80 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, Nov 2, 2022”

    1. I’d argue Australia will have the most fossil fuel resources and military explosion capability per capita.

      20 million people and will make Texas blush with hydrocarbons.

  3. These are ten year trailing averages for some larger “developing” countries, especially some major oil producers, showing GDB per capita growth and, below, simple GDP. The most notable things to me are the collapses from quite high levels to zero and negative values for Nigeria and Angola over just ten years. A trailing average is a lagging number and these declines are fairly steady so it’s likely these countries are now in recession and seem likely to stay there (so actually depression). Corruption and population growth must be big effects, but the loss of oil production, even as average prices rise, must be a principal influence. Related, and almost surprising, are the less dramatic declines for Saudi and Brazil. India and Indonesia have been doing generally well but may have entered stormy waters with Covid, inflation and energy shortages over the past three years. Egypt looks better than most, another surprise to me, it has had some natural gas developments recently, which must have helped, but I don’t know what else.

  4. I read this yesterday and thought OFM might find a particular tit-bit particularly interesting

    100% Electric Vehicles = 13% Of New Vehicle Sales Globally!

    Here’s the part of interest to OFM

    Despite the USA and Europe not reaching record months in September, China made up for it. China was also supported by a long list of other markets at record heights, with the highlights being: Australia (8,000 units), South Korea (17,000), and … Japan (13,000)!

    Yep, Japan is (finally!) warming up to EVs, in no small part thanks to the success of the kei car Nissan Sakura and its Mitsubishi sibling, the eK X EV. Another interesting trend: all of the previously record-breaking markets are located in the Asia-Pacific region….

    (bold mine)

    Nissan Sakura

    And the picture below is why I think this would be of interest to OFM. A tiny highway legal (in Japan) EV with a range of 111 miles and a price of $18,210 (~$14,000 after subsidies) has moved EV sales in Japan to 13,000 YTD!

    1. The only reason there aren’t many more EVs in Europe is supply chain problems.

      1. I was skeptical of this claim you made, but when i looked up wait times for new factory ordered vehicles in Europe and US it is indeed very long. This pertains to both old style and EV’s for most manufacturers.

        2. This is an oil site, so it is understandable that events in the car industry aren’t so well known. But what happens now in the car industry decides what happens in 5-10 years in the oil industry.

          Right now the car industry is in complete meltdown. Where do I start? They are heavily dependent on chips, and the there is a worldwide shortage. So they are losing money. Meanwhile, they always look 5 years in the future, and have realized that internal combustion engines, which are the core technology of the industry, are dead. So they are making nine figure bets on EVs, but they can’t get any batteries (or chips). Because of the complexity of the product, their bets are baked in for years. The key technology is batteries, which they don’t know how to make. And then unions and governments are noticing that the EV supply chain needs maybe 40% fewer workers than the ICE supply chain. Yeah, and what cars companies need is software guys, not factory workers. Also cars need operating systems instead of being a bunch of disconnected modules, so they need to restart from scratch — see Nokia. And then there’s the looming problem of software standardization — there are only two mobile phone operating systems, do we really need 20 car operating systems? If not, how do individual vendors add value? And then there’s self driving vehicle. If that happens the industry is pretty much screwed, because it means people will stop buying cars just to park them 90% of the time.

          1. Well said.

            I’ll add to your observations that many people with ICE vehicles will milk them along for longer than has been the trend in the past, waiting for better outlook on the economy, newer models, and for their current vehicle to really need replacing.

            It all adds up to the strong likelihood that global light vehicles sales will trend much lower over this and next decade.
            By the end of this decade the great majority of sales will be electric.

            An example of the industry disruption- Honda [late to the game] is going to sell a midsize electric SUV called the Prologue in a year or two in the USA. They are using a GM vehicle core and Honda is just putting the cabin and exterior together. Trying to preserve their brand market share here as they play catch up.

