175 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 19, 2023”

  1. Interesting. What is the general consensus on this conjecture amongst retired senior IBM engineers?

    And what is WJARR?

    “According to the Beall’s list, World Journal of Research and Review?(WJRR) is a predatory journal. The title of the journal is included in the archived version of the Beall’s list – a list of potential predatory journals.

    Predatory Journals take advantage of authors by asking them to publish for a fee without providing peer-review or editing services.”

    Looks like the going rate to get your (non-peer reviewed) paper ‘published’ by JWARR is $32. Bargain.

    1. Bob,

      It is amazing that there is this polemic belief that everything written in a so called scientific journal is honest and truthful because is has been peer reviewed – whoopee. In the main that means a pal review. There are too many instances of so called peer reviewed articles having the data massaged to fit the narrative. Worse still is the reluctance of journals to take down false information. Woe betide anyone that writes a contrarian view to the climate change mobsters who masquerade as scientists, telling us that the climate crisis is fact. The snag is that the so-called data has a lot of holes that were pasted over. The data was adjusted to fit the narrative so that the cosy club could continue in there safe acaemic postion and secure more lucrative grants.
      I spend most of my working day reading so called scientific papers on chemical processes. How many times have I come across wild claims of some new process or terchnology. Then there is the Oil Price.com website that publishes puff pieces of an implausible new technology breakthrough usually posted by some would bejournalist that know zilch about anything.
      How many times have we been mislead about the cost of renewables. I do not see it in my utility, bills and neither does anyone else I know subjected to unreliable costly renewable energy. The excusniks claim Nirvana will arrive. I doubt it. Go do your homework on power grids and grid forming and grid following generation. Then tell me how during the Dunkelfluate days the power is going to be there, at the flick of a switch? I would love to know because as far as I am concerned the idea of cheap renewables is fiction.
      The sad fact is that Academia has been taken over by greed and egos. When I was at University we had standards. Those standards have been watered down to such an extent that is hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. But, I guess that if the alternative option is unemployment then massaging of the data and the conclusions being adjusted to fit the narrative it is okay.
      Do you ever see papers by Happer, Lindzen, Curry and others in the pal reviewed journals. No – I wonder why. They are n stupid unlike the pal reviewers who have prostituted their trade. These , and manyothers, uphold their standards. No hockey sticks involved.
      In the past I peer reviewed work at the IEA. When I objected to some of the conclusions I was quickly dropped. Here is a well written piece from the Spectator. You can download the pdf.
      https://canadahealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Science-fiction-the-crisis-in-research-The-Spectator.pdf

      1. Carnot,

        You’ve convinced me that peer review has no merit. It was the fact that you were a peer reviewer that cinched it.

        Just kidding. Have a good day brother. Stay cool.

      2. I wonder what Carnot thinks would be a better method to assure quality than peer review. Perhaps, based on the other insights noted a policial test would be preferred.
        I spent over thirty years working with physicists and other scientists in industry and with regulatory scientists and engineers from the federal government. The notion that any large number of PhDs are prostituting their academic credentials to be “pals” with other academics or to “secure academic grants” beggars belief. Most of these guys I have met would go to the ends of the Earth to show that their best friend was wrong on a competitive topic. Reputations, accolades, promotions and money flow to those who demonstrate something new, especially if it would upset the current paradigm.
        But I do believe that in the fossil fuel industry that paycheck prostitution has become the norm. We know that scientists at ExxonMobil were predicting temperature rise due to CO2 emissions while the company was publically disparaging similar data from others. There are at least two outstanding court cases on the subject
        While not a climate scientist myself I choose to look for the most reliable sources of information on the subject. I am certainly not going to individuals who align themselves with information brothels like the the Hearland Institute, people like Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry and William Happer.

      3. The so-called Canada Health Alliance is an anti-vax and climate denier group.

  2. The article that George posted last week by Williams Rees is worth re-emphasizing, and reading through as many times as it takes to digest.
    I’m sure you might not like some of the particular points, unless you are simply into doom-porn.
    The reality of this big picture is not to be ignored, unless denial is your technique.

    Pick a quote- here is one
    “The abundance generated by fossil fuels enabled H. sapiens, for the first time, to experience a one-off global population boom−bust cycle (Figure 1)….As Clugston argues, by choosing to industrialize, Homo sapiens unwittingly made a commitment to impermanence. No repetition is possible.”

    https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32

    1. Here is another quote which goes over a lot of peoples heads in this site:

      There is more than a touch of irony lurking behind these biophysical realities. Economists and techno-optimists hallucinate that the economy is ‘dematerializing’ or further ‘decoupling’ from the material world on such simplistic grounds that the ratio of carbon emissions or resource use per unit GDP is declining [24]. The above data illuminate the contrary fact that, in terms of what really matters to nature—the expanding human ecological niche—humans are actually becoming an ever greater and more destructive integral component of the ecosphere [25]. Indeed, the human enterprise is effectively subsuming the ecosphere.
      Nevertheless, the bizarrely nonsensical myth of decoupling persists. Politicians lean on technology—efficiency and ‘dematerialization’—to argue that there is no inherent conflict between the continued growth of the economy and ‘the environment.’ They speak from naïveté or ignorance, but this assertion encourages the all-too-willing public to share in one of the most toxic of humanity’s panoply of illusions.

      He makes a bold prediction that population will collapse this century. I hope i am alive to see it.

      1. You want to watch, and experience a human population collapse? Isn’t there enough disintegration and misery to behold currently?

        1. I would want to see how the whole thing comes crumbling down, similar to why humans gather and watch when a building is being imploded.

          1. Agreed. It’s happening anyway.
            Might as well check it out; help out some kin.
            What a time to be alive!

            1. Exactly. Unique time to be alive. But one has to wonder when exactly the whole thing will start to crumble. Population is still growing by 80 million a year.

            2. I agree. If I have to rot in a hole like everyone else, I want to see the big bang before I croak.

            3. If the earth’s energy imbalance keeps accelerating like it has done the last ten years then I don’t think we’ll have long to wait. I think only changes in albedo can explain how fast this has changed and the step change in warming this year is consistent with the EEI changes (which by the latest Leon Simon twitter are actually getting worse). There was a research project, Earthshine, specifically set up to study albedo changes but it got shut down in 2021 (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021GL094888). In it’s last report it did show steadily declining albedo that must have got worse since because of sea ice loss, changes to marine fuels etc.

              And before that tedious prat says anything this was all started by GHG emissions.

          2. Just about everyone likes to watch things crumble, or take part in it.
            But I point out that waves of chaos are unpredictable, and the very ground upon which you stand (or civil streets upon which you drive to the market) could suddenly dissolve.
            Your sense of resilience and stability could disappear in a moment, no matter what planning or strength you have under your belt at this moment.
            Sure, that can happen any day in this world but it will be much more likely under the circumstances that we discuss and which are primed to come.
            I do not savor the prospect.

            1. “Your sense of resilience and stability could disappear in a moment.”

              We’re utterly dependent on the Medicare system in my household. As soon as the crash starts, we’re done.

            2. What’s the alternative?

              I’d rather be sticking around and helping out the kin, well some of them anyway lol, than topping off early.

          3. I tend to agree that it wuld be so satisfying to be able to say “I told you so”. But the trouble is, I – and you – would not necessarily be neutral spectators of the chaos, but a victim. There is a savage pleasure to be gained from watching a car crash, but not quite so nice to be involved in a head-on.

      2. Decoupling does exist. There’s little doubt that in some respects economic activity is increasing FASTER than energy consumption in these PARTICULAR ASPECTS of the economy. But it is NOT reasonable, it is NOT justified by the facts, to say that decoupling is happening on a national or world wide basis, except maybe in a very few places.

        The first critical fact is that energy consumption on a world wide basis is still growing fast……… and it’s the total amount of energy, excepting renewables, that determines what happens climate wise.

        And the second critical fact is that we’re also using up Mother Natures one time gift of natural resources such as the many things from iron ore to aluminum to phosphate rock A to z that are essential to an industrial economy.

        Decoupling is just more propaganda, in nitty gritty terms, pushed by the various business as usual professions and industries.

        The only halfway nice thing I can say for economists who believe in it is that they mostly DO believe their own bullshit. That’s entirely understandable because hardly any of them ever took even ONE real course in the physical and life sciences.

    2. The dichotomy between the viewpoints here today is reflects a similar disconnect between two separarte articles in the local paper this morning.
      One article discussed the rising involvement of young people in protests against the general distruction of the ecosystem, the other the “outing” of violent and hate-filled rhetoric among young right wing activists. The outing is being done by fellow right-wing activists who are then outed!
      One of the articles mentioned that these right wing youngsters are a far cry from the Reagan Republicans, some of whom voted for measures that today would be welcomed by the most ardent environmentalists. That is highly unlikely today as any mention of environmental protection is anethma to ardent Republicans. So when I see posts by Romanov I assume that he aligns with a far-right political agenda based solely on his environmental assertions, fair or not.
      One must wonder at what underlying value structure encourages an individual to seek out clearly marginal “documentation” to support a view that is so radically distant from the mainstream of science and, by 2023, at least as distant from common sense. Is it an alignment with a worldview that insists that mankind is destined to an infinite prosperity only if we leave our wellbeing in the hands of the god given capitalist marketplace or just plain orneriness?

      1. I find it hard to believe that Romanov is anything other than a skillful right wing troll………. until I remember that I know a LOT of true believers in various causes or organizations, such as the members of the local church where half my local kin have been or will be buried.

        But bottom line , it’s like they say about the Civil War.

        If you know only a little bit about it, it’s all about slavery.

        If you know a LOT about it, you know that there were some other serious issues in play.

        If you know everything about it, it’s all about slavery.

        Bottom line, Romanov is a troll……. a far better one that most, but still just a troll.

          1. Trump…the biggest shitposter.
            I heard that 70% of republicans replied that they trust trump more than their family and friends. Desperate for authoritarianism, and very bad at picking friends and family (and media).

            1. I’m rather hopeful that a fair number of more or less conservative and hard core conservative people known to me are going to sit out the next election…… with a few of them even voting blue.
              The trump signs, rebel flags and such are noticeably less common around here now than in the last couple of years. The people who were talking trump up are talking a lot less.
              The steady drip of news about trump and his crony R friends is gradually wearing away some of the stone of these people’s convictions, at least among the ones of average intelligence.

