59 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum July 31, 2022”

  1. Carbon monoxide in the atmosphere reacts rapidly with hydroxyl radicals which are then not available to destroy methane. The Barrow Observatory in Alaska is indicating that Carbon Monoxide levels have started to rise in the last couple of years after decades of decline. There’s not much data but this would agree with the CO coming from increased wildfire activity. The site that would give the most useful data is in Siberia but it stopped reporting CO levels in 2018. Measurements in Brazil and Africa show a continuous slightly increasing trend since the 80s, but in many measurements there doesn’t appear to be much of a trend and hardly any year to year variation. Make of that what you will but it’s probably not good for methane levels and therefore climate change, though what the magnitude of the effect might be is not at all apparent. The was a paper in the early 2000s that said the fall in CO levels to then had decreased methane half life by 4%, so probably no big impact yet.

    https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=BRW&program=ccgg&type=ts
    (Choose carbon monoxide from the top drop down menu and then submit).

    2. If global temps do not move from a recent historical direction in the next year, there’s little to put to those who argue CO does what they propose it does, at a time when the movement which supports CO involvement is gaining some momentum, generally.

  2. “It’s hot and getting hotter. The first six months of the year are about 0.2°C cooler than the first six months of 2016 and 2020 (Fig. 1), but that’s only because the current La Nina continues to cool the tropics. Global temperature is rising despite the La Nina. Earth is out of energy balance (more solar energy absorbed than heat radiated to space) by an astounding amount – more than any time with reliable data – so, within a few years, we will be setting new global temperature records.”

    http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2022/JuneTemperatureUpdate.29July2022.pdf

    “Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
    Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
    https://youtu.be/YToMoNPwTFc?t=45m36s

    Consider adding nutrient shortage secondary to disruptions in fertilizer manufacturing and costs to the predicted climate impacts. Buckle your chin straps.

    1. You’ve probably seen this, in fact I may have got the link from you originally:
      https://www.fao.org/3/cb7654en/cb7654en.pdf

      It shows all the ways agriculture was already under pressure immediately before the Ukraine invasion including water stress, soil loss and salinisation. These are all irreversible in human lifetimes and aren’t susceptible to facile quick fix suggestions (like EVs – yeah!!) so they don’t make the overshoot discussion space as much as climate change.

      2. “aren’t susceptible to facile quick fix suggestions (like EVs – yeah!!)”

        George, please supply a link to anyone who posts here that have advocated that EV’s are a “quick fix”. Your strawman argument is a distraction. Because these kind of statements feed the challenged with ignorance. EV’s are the low hanging fruit to transition to a world of not burning fossil fuel. Foolish comments like yours injects confusion for the special interest of BAU and delay progress, which has been the playbook for the last 30 years. You become part of the problem. Over 25 people died this weekend in Kentucky from flooding caused by climate change. When your doctor suggests you loose weight. No one needs their neighbor to tell them why bother. Your going to die anyway.

        On the lighter side, some of the fruit that’s going to need a ladder.

        New Rule: Let the Population Collapse | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB97iwcm_Qc

            2. Madeline,

              I heard my name! I’ve been short on time lately, but what the heck, I’ll weigh in:

              This is a complex topic, so it’s hard to have a good discussion, especially when people are looking for simplistic ways to refute arguments rather than reallly engaging. However. here are a couple of thoughts:

              The vast majority of climatologists and environmentalists agree that:

              -Climate change is a very serious problem;

              -Fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change, though not the only one, accounting for very roughly 75% of GHG emissions;

              -Non carbon emitting energy sources are an essential part of a sensible response to climate change;

              -Wind and solar power are an essential part of a non-carbon energy system;

              -Electrification of transportation, as well as other energy systems, is essential to take advantage of non-carbon energy sources.

              So: Anyone who ridicules wind, solar and EVs is saying that they are not comfortable with moving away from fossil fuels, and they certainly appear to not be honest when they claim to be concerned about climate, no matter how many times they post pessimistic articles about how much the environment is suffering.
              ————————

              Regarding the reference to overshoot: the point of that discussion was to show the importance of fossil fuels. The model in question tried to quantify the demands on the earth into a simple single number, and I was pointing out that that model indicated that if you eliminated fossil fuels then human civilization was no longer in “overshoot” That very likely also demonstrates that the model is too simplistic, but that’s another discussion.

          2. Nice shift of the goalposts. EVs reduce fossil fuel consumption but don’t eliminate fossil fuels. So whether Nick was right about eliminating fossil fuels, it doesn’t provide any evidence that EVs are a facile quick fix suggestion.

          1. Agree, but I was disturbed by the bizarre audience laughter as if it all was some joke.

  6. I think we’ll be seeing more and more papers like this as it becomes increasingly apparent that we can’t do much about our various existential challenges:

    CLIMATE ENDGAME: EXPLORING CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS
    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

    “Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? [Yes] At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe.”