            1. An additional factor that continues to amaze me is the durability of ICE cars. 200 or even 300 thousand miles is not unusual. A friend of mine recently took a an 800 mile round trip journey through the desert in a 15 year old Honda Civic with 200,000 miles on it. Used AC the whole trip and didn’t burn a drop of oil. 30 years ago that would have been considered a foolhardy thing to attempt yet today is quite ordinary. So the demand for cars per capita is not likely to be what it was in the recent past especially adding the increased cost.
              A recent newspaper article stated that average new car prices have dropped from a high of (approx.)$45,000 down to $43,000 as supplies have increased. With an average U.S. household income of under $80,000 it is easy to expect that there are going to be a lot of high mileage cars on the road in the years to come. And fewer trips to the showroom.

  5. One of the unintended consequences of sky-high electricity costs in Europe is that the payback time for solar installations has shrunk considerably. At 90 Euro cents/kWh payback time is somewhere around a year or so. And even if power prices come back to earth, once they are installed they’ll be there for the next couple of decades.
    Rgds
    WP

    1. After 30 years the residual power output of modern panels is looking to be over 70% of original capacity.

    2. Actually that is not unintended at all. For example in Germany there is an electricity tax of 2 cents per kilowatt hour which the Greens introduced in 2003 to discourage waste and encourage rooftop solar. The money is put into the retirement fund.

  6. Global Food Price Index virtually unchanged in October, with higher world cereal prices almost offsetting lower prices of other food commodities…

    1. >The world’s most vulnerable communities are experiencing some of the highest food prices this century, and this trend is expected to continue into 2023

      It’s worth mentioning that the poorest people in the world are by and large subsistence farmers, and they actually profit from high food prices, or are so off grid that they don’t notice them. The high prices mostly affect the urban poor.

      But this is not to downplay how serious the situation is. It’s just to point out that it is a little more complicated than the link suggests.

      1. I want to modify this statement. I should have looked at Beckwith’s source first. It’s a Christian End Times blog.

        What the hell has happened to Paul Beckwith?

        1. Yeah, I saw the book “The Rapture Verdict” displayed on his bookshelf. Nevertheless, he is correct about the coming famine. It doesn’t matter that he is a Christian nutcase; even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while. He is correct about global warming and the Russian invasion causing massive starvation next year. It just happens that this fits his ignorant ideology like a glove.

    3. According to the latest IPC analysis, the WFP found that a record 4.7 million people in Haiti are currently facing acute hunger (IPC 3 and above), including 1.8 million people in Emergency phase (IPC 4) and, for the first time ever in Haiti, 19,000 people in the capital city of Port-au-Prince are in Catastrophe phase (IPC 5). This means that they are at imminent risk of outright starvation.

      https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-167-haiti-2022-polycrisis

      And they’re short of gas, diesel and electricity. It’s a mess.

  8. Here is the latest major report supporting the conclusion that we are heading north of three degrees of warming. I don’t think governments had any real intentions of attempting, or plans for successfully achieving, the tree planting programs in their Paris pledges, but this shows they are impossible anyway.

    https://www.landgap.org

    “The total area of land needed to meet projected biological carbon removal in national climate pledges is almost 1.2 billion hectares – equivalent to current global cropland. Countries’ climate pledges rely on unrealistic amounts of land-based carbon removal.

    “More than half of the total land area pledged for carbon removal – 633 million hectares – involves reforestation, putting potential pressure on ecosystems,
food security and indigenous peoples’ rights. Restoring degraded lands and ecosystems account for 551 million hectares pledged.

    “Current ‘net accounting’ methods assume that planting new trees offsets fossil fuel emissions or the destruction of primary forest, but this ignores scientific and ecological principles.”

      1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Me2G6FJZMI

        Can those more skilled in the subject than me explain something?

        Peter Zeihan is on a world tour telling people that Russia, China, Canada, Germany, etc are going to collapse because of population demographics.

