it all shakes out. All you all dying for a haircut and a game can let me know.

            http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/a-tale-of-two-countries/

            Sweden announced it would hire up to 10,000 more care workers to address shortcomings in elderly care exposed by the pandemic. About half of the Sweden’s 3,460 coronavirus-related deaths have been among nursing home residents, and another quarter among those receiving care at home.

            Elder care seems to be a weak spot, globally. My grans put the Nazi’s back in the box. I was thinking about not killing the last one left over a couple of paychecks.

            1. In some cases/places, the elderly-residence-coronavirus issue/approach seems almost completely backwards where, instead of quarantining them properly (and maybe with their caregivers also being quarantined with them as they continue their work), the rest of the population gets locked down while the caregivers casually waltz in and out of the residences– assuming they even stick around.

              Also, have seniors been asked what they would want in all of this or is it not up to them to decide for their own lives and freedoms? For example, would some be willing to risk infection in exchange for external visitations?

        2. “To mutate most likely means it gets worse.“

          Ron,

          Not ‘most likely’.

          Researchers have identified a mutation in the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 that mirrors changes scientists saw in the 2003 SARS outbreak.
          SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes the illness COVID-19. In the mutation, 81 letters in the virus’s genome had been deleted.
          Viral mutations are a normal part of a virus’s evolution and can alter the severity of the disease they cause.

          In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the finding is of interest because the nature of the mutation suggests it may have an association with a less severe form of the disease. A less virulent virus may have a selective advantage over other strains.

          https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/scientists-discover-unique-mutation-of-new-coronavirus

      2. Why do people say dumb shît like that when it’s obvious that the common cold hasn’t “mutated” and gone away? And influenza hasn’t mutated and gone away. Nor chickenpox. Nor HIV…

        1. Yeah, that is doubly stupid. When a virus mutates, the original virus does not go away. How could a virus mutating in one person change the same virus in other people throughout the world? A person would have to be as dumb as Donald Trump to not understand that. And boy, that is really dumb.

        2. “Why do people say dumb shît like that when it’s obvious”

          SaraB, its the in-thing. Just look at the president this country elected [ok, so he lost by 2.9 million votes]. He says more dumb shit in one day, that any other president has said in 4 years. People seem to like it.

        3. The common cold is a whole range of bacteria and viruses that mutate all the time. It has not gone away.

          Influenza is mutating all the time and has many strains which makes it a difficult target for a vaccine and new ones are needed almost every year. It has not gone away.

          Chickenpox, I don’t know about but I suspect it follows the same pattern.

          HIV has undergone mutations. It has not gone away.

          Ummm, I think I see a pattern here. In fact, all viruses do mutate and natural selection tends to move them to less lethal but more contagious as that favors its survival and spread. Covid-19 ha already undergone many mutations and that is helping trace the route of spread. It too has not gone away and will not until a vaccine is found and most of the world’s population is immunised as was done with smallpox. It is worth remembering that viruses can buck the natural selection process and create a much more lethal strain.

          NAOM

          1. “It’s 2274, and on the surface, it all seems to be an idyllic society. Living in a city within an enclosed dome, there is little or no work for humans to perform, and inhabitants are free to pursue all of the pleasures of life. There is one catch however: your life is limited and when you reach thirty, it is terminated…” ~ IMDB

            “The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs, which no longer affect us, began to kill them. The end came swiftly.” ~ War of The Worlds

            1. Caelan MacIntyre,

              That idea of pre-set ending of life is the core of the film In Time, with the possibly surprising cast being Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy (scary), and Olivia Wilde. I enjoyed it.

              Your life will end at age 25…unless you earn more time. The economy is still capitalism but the pay is time extending your life.

    2. While the WHO continues to carry the mantra that a vaccine is our only hope for salvation, here’s a different take:

      Quite Compelling Evidence (that low levels of vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin”, increase the severity of COVID-19 infections)

      That would suggest that correcting the low levels of vitamin D will improve the chances of recovery. As is obvious from other comments I have written here, I believe there are other substances that will improve chances of recovery.

      edit: I had originally linked to a video from UK nurse John Campbell Phd., from which the title above is taken ,at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fxw3nTZYlA

      1. Islandboy, why do persist in your quack remedy nonsense? There are thousands upon thousands of healthcare professionals out there, real scientists, all trying to educate the public regarding the best course forward.

        “I BELIEVE there are other substances that will improve chances of recovery.”

        Then why don’t you educate the healthcare professionals with your unique wisdom? I may believe in the Tooth Ferry but the grim reality is different….

        BTW Quack·er·y/noun: dishonest practices and claims to have special knowledge and skill in some field, typically medicine.

        CORONAVIRUS MAY NEVER GO AWAY, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION WARNS

        “… Dr Tedros warned that there was no guaranteed way of easing restrictions without triggering a second wave of infections. “Many countries would like to get out of the different measures,” the WHO boss said. “But our recommendation is still the alert at any country should be at the highest level possible.” Dr Ryan added: “There is some magical thinking going on that lockdowns work perfectly and that unlocking lockdowns will go great. Both are fraught with dangers.”

        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52643682

        1. Doug

          Why don’t you watch the the doctor talk about vitamin D. You might learn something. Maybe.