    1. Yes. Thanks.
      “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave ”

      Compound hazard is what the designers/operators of Fukushima failed to account for- earthquake leads to tsunami leads to diesel backup generator failure leads to failure to circulate cooling water leads to melting of nuclear core

      What is generally underappreciated or under-reported is just how many pathways can lead to ‘failed state’ status, whether it is trade war or currency imbalances, poor harvest, bad weather, energy shortage, the idiocy of the mob (as we have seen in the US with the emergence of the trump voter), etc.
      Most countries are vulnerable to quick slide into high risk zone.

      “There are many potential contributors to climate-induced morbidity and mortality, but the “four horsemen” of the climate change end game are likely to be famine and undernutrition, extreme weather events, conflict, and vector-borne diseases. These will be worsened by additional risks and impacts such as mortality from air pollution and sea level rise.”

      The combination of climate change and escalation of prices for energy/energy derived products combine to greatly compound the risk of society destabilization and country drift toward chaos. Borders are not a bulletproof barrier to the spread of civil society breakdown.

      1. Meanwhile,

        WORLD JUST ONE MISSTEP AWAY FROM NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION

        “United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres sounded the alarm over the war in Ukraine, nuclear threats in Asia and the Middle East, and other tensions, warning that “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” ”

        https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/un-nuclear-treaty-conference-1.6538373

    2. When I was a child doing an overnight stay in a hospital for some odd reason, I recall, that when I went to the nurses station, asking to call my mom, there was an ashtray and cigarette butts on the desk. Later in life, when doing some of my first clinical work as a student in major hospitals, I recall wheeling patients down to the smoking room, as they had requested, and since I had the time. Smoking then went next outside, several feet from the doors, and is now completely prohibited on hospital property. All the patients, in gowns, must cross the road and have a ciggy on the opposite sidewalk, IV poles in tow, or risk a fine. Quite a few staff too. What an outcast bunch they look; culture changes fast, never under estimate the power of a bad example. I doubt we’ll avoid catastrophe, but the cultural change that pops up to cope with it will be very interesting to see.

    1. Because their bus system was crap in the first place probably.

    1. Thanks for the link. Interesting and disturbing to see so many pointers in the same direction. Unfortunately though (purely my guess) unless there are financial consequences to people who have a voice nothing will change.
      rgds
      WP

  9. If you haven’t been to the Willamette Valley of Oregon it is a gem of place.
    Excellent for a wide range of agriculture, wildlife, forests…with lots of water and much of it has great soils.
    The state has done a decent job limit the sprawl of Portland and Eugene suburbs
    and now is extending limitation on the placement of photovoltaic- in my view in a wise and appropriate way.

    “Oregon Restricts Solar Development On Prime Farmland”
    ‘On Thursday, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission approved new rules that restrict commercial solar development on millions of acres of high-value farmland across the state.’
    ‘By putting restrictions on land with high-value soils designated prime, unique, and classes I and II, the rules put about 6% of the state off limits’
    ‘They allow for 12-acre solar developments on lower quality, classes III and IV soils and for 20-acre developments that incorporate agricultural uses such as grazing or shade crops in between the panels. Even larger projects are allowed on farmland that isn’t zoned for exclusive farm use.’

    There is plenty of land for photovoltaics in the sunnier and drier areas of the state to east of the Cascades, or the bordering state of Nevada for that matter.

  10. So, there I was this afternoon, the peak-oil-aware farmer, up on a ladder in my Yellow Transparent apple trees, picking dreadfully small, drought-stricken apples for market, as my neighbor, the retired oil furnace salesman, drove by in his monster pickup towing his huge boat with double motors.

    My question to you wise persons is: Who is the bigger fool?

    1. I think it is mostly, if not all, about timing, but I´d say better safe than sorry, unless Dennis is correct… (meanwhile I´m checking for used snowmobiles in the 10k dollar range, while adding insulation to my already fairly well insulated house)
      Edit: Paid off or loaned money is a also a major consideration.

    2. A boat can be a great investment, perhaps not in the tangible way real estate or a mutual fund can increase in value, but certainly in a non-material way. Owning a boat is about the pursuit of pleasure or adventure, of bonding with family and friends, of a passion for freedom that many people find only on the water.

      “The two happiest days in a sailor’s life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it.”

      “A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.”

  11. I’d vote for your neighbor, unless you can prove you were acting unwisely or imprudently; or being a silly person…

    But everyone knows the cost of owning a boat, if that’s not financially foolish then I don’t know what is…he prob. get’s around 1-2 miles per gallon in the boat, maybe 10 mpg in the truck while hauling the boat…money to burn, good for him (not so good for the rest)…

    1. IMHO- Ostentatious displays of wealth are always foolish, as well as they are a sign of poor character. Character is not the same as a good deed. Character is something you are that is cultivated over years of correct action. It’s not something you can turn on when needed. Perhaps better in life to appear as poor and strong, rather than wealthy and weak; no matter what you really are. I prefer my old 14 foot aluminum with oars, my old family canoe and my kayak.