        Men in the 20 -40? range are disappearing and that age band is critical to your success (something along those lines)

        Russia is particularly in trouble cause they don’t have many in that band, and the ones they have are being sent into combat to die.

        My sincere question: If we are adding 83 million people per year, how do we have demographic issues? It seems like we should be busting at the seams in every cohort.

        1. 1. The population growth is not evenly distributed. Some countries are in decline already (Japan Italy, Poland for example), and yet others are still ramping up- like Nigeria, Ethiopia, India.
          2. People are not free to migrate. Guns, borders and laws prevent that.

          So, many countries are in the early stage of demographic crises (decline) while others are still young and growing fast.
          We’ve got a short term problem of severe population overshoot, and once we begin to correct downwards it will be a very painful and long transition. There is no recipe for gentle economic or population contraction.
          That is why everyone in the world has been hoping/pretending that growth can be perpetual.

          1. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

            So we are growing our global population in all the wrong places!!!

            The places that need it are facing demographic collapse.

            Satan, the evil demon, is clever…very very clever!!

    2. “Current ‘net accounting’ methods assume that planting new trees offsets fossil fuel emissions or the destruction of primary forest, but this ignores scientific and ecological principles.”

      Yes, in order for a small measure of help on greenhouse warming humans would simply have to walk away from vast areas of naturally production forestland- such as much of eastern China, India, Europe and eastern 1/2 of N.America for example. Walk away and leave the biomass undisturbed for a couple hundred years.
      Not going to happen.
      The rest of the efforts are simply nice for shade and other environmental benefits of having trees instead of grass and concrete. No carbon credit earned or awarded.

  9. I have never read anything by Thomas Homer-Dixon, hadn’t realised he was an academic and had, for some reason and completely wrongly, thought him a panglossian, secular millennialist. In fact he is very doomy, doubts his teenage children will reach old age and gives civilisation a 2% near term survival rating. He used to be a peak oil proponent and then completely switched. This talk was in January, it is about the Limits to Growth report. Events since then may have changed a few peoples minds, including his. He doesn’t mention the two studies over the last few years that showed we are broadly on track for the LtG base case and, I thought, had addressed some of what the original report had got wrong.

    https://canadiancor.com/dr-thomas-homer-dixon-world-3-at-50-what-it-got-right-and-what-it-got-wrong-cacor-zoom-series/

  10. Sunday morning trivia.

    ARCTIC FIRES COULD RELEASE CATASTROPHIC AMOUNTS OF CO2

    In 2019 and 2020, fires in this remote part of the world destroyed an area equivalent to nearly half of that which burned in the previous 40 years, said this study, which was published in the journal Science. These recent fires themselves have spewed some 150 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere contributing to global warming — a feedback loop. The area above the Arctic circle heats up four times faster than the rest of the planet and “it is this climate amplification which causes abnormal fire activity,”

    https://phys.org/news/2022-11-arctic-catastrophic-amounts-co2.html

    1. Just because greenhouse warming of earth is an inconvenient thing to acknowledge doesn’t justify willful ignorance or denial-ism. It is like denying the ramifications of other big problems like oil depletion or poverty.

      I suppose some people can’t acknowledge this issue because their tribal policy is to pretend it not a real thing.
      Such a very small box to put ones mind into…voluntarily even.

  11. I went to one of those AI image generators and requested “George Kaplan and Doug Leighton dreaming about climate change”. The result checks out lmao.

    1. If you’ve got nothing intelligent to say, you ought to just shut up and crawl back in your hole.

      1. Oh lighten up, what’s the point of living if you can’t have a laugh once in a while?

  12. Climate crisis: past eight years were the eight hottest ever, says UN
    CLIMATE CRISIS: PAST EIGHT YEARS WERE THE EIGHT HOTTEST EVER, SAYS UN
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/06/climate-crisis-past-eight-years-were-the-eight-hottest-ever-says-un

    António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said ahead of Cop27: “Emissions are still growing at record levels. That means our planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We need to move from tipping points to turning points for hope.” (There’s that word again…HOPE!!)