          PS that idiot Tedros was telling us all that people flying around the world would not spread the virus. Why do you listen to a corrupt liar?

        2. “Islandboy, why do persist in your quack remedy nonsense?”

          Because sometimes your, “thousands upon thousands of healthcare professionals out there, real scientists, all trying to educate the public regarding the best course forward” are full of it! To illustrate that point using an example from the field of aeronautics, did you know that the prevailing wisdom in 1903 was that heavier than air flight was impossible? A fairly long and detailed account of the disbelief faced by the Wright brothers is at:

          They Wouldn’t Believe The Wrights Had Flown

          A Study in Human Incredulity

          That account portrays how the feat of the Wright brothers was met with disbelief all the way until a public demonstration of a much improved flying machine almost five years later, despite significant amounts of witnesses to flights they made between the first flight at Kitty Hawk and the formal public demonstrations of flying, from the parade grounds at Fort Myer, in September, 1908.

          Then, specifically related to new discoveries in medicine, there’s this from the US National Library of Medicine:

          23 years of the discovery of Helicobacter pylori: Is the debate over?

          At that time when Warren and Marshall announced their findings, it was a long-standing belief in medical teaching and practice that stress and lifestyle factors were the major causes of peptic ulcer disease. Warren and Marshall rebutted that dogma, and it was soon clear that H. pylori, causes more than 90% of duodenal ulcers and up to 80% of gastric ulcers. The clinical community, however, met their findings, with skepticism and a lot of criticism and that’s why it took quite a remarkable length of time for their discovery to become widely accepted. They had to just push it harder and harder with all experimental and clinical evidences. In 1985, for example, Marshall underwent gastric biopsy to put evidence that he didn’t carry the bacterium, then deliberately infected himself to show that it in fact caused acute gastric illness. This ‘self-help’ experiment was published in the Medical Journal of Australia [4] to describe development of a mild illness over a course of 2 weeks, which included histologically proven gastritis. This extraordinary act of Marshall demonstrated extreme dedication and commitment to his research that generated one of the most radical and important impacts on the last 50 year’s perception of gastroduodenal pathology.

          How about, Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work

          I have brought up the subject of vitamin D, based on presentations made by Dr. Michael F Holick of the Boston University School of Medicine. Here is a YouTube Video featuring Dr. Holick and his message of sensible sun exposure from October 2009:

          Sunshine,Solariums (Sunbeds), and Vitamin D. interview with Dr Michael Holick

          At 5:30 in Holick says

          I think just like anything else in life, it’s moderation should be the message and that’s my message to the public is that, you should never get a sunburn but, abstinence doesn’t work. So we should really be out there recommending sensible sun exposure which is what I’ve been doing for more than 30 years

          So after 40 years of Holick insisting that optimal levels of vitamin D play a critical role in human health, JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH of Harvard is saying essentially the same thing!

          Others might find this information interesting, maybe even useful. Feel free to use the little x beside my screen name if you find the contents of my comments upsetting. If the general consensus is that the information is grossly misleading and of no benefit, I will happily keep it to myself.

          1. Many, perhaps most, especially older people, suffer from one or more vitamin deficiencies for a whole host of reasons, including poor diet. These can usually be identified with blood tests. I have a chronic iron deficiency and must take a supplement. Lots of people, especially those living in northern latitudes, take vitamin D. This is all common knowledge and NOTHING to do with (false) claims that vitamin C will somehow cure virus infections.

            1. Let me once again refer to a five page article written in 1991 by one Robert Landwehr:

              The Origin of the 42-Year Stonewall of Vitamin C

              From the final page

              Five International Poliomyelitis Congresses were convened every three years from 1948 to 1960 to deal with the polio epidemics around the world. In all of the voluminous reports of these conferences there is no reference to Klenner or to vitamin C. Only the first congress dealt briefly with the possible effect of nutrition, and this was dismissed by the statement of an expert “that no clinical evidence is known to me which justifies an increase in intake of vitamins beyond usual recommended allowances”.

              Thus in 1949 the polio experts at the Annual Session of the AMA knew of Klenner’s claim, as did the many readers of JAMA’s lead article of its September 3 issue, the many researchers who used the National Foundation’s Bibliography, those that kept up with the titles in the Current List of Medical Literature, and the relatively few readers of the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery. All this exposure led to no official inquiry or follow-up of Dr. Klenner’s work by U.S. government health authorities or the National Foundation. No one in authority anywhere stepped forward to insist that it be checked out. The strategy of medical leaders, conscious or unconscious, planned or unplanned, was clearly to ignore Dr. Klenner and hope his claims would be forgotten.

              It worked. Klenner’s cure never became well known and today has sunk almost into oblivion.

              The article concludes

              A thoroughly exasperated Klenner concluded a February 1959 paper in the Tri-State Medical Journal with these words: “Should the disease be present in the acute form, ascorbic acid given in proper amounts around the clock, both by mouth and needle, will bring about a rapid recovery. We believe that ascorbic acid must be given by needle in amounts from 250 mg to 400 mg per kg body weight every 4 to 6 hours for 48 hours and then every 8 to 12 hours. The dose by mouth is the dose that can be tolerated. To those who say that Polio is without cure, I say that they lie. Polio in the acute form can be cured in 96 hours or less. I beg of someone in authority to try it.”