    1. That is the equivalent annual electricity output to just about 56 nuclear power plants [1000 MW size].

      That is also the number of French nuclear reactors.
      France has the largest share of electricity from nuclear energy of any country by far.
      And almost 1/2 of those reactors are out of service this summer.

  13. Latest global food prices, down for the third month in a row. But still high.

  14. GE Is Breaking Up. How Investors Can Benefit. — Barrons.com
    6:30 am ET August 5, 2022 (Dow Jones)

    The wind business, in particular, is problematic, and not just for GE. Over the past 12 months, the dominant wind turbine makers — GE, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE.Spain), and Vestas Wind Systems (VWS.Denmark) — have lost a combined $2.4 billion, despite good demand for renewable energy.

    The problem, says Culp, is that “it’s an immature industry.” Wind technology is changing rapidly, with new-generation turbines arriving before the older ones achieve high enough production volume to truly drive costs down. Wind farms also take years to build — usually on fixed contracts — so inflation like today’s can turn them into money losers. And erratic government investment-tax policies lead to boom-bust cycles.

    1. Hi Madeline, not much context here. $2.4 billions sounds alot, but its 4 BIG companies. How does it compare to their annual sales?

      And for more context, how many other businesses lost lots of money in the last 12 months because of inflation and rising interest rates? Any reason Barrons.com highlights wind turbines? Have they had similar articles about the rest of the economy?
      Cheers, Phil

      1. This was part of the same article:

        “To truly cash in on demand for alternative energy, the industry must better manage costs, slow the pace of new-product introductions, and negotiate contracts that pass through higher raw material costs. Until that happens, the business will earn roughly the same valuation as Siemens Gamesa and Vestas. They fetch about 1.25 times sales, making GE Renewables worth about $18 billion.”

        I only copy & pasted the part of the article that referenced GE’s energy division. I don’t have total access to Barrons.

      2. Is kind of analogous to the shale industry 2014-2020 when prices were pretty low for their product.
        Big production but money losing.
        It may take higher prices for electricity to make wind more profitable.
        For some countries with lots of wind resource but poor other resources- like UK, they may have to take that choice.

  15. Hot off the press

    Warm water rushing towards world’s biggest ice sheet—that’s not good news
    “The research, published today in Nature Climate Change, shows changing water circulation in the Southern Ocean may be compromising the stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet, about the size of the United States, is the largest in the world”
    https://theprint.in/environment/warm-water-rushing-towards-worlds-biggest-ice-sheet-thats-not-good-news/1070337/?amp

    The research…
    Poleward shift of Circumpolar Deep Water threatens the East Antarctic Ice Sheet
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01424-3

  16. Scientists Say It’s ‘Fatally Foolish’ To Not Study Catastrophic Climate Outcomes

    https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01082022/scientists-study-catastrophic-climate-outcomes/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=5bf8c5465b-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-5bf8c5465b-328831714

    New climate models that can accurately show 3 million years of climate history show that, at no point during that time, has Earth come close to warming 2 degrees Celsius, Rockström said.

    “It tells you a lot about what does 2.4 Celsius imply, which is the trajectory we’re following,” he said, “and it’s happening at a blink of geological time. That, to me, gives a high degree of scientific confidence that we’re facing disaster if we follow that path.”

    “We don’t know exactly where these tipping points are and where we risk that the entire planet starts drifting away in the wrong direction. However, I would argue that we have enough evidence to act on the science we have now, immediately,” he said.

    Lowering the risk requires drastic actions at the U.N.’s 27th Conference of the Parties climate talks in Egypt later this year, he said.

    “You’d have to meet at COP 27 and ratchet up every [individual nation’s] plan, and legally lock into place plans to phase out fossil fuels, to end the use of internal combustion engines, stop all investments in coal,” he said. “We need to move faster on all the paths we know so well, but we’re moving too slowly. We’re not even bending the global curve of emissions.”

    That’s left the planet on track to surpass the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally, to hold it below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which pushes the planet into the danger zone for climate tipping points, he said.

    “Go beyond 1.5, you go from moderate to high risk, go beyond 2, we go from high risk to catastrophic risk.”