              I’m not complacent by any means, and it distresses the hell out of me to know that half the voters in this country don’t know hardly anything at all about basic issues…….. but the economy is humming, and maybe by some stroke of luck it will hold up ok until the election.

        2. Nice analogy about the Civil War. Recently I heard that in Florida schools they are describing the War as the result of a labor dispute.
          I agree that Romanov is trolling but as such he seems more sincere than the usual type and that makes me curious about what drives that belief system even though I understand that you don’t change the mind’s of true believers with rational argument.

          1. One goal of a troll is to interrupt serious discussion on a topic. It’s better to just ignore them.

          2. That’s not difficult to imagine : the fear of changing his way of life. In France, the RN (the local extreme-right) have decided to admit the existence of climate warming and the responsability of Humanity in it. But, they refuse to change anything to the way of life of French people and they consider the statements coming from the GIEC as greatly exagered. By the way, as they are from extreme-right, they invent statements from GIEC.

        3. In stead of name calling, show us how smart your are and present irrefutable scientific evidence that he is wrong. For someone as smart as you that should be easy.

          1. ERVIN:
            Was that directed to me?
            I don’t think I “name called” anyone. I used “troll” as a verb.
            As far as incontrovertble evidence is concerned, and I assume you are talking about climate change, it’s there. If you chose to decide on scientific subjects based on political talking points or a minisculeminority, both largely funded by fossil fuel money, that problem really is not mine to cure.

    3. I personally don’t believe that it’s impossible for another industrial civilization to rise after the population crashes due to overshoot, which will probably happen well before the end of this century.

      There will still be plenty of mineral resources in the ground in many places, trees will grow back, rivers will eventually have fish in them again. There will be tens of millions of tons of easily salvaged metals, already processed into end use goods. There will be millions of text books and some well educated people will survive and establish new colleges and universities, even if they have only a few dozen students and old books and very limited equipment.

      Of course it will never be like it is now, but various people have pulled together in past times and done amazing things, such as create empires.

      Consider the MOONIES. They mostly work their tails off for nothing, really…… thereby providing a steady stream of megabucks to the people running the show. A leader capable of inspiring or hoodwinking people that way could use his loot to put together teams of engineers, or at least skilled workers, and given time, could get any of at least a couple of dozen industries up and running at a small scale…… but big enough to eventually grow.

      Auto and truck technologies from that era worked just fine……. and in a brave new world with only a few million people, nobody would be much worried about engine emissions, lol.

      Most of what makes the world go around, in a manner of speaking, can be down loaded into hard drives that will fit into one small office………. maybe into one filing cabinet.

      It would be impossible to build a brand new chip fabrication plant, but we had a thriving industrial civilization prior to WWII……… which is about the time computers were first used for serious work.

      1. Can some regions avoid chaotic slaughter and/or de facto slavery when things run short?

        If history is any guide, I fear the human mob more than any other factor.

        1. Hi Hickory,

          It’s certainly possible that things will get to the point that there won’t be any functional government anywhere at all, other than what is established by local warlords or religious or tribal leaders and so forth.

          But I personally think that organized government will continue to be a thing, at least in today’s relatively prosperous and more or less free western countries, and no matter how bad it gets………. If there are any people left IN a place such as Afghanistan, they will continue to have a government pretty much like the one they have now.

          Leviathans, nation states, are quite capable of looking after themselves, when the chips are all on the table. They lose wars, and sometimes there’s a revolution and all the old top dogs wind up hung or beheaded or shot, but the country usually continues to exist, barring losing a war and being occupied permanently, until the people who remember losing are dead and forgotten.

          Large areas of many countries will very likely turn out along the lines of Haiti or Somalia but the military, police and various powerful people will establish enclaves to protect themselves.

          They may be impoverished , WILL be, by today’s standards, but they will have power enough to protect themselves and control the REALLY basic stuff such as the food supply. Even a billionaire can live on potatoes, onions, beans and maybe a chicken leg once in a while, if he has no choice.

          The people outside these enclaves won’t be any better armed, and won’t be even a tenth as well organized……. which is not to say one such enclave might not capture or merge with another.

          The ONE thing people on the inside of such communities are NOT going to run out of ONE particular thing for a very long time…… weapons and ammo.

          You and I may live to see some interesting times.

          I’ve been saying for a long time now that we will be seeing migrant people shot wholesale at national borders once things get really tough.

          It’s already happening, but it’s not yet making the headlines.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACCIp-ZJ93M

      2. IMHO the post-industrial economy will principally be a salvage economy.

        1. And the quality/value of the salvage material will decline over time as with any other of our non-renewable resources.

        2. You’re right, it will be a salvage economy for quite some time, anywhere from a decade to a century or longer, depending on the place and the survivors.
          But industries can be reestablished a little at a time.

          I grew up on a small family farm at the VERY tail end of the animal and hand labor era. We were mechanized, for the most part, even when I was a little kid, but we still had a horse and mule or two in the family, and used them for a few jobs a few days a year, as much for old times sake as any other reason.

          My great grand parents farmed and produced enough basic food , such as potatoes, beens, and apples, for themselves and enough to support a considerable number of other people, probably at least four or five each per farm family in this neighborhood.

          And they did it by hand with less than a ton of steel and iron tools per man.

          Life will continue.

          Somebody will eventually clean out the trees growing in the ditch one of my great grandparents dug by hand to divert a stream a quarter of a mile to the spot they built a water powered mill to grind grain. The entire mill was done by hand, no power tools, and all local materials were used, excepting the necessary iron and steel hardware. Some of that was made locally, by blacksmiths, but there wasn’t any steel industry nearby, so even back then, local people were depending on foundries over a hundreds miles away for steel tools or steel to make tools.

          1. On the bright side, with 400+ nuclear reactors currently running, there will be no shortage of “glow in the dark” matters to keep some sort of light on in the nights. You might also get some residual heat from the left-overs as a bonus. Happy days!

            1. I know a little about commercial reactors, having worked a bunch of short term jobs in nukes…… something a lot of people do, especially ones like me, leading a rolling stone jack of all trades lifestyle.

              I talked to the engineers, and read up a lot on these things. They can and do occasionally melt down, with catastrophic consequences for nearby people, and even people hundreds of miles away.

              Four hundred sounds like a hell of a lot, but that’s not very many considering the size of the Earth, and most of them will probably be shut down more or less safely, at least in terms of a catastrophic short term radiation problem.

              One left with fuel in it, for centuries, will eventually start leaking contaminated water that finds its way inside, and depending on the amount of flow in the nearest stream or river, this could be a really bad problem LOCALLY.

              But the world will continue on more or less the way it is, in terms of radiation from power plants, in the vast majority of places.

              Don’t forget that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a defacto wild life refuge. Some of the animals are maybe a little unusual, but they’re not dying off by any means.
              There’s a thriving population of many many species.

            2. Chernobyl was actually first (officially) recorded in the west by sensors in Sweden that reacted to elevated geiger readings. What I´m most concerned of though is the radioactive waste from the reactors, it´s quite active for a long, long, long time and if/when no-one looks after it, bad things will happen…
              But hey, electricity is so damn expensive now,…/s
              Btw, Uranium mining is not a clean business either.

            3. I guess that is one way to get humans to leave a place for wildlife.

            4. I spent the first eight years of my engineering career working for a reactor design company, General Atomic. I left in 1979, right after Three Mile Island, having completely lost faith in the technology for a number of reasons. Just to name a few:
              If I remember correctly virtually all of the existing reactors are based on a fuel cycle that generates Plutonium and Plutonium can easily be chemically separated from the waste products. That means that it can relativelly easily become weaponized. A popular word today. Even the recently touted Thorium cycle breeds a “useful” and highly radioactive amount of fissile material (U233, I think).
              One of the ongoing dangers from situations like Chernobyl is the certainty of radiation damage causing unknown mutation of species, especially species with high reproduction rates like insects.
              When I think about the possible dangers of nuclear plants I am reminded of a real near-accident that happened at a now defunct plant at Ft. St. Vrain in Colorado. A careless engineer short circuited a control rod wire and scrammed the reactor. Just previously a not-so-bright maintenance tech painted the exhaust manifolds on an emergency generator which a not-so-bright archetect had located below the air intake vent to the reactor control room. When the reactor shut down the generator started, the painted manifold sent smoke into the control room, all of the locally hired and trained technicians ran for their lives leaving the reactor unmanned. Fortunately GA staff were there to safely shut the plant down. So there are more dangers with nuclear plants than just a messy neighborhood and those dangers will last for many hundreds of years. Humans just aren’t smart enough to handle a technology so dangerous that requires extraordinary skill from an entraordinary number of individuals over an extraordinary period of time.

    4. Jesus Christ, what a line from Rees’s paper:

      [B]y choosing to industrialize, Homo sapiens unwittingly made a commitment to impermanence . . .

      1. None of us would have existed if that “choice” wasn’t made

        1. ANDRE:
          “None” is a big number in this case.
          No doubt the population would be a lot smaller.

  3. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15082023/central-texas-dry-wells-water-shortage/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=e3c5e4789c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_19_01_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-e3c5e4789c-328831714

    I’m increasingly at a loss for words to describe how I feel when reading, oh, just about everything these days. Here’s what’s happening in my neck of the woods. I paid $375 for 2k gallons of water for one of my rentals. Last year it was $250. More and more The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) looks like today. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend that you do.

    1. I was talking about this with my wife…what would be outcomes of all this that would be good-
      Keeping republicans out of the whitehouse would be great.
      Teaching the country at large that breaking the law or blindly following orders is going to have consequences, even if you are following a tyrant, a bully, a general, or an orange fool.
      Fabrication of false reality is not simply going to be swallowed by the country.
      Facts matter.
      Party is not more important than country (the common good).
      Republicans are extremely vulnerable to mental manipulation. You can buy them for promise of penny.
      (ok…democrats too).
      Democratic officials have flipped the table and now have the reigns as the Law and Order party….yes we think there should a mug shot at the Fulton County Jail.

      1. I’d like to see Democrats learn why they have lost so much of the working class and found themselves vulnurable to being charged as in league with some mysterious “elite”. Trump has benefitted from that loss, not caused it. There are plenty of Desantis, MTG, Cruz, Hawly types on the bench to pick up the mantle.

        1. I seem to recall that the working class left the Democrats. In the 80’s a Democrat couldn’t get elected as Dog Catcher, so Clinton took the party on a turn to the right, and they then enjoyed more success at the polls.