              Today there are areas of the world where polio vaccine is still not used and where the incidence of polio is increasing. Polio remains The Crippler, and the only effort of the World Health Organization is to increase vaccination. The leading medical authorities, the editors of the leading journals, the heads of the AMA and the National Foundation, U.S. Surgeons-General and the heads of other U.S. governmental health agencies were, and are, responsible for stonewalling for 42 years Dr. Klenner’s simple, inexpensive cure for many viral diseases, including the dreaded polio.

              1949 — a year in medicine which will live in infamy.

              “that no clinical evidence is known to me which justifies an increase in intake of vitamins beyond usual recommended allowances” Anybody heard/read that lately? The stonewall continues, 70 years on!

            2. Islandboy,
              I care to not get involved in this discussion, other than to say that there is no attitude of ‘stonewalling’ of vitC in the usa. In general, everyone (especially in the health care provider world) is wide open to anything that has proven itself useful over time. And this is especially true regarding something as benign as a vitamin.
              enjoy your health!

            3. I dunno! I just find this unwillingness to have a serious examination of the observations of Klenner and Cathcart among others, a little hard to explain. It’s not like it would be all that difficult or expensive.

            5. Actually that’s one thing I’m not full of. Bowel tolerance doses of vitamin C see to that! 😉

        3. Vitamin D deficiency can cause any communicable disease to be worse. In fact, any vitamin deficiency can impair your immune system.

          Vitamin D Determines Severity in COVID-19: Researchers Urge Government to Change Advice

          Vitamin D can also support the immune system through a number of immune pathways involved in fighting SARS-CoV-2. Many recent studies confirm the pivotal role of vitamin D in viral infections.

          On my doctor’s advice, I have been taking 2000 IUs daily of vitamin D for about 20 years now. As we get older we lose much of our ability to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight.

          1. Yes, many people have vitamin D deficiency.

            It comes from modern life style: Much work in closed rooms, and at maximum a short lunch break not leaving the building.

            And at the weekend either stay in air conditioned rooms, or in cars. So no sun light.

          2. “As we get older we lose much of our ability to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight.”

            Do you have a link for that as I would like to look into it since I have been expecting to get enough vit-D from or strong sunlight.

            NAOM

            1. Decaying renal function is a major source of lower vitamin D synthesis. Renal failure and damage is of epidemic proportions in the hotter regions of the world. Mostly related to repeated dehydration due to working in hot conditions without adequate hydration.
              The elderly or ill who are closeted away for long periods are at high risk of vitamin D deficiency.

              If you don’t have kidney problems, getting sun at any age will generally provide more than enough vitamin D in your system. Vitamin D is needed to absorb calcium and phosphorus at optimum rates.

              Thus, the major cause of VDD is inadequate exposure to sunlight.[29,33–35] Wearing a sunscreen with a sun protection factor of 30 reduces vitamin D synthesis in the skin by more than 95%.[36] People with a naturally dark skin tone have natural sun protection and require at least three to five times longer exposure to make the same amount of vitamin D as a person with a white skin tone.[37,38] There is an inverse association of serum 25(OH)D and body mass index (BMI) greater than 30 kg/m2, and thus, obesity is associated with VDD.[39]

            2. I’m pretty sure I heard that from Michael Holkick. I believe the paper below might be the basis for his many presentations on YouTube and he mentions it:

              VITAMIN D: A D-LIGHTFUL SOLUTION FOR HEALTH

              He covers aging in a little more detail here:

              The Physiology and Treatment of Vitamin D Deficiency: In Response

              Although it is true that aging decreases the body’s ability to produce vitamin D in the skin, investigators have shown that, because the skin has such a great capacity to produce vitamin D, elderly persons’ exposure to 15 minutes of sunlight 3 times a week in the summer or exposure in a tanning bed 3 times a week can raise their blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D.5, 6 Furthermore, Chuck et al7 reported that in nursing home residents, exposure to indirect ultraviolet radiation was the most effective means of maintaining circulating concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, even better than a vitamin D supplement.

            3. Do you have a link for that as I would like to look into it since I have been expecting to get enough vit-D from or strong sunlight.

              The Problems of Vitamin D Insufficiency in Older People

              This report reviews evidence on disorders related to inadequate vitamin D repletion in older people. Vitamin D is as essential for bone health in adults as in children, preventing osteomalacia and muscle weakness and protecting against falls and low-impact fractures. Vitamin D is provided by skin synthesis by UVB-irradiation from summer sunshine and to a small extent by absorption from food. However, these processes become less efficient with age.

            4. Thanks for the feedback guys. Have just delayed my trip out to buy construction items, for an hour or two, to get a better dose of ‘D’ 🙂 while exercising my legs. A daily walk or bike ride vs supplements, I’ll take the free stuff.

              NAOM

    1. Last winter, I had a cold from hell (turning to pneumonia?) and it makes me wonder if I might have acquired from it, some kind of ‘cross-immunity’ to covid19. I’ve not been sick at all since then, or at least symptomatic enough to notice.