    A series of recent reports signalled how near the planet is to climate catastrophe, with “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and the current level of action set to see no fall in emissions and global temperature rise by a devastating 2.5C. (So basically, at this point, what were left with is praying (for the god believers) and hoping (for the rest of us.)
    …
    Prof Mike Meredith, at the British Antarctic Survey, said: “The messages in this report could barely be bleaker – all over our planet, records are being shattered as different parts of the climate system begin to break down. The loss of ice is especially alarming as the impacts on people, societies and economies are huge. If this doesn’t focus the minds of the global leaders at Cop27, I don’t know what will.” (Umm, nothing?)

    1. Remember the incredulity when Jared Diamond asked about the Rapa Nui, “What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

      But indigenous wisdom! Diamond’s view has been strenuously denied.

      The situation might be restated thus: What were they thinking when they mined and burned all those hydrocarbons and spewed the CO2 into the atmosphere even after decades of warnings that they should not be doing this?

      Well, we know exactly what they were thinking: God is going to bail us out of this. Have faith!

      1. When you live in a climate zone that you need to burn fuel to keep warm. Your part of the problem. B did you install a heat pump powered by solar panels yet ? or are you selfishly waiting for the climate God to not make it necessary.

        1. says the man whose food and water is all transferred into his artificial zone at huge ecological and energy cost.
          A 95% downsizing of population in the LA metro area might approach a sustainable level. Should begin immediately. The residual population will probably all have Spanish as their 1st language.

          1. Isn’t LA area the car capital of the world? The last time I was there, kids to Disney World, it seemed to be mostly freeways, parking lots and smog.

            1. Just looked it up. Every day, there are 45 million miles travelled in the City of Los Angeles There are 7.8 million vehicles registered in LA County There are 6.6 million drivers licenses issued Every day, 471,000 workers commute into LA County from other counties Every day, 3.9 million workers commute by car or carpool, 82% of the workforce.

            2. Montana has 184 vehicles registered per 100 people in the state — the most in the nation.

              Registered vehicles per capita by state- Great Plains states Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota have the largest rates of vehicle registrations per capita, according to 2020 Census Bureau figures.

              Metros with the highest rates of vehicle ownership-

              Of the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas (or metros) in the U.S., Raleigh, N.C., has the highest percentage of households with access to at least one vehicle. #31-Los Angeles, CA

              https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-insurance/car-ownership-statistics

              Next time Doug, do your homework

              *****

              “kids to Disney World”

              Again Doug, you are part of the environmental problem with no solutions. BTW, it’s Disneyland

          2. 100,000 max, under ideal conditions.
            I was born there in the 1940’s.
            11 million? Not without massive imports.
            (But almost all are from instate)
            You can get quite remote if you try.

          3. Woodstick,

            How water works in Orange County

            Orange County receives its water from multiple sources. The Orange County Groundwater Basin provides 77% of the drinking water supply to 2.5 million people in north and central Orange County. South Orange County receives imported water from the Colorado River and northern California via the State Water Project.

            North and central O.C. (Huntington Beach)

            The Orange County Water District (OCWD), servicing 2.5 million residents in north and central Orange County, manages the Orange County Groundwater Basin (Basin) and refills it with many different water supplies: water from the Santa Ana River, which includes rainfall, snowmelt and treated wastewater from upstream water users, local rainfall, imported water from the Colorado River and northern California, and purified wastewater from the Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS).