          1. I think it’s more complex than that.
            Clinton won the White House in1992 after 12 years of Republican Reagan-Bush administrations. That represented a turn to the left. At that point the House had been under control of Democrats for 40 years. The Senate, too, had been under Democratic control for 40 years except for 1981-87, the first six years of the Reagan presidency. Clinton didn’t turn to the right until after the 1994 loss of both houses to Republicans. He did so to be able to get anything through Congress and those Republicans were nothing like the radicals there today. In terms of policy it would seem that the most significant changes have been primarily in cultural issues where Democrats have been attempting to extend civil rights to more Americans and Republicans have exploited those well meaning efforts with bigotry and hate speech to convince Trump’s favorite voters “the poorly edicated” that extending rights to marginalized citizens and extending sympathy to desperate people at our borders somehow was stealing from working class white Americans. Meanwhile economic policy for both parties has remained the same. Republican continue to fight for the econimic interests of the wealthiest residents and the Democrats continue efforts to “share the wealth”.
            So in my view the Democrats big problem is threefold. First they have done a really lousy job of selling their accomplishments for working people, typically by the constant blather about the “middle class” instead of talking about “working people” probably because they depend on the support of the educated middle class. Second they face a powerful coalition of super-wealthy donors, religious extremists, and bigots. Those exploiting this coalition have demonstrated an utter disregard for the truth or even common decency while encouraging the worst instincts of their coalition. Finally, Democratic leaders can certainly be blamed for complacency and self-righteousness the worst example of which must be Hillary Clinton’s comment about half of Trump’s supporters being a “basket of deplorables”.

            1. You are dead on about the D’s talking middle class all the time, rather than working class.

              The D’s running the show KNOW they OWN the various votes of gays, lesbians, and just about everybody else who is out of the middle of the mainstream, in terms of their lifestyles.

              I’m totally for supporting these various people, but so much emphasis on their problems means LESS emphasis on working class people who outnumber them twenty to one.

              They need to talk less about climate and MORE about the future cost of living being MUCH LOWER as we switch over to renewable energy, due to depletion of oil and gas.

              They need to talk about how many jobs there are building wind and solar farms, and new long distance transmission lines, etc, compared to the number of jobs being lost in the coal industry.

            2. We certainly agree on the incompetent salesmanship of Democrats. But it takes a real full court press to overcome the right wing megaphone.
              And, let’s face it. Ole Joe may have his heart in the right place and the skills to get his plans through a reasonable Congress but he does no provide the aura of a great leader.

          1. What a wonderful world you live in, your so very lucky to know in your heart that every word you hear and read from the MSM is nothing but the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACCIp-ZJ93M.

    I mentioned this upthread in a reply but it’s worth posting twice, in case some of us don’t go over older comments.

    This is going to be the new normal within another twenty years or so as people find they have no choice except to perish in place or migrate…….. and the people behind the border fence are already dealing with catastrophic domestic problems. Broke, illiterate, unskilled immigrants who can’t even speak the language or simply not going to be allowed into countries already experiencing desperate times domestically.

    1. You are right, but how do you bypass the NGOs, like in the video, that exist to idealize unimpeded immigration?

      1. “Idealize”?
        I think most people know that the world-wide immigration situation is Sophie’s Choice. How do you stand by and watch the misery of innocent people, mostly women and children, caused by forces beyond their control, without compassion and yet realize that at some point you cannot solve all the problems in the world by accepting an unlimited number of refugees?
        Americans live in a country that is now primarily populated by the descendents of immigrants. Isn’t this part of our roots:
        …”Give me your tired, your poor,
        Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
        The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
        Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
        I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”?
        The discussion should be around how to balance the need to succor the huddled masses and work with them and those they left behind to create a livable world in the places they have fled, not demonizing others whose sympathies and fears have found a different balance.

        1. I think most people know that the world-wide immigration situation is Sophie’s Choice.

          Exactly! Our heart goes out to those poor people. All they want is a better life. Just a little better than the horrible day-to-day existence they have now, not knowing if they will find food to survive another day. But still… they stream from those countries like Venezuela, Honduras, and San Salvidor, where day-to-day life is so unbelievably horrible.

          But neither we nor any other country can accept unlimited immigration. What to do? It’s not my choice, and I have no input into the matter. And I am damn glad that I don’t. Because if I did, I would have no idea what to do.

  10. Here is a good example of so called new technology that is going to solve the waste plastic problem.

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Recycling-Breakthrough-Makes-Plastic-Waste-A-High-Value-Commodity.html

    Once again a University makes a breakthrough – Yeah right and Brian fell for the hype- as usual.

    Brian Westenhaus – Brian is the editor of the popular energy technology site New Energy and Fuel. The site’s mission is to inform, stimulate, amuse and abuse the news and views across the emerging field of energy and fuels in our future.

    That’s all right then. Welcome to the circular economy. This is a load of horse dookey. I have spent the last 5 years looking at pyrolysis oils and there is nothing simple about them. Recycling polymers is challenging. Pyrolysis oils are less than ideal feedstocks and the idea that you can simply take these materials and put them into a hydroformylation process is wishful thinking. The higher alcochol yield will be small, and higher alcohols do not cost $6k per tonne. – not even close. Moreover back cracking to olefines is plain dumb.

    Once a week I come across a so called breakthough that is not worth the paper it is written upon; not even to to wipe your arse. This is a classic case and the flaws in the paper are so bad it is not worth reading. By the way, steam cracking remains the most effective means ofolefines production, using virgin feedstocks or pyrolysis oil. It is done at high temperature and LOW pressure, not high pressure which is in the puff piece.

    I post this to illustrate the dire state of of academia. See my earlier post today. Our universities are a disgrace to science and the so called peer review should be called a PAL review, Climate crisis? I don’t think so. Population outstripping the global carrying capacity more like it. The 4 horsemen beckon.

    1. The article is by Hasan Chowdhury, and its title is “Humanity is on the brink of major scientific breakthroughs, but nobody seems to care.”

      Chowdhury’s article points out that recent news stories about the latest heavily promoted claims of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research, and the much-hyped announcement by two South Korean researchers that a room-temperature superconductor had been discovered, didn’t get the response the media expected. By and large, people yawned. To Chowdhury, this is appalling, and he argues that two factors are responsible. The first is that people in the hard sciences need to be better at publicity. The second is that too many people out there suffer from an irrational fear of progress, and simply need to be convinced that the latest gosh-wow technologies will surely benefit them sometime very soon.

      Yeah, that was when I started laughing too.

      Let’s start by talking about the two supposed breakthroughs Chowdhury talks about. The first is the claim that yet another team of fusion researchers has achieved net energy gain—the point at which the energy coming out of a fusion reaction is more than the energy put into it. This was first achieved in 2014, and a handful of other research teams have managed it in the years since then. Is it a step in the direction of commercial fusion power? Sure, in exactly the same sense that bouncing high on a trampoline is a step in the direction of landing on the moon.

      The net energy gain in question, to begin with, is only a gain if you compare the output of the laser beams used to kindle the fusion reaction with the energy released by the reaction itself. It takes far more energy to fire up those lasers than you get out the business end, and so far fusion reactions have not even achieved the energy output they need to power their own lasers. And the other energy inputs needed to build, run, and maintain an experimental fusion reactor? Those aren’t included in the net energy figures either.

      Nor, of course, does any of this affect the astonishingly dismal economics of fusion power. The reason that commercial fission, the other kind of nuclear power, is dead in the water these days is not that it doesn’t work—it’s that it’s so expensive that nuclear reactors can’t pay for themselves without gargantuan ongoing government subsidies. Fusion reactors are several orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than fission reactors. This means that even if some future fusion reactor can get positive net energy compared to all its energy inputs, it’s still an expensive stunt, not a source of grid electricity that any country anywhere in the world can afford. Of course Chowdhury doesn’t mention this; nobody pushing fusion hype ever breathes a word about the economics of what promises to be, even if it works someday, the world’s most hopelessly unaffordable power source.

      The second breakthrough Chowdhury wants us to get excited about is the claim that a room temperature superconductor has been invented. A superconductor, for those of my readers who went to American public schools and therefore got no scientific education worth mentioning, is a material that conducts electricity with effectively no resistance. Existing superconductors have to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero and subjected to various other complex conditions, which limit their usefulness. (Superconductors are heavily used in experimental fusion reactors, for example. Is the energy needed to cool them to working temperatures factored into those net energy figures? Surely you jest.)

      So why hasn’t this announcement been met with gladsome cries? Because for decades now the media has been full of exciting new scientific breakthroughs that turned out to be bogus. We’re constantly being told that this or that or the other wonderful technological revolution is about to happen. It’s the follow-through that deserves attention here, because the vast majority of these announcements are pure hype, meant to separate fools from their investment money in the time-honored fashion. As it turns out, the room temperature superconductor seems to be another example of this kind; repeated attempts by other labs to get the same results have failed, and so it’s pretty clear that the research team that made that claim was either mistaken or lying.

      The fact that scientists, politicians, and the media still pretend that commercial fusion power is possible is thus an important factor in the collapse of public confidence in expert opinion of all kinds. The narrative that scientists, politicians, and the media are pushing—“fusion researchers are closing in rapidly on a wonderful new power source for everyone”—has drifted much too far away from the narrative that the facts are telling—“fusion researchers are spinning their wheels uselessly, but they don’t want to admit it since their income depends on claiming otherwise”—and more and more people are coming to believe the second narrative.

      Hasan Chowdhury also has his equivalents in this field. I’m thinking here especially of a recent article by Rebecca Solnit titled “We can’t afford to be climate doomers,” which you can read here. She insists that it’s wrong for people to assume that nothing can be done about climate change—why, if we all clap our hands in unison and believe, surely Tinkerbell can be saved! Solnit is incensed that “the comfortable in the global north”—that is to say, the privileged classes to which she herself belongs—are increasingly discouraged about climate change. She insists that all we have to do is embrace the same remedies she and her fellow activists have been pushing all along: political action, allegedly green technologies, and the demonization of fossil fuel companies. The difficulty, of course, is that those supposed remedies have not just failed to achieve their goals, they’ve failed to have any effect on climate at all.

      .