  25. This is news, to me anyway:

    THE REVOLT OF THE PLANTS: THE ARCTIC MELTS WHEN PLANTS STOP BREATHING

    “When the CO2 concentration rises, plants can absorb enough CO2 without opening their stomata widely. If the stomata open narrowly, the amount of water vapor released also decreases. When this transpiration of plants declines, the land temperature rapidly rises under greenhouse warming. Recently, such a decrease in transpiration has been cited as one of the reasons for the surge in heat waves in the northern hemisphere. This response from the vegetation leads to the global climate change by controlling the exchange of energy between the surface and atmosphere, referred to as ‘physiological forcing…

    The stomatal closure effect due to the increased CO2 levels is not fully counted in the future climate projection. This means that Arctic warming can proceed much faster than currently forecast. The increase in CO2 is accelerating global warming not only through the greenhouse effect that we all knew of, but also by changing the physiological function of plants.”

    https://phys.org/news/2020-05-revolt-arctic.html

    1. Well, the heat of vaporization is highly energetic and plants do move a lot of liquid water to water vapor in the atmosphere.
      However, would this effect not be balanced out by increased evaporation from all surfaces due to higher temperatures and lately increased sunlight? Lakes, rivers, swamps, wetlands, oceans, and solid surfaces would all be subject to higher average temperatures, increasing evaporation.
      The downside is a larger amount of water in the atmosphere causing increased greenhouse effects, which causes increases in evaporation and general heating.

      Possibly exposing bare soil and then planting very dense crops across much of the planet is also a factor in both evaporation and the amount of water vapor in the air.

      1. I’m no expert, but I wish them well with it. Wonder if we’ll see them in this market?
        The safety is an important issue for sure.
        I wish we had someone with good battery expertise around here, to help us put the energy storage ‘news’ in perspective.
        I certainly hope BYD or others can show up to the game in a big way, before Tesla gets even further ahead. I’m never comfortable with one company dominating such an important area.
        Hopefully they will all continue to make progress and all subsidies will become irrelevant. All of Tesla sales in the USA are no longer subsidy eligible, since last year I think.

  27. Bill McKibben has an article in TNYRB that begins:

    People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude.

    This and the Michael Moore produced film about “alternatives” recently convince me the the mighty McKibben is just another fucking jackass.

    1. Is water wet? The man routinely dogwhistles to internet trolls (some being fund managers?) on his twitter. Enron Musk’s fall, if there ever is one in this magical economy, will be biblical.

    2. No, Musk isn’t a fraud, he is a typical Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Everyone knows what a success story the region has been, but it’s hard to put in words how much money gets put into completely untested ideas.

      Musk has made a series of extremely high risk investments. His strategy is textbook high tech marketing, finding niches for new technical ideas and using success there to improve the tech enough to fit new niches. He has been surprisingly successful with batteries, cars and space launches. Solar not so much. Sometimes high risk investments work, at least for a while.

      Comparisons to Enron are just propaganda. Enron was a fraud based on moving debt to “off balance sheet entities”. There are complicated rules about when the debts of a subsidiary show up on the balance sheet of the holding company, and they exploited this. The other trick was booking sales forecasts as income in the current period. They bribed their auditors to get away with this crap. They claimed to be profitable when they were not.

      There is no evidence that Tesla does either of these things. They lose money sometimes (usually actually), and state their losses. Any claims of similarity between Tesla and Enron are tells that the author is a liar.

      1. And especially the Tesla stock is a product on his own at the moment. Every milennial with spare money has to have it in his depot.
        So Tesla can finance with capital increases, no need to take more credit. The last increase was in February.

        Announcing their new battery tech is a tricky thing – it has to be very near to product start to avoid an osborne effect.

    3. I don’t really care about Musk. I’ve never been a fan of the powerful or super-rich. Enabling those characters can be very dangerous- just look at the current president for an example.

      But Tesla is no ‘fraud’. Its a innovation powerhouse. I’m no fan of fancy stuff or brands, but the guts of the vehicles are the real deal, and out in front.
      I wish them success, along with all the other electric vehicle innovators.

      1. making electric motor vehicles and tying them to your iphone is innovation? THat’s literally 1990s technology in a new form

        1. aaaa- if thats all you think tesla has pulled off so far, well then you clearly just prefer to be an ostrich on it?
          not my job to give an you education.
          their mobile and stationary battery management software is far ahead of any competitor, for example.
          but if it makes you comfortable to believe they just glued an iphone to an electric motor, go for it.

  29. UNUSUAL WARMTH POURS OVER NORTH POLE, POTENTIALLY JUMP-STARTING MELT SEASON FOR ARCTIC ICE

    “It was a remarkably cold winter across the High Arctic, at least compared with the abnormally mild winters in many recent years. But the weather pattern has reversed this spring and unusually warm air is surging toward the North Pole, paving the way for the Arctic ice melt season to commence. The sudden pulse of warmth is one of many observed in the Arctic in recent years, which research shows are increasing in frequency due to rapid climate change, accelerating the loss of sea and land ice…

    On global maps of temperature anomalies for the year so far, northern Siberia shows up as a splotch of crimson red, with some of the largest anomalies of anywhere in the world. Across parts of northern Asia, average temperatures so far this year have been 5.4 degrees above average or higher, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/14/arctic-temperature-spike-sea-ice/

    1. DougL and all,

      I don’t know if I’ve mentioned the site Climate Reanalyzer.