      1. Thanks S, but your woodfortrees link is totally non intuitive. What are the units of the y-axis? What are the different lines? I have no idea…

        1. Hi John, to put it mildly, I’m not a climatologist; the wood for trees link illustrates, basically, that the northern hemisphere is warming faster than the globe is. The jagged green line is global warming, the jagged red line is northern hemisphere warming. The purple line is the global linear trend, the blue line is the northern hemisphere liner trend. The y-axis is degrees celsius. To wit; the NH has lately averaged about 1.5 degrees C warming, above baseline, while the globe is averaging under 1 degree C. The Southern hemisphere surface temperature has averaged the least increase in warmth, because it’s mostly ocean.
          I find this interesting because lots of food is grown in the NH.

          1. Thanks S, makes more sense now.

            I hadn’t seen these terms before:
            CRUTEM is a dataset derived from air temperatures near to the land surface recorded at weather stations across all continents of Earth.

            HadCRUT is a global temperature dataset, providing gridded temperature anomalies across the world as well as averages for the hemispheres and the globe…

            https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem/ge/

  17. Virginia regulatory authorities have approved the construction of a big wind farm, starting in a couple of years, off the Virginia coast.

  19. FEAR IS GROWING IN RUSSIA

    I have been watching this guy’s videos on Russia for about two months now. He is a Russian who spent 9 years in the USA, and a few years in other countries, then decided to return to his native Russia. His YouTube videos have been documenting what has been happening in Russia since the Ukraine invasion. His videos have toured the shopping malls showing how it used to be before the invasion and how it is now, with all the shop closures. Most American companies have pulled out like Mcdonald’s, Starbucks, and all the foreign retail stores. He has shown that the traffic in the malls and elsewhere is less than a quarter of what it was before the invasion. He told it like it was, with no punches pulled. He did not get political or blame anyone, for obvious reasons, he just showed it like it was.

    But this video was different. It shocked me. And it takes a lot to shock me. But all through the video, I wanted to cry. It hurt me to see a man so much in pain. He desperately wanted to say more but dared not. He showed a desperate fear, fear of being thrown in prison for what he was doing.

    He always closes his videos with a prayer. Being an atheist, or at least a Biblical atheist, I never watched his ending prayer. But this time I had to. It almost made me cry. He prayed for the Ukrainian people, for the old and helpless who were being killed. This man is scared, he is desperately scared. Watch it if you really want to know what it is like to live under the rule of a dictator.

    FEAR IS GROWING IN RUSSIA

    2. Thanks Ron, Excellent

      ******

      The Plot Against America (miniseries)

      The Plot Against America is an American alternate history drama television miniseries created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Philip Roth, that aired on HBO from March 16, 2020, to April 20, 2020.[1]

      The Plot Against America imagines an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist, who becomes president and turns the nation toward fascism.”[2]

      Simon had read the novel in 2004, but thought it politically irrelevant;[7][8] though approached by Tom Rothman in 2013 to adapt it for television, he declined.[8] He decided to take on the project in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, in which Donald Trump was elected US President,[9] saying that Roth’s novel had proven “perversely…allegorical,”[10] and approaching his longtime collaborator Ed Burns, with whom he had worked on The Wire and Generation Kill, to co-write.[11] Events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville influenced the adaptation.[8]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plot_Against_America_(miniseries)

      HBO’s excellent mini-series “The Plot Against America” is the kind of nuanced, detailed storytelling we should expect from David Simon, Ed Burns, and Philip Roth. It is not so much about people who do wrong as what happens when people choose not to do what’s right. Roth’s story brilliantly captures an American society in decline as it allows fascism and hatred to weave its way into the national consciousness. Simon and others have made the parallels to 2020 clear in interviews, and the mini-series undeniably echoes rhetoric and hate speech that we have heard in recent years, but there’s something about “The Plot Against America” that feels depressingly timeless—people will look the other way again, often out of fear, and the consequences won’t be immediately drastic, just a slow deterioration of what should have been.

      Roth’s novel imagines a world in which Charles Lindbergh ran for President against FDR in the early days of World War II, and he did so on a platform of no involvement in the growing war in Europe. It’s remarkably easy to imagine a candidate arguing that we shouldn’t send our boys to die in a foreign war, and that we should stay out of combat and not get involved in the persecution of Jews, especially if that candidate was himself an American hero. In fact, “The Plot Against America” makes this alternate history remarkably believable by paying so much attention to detail and atmosphere over melodrama.

      https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-plot-against-america-movie-review-2020

  21. D4 EXCEPTIONAL DROUGHT IN 3 OF TOP 18 CORN GROWING STATES
    “As August begins, more than 51% of the lower 48 states are suffering from drought. Of the top 18 corn growing states, D4 exceptional drought has been reported in three – Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska.”
    https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/d4-extreme-drought-in-3-of-top-18-corn-growing-states

    How humans’ ability to digest milk evolved from famine and disease
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02067-2

    1. And, CO2 levels keep increasing.

      Aug. 7, 2022 417.92 ppm
      Aug. 7, 2021 415.03 ppm
      1 Year Change: 2.89 ppm (0.70%)

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