      Every society depends for social cohesion on the widespread acceptance of a shared narrative about authority. In the European Middle Ages, the narrative held that kings were anointed by God to do the work of leading God’s people, and that divine sanction cascaded down the feudal hierarchy through dukes and barons and knights and peasants all the way to the swineherd leading his pigs. Everyone knew that plenty of kings, and for that matter plenty of swineherds, didn’t live up to the image the narrative assigned them. As long as the narrative remained in place, even the political radicals of the time thought in terms of getting each person to fill their assigned roles, rather than tearing down the feudal structure itself.
      “Yes, he’s a complete dunderhead, but God has set him over us!”

      The medieval narrative was durable precisely because it wasn’t vulnerable to objective disproof. If the king was a brute or a nitwit, as of course he was tolerably often, that just showed that God was irate and had sent the people a bad ruler as punishment for their sins. The early Protestant-capitalist narrative that replaced it was equally immune to disproof. God (or his faux-secular equivalent, the almighty market) had assigned the rich their riches and the poor their poverty as a sign that the former were pleasing in his sight and the latter were not, and the remarkably arbitrary nature of divine favor was hardwired into Protestant ideology from the early days of the Reformation onward.

      But the Protestant-capitalist narrative gave way in the wake of the Great Depression to a new narrative of expertise. According to that new narrative, bureaucratic and corporate meritocracies had received the secular equivalent of divine favor because they were the smart kids in the room. Their university degrees and their successful ascent of organizational hierarchies proved that they were better suited to run the world than anyone else, and they were expected to demonstrate that in practice by pursuing policies that worked.

      At first, that wasn’t much of a problem, because the kleptocratic investment class that ran the country before the Depression had made such a mess of things that almost anything would have been an improvement. Later on it became more difficult, when real world problems—cough, cough, Vietnam, the War on Poverty, etc.—turned out to be much more recalcitrant than anyone in the managerial class thought. There was a trap hidden within their rhetoric, however, and it turned out to be a trap from which they could not escape.

      Central to the core narrative of the entire industrial world during the managerial era was the insistence that sometime soon everything would change. The world we all knew would be replaced by something else—by a shiny Utopian Tomorrowland, if we all gave the experts everything they wanted, and by a smoking postapocalyptic wasteland if we didn’t. That was the message that scientists, politicians, and the media rehashed endlessly: tomorrow may be wonderful or it may be terrible, but it will not be the same as today.

      The fact of the matter is that both the promise and the threat turned out to be bogus. As Peter Thiel famously said, we were promised flying cars, and what we got instead was 140 characters and an easy way to circulate cat pictures around the world. Chowdhury himself, in the article cited above, quoted a venture capitalist complaining that no matter how wonderful and exciting and cutting-edge the imaginary world of computer imagery looks, as soon as you return to everyday life things change utterly: “The minute you get into a car, the minute you plug something into a wall, the minute you eat food, you’re still living in the 1950s.”

      Except, of course, you’re not—not unless you’re a wealthy venture capitalist, or for that matter a comfortable media flack, and in either case you can afford to ignore the explosive crapification of modern life. In the 1950s an ordinary unskilled laborer could count on earning enough money to stay fed, clothed, housed, and supplied with the other necessities of life. In the 2020s even skilled workers have to struggle to do these things. Compared to that unchanging reality, all those promises of a shiny new future about to dawn any day now look like vicious jokes. Even the thought of a sudden apocalyptic end to the system has begun to lose its appeal—and yes, it has considerable appeal to those who have been assigned the short end of the stick by the current system. The apocalypse has pulled so many no-shows at this point that the disaffected are no longer counting on it to free them from the dead weight of an unbearable situation.

      What we see around us is a society caught in the throes of futurus interruptus, denied both the orgasmic release of the Tomorrowland future and the even juicier equivalent of its apocalyptic twin, waiting in increasing frustration for a fulfillment that’s endlessly promised but never arrives. That’s the time bomb ticking away at the heart of the system. Chowdhury, Solnit, and their many equivalents in today’s media are right to be terrified at the increasingly widespread refusal to put any more faith in the same tripe that’s been shoveled forth by their equivalents since the managerial aristocracy seized power not quite a century ago. Once the central narrative breaks down, after all, the end of the existing order of society is a foregone conclusion.

      That end need not involve vast amounts of bloodshed. Wars of independence tend to be hard-fought, but domestic revolutions very often involve only token violence. What happens instead—in France in 1789, in Russia in 1991, and in many other cases—is that a system that has been hollowed out by a string of cascading failures runs into one more crisis than it can tolerate, and implodes under the weight of its own absurdities. We are much closer to such scenes in North America and Western Europe right now than I think most people realize. Every belly laugh called forth by the drivel that Chowdhury and Solnit expect us to believe brings us closer still.

      1. “.. but domestic revolutions very often involve only token violence”
        Just a reminder: we had a civli war here a while back and more people were killed during that war than in the total of all the other wars the US fought over it’s 250 plus years. Perhaps 10 million died in the Russian civil war of 1917-20. The Chinese civil war, probably closer to 20 million casualties.
        Civil wars are not to be discounted.

      2. A nice rant, I remember, decades ago, reading some magazine article talking about revolutionary technologies that we would be seeing soon in our homes and lives.

        The ones that stuck with me was the idea of the magnetism powered refrigerator, which would soon be in all our kitchens.

        Seeing your post, I decided to see how things were going on that front and my first three hits were as follows:

        “Magnet powered refrigerator created” (CBC, 2002)
        “Magnetic fridge cuts electricity bill in half” (Science Nordic, 2012)
        “Camfridge hits net zero magnet-powered fridge milestone” (Cambridge Independent, 2022)

        Plus ca change, and all that. It reminds me of the start of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, when a character encounters an elevator with no elevator car (you just float up or down as needed), and notes how new technologies exist, but no longer get widely deployed or adopted, and this is taken as a sign of the impending decline of the galactic empire

  11. Two or three years ago I was rather pessimistic about the electric bicycle industry, knowing full well that the cheap ones were junk, and that the good ones were DAMNED expensive, considering the amount of material and labor involved in building them.

    Come on now, four thousand bucks for a hundred pounds or less of bicycle…….. with the only seriously expensive part being the battery, lol.

    But prices have come down MUCH faster than I expected, and now in just about any fair sized city you can actually go to a dealership with a brand name you know and buy an electric bike, with the reasonable expectation that it will last and that parts will be available as needed, etc. And you can get it two or three than four using today’s money that’s worth less.

    Sometime in the not very far off future, I expect to see the industry come up with some standardized specifications, so that you can use competing spare parts, in so called plug and play fashion.

    Then you will be able to buy a battery that will fit your bike and just plug up the cables and go from AHEM, auto parts stores?

    Then the axle bolts and so forth that attach hub motors can be standardized, as is the case today with electric motors used in machinery. You have your choice of a dozen different manufacturers for almost any industrial electric motor…. and every large city has a warehouse or two or three with a few thousand motors in stock for immediate or overnight delivery.

    I’m guessing we will see this scenario come to pass within five to ten years. By then electric bikes are going to be as common as ants at a picnic.

    1. And if you ride one it will knock your socks off just how useful of a tool they are. For distance travel, for handling hilly terrain far beyond your normal capability, or hauling cargo.
      Its dramatic. Like the assistance you get when you use an electric drill, a nail gun or a chain saw compared to their hand-powered versions.

      1. And they are a great equalizer. One of my buddies is an obsessive cycling nut avid cyclist. There is no possibility of us enjoying cycling together if we were both on acoustic bikes, but with him pulling his own weight, and me on a cheater, we can ride together comfortably.

        One of the sights that I really enjoy seeing now is a fully Spandexed middle age cyclist intently riding at full steam on his $10k carbon fiber ride, and behind him a bit is his built-for-comfort-not-speed wife on an e-bike, having no trouble keeping the pace comfortably, and smiling broadly that she can now ride with her husband. And so long as they are pedal assist and not throttle driven, they do get you fit. You have to maintain the cadence.

        1. “You have to maintain the cadence.”
          Mine is torque assist rather than throttle or cadence, meaning that you get power from the motor in proportion to the effort you exert. More effort gets you more assist. Little effort gets you very little assist.
          I chose that kind of system purposefully.

        2. “You have to maintain the cadence.”

          True enough but, in my case, no.

          I have a narrow (designed to fit through a standard door) delta recumbent trike for a fishing buggy and recently fitted it with a powered front wheel.

          Bloody marvelous.

          I drive it on the throttle but, depending on what gear I select on the nine-speed derailleur I can exert as little (or as much) effort as I please.

          Cheers to all, been offline for some time.

      2. They really are an example of electric motor power working well with a vehicle that is already very efficient as opposed to trying to replicate a 12 gallon gas tank in a vehicle competing for 80 mph highway speeds on big wide tires. When I was young I thought nothing of getting on my bike to meet people places a few miles away as I got there before they did by bus and few of us had cars.
        Still, personal auto transportation is going to have to cost a lot more before bicycles are viable transportation in suburban areas in the US. I think we’re a couple decades away from that reality. In 2008-9 I didn’t see bike traffic increase much when prices spiked. I think it’ll take many years with a clear declining number of vehicles for people to feel safe on the roads with cars.

    2. OFM, I’m 20 yrs behind the times on bike tech having raced and owned a bike shop 40 yrs ago. I added a middrive motor to my favorite all purpose bike and use it instead of a noisy side by side for chores and getting around here in rural Tennessee. Unfortunately bike industry in the US is oriented towards recreational use with bling driving a lot of design since utility/transportation use cycling is too hazardous for most folks.. For the money I could have got a Honda Trail 125. The good stuff still costs a lot. Esp the fine internal gear hubs made in Germany and Sweden. Pinion is making a gearbox/motor unit that looks sharp but it’ll be in bikes for $5k+ . Mid drives are where it’s at for hilly high torque applications but rear derailleur/gear transmissions aren’t up to the task for terrain w high grass and debris.
      I’ve been following the peak oil issue since OilDrum days which coincided with my dad’s last years. He was a petroleum reservoir engineer out of CalTech and worked for Aramco around ‘49-50.

      1. Hi LEEG,
        I’m thinking that times are changing so that that people by the millions will be riding bikes in my country within another decade or so, simply because they won’t be able to afford cars anymore.

        The politicians will get on board with bike lanes, that’s happening already. People who continue to drive either don’t give a hoot about bike lanes, or else they understand that more bikes make things easier for them during rush hours.

        And the kind of gear you’re talking about will get to be substantially cheaper as the market for it grows.

        You can get back your entire investment in an electric bike for commuting within a year, sometimes within a few months, by avoiding the cost of owning a car.