      Go to climatereanalyzer.org and you’ll find, in pleasing decorator colors, what Doug’s reference describes.

      (too early for Port, mutter, mutter)

      1. I agree, great site. Been using it for a long time.
        Also earthnullschool.

  30. If this post is too long Dennis or Ron please delete it (sometimes I get carried away 😉 )

    OFM — Here’s something to test your worry-beads. You have expressed an interest in this on several occasions so here goes: Magnetic storms are a constant irritant to geologists trying to map magnetic anomalies related to mineralization and geophysicists use them in their attempts at mapping deep geological structures. But the truth is that big ones are likely to be a lot more than minor irritants. The question is not if a big one will hit, it’s when. And when it does, life in developed nations will suddenly come to an abrupt change that will eclipse our current virus dilemma.

    THE GREAT GEOMAGNETIC STORM OF MAY 1921: 99 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK

    It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. For the next 3 days, CMEs rocked Earth’s magnetic field. Scientists around the world were surprised when their magnetometers suddenly went off scale, pens in strip chart recorders pegged uselessly to the top of the paper.

    Then the fires began. Around 02:00 GMT on May 15th, a telegraph exchange in Sweden burst into flames. About an hour later, the same thing happened across the Atlantic in the village of Brewster, New York. Flames engulfed the switchboard at the Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly spread to destroy the whole building. That fire, along with another one about the same time in a railroad control tower near New York City’s Grand Central Station, is why the event is sometimes referred to as the “New York Railroad Superstorm.”

    What caused the fires? Electrical currents induced by geomagnetic activity surged through telephone and telegraph lines, heating them to the point of combustion. Strong currents disrupted telegraph systems in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and USA. The Ottawa Journal reported that many long-distance telephone lines in New Brunswick were burned out by the storm. On some telegraph lines in the USA voltages spiked as high as 1000 V.

    During the storm’s peak on May 15th, southern cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta felt like Fairbanks, with Northern Lights dancing overhead while telegraph lines crackled with geomagnetic currents. Auroras were seen in the USA as far south as Texas while, in the Pacific, red auroras were sighted from Samoa and Tonga and ships at sea crossing the equator.

    What would happen if such a storm occurred today?

    Researchers have long grappled with that question — most recently in a pair of in-depth papers published in the journal Space Weather: “The Great Storm of May 1921: An Exemplar of a Dangerous Space Weather Event” by Mike Hapgood (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK) and “Intensity and Impact of the New York Railroad Superstorm of May 1921” by Jeffrey Love (US Geological Survey) and colleagues.

    The summary, above, is largely a result of Hapgood’s work. He painstakingly searched historical records including scientific journals, newspaper clippings, and other reports to create a moment-by-moment timeline of the storm. Such timelines are invaluable to emergency planners, who can use them to prepare for future storms.

    Jeffrey Love and colleagues also looked into the past and — jackpot! — they found some old magnetic chart recordings that did not go off scale when the May 1921 CMEs hit. Using the data, they calculated “Dst” (disturbance storm time index), a measure of geomagnetic activity favored by many space weather researchers.

    “The storm attained an estimated maximum − Dst on 15 May of 907 ± 132 nT, an intensity comparable to that of the Carrington Event of 1859,” they wrote in their paper.

    This dry-sounding result upends conventional wisdom. Students of space weather have long been taught that the Carrington Event (-Dst = 900 nT) was the strongest solar storm in recorded history. Now we know that the May 1921 storm was about equally intense.

    If the May 1921 storm hit today, “I’d expect it to lead to most, if not all, of the impacts outlined in the 2013 Royal Academy of Engineering report led by Paul Cannon,” says Hapgood. “This could include regional power outages, profound changes to satellite orbits, and loss of radio-based technologies such as GPS. The disruption of GPS could significantly impact logistics and emergency services.”

    It’s something for you to think about on the 99th anniversary of a 100-year storm….

    1. Very interesting Doug. Thanks. I’d like to see more about what would be the fallout from such an event in this modern electrified world.

    3. Trend is toward a total electrical powered and electronically controlled civilization, run by AI and machines. Are you saying there might be some problem with that?

      Likelihood is higher for a nuclear event.

      1. Well, if a storm of equal strength to the Carrington Event were to occur in today’s technology-addicted world, it would have catastrophic impacts, according to the American Association for the Advancement scientists at their meeting in Washington, DC on Feb. 15th. In fact, just this kind of blast occurred in July 2012 when a powerful coronal mass ejection was observed by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Had it hit Earth the resulting storm may have been even stronger than the Carrington event. Luckily for humanity, it missed, by only a slim margin. Further, according to those space weather folk: “If this event had occurred just a few days earlier, as the Earth was in the line of fire, we would still be picking up the pieces.” I’m no space weather expert but I understand it’s a question of when not if.

        https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201603/space-weather.cfm

        1. Sounds like civilization is self trapping. Every “advance” seems to just cause more trouble or set us up for more trouble. Anyone noticed this yet?

          1. “Anyone noticed this yet?”