  12. Good recap on our global resource situation:
    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/exponential-growth-forever-and-beyond?subscribe_prompt=free
    “The issue is, that we need this exponential growth in order to prevent a rapid collapse in infrastructure. As the length of roads and bridges grow, so does the continued investment in their maintenance get bigger and bigger. Most of what we have today has been built in the last couple of decades, since the 1960s. Now this is becoming end-of-life and begs to be replaced. What used to be an added bonus to the economy six decades ago has become a huge liability. Most of it is beyond repair. The only way to prop this system up is to add newer and newer roads to it every year. A stop in material growth would equal certain decay and collapse. Literally.”

    Rgds
    WP

    1. There isn’t any such thing as a road that costs more to repair than it costs to build it from scratch, excepting very rare cases such as in the case of landslides or earth quakes, etc.

  13. Looking out my window at smoke filled sky I wonder: have we passed a wildfire Tipping Point?

    ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ CANADIAN WILDFIRES MADE WORSE BY CLIMATE CHANGE, SCIENTISTS FIND

    The weather behind Canada’s record-breaking fires, which have seen millions of hectares destroyed and tens of thousands evacuated from their homes, was made significantly worse by climate change, according to a rapid analysis by a leading team of climate scientists.

    “The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires in Canada this year,” paper co-author Dr Yan Boulanger from Natural Resources Canada said in a statement. “From a scientific perspective, the doubling of the previous burned area record is shocking.”

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-23/research-shows-warmer-climate-made-canada-fires-worse/102759834

    1. Meanwhile,

      GLOBAL OIL CONSUMPTION NEARS ALL-TIME HIGHS

      In June, the Energy Institute released the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy. This was formerly the BP Statistical Review, but BP has handed this off to the Energy Institute going forward. The Review provides a comprehensive picture of supply and demand for major energy sources on a country-level basis.

      For 2022, the Review reported 2022 global oil production (which includes lease condensate and NGLs) of 93.8 million barrels per day (bpd). This was about one million bpd short of the all-time high set in 2019, but this was 3.8 million bpd higher than 2021 production. Consumption was reported to be 97.3 million bpd. Total liquids consumption — which includes biofuels — was reported at 100.3 million bpd, once more just short of the 2019 record and 3.1 million bpd higher than in 2021.

      https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Global-Oil-Consumption-Nears-All-Time-Highs.html

        1. The UK is also sliding down to 1990 levels of electricity consumption, down from a peak in 2005. See attached. [peak cars sold was 2016]

          1. I wonder how that graph looks on a per-capita level and relative to inflation adjusted income. Does it mean that they are intentionally doing better as environmentalists or just getting poorer?

            1. Perhaps they added some insulation to their brick walls, and possibly even added an extra glass to their single pane leaky windows?

            2. “Does it mean that they are intentionally doing better as environmentalists or just getting poorer?”

              A very important question. When you look at wages, life expectancy, people disconnecting from electricity, or a number of other measures, it seems like for the most part they are just getting poorer. Certainly they are not getting any richer.

  14. Enshrouded in smoke it’s Business As Usual up here folks.

    CANADA’S OIL PRODUCTION SET FOR 8% RISE OVER TWO YEARS

    “Last year, Canadian oil production hit a record 4.86 million bpd, per data from the Canada Energy Regulator. Analysts now expect output to grow in 2023, 2024, and 2025 as companies are ramping up production at new and tie-back sites in Alberta’s oil sands. Despite the impact of wildfires in Alberta earlier this year, major oil and gas producers including Cenovus Energy and Canadian Natural Resources eye production growth for the rest of this year and in the near to medium term. Tie-backs to existing oil sands facilities or expansion of operational sites by some of the biggest Canadian oil firms are expected to boost Canada’s crude oil production by 8% by 2025.”

    https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Canadas-Oil-Production-Set-For-8-Rise-Over-Two-Years.html

    1. “Enshrouded in smoke it’s Business As Usual up here folks.”

      This eventuality has been written in big bold letters on the public wall for about 50 years.

      1. HICKORY —

        True, not really news but this is clearly another case of kicking can down the road.

        NEW NORTH SEA OIL AND GAS LICENCES WILL SEND ‘WRECKING BALL’ THROUGH CLIMATE COMMITMENTS

        “Saying that at least 100 new licences and possibly many more were expected to be awarded from the autumn, the press secretary argued this was “totally compatible” with the goal to achieve net zero by 2050, given fossil fuels would still be needed then, and domestic supplies required less transport.”

        https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/rishi-sunak-approval-100-new-north-sea-oil-and-gas-licences-fossil-fuel-climate-crisis

        And,

        NORWAY APPROVES MORE THAN $18 BILLION IN OIL, GAS INVESTMENTS

        “Norway’s government said it has given approval for oil companies to develop 19 oil and gas fields with investments exceeding 200 billion Norwegian crowns ($18.51 billion), part of the country’s strategy to extend production for decades to come.”

        https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/norway-approves-more-than-18-bln-oil-gas-investments-2023-06-28/

        1. What people need to get through their heads is, just like with the war on drugs, the focus on supply is misguided.

          Compare cigarettes and marijuana. Production of cigarettes is legal, and carried out by large well-organized corporations. The production of marijuana is illegal, and cracked down on by police and law enforcement. But production of marijuana continues to rise while production of cigarettes continues to decline.

          Why? Because how you treat supply is irrelevant. It is a big planet, people are resourceful and as long as there is demand for something, the supply will find a way. But if the demand goes away, the supply goes away automatically. If coal consumption goes down, you don’t need to fight the coal mines or the coal shipping or any other part of the coal supply process, it all just magically goes away as soon as there is no demand for coal.

          This is the biggest error of the environmental movement over the last few decades in my opinion, they are like the dogs in the movie ‘Up’. They see the big shiny object which is new fossil fuel supply and the companies that provide the supply and they point and say ‘Squirrel!’, I mean ‘Bad’. But the far more effective approach would be to mirror the success in fighting cigarettes and focus on reducing demand. Carbon taxes, better transit, walkable neighbourhoods, crackdowns on private jet travel, etc. Not that environmentalists don’t do this, but they waste so much time and energy fighting supply, for such a small gain, it is frustrating.

          1. Fuel taxes make a lot of economic sense as well. The standard narrative is that we could quit fossil fuel but economics trumps ecology, This is in that book The Ministry for the Future that EDGY was talking about, for example. But in reality, most fossil fuel consumption is just dumb and a waste of money and taxing it would improve the economy. So there is no dilemma, just stupidity.

            1. Of course there are two big flies in that particular ointment. The first is that fossil fuels, and oil in particular, is so profitable that the amount of money available to the producers is so enormous that their ability to use that money to manage both perceptions and legislation is unparalleled. It is also true that western civilization (the concept not the location) has become so dependent on ff transportation that there is a very large constituancy for BAU who consider gasoline taxes an attack on their very human rights.

        2. Hi Hickory, Doug,

          We’re in a damned if we do, damned if we don’t situation. Realistically speaking our only real hope of keeping the renewable energy industries growing like mushrooms in a spring rain is that the overall economy continues to function reasonably well, in business as usual terms.

          We just can’t cut back sharply on the use of fossil fuels in the short term. That’s a political impossibility.

          Maybe, just MAYBE, on one hand, we can keep the fossil fuel train chugging along as usual long enough for the renewable energy industries to grow to the point we can simply reduce demand for fossil fuels significantly year after year.

          But on the OTHER hand, there’s a strong possibility that if we continue to use fossil fuels to such an extent, the climate will go nuts with the result being that the world economy crashes and burns……. and of course the renewable energy industries will crash and burn along with everything else.

          I’m afraid this last scenario is more than a possibility. It’s looking like it’s probably going to happen.

          But maybe a few people in a few places will manage to pull thru with the lights on and the water working.

  15. https://www.ft.com/content/d317a2eb-5cda-4955-b90d-ec4c6b86018c
    More economists telling us that the world wide economy will collapse without continued population growth…….

    The vast majority of them have apparently never taken a single real university level class in the physical and life sciences.

    I’m dead sure there will be major economic and social disruptions in societies with declining populations…… only a nit wit could think otherwise.

    But compared to avoiding crash and burn environmental and natural resource scenario, such economic and social troubles wouldn’t be more than an INCONVENIENCE.

    1. Amazingly a good friend of mine with an engineering degree actually tried to explain to me that it is possible to reduce the amount of physical consumption by increasing services and thereby maintain growth based industrial society at a much lower consumption level. He’s a bright guy and very environmentally conscious but I was apalled that anyone but an economist could come up with that statement.

    2. You can read the book, ‘Systems of Survival’ by Jane Jacobs (it is a short, easy read), and then you will understand this phenomenon. But until then, you likely never will.

      Basically, there are two ways of understanding the world, a world of trade, in which there are no limits (the world of economists) and the world where there are limits, and there is a limited supply of things for the taking, with the distribution governed by force, not by trade.

      Think about it for a few minutes – how does the moral logic of a situation change when there are limits vs. when there are no limits. If there are no limits, then why not advocate for more immigration, for a billion Americans or 100 million Canadians – more people equals more trade equals more prosperity. But if there are limits, then more people just means more people to share the existing resource base with. How would you manage a forest so large that it had no limit, no matter how many trees you cut down, vs. managing one that only grew so fast every year. In the unlimited forest you innovate and increase productivity to cut down as many trees as possible, and new immigrants just mean more trees can be cut down, with no negative consequence because there are no limits – more more more. But in the limited forest, you need to conserve your ‘capital’ (the forest) by managing logging to a steady state. More people just means there is less wood to go around. And so on.

      David Korten’s ‘When Corporations Rule the World’ covers this same concept, referring to the transition from ‘Cowboy’ (no limits) to ‘Spaceship’ (limits) economic situation of humanity, but the work by Jacobs gets closer to the root of the issue, in my opinion.

      1. One of the difficulties in finding a balance of consumption vs sustainability is the vast difference in quality of life in different parts of the world. It’s one thing to say in the US, for example, that we cannot sustain a larger population when the average population density in Europe is close to 10x the US. How do you tell an immigrant from a murderous environment such as Guatamala (169/km2) that we cannot add any people because there are too many here already (37/km2) when our lifestyle is incredibly richer on average but incredible uneven?
        Meanwhile the drumbeat from those who are supposed to be the experts is that growth will solve all of these issues. Yet growth consists only of more people and/or more output per capita.

  16. Putin killed 9 innocent people just to kill Prigozhin. Putin, that son of a bitch is a war criminal.

    Russian Wagner Group warlord Prigozhin was on a plane that crashed, killing 10, officials say

    Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner Group who challenged the rule of Vladimir Putin just months ago, was involved Wednesday in a plane crash that has left 10 people dead outside of Moscow, state media is reporting.

    The business jet was traveling from the Russian capital to St. Petersburg went it went down in the Tver region, according to the TASS news agency.

    It’s not immediately clear whether Prigozhin is among the 10 reported to have died in the crash. The Pentagon told Fox News Digital that it is monitoring the situation.

    1. Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin was likely one of those also on the plane. He’s a bastard.

      The 3 crew member were perhaps quite innocent. If so, then It’s morally impermissible to have them all killed like that. Prigozhin & Utkin could have been eliminated with little difficulty and no innocent bystanders harmed.

      Not sure who the other 5 are; besides Prigozhin, possibly Utkin, and the 3 crew. Perhaps a few hired goons. It’s quite possible the 3 flight crew members were also more or less just hired goons.

      The model of plane they’re flying in has an impeccable safety record.

      Russians are killing each other. Kadyrov is gonna get expensive. I wonder if Pentagon has teams in Georgia, again, slipping support, this time, to Kadrov’s Chechen opposition? Theres lots of independent minded folks in the Caucasus who might start looking for some elbow room.

      Russia will likely experience some political fragmentation, and eventually, someone’ll be chalking out Putin.

      1. “morally impermissible”?
        By whose rules? That happened in Russia.
        Besides, I don’t know how you can be sure Progoshin is dead. The supply of information in Russia is controlled by the same person that virtually everyone is assuming caused the plane to crash.
        Really we know nothing for sure.

        1. Whether one prefers a consequentialist or a Kantian analysis, it will come to the same conclusion; as a national leader it is morally impermissible to kill your own innocent civilian citizens in order to kill your enemies who are also citizens. Interestingly enough, though, if Ukraine is behind it, then it’s perhaps morally permissible in the context of a consequentialist analysis.

          Pro tip- morals are not the same as rules.

          1. Thanks for the Pro tip.
            If you come across any more by all means please share.
            Is this one? ‘Its only wrong if you get caught’

            1. Get on your fav search engine and type in military ethics. You might be surprised.

              FWIW I don’t think Putin did it. Putin could have thrown him in a hole to rot or had him shot. No fuss needed. No dead flight stewardesses either. Instead he let him board a plane so he could blow it up 30 min later at 25000 feet. Seems a little ostentatious, even for Putin.

              Prior to Moscow Prigozhin was in Mali shoring up business. So was RA-02795. Then he flew to Moscow to shore up business there. Then he was allowed depart Moscow (not arrested and beaten senseless) and was blown up in mid air.

              The bomb was put on the plane in Mali, not Moscow. My moneys on DGSE; always good for a Putin Mind Fuck.

              Quick quiz- is it morally permissible for DGSE to kill innocent Russian civilians when murdering their Russian enemies? Is it morally permissible for Putin, leader of Russia, to harm innocent Russian civilians when murdering his Russian opponents? Is there a difference? And finally, who do you think hid all those explosives in Makhir Yusubov’s truck and detonated them on Kerch Bridge without letting him know he’s being committed?

              You remember the old ham and egg breakfast; the chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

              Prig never took a run at Putin. He took a run at Shoigu. If Putin and Prig were making up to save Wagner gains in Africa, then I could see DGSE being involved in disrupting that; any of ’em that weren’t wouldn’t be too doing well on their annual performance review.

    2. Not that innocent. One of them was Utkin, whose online nick is Wagner.

      Putin more or less decapitated the Wagner Group with that hit.

    3. “that son of a bitch is a war criminal.”

      Putin is in the position he is in because he will do anything for power.

      Peak Oil is what he is anticipating. Russia just makes mistakes in their forecasts like everyone else.

      If you are expecting Peak Oil, then you are expecting Military conflict.

      Russia doesn’t want NATO on their borders, with China to the South.

      Hence Crimea in 2014 (prediction of peak oil before the unpredictable USA shale boom )

      and Ukraine 2022 ( prediction of peak USA shale)

      Why else would you wait 8 years between these two events????

      1. Hint:
        The territory of Crimea, previously controlled by the Crimean Khanate, was annexed by the Russian Empire on 19 April [O.S. 8 April] 1783.

        About as long as the USA has been a country.

        1. Ukrainian history didn’t stop there:
          The following takes up the Ukrainian story after 1783, plagiarized from wikipedia and edited :
          ..The western part of present-day Ukraine was split between Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria after the fall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.
          As the Russian Empire collapsed post WW1 , fighting in the region evolved into the Ukrainian War of Independence, with Ukrainians fighting alongside, or against, the Red, White, Black and Green armies, with the Poles, Hungarians (in Transcarpathia), and Germans also intervening at various times. The result of the conflict was a partial victory for the Second Polish Republic, which annexed the Western Ukrainian provinces, as well as a larger-scale victory for the pro-Soviet forces, which succeeded in dislodging the remaining factions and eventually established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
          Following the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, German and Soviet troops divided the territory of Poland. Thus, Eastern Galicia and Volhynia with their Ukrainian population became part of Soviet Ukraine. During WW2 Ukrainians fought both with and against Soviet Russia and multiple efforts were made to establish an independent Ukraine.
          After a putsch of some Communist leaders in Moscow failed to depose Gorbachev, outright independence was proclaimed on 24 August 1991 and approved by 92% of the Ukrainian electorate in a referendum on 1 December.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine#:~:text=Ukraine%20gained%20independence%20in%201991,in%202014%20after%20a%20revolution.

          The comparison to the US is unwarranted methinks.

          1. Hint:
            82% Russian
            10% Crimean Tatar
            3% Russian and Ukrainian equally
            3% Russian and another language equally
            2% Ukrainian

            Crimea is Russian

            3. I guess I’m just not seeing clearly—
              Obviously with Ukraine at 2%, it would be the obvious ruler.
              How could I be so foolish?
              (Orwell would be blushing)

            4. Here’s the CIA data on Ukrainian ethnicity:
              Ukrainian 77.8%, Russian 17.3%, Belarusian 0.6%, Moldovan 0.5%, Crimean Tatar 0.5%, Bulgarian 0.4%, Hungarian 0.3%, Romanian 0.3%, Polish 0.3%, Jewish 0.2%, other 1.8% (2001 est.)Dec 27, 2022
              Maybe the data you posted is for Crimea? Even so that is a forced number as is the population of east Ukraine.
              Early in the creation of the USSR Stalin move tens or hundreds of thousands of Russians into the former colonies of the Tsars very specifically to weaken the local sense of identity in the regions. Putin used a crooked election to seize Crimea and little green men to seize the Donats. Perhaps the populations of both regions, in a fair election ,would choose to be part of Russia. Putin did not give them the chance. Therefore his actions can fairly be called a hostile invasion with intent to enlarge his own territory. Theft and murder.

        2. The Russians drove thru the Ukraine to get to Crimea.

          That is an invasion of the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

          They wanted military personnel in Crimea because they were concerned NATO was going to take out their naval base there.

          That is called an anticipation of Military conflict which I speculate was based on an anticipation of Peak Oil.

          I believe they thought, just like the USA Military thought, that a severe energy crunch was on the horizon.

          I think the energy crunch delay was because of USA shale.
          Which most forecasters got wrong.

          Crimea was about protecting the underwater nuclear deterent and
          ship sinking ability..

      2. Putin waited to see how the West would react to his Crimea grab, and he saw that we were basically doing nothing and had more or less forgot about it.

        And going back all the way to ‘sixteen, he had his little lap doggie trump’s nuts in a vise……… because his own son said in a national news magazine well before that that trump was getting his money from Russia. ( You can’t fix stupid.) I would be willing to bet good money that they have plenty of video of him enjoying half a dozen or more “honey trappers” not to mention plenty of other highly embarrassing information including proof of a number of crimes.

        So his entire time in office, trump did everything he could, and he was quite successful in doing so in some respects, to tear down NATO, and create problems between the USA and her allies, etc.

        In one respect he was especially successful, this being fostering a redneck nationalist right wing culture that cares nothing about anything or anybody except themselves. Upwards of half my country nowadays is part of a cult PROUD of it’s prejudices, PROUD of its ignorance, convinced scientists are all socialists out to get a living out of their own hides promoting renewable energy, climate troubles, etc.

        So……. when he felt like he was ready, and felt like he would get away with it, because the Western countries and NATO would LET him get away with it, using his control of the oil and gas needed in Western Europe as a club……….. He went for it.

        Of course he estimated that Peak Oil in terms of world supply would be on his side, as far as using the oil and gas supply as a club to bash western economies.

        But he catastrophically underestimated the Ukrainian people, the competence of his armed forces, and the response of the West to threatened and actual energy black mail.

        Eight or ten years is not a long time in terms of the history of countries and empires.

          1. So that car I sold in 1991 is still mine AND I get to keep the money?

          2. So, if Russia is going to renege in its territorial agreement does Ukraine get return of the 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads and between 2,650 and 4,200 tactical nuclear weapons that it gave up in return for sovereignty.

            1. With the same line of argument Russia should return Königsberg and many other areas to other countries as these did not use to belong to Russia. What a big surprise Russia only refer to history to expand their boarders, not shrink.

            2. JEFF
              As much as I hate Putin’s behavior and have fond memories of my time in Germany, anything the Russians took from Germany (e.g. Koningsberg) in 1945 was not payment enough.

  17. This gives a pretty good overview of Prof. Rees’ overshoot ideas. Although he never seems to get through to the interviewer; no matter how much he explains that unless the fundamental overshoot is eliminated no amount of tinkering at the edges is going to make any difference she keeps coming up with “Ah yes but, if we just …”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWuKqFUsDH0

  18. Here is the latest from Hansen, which suggests all the temperature records currently being set are likely to be broken next year, with some more about Antarctic sea ice loss, EEI acceleration and albedo changes (I don’t see why someone can’t do an order of magnitude calculation on the change in albedo an increase in EEI since 2014 because of the ice loss).

    http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/UhOh.14August2023.pdf

  20. https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/automotive/article/21272244/electronic-design-new-motor-designs-help-ev-makers-kick-the-rareearth-habit-part-2

    Hopefully somebody here with an engineering background will have something to say about it.