            Perhaps we’ve been programmed to think human problems will all be solved by new technology. Exploding electrical grids all over the planet would certainly be cause for some re-thinks in that area.

            1. Doug, for reasons I will not expound here, they will not learn. They think it is a plug and play world but as they say ignorance is bliss. For a short time and a select few. It’s a new religion, reality, facts and sense do not enter the picture.

        2. Well Doug,
          seems like it its similar to meteors, wars, or giant earthquakes.
          not much you can do about these events, other than try to live at times or places when they don’t happen.

  31. Facts about Covid-19

    “According to data from the best-studied countries and regions, the lethality of Covid19 is on average about 0.2%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu) and about twenty times lower than originally assumed by the WHO…

    Up to one third of all persons already have a certain background immunity to Covid19 due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses).

    The median or average age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.

    In most Western countries, 50 to 70% of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown…

    Up to 50% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.

    Even in so-called ‘Covid19 deaths’ it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as ‘presumed cases’ and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction…

    In several countries Covid19 deaths remained below strong flu seasons.

    Regional increases in mortality may be influenced by additional risk factors such as high levels of air pollution and microbial contamination, as well as a collapse in the care for the elderly and sick due to infections, mass panic and lockdown…

    In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent the UK and the US, hospital overloads due to strong flu waves are not unusual. In addition, up to 15% of doctors and health workers were put into quarantine, even if they developed no symptoms.…

    In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown.

    Countries without curfews and contact bans, such as Japan, South Korea or Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than other countries…

    The fear of a shortage of ventilators was unjustified. According to lung specialists, the invasive ventilation (intubation) of Covid19 patients, which is partly done out of fear of spreading the virus, is in fact often counterproductive and damaging to the lungs.…

    There is also no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in healthy or asymptomatic individuals. On the contrary, experts warn that such masks interfere with normal breathing and may become ‘germ carriers‘. Leading doctors called them a ‘media hype’ and ‘ridiculous’.

    Many clinics in Europe and the US remained strongly underutilized or almost empty during the Covid19 peak and in some cases had to send staff home. Numerous operations and therapies were cancelled, including some organ transplants and cancer screenings.

    Several media were caught trying to dramatize the situation in hospitals, sometimes even with manipulative images and videos. In general, the unprofessional reporting of many media maximized fear and panic in the population…

    Numerous internationally renowned experts in the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology consider the measures taken to be counterproductive and recommend rapid natural immunisation of the general population and protection of risk groups. The risks for children are virtually zero and closing schools was never medically warranted.

    Several medical experts described vaccines against coronaviruses as unnecessary or even dangerous. Indeed, the vaccine against the so-called swine flu of 2009, for example, led to sometimes severe neurological damage and lawsuits in the millions…

    Several experts believe that the measures may claim more lives than the virus itself…

    …’corona crisis’ will be used for the massive and permanent expansion of global surveillance. The renowned virologist Pablo Goldschmidt spoke of a ‘global media terror’ and ‘totalitarian measures’. Leading British virologist professor John Oxford spoke of a ‘media epidemic’.

    More than 500 scientists have warned against an ‘unprecedented surveillance of society’ through problematic apps for ‘contact tracing’…

    Stanford professor Scott Atlas explains… that ‘the idea of having to stop Covid19 has created a catastrophic health care situation’ …[and] says that the disease is ‘generally mild’ and that irrational fears had been created. He adds that there is ‘absolutely no reason’ for extensive testing in the general population, which is only necessary in hospitals and nursing homes. Professor Atlas wrote an article at the end of April entitled ‘The data are in – Stop the panic and end total isolation’…

    Epidemiologist Dr Knut Wittkowski explains… [that the] lockdown of entire societies was a ‘catastrophic decision’ without benefits but causing enormous damage. The most important measure is the protection of nursing homes. According to Dr. Wittkowski, Bill Gates‘ statements on Covid19 are ‘absurd’ and ‘have nothing to do with reality’… [and] considers a vaccination against Covid19 ‘not necessary’ and the influential Covid19 model of British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson a ‘complete failure’.

    German virologist Hendrik Streeck explains the final results of his pioneering antibody study. Professor Streeck found a Covid19 lethality of 0.36%, but explains that this is an upper limit and the lethality is probably in the range of 0.24 to 0.26% or even below. The average age of test-positive deceased was approximately 81 years.

    Biology professor and Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, who has been analyzing the spread of Covid19 since February, describes the general lockdown as a ‘huge mistake’ and calls for more targeted measures, especially to protect risk groups.

    The emeritus microbiology professor Sucharit Bhakdi explains… that politics and the media have been conducting an ‘intolerable fear-mongering’ and an ‘irres­pon­sible disinformation campaign’… while a vaccine against coronavirus is ‘unnecessary and dangerous’, as was already the case with swine flu. The WHO has ‘never taken responsibility for its many wrong decisions over the years’, professor Bhakdi adds. (Note: The video was temporarily deleted by YouTube).

    A new overview of existing PCR and antibody studies shows that the median value of Covid19 lethality (IFR) is about 0.2% and thus in the range of a strong influenza.

    A new antibody study with Danish blood donors showed a very low Covid19 lethality (IFR) of 0.08% for persons under 70 years of age.