    This could be mostly hype……. or it could be a game changer, eliminating the need for scarce and expensive rare earth materials in electric motors for cars and trucks.

    One thing that I’m sure of,which is not mentioned, so far as I noticed, in the article is that the cost of currently expensive motor control hardware will certainly fall like a rock if production is scaled up hundreds or thousands of times, so this could be a real bright spot in the black energy clouds.

    1. My engineering background is mechanical, not electrical ,but it looks to me that the biggest challenge for this design is that it would be both less reliable and have excessive vibration without adding a lot more compute power to the electronic control. I would say that the design offers some relief in materials cost plus reducing our dependence on both China and Russia for rare earths. Whether these challenges can be met to produce an acceptable product is still, I think, uncertain.
      It is good that people are looking beyond hard to obtain materials. On the other hand, in line with the earlier discussion about electric bikes, I can’t see a any realistic future for three ton electric SUVs and that is what too many Americans are expecting as a “solution” to environmental damage and resource depletion.

    2. And no mention of the increased power consumption when you replace static magnets with electromagnets. The whole reason EVs have static magnets is because it reduces power consumption so much. So yes, you can (quite easily ) get rid of the heavy rare earths in EVs but at the cost of increased power storage requirements.
      rgds
      WP

      1. I was going to harp about the not needed need for neodynium et al but you explained it fairly good, thanks! But anyway, if 90% efficiency or more is enough you can go with a standard AC induction motor even though it is heavier.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_motor
        However, if you use your availible copper to encapsulate nuclear waste, the windings for said motor will cost a bit more…

  21. We ran out of space for comments talking about the nuclear issue up thread.

    I certainly don’t minimize the dangers involved when old reactors run away or when they might be abandoned without a proper cleanup. For anybody or any animal or plant in the vicinity, possibly for hundreds of miles, there can and often will be hell to pay, for centuries or maybe even tens of thousands of years.

    But there will be more places than not that are affected to only a rather minor extent because there are only so many reactors and the Earth is such a big place.

    Life will go on. Evolution will allow various life forms evolve to cope with radiation.

    Some species will go extinct, maybe hundreds of thousands. Others will occupy their former niche.

    I personally don’t see old reactors as being even one hundredth as big a problem for OUR species as the loss of industrial agriculture, lack of trucking, lack of grid juice, etc, in a crash and burn scenario.

    1. OFM
      You are right, of course. Nuclear reactors, old or new, are not likely to be the biggest problem we face in the future.
      However I see them as yet one more legacy of industrial society that many, many generations of humans and other species will have to contend with, generations that will have experienced none of the benefits that accrued to a relatively small number of humans in the 20th and early 21st centuries.
      That is assuming that the Plutonium, U235 and U233 remains inaccesable to the Hitlers, Putins and Trumps of the future. In that case it could be indeed be the worst problem.

    2. At Chernobyl, only the working material in one reactor was ejected, at Fukushima, the spent fuel ponds storing lots of old fuelrods was also damaged but release is not total and somewhat localized, if you consider the pacific ocean local… So the elephant is mostly the total amount of spent fuel, many times larger than what has been released in previous events. So that´s why I feel sorry for future generations, besides all else they will also have to deal with sht left behind by idiots.

      1. The phrase “best and brightest” comes to mind. Some of the very smartest and well intentioned people I have ever known I met in the nuclear industry. Remember what Upton Sinclair said:
        “It’s hard to get someone to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it”
        After you’ve spent the most interesting part of your live, perhaps up to eight years, getting advanced degrees in Nuclear Engineering it may be too easy to forget some issues outside of your specialty.

        1. Correct, and I´m not talking about nuclear engineers per se, who´s intelligent by all means as you say, but society in general who cannot think longer than the end of their nose, or even less.

    3. The radioactive inventory of the reactors is small compared to radioactivity distributed everywhere in nature.
      It’s only the concentration that’s dangerous, especially to more long lived species. Short lived have no problems with radioactivity at all – just adjust a bit and lay 550 eggs instead of 500.

      Just not your typical hollywood post apocalypse zombie style wasteland:
      https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife

      The area around Chernobyl is prohibited area – and it’s thriving with wild life. A kind of ecological paradise. It’s dangerous because of PU alpha radiactivity – as having an old cellar in granite stone.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_radon

      Generally, this natural radioactivity leads to a lot more cancer deaths per year than all nuclear incidents together – so the nature adopted already.

      And there is a really lot of this stuff on earth. A big part of geothermal energy comes from nuclear decay of this stuff ( where the dreaded Radon is an intermediate step) – and decay is a lot of less efficient than fission.

      Think of all the volcanos and Yellowstone geysers as kind of nuclear events.
      You may abandon nuclear power, but radioactivity will stay.
      And dictators can build atomic bombs – what the US could do with 1945 tech can be repeated by every dictator that is able to spend a few billions and today tech.

      Hint: Produce heavy water – build a primitive nuclear reactor with heavy water moderation and natural uranium – chemical separate PU – BOOOM.

    4. Reactor projects are expensive and it has been pointed out by one in the industry that no company in the world can afford to do a project without host country help in the form a big subsidies and other financial help like loan guarantees.
      What do you think it would take for the US population majority , and thus government, to become eager for the massive government spending required to reignite a robust nuclear industry here?

      https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor
      https://www.utilitydive.com/news/NuScale-small-modular-reactor-nuclear-NRC/641012/

  22. Attention all cornucopians

    CARBON EMISSIONS FOUND TO COST THE WORLD’S ECONOMIES 4 TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY DID 10 YEARS AGO

    Every ton of carbon is four times more damaging to the world now than it was 10 years ago, according to a recently published study from the University of Sussex Business School. The “social cost of carbon” is the cost that economies face from the release of carbon into the atmosphere. The cost can be calculated by carbon’s effect on: human health and welfare, agricultural productivity, sea level rise leading to property damage and destruction, desertification, changes in energy consumption, and declines in labor productivity.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-08-carbon-emissions-world-economies-years.html

    1. Meanwhile,

      Daily CO2
      Aug. 20, 2023 — 419.76 ppm
      Aug. 23, 2022 — 416.85 ppm
      1 Year Change — 2.91 ppm (0.70%)

      1. It looks like this El Nino is going to see much higher CO2 increases than the 2015/16 one.

    1. In his conclusion section on page 87 he says
      -“Metal production needs more energy against the grade decline and energy could peak around 2060”, and
      -“Energy consumption per capita is increasing since 2000 and will continue at least up to 2050.”

      This sounds wildly optimistic… that energy supply won’t be peaking until mid-century. I have been guessing Peak Global Combustion Day to be in the next decade.

      1. Laherrere is just showing current trends if business as usual. He knows full well there is no way this is going to happen. That is his point.

        1. Metals supply is good example of how Overshoot will manifest.
          Energy, food, materials don’t just run out some day.
          But the affordability declines. Declines to the point that it hinders growth, and then hinders even a stagnant condition.

  24. Least we forget.

    GREENHOUSE GASES CONTINUED TO INCREASE RAPIDLY IN 2022

    “The 2022 methane increase was 14.0 ppb, the fourth-largest annual increase recorded since NOAA’s systematic measurements began in 1983 and follows record growth in 2020 and 2021. Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than two and a half times their pre-industrial level.”

    https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/greenhouse-gases-continued-to-increase-rapidly-in-2022#:~:text=The%202022%20methane%20increase%20was,times%20their%20pre%2Dindustrial%20level.

    1. Meanwhile,

      STUDY FINDS HEAT WAVES ARE BECOMING MORE FREQUENT AND MORE DEADLY

      “The study assumes that the global average temperature is on track to increase by a maximum of 1.5°C to 2°C, but with greenhouse gas emissions at their current levels, the more likely figure is 2.6°. And future scenarios do not take account of the projected population growth, migration to cities and the increase in the number of older people—all factors that are likely to increase heat-related excess mortality even further. The study also lacked epidemiological data for Africa and India, both regions heavily affected by the climate crisis and poverty.”

      https://phys.org/news/2023-08-frequent-deadly.html

    1. Hickory

      Yes, he is a good communicator. With an engineering background – it is not so easy to get a best seller status (in France) within the dense and sometimes unpopular theme of climate change, energy transition and conservation. So I would have to read his best books, just like I read V.Smils books – just to be sure to not miss some of the ideas or thought processes.

  26. Regarding the discussion about electric 2- wheelers or 3-weelers (up in the thread).

    I would say that based on what I see in Oslo (Norway), it works perfectly well to use an electric bike or electric 3-wheeler in the whole city including suburbs. There are some caveats probably. The first one being able to afford the infrastructure for cyclist paths all over the city (no problem in Norway – it is being done), the second one is to have a vehicle that can travel on highways with temperature control when needed. The second challenge is harder to come by. So – my grand uncle (89 years old), just adores his 3 wheel electric vehicle in part granted to him by the government. At winter he would ask someone to get him his groceries however. A lot of the younger people in the city would not have a problem at all only using a combination of public transport and an electric bike.

    1. I foresee a few million two car families in this country that have two mostly so they can commute to different jobs cutting back to one car and an electric bike over the next few years.

      They’ll figure out ways to double up with the one car on days the weather is too bad for one of them to use the electric bike.

      They would save enough money not paying for a second car to take a cab four or five times a month, if necessary, for one of them to get to work, and come out hundreds of dollars, probably over a thousand dollars, every month.

      Cars aren’t cheap anymore, insurance isn’t cheap anymore, and garages aren’t cheap anymore.

      And only a very few people know how to maintain and repair an older car at home.

  27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pbPn2TNwag

    Trump is selling “No Surrender” merchandise with his mugshot

    after he ironically

    just surrendered to Law Enforcement

    I could not imagine living life thinking every single moment is a chance to sell something else and rip people off.

  28. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/25/sunagri-reveals-agrivoltaics-performance-in-heat-waves/

    I’m thinking that in any country that has an energy supply issue, a farm land issue, and an excess labor supply issue that agri voltaics will be a really big thing within a decade or so, assuming the government provides good leadership by not standing in the way of it happening.

    People that don’t have work are supported by whatever safety net is available until their society more or less collapses, and so paying them a subsidized wage to work on agri voltaic farms will be a very positive thing to do.

    And the more solar power, the less need to spend money importing energy.

    Plus there’s a possible substantial saving of irrigation water, which is a critical issue in many countries.