    A new antibody study from Iran, one of the earliest and most affected countries by Covid19, also showed a very low lethality of 0.08% to 0.12%.

    A new antibody study from Japan comes to the conclusion that about 400 to 800 times more people there had contact with the new coronavirus than previously thought, but showed no or hardly any symptoms.

    A new study from Germany, with the participation of leading virologist Christian Drosten, shows that about one third of the population already has some cellular immunity to the Covid19 corona virus, presumably through contact with earlier corona viruses (cold viruses). This cellular immunity by so-called T-cells is significantly higher than PCR and antibody tests suggested and may partly explain why many people develop no symptoms with the new coronavirus.

    Numerous media reported about alleged ‘re-infections’ of already recovered persons in South Korea. However, researchers have now come to the conclusion that all of the 290 suspected cases were false-positive test results caused by ‘non-infectious virus fragments’. The result again highlights the well-known unreliability of PCR virus tests…

    In an open letter to the French Ministry of Health, a French doctor speaks of Covid19 as ‘the biggest health scam of the 21st century’. The danger of the virus for the general population is in the range of influenza and the consequences of the lockdown are more dangerous than the virus itself, the French doctor argues.

    The Executive Director of the WHO recently praised Sweden as a successful model for handling Covid19. Sweden had implemented its health policy successfully and ‘in partnership with the population’, he said. Previously, Sweden had been heavily criticized for weeks by foreign media and politicians for its relaxed approach to Covid19.

    Belarus, which took the least action against Covid19 of all European countries and did not even cancel major events like soccer matches, is counting only 103 test-positive or suspected Covid19 deaths after more than two months. The Belarusian long-term president Lukashenko called Corona a ‘psychosis’.

    A Swiss chief psychiatrist expects a sharp increase in psychological problems and more than 10,000 additional suicides worldwide due to the global lockdown and unemployment.

    The so-called reproduction number, which indicates the proliferation of Covid, is increasingly becoming a political issue. However, this does not change the facts: the peak of the spread was already reached in most countries before the lockdown and the reproduction ratio fell to or below the stable value of one due to simple everyday and hygiene measures. The lockdown was therefore epidemiologically unnecessary…

    Some researchers… expect that the Covid19 coronavirus, too, will be seen as a typical cold virus in the medium term.

    Nursing homes play an absolutely key role in the current corona situation. In most Western countries, 30% to 70% of all deaths ‘related to Covid’ occurred in nursing homes (in some regions even up to 90%). It is also known from northern Italy that the crisis there began with a panic-induced collapse of nursing care for the elderly.

    Nursing homes require targeted protection and do not benefit from a general lockdown of society…

    Moreover, in many cases it is not clear what people in nursing homes really died of, i.e. whether it was Covid19 or stress, fear and loneliness. From Belgium, for example, it is known that about 94% of all deaths in nursing homes are untested ‘presumed cases’.

    A new analysis of French statistics moreover shows the following: as soon as there is a ‘suspected case’ in a nursing home (e.g. due to coughing), all deaths are considered ‘suspected Covid19 deaths’, and as soon as there is a ‘confirmed case’ in a nursing home (even if symptomless), all deaths are considered ‘confirmed Covid19 deaths’.

    A report from Germany vividly describes the extreme conditions under which hundreds of thousands of patients in care and nursing homes have had to live in recent weeks, often against their will. Many of the patients were barely allowed to leave their rooms, were no longer allowed to go out into the fresh air or receive visits from their relatives.

    …In one Canadian nursing home, employees fled in fear of the corona virus, resulting in the tragic death of 31 patients due to lack of care.

    The former New York Times journalist and Corona critic Alex Berenson writes on Twitter: ‘Let’s be clear: the fact the nursing home deaths are not front and center every day in elite media coverage of COVID tells you everything you need to know about the media’s priority – which is instilling panic (and punishing Trump), not driving good health policy.’ “

    1. With all of the fresh facts coming in that you’ve presented, I am at a real loss for words to describe those people still out there that seem to think the only way for everything to be OK is for everything to stay shut down indefinitely.

      There are actually people out there that think we can shut down society until, by magic, a vaccine comes to save us all. On top of that, the vaccine will somehow be immediately available to everybody, such that within 24 hours everything goes back to the way it was at the start of 2020.

      People actually believe this, though I’m willing to concede some of these believers are probably holding onto these views simply to save face now that their over-the-top predictions of exponentially increasing deaths and despair have turned out to be unfounded.

      1. The Crown’s Pokerface

        ‘Green anarchists’ like myself, if they are paying any attention (and they tend to which is why they are anarchists), are having a field day as decaying governments (what I like to call, governpimps because they are already corrupt in tax-pimping the sheeple and assorted ideological and/or physical prisoners) in the faces of decaying energy, decaying infrastructure, decaying ecosystem, decaying mineral resources and decaying social and economic stability shine a glaring spotlight on themselves in the name of the coronavirus/COVID-19.
        It’s a desperate opportunistic measure and will be one of many in the interests of governpimp survival as decay increasingly sets in.
        This is while others, including some former sheeple perhaps, are beginning to get the picture in such a light.
        Now, how things unfold over the coming months may make a shit-show look lame, depending on how carefully the governpimps open the lockdown prison gates and what they do next and how they do it.