    1. An example here- if you take the 30 plus million acres of prime farm land in the US that goes to corn ethanol/stillage production
      and instead use the land for mixed purpose, for example including
      -2% photovoltaic coverage
      -8% forest, watershed protection and wildlife reserve
      -90% mixed species grazing

      you would be producing something like 6 times the net transportation miles energy equivalent,
      along with much greater food production,
      and with considerable relative ecosystem benefit.

      Perhaps the ethanol distillation industry that was displaced could shift to hydrogen/ammonia production.

  29. While the northern hemisphere boils the southern half refuses to be left behind.

    SOUTH-EAST AUSTRALIA MARINE HEATWAVE FORECAST TO BE LITERALLY OFF THE SCALE

    “Australia’s south-east could be in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture. The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast a patch of the Tasman Sea off Tasmania and Victoria could be at least 2.5C above average from September to February, and it could get hotter. Oceanographer Grant Smith said the colour-coded scale the bureau uses to map forecast sea surface temperature anomalies stops at 2.5C.”

    “We didn’t account for anomalies that high when we developed this … it could be 3C, it could be 3.5C, but we can’t see how high it goes,” he said. Smith said he could be sure that it was the first time forecast temperatures had gone beyond the scale’s upper limit, but it was the first time he had seen it.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/27/south-east-australia-marine-heatwave-forecast-to-be-literally-off-the-scale

  30. This is just the best. For all you “lovers” of the Artificial Intelligence bubble:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/28/scale-ai-remotasks-philippines-artificial-intelligence/

    “but, but, it’s way different than crypto. it has way more use cases.” so you’re telling me there aren’t enough examples of “trees” and “pedestrians” already on the internet to teach a computer the difference? then it’s not AI. a 4 year old human could do this task.

  31. Where climate change takes charge, not pretty.

    N.W.T. WILDFIRES HAVE EMITTED 280 TIMES MORE CARBON THAN ITS PEOPLE

    From the start of the year up until Aug. 23, wildfires across Canada have emitted 327 megatonnes of carbon into the air according to CAMS data. (For context, one megatonne is a million tonnes.) More than a quarter of that has been generated by wildfires in the N.W.T., which began burning back in May.

    “We can all unequivocally agree this is climate change at the very root of this,” said Jessica Davey-Quantick, a territorial wildfire information officer, during a press conference last week.”We’re going to see more active fire behaviour, more extreme weather, more drought-like conditions — all of those factors have kind of combined. But it’s really hard to say that there’s one culprit that led it to communities this year, when it didn’t in previous years.”

    https://ca.yahoo.com/news/n-w-t-wildfires-emitted-080000068.html

    1. Meanwhile,

      STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED IN SIBERIA OVER RAGING WILDFIRES

      Wildfires have become more intense in Russia in recent seasons, helped by unusually high temperatures in Siberia, driven by climate change. They release millions of tonnes of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere each year. The 2021 fire season was Russia’s largest ever, with 18.8 million hectares (46.5 million acres) of forest destroyed, according to Greenpeace Russia – about two times the size of the island of Ireland.

      https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/3/state-of-emergency-declared-in-siberia-over-raging-wildfires

  32. Globally, we are close to Peak Combustion Day.
    I guess within about ten years, but lets not be under the illusion that this day
    will mark a quick end to carbon dioxide emissions.
    Rather, it is likely that this huge pulse of combustion will roll on for the rest of century
    gradually declining as depletion of the fossil sunlight energy plays out.
    Draw you own trendline. It won’t be a mirror image of the way up,
    but the cumulative burn will be a huge addition to what we have already ‘accomplished’.

    What factor will limit human population first?

  33. World is installing 1GW of solar a day, new figures show

    An average of more than 1GW a day of new solar is being installed around the world, according to forecasts from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, with China contributing at least half of that amount.

    The BNEF numbers, shared on LinkedIn by Europe-based energy analyst Gerard Reid, forecast that China will install a whopping 208GW of solar this year, which Reid points out is more than the US has installed over the last 20 years.

    This forecast blows past the high case from my most recent “quick and dirty” spreadsheet projection for global solar capacity additions. I have done a 17 line spreadsheet with actual solar capacity additions between 2014 and 2022 and a low and high case projections through to 2030. I’ve had to change my high case to medium and add a new high case to keep up with the forecasts for this year.Global cumulative installed PV capacity was just under one terawatt at the end of 2021. My new high case projection has global cumulative PV capacity exceeding two terawatts by the end of next year.

    I look at this from the perspective of manufacturing capacity and follow the news surrounding PV developments fairly closely. Every week there are reports of company x expanding manufacturing capacity or company y adding a new manufacturing plant in plant in a country where they previously had no presence. Every single PV module that is manufactured is going to be sold and installed somewhere so I look at global manufacturing capacity as a proxy for new annual capacity additions.

    I am not aware of any forecasts from any of the major forecasting agencies that have got the PV growth right. This has implications for the IPCC carbon emission projections over the long term.

    1. From that same summary article-
      “The BNEF numbers,…forecast that China will install a whopping 208GW of solar this year, which Reid points out is more than the US has installed over the last 20 years.”!

      Two things on this
      -the US has more domestic Oil and Gas than China, and therefore the imperative to burn Coal or install PV is much greater in China
      -in the US about 1/2 of the country is overtly hostile to Solar Energy, with the republican party and its voters having associated solar energy with socialism and radical environmentalism starting back to almost 50 years ago. That reactionary stance is just starting to crumble a little, but it is still a very strong headwind at both a national level, and in many states with huge solar potential such as Texas, Arizona and Florida.

      1. The opposition to renewable energy did not happen by chance. The article below delves into some of the details

        Why We Didn’t Act on Climate When We Had the Chance

        Yeah absolutely, and it had never been reported as far as I know, this story of how the industry developed its strategy that later metastasized into climate denialism but began as a kind of effort to deal with emphasizing uncertainty in the science—which of course is an old tactic in the industry—and trying to resist any kind of regulation that went beyond what was merited by the science.

        I talked to the head of the API environmental office, who was one of my main sources, and he explained how they came to those determinations. The success of the doubt campaign, the PR campaign, which sort of began at the time in a kind of low-budget way, became the overriding strategy, the political strategy, from the industry, and the success of that strategy even surprised him.

        That’s how easily they were able to change the public dialogue, by just having a few industry-supported scientists tell reporters that the science around climate change was uncertain, and all of a sudden an issue that had one side had two sides. They also started paying scientists $2,000 to write op-eds supporting the view that the science around climate was uncertain.

        He spoke about it freely with me and freely admitted to this kind of behavior.

        Opensecrets.org documents the contributions of the oil and gas industries to US politicians at the following page.

        https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e01

        People like Romanov appear to have no clue as to the amount of money that has been spent to influence his thinking, That assumes he is not on the payroll of the FF industries propaganda machine.

        1. I’m dead certain he’s a troll…….. and more than willing to believe he’s a paid troll.
          The links he posts are cherry picked with considerable skill, and the bottom line is this:

          IF he understands what he’s posting, then he’s trolling, because he’s also smart enough to understand the mainstream links posted in response. This makes him a true believer if he doesn’t understand both sides….. so it’s possible he’s free lancing for one reason or another.

          Ten to one, somebody is paying him one way or another. It could be as simple as having some of his own skin in the fossil fuel game, meaning he’s working for himself. Or he could be posting to help right wing politicians get elected without being paid.

          I do quite a lot of the same in hopes of helping leftish /Blue politicians get elected but I deal in facts.

        2. A major mouthpiece for the climate denial movement is the Heartland Institute which was originally funded by the tobacco industry to create doubt about the links between smoking and health. The goals are identical for the ff industry. When Heartland started working on climate they were openly funded by, among others, the Kochs. Lately the sources are a little harder to follow.

  34. https://newatlas.com/energy/antora-carbon-heat-battery/

    At first glance it looks as if this can be a BIG new thing.

    I don’t expect the technology ambulance to save the large majority of us from the overshoot crash that technology has made possible…….. err….. more or less inevitable. Only a miracle of some sort could save us from this built in crash at this late date.

    (Such a miracle could be a new disease that spreads worldwide like wildfire, before it’s even recognized, having the effect of rendering men and or women incapable of having children. I’ve been thinking about using this idea as the theme of a sci fi or fantasy short story, lol. I’m not good enough at it to sell anything, but it’s an amusing hobby. )

    I think some people in some places will pull thru and continue to have a basic working level industrial civilization. Leviathans, nation states, can and will seize what they need to maintain their own security and existence from their weaker neighbors, and from the far side of the Earth, if necessary. The world is not about to RUN OUT of anything in particular…… We’ll just be running extremely short to desperately short of various natural resources. There will be enough for countries powerful enough to seize such resources for quite some time to come.

    Assuming the climate doesn’t go totally nuts, and assuming we don’t fight WWIII with thousands of nukes, industrial civilization will survive in at least a few places.

  35. More bad news for planet Earth and its plants and creatures.

    CHINA CONTINUES COAL SPREE DESPITE CLIMATE GOALS

    In the first half of 2023, authorities granted approvals for 52GW of new coal power, began construction on 37GW of new coal power, announced 41GW-worth of new projects, and revived 8GW of previously shelved projects. About half of the plants permitted in 2022 had started construction by summer.

    Not forgetting that China is the world’s largest producer of renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydroelectricity. But, previous analyses have found infrastructure to store and distribute has not kept pace.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-plants-climate-goals-carbon

  37. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/29/2185388/-Southern-Ocean-deepwater-is-shrinking-warming-and-scaring-the-bejeebus-out-of-scientists

    This is scary as hell, sure enough. The farther down you read in this stuff, the scarier it gets. Truly catastrophic shifts in the world wide climate may come to pass within the next couple of decades.

    Agricultural production could go to hell to the point that food is in short supply even in a country such as the USA, but I think we Yankees will likely be able to produce enough food for our own needs, dropping down the ladder towards pork, poultry, and grains as necessary. A chicken leg might be an occasional Sunday treat a generation down the road.

    Beef and mutton would still be available in very limited amounts, but only at unheard of prices, because there’s some land that’s not good for anything other than grazing livestock.

    Things could get so bad, economically, that a number of countries country with sufficient armed forces forces will attack other countries near and far….. with such conflicts morphing into hot war between major powers.

    An empty belly trumps just about every other possible consideration.

  39. Some very interesting views here…my key takeaway:

    Romanov the sincere Russian troll…

    It has a nice ring to it!

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