        Any serious anthropologist of the future might cut off their arm to be here at this moment in time.

        “The Crown is the state in all its aspects within the jurisprudence of the Commonwealth realms and their subdivisions (such as Crown dependencies, provinces, or states)… It is used to designate the monarch in either a personal capacity, as Head of the Commonwealth, or as the king or queen of his or her realms. It can also refer to the rule of law; however, in common parlance ‘The Crown’ refers to the functions of government and the civil service.” ~ Wikipedia

        “co·ro·na…
        noun: corona; plural noun: coronae
        1. Anatomy
        a part of the body resembling or likened to a crown.” ~ Google dictionary

        Finally: a study on the SARS-CoV-2 virus

        “Around the second week of March, the situation here about the virus changed into one of bureaucratic, media, political, and financial interests. The presentation in mass media has shifted into a version of agitating propaganda (agitprop). “

    2. Caelan,

      For now I only attack two of the “facts”

      Countries without curfews and contact bans, such as Japan, South Korea or Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than other countries…

      Japan, South Korea, and some other countries managed to control the local epidemic quickly because of masks obligation. Using simple masks in public transport and supermarkets, etc.
      Let’s compare Sweden with Norway. Sweden has 10 million inhabitants and until now 3529 covid-19 related deaths (deaths with confirmed covid-19 infection). Norway has 5 million inhabitants and 232 covid-19 related deaths.
      On covid19info.live you can compare the countries. Austria started mask obligation the end of March. From 14 April on they began easing measures but the daily registered infections stayed very low, until now. That’s more than one month with few daily new infections and the economy running considerably.

      There is also no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in healthy or asymptomatic individuals. On the contrary, experts warn that such masks interfere with normal breathing and may become ‘germ carriers‘. Leading doctors called them a ‘media hype’ and ‘ridiculous’.

      Two months ago most scientists and doctors didn’t recommend face masks. Now it’s on the contrary. Control of local epidemics is NOT the result of only a lot of testing, tracing and isolating. For example: South Korea has 50 million inhabitants. Covid-19 infected people start massive viral shedding a few days before showing clear symptoms (most (85-90%) cases show few symptoms or no symptoms at all. With using masks even a higher percentage). At least 5% of the test results are false negative. Go figure how to get an epidemic under control in a country with many millions of inhabitants only with testing, tracing and isolating. It’s the combination of masks obligation and testing, etc that does the trick.
      The so called false safety that masks give plays a minor role apparently. The same can be said of masks as germ carriers. Of course the masks or cloths should be hand washed with soap at least once daily or replaced daily. With laser light the effect of simple masks has been demonstrated. If everyone uses face masks there is a double barrier for the ones that are not infected.
      People with COPD, for example asthma, could have some problems with breathing indeed. But they don’t need to wear a mask all the time and with simple masks on breathing isn’t much more difficult.

      1. “masks as germ carriers.”

        Remember, too, those germs would have ended up inside you, infecting you.

        NAOM

  33. There are some here who perpetuate a myth, as if they hope saying it enough it will make it true, like the current president does every day.
    I don’t know if they are just very misinformed, or it is intentionally misleading (and therefore a lie).
    In the name of setting things on a straight path-

    “In the July 2011 PE magazine article “Why We Need Rational Selection of Energy Projects,” the author stated that “photovoltaic electricity generation cannot be an energy source for the future” because photovoltaics require more energy than they produce (during their lifetime), thus their “Energy Return Ratio (ERR) is less than 1:1.” Statements to this effect were not uncommon in the 1980s… However, today’s PVs return far more energy than that embodied in the life cycle of a solar system (see Figure 1).Their energy payback times (EPBT)—the time it takes to produce all the energy used in their life cycles—currently are between six months to two years, depending on the location/solar irradiation and the [specific panel] technology. And with expected life times of 30 years, their ERRs are in the range of 60:1 to 15:1, depending on the location and the technology, thus returning 15 to 60 times more energy than the energy they use. Here is a basic tutorial on the subject…
    https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/PE_Magazine_Fthenakis_2_10_12.pdf

    Or…
    “Reaping the environmental benefits of solar energy requires spending energy to make the PV system. But as this graphic shows, the investment is small.Assuming 30-year system life, PV systems will provide a net gain of 26 to 29 years of pollution-free and greenhouse-gas-free electrical generation.”
    https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf

    Or…
    A complete PV system based on polycrystalline panels, made in 2017, would need 15.8 MJ of primary energy per watt-peak. This corresponds to an EPBT [Energy Pay Back Time] of roughly 1.2 years (for global average yield)
    https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2016/12/8/musqo7036dslptm1b8efduj6i3e7ms

    I could go on with many more sources, but the take home point is clear.
    And it is never too late for anyone to learn information which can shatter their misconceptions, and dissolve their ill-conceived opinions. If….

    1. Similar story for wind energy-
      “US researchers have carried out an environmental lifecycle assessment of 2-megawatt wind turbines mooted for a large wind farm in the US Pacific Northwest. Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, they conclude that in terms of cumulative energy payback, or the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation, a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit within five to eight months of being brought online.”
      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140616093317.htm

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