            https://www.ocwd.com/learning-center/how-water-works-in-oc/

            The Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) is
            a water recycling project jointly sponsored by OCSD
            and the Orange County Water District (OCWD) that
            supplements existing water supplies by providing a
            new, reliable, high-quality source of water to recharge
            the Orange County Groundwater Basin and to protect it
            from seawater intrusion.
            Operational since January 2008, GWRS is the world’s
            largest advanced water purification system for potable
            reuse and currently produces 100 million gallons per
            day (MGD) of purified recycled water that meets or
            exceeds drinking water standards. This is enough water
            to meet the needs of 850,000 Orange County residents.
            OCSD and OCWD are working to meet the future needs
            of this project through the GWRS Final Expansion. This
            expansion will require 179 MGD of treated wastewater
            flow from OCSD to produce 130 MGD of purified
            recycled water

            Woody, the above facts reject your “95% downsizing of population” pull it out of your ass statement regarding water. That right, Orange county residents know how to separate your shit from the truth. Let me also add, the energy to transport water to the LA basin is just a faction of the renewable energy generated from the dams that store the water.

            ORANGE COUNTY SANITATION DISTRICT

            “The energy costs run our treatment plants are
            a significant part of our annual operations and
            maintenance budget. As such, we continuously strive
            to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of
            our operations, while ensuring compliance with strict
            environmental regulations as well as conservation of
            natural resources.

            Consistent with these efforts, we have for more than
            30 years used digester gas, also called biogas, a product
            of the digestion process, as a fuel at our plants to save
            energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The
            Central Power Generation System helps us achieve our
            productivity, energy conservation, and resiliency goals
            by using the biogas we create. It allows us the option to
            operate independent from the electric company while
            increasing operational reliability. And, because we have
            been able to substantially reduce electricity costs, we
            saved $7.2 million in 2019-2020 and, in turn, are
            keeping our rates low for our ratepayers.”

            https://www.ocsan.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/29770/637673018704930000

            “food transferred”

            California is the world’s 5th largest supplier of food, cotton fiber, and other agricultural commodities. In the U.S., California is the largest producer of food despite having less than 4% of the farms in the country.

            The state has a unique Mediterranean climate that allows it to grow a variety of over 450 different crops. Some of the crops such as almonds, artichokes, figs, and raisins are exclusive to California, and the state is the largest exporter of almonds in the world.

            In the U.S., California is the number one dairy state and is the 4th largest wine producer in the world. The state produces over 90% of the wine in the U.S. It is also the nation’s leading producer of strawberries, averaging 1.4 billion pounds of strawberries (that’s 83% of the country’s total fresh and frozen strawberry production).

            https://blog.aghires.com/california-largest-food-producer-u-s/

            That’s right Woodick, I live just a couple of hundred miles from Imperial and San Joaquin valleys. The most productive food sources in the United States. That’s about 5 times closer than yourself. Better yet, I can step out my backdoor and pick avocados, pears, oranges, plums, apricots, peaches, cherries, apples and nectarines. And if times really get tuff, a couple hundred dollars for a green house and I would have year round food production.

            “downsizing of population”

            Absolutely, and I could pull a Doug and every other day posting some do nothing numbers of population increases without any solutions to a major problem. Like a lost Alzheimer’s disease patient who can’t remember yesterday. But really, what’s the point. Idea’s to address the issues are what’s important. That’s what makes humans unique.

            “Implement a one child system”

            https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-october-26-2022/#comment-748261

            BTW, I’m not the “man” who moved from the frying pan to the fire(Washington) because he got a little smoke in his eyes. Not here. Just sunny beach days.

            Why is Seattle so gloomy?

            https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Seattle-so-gloomy

            Seattle ranks as most medicated metro for mental health reasons

            https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-ranks-as-most-medicated-metro-for-mental-health-reasons/

            2. Oh, no. Not the “Ignore” button.

              “If you’ve got nothing intelligent to say, you ought to just shut up and crawl back in your hole.” “says the man” who should take his own advice

              You can’t handle the truth. You have nothing. So you run and hide. Enjoy your pity party.

      2. My mother took me to see the last mature chestnut, near Chattanooga. It’s dead now, nobody noticed.

        The problem with desertification is that it happens slowly on a human scale. For example, North America has been turning into a desert since European settlers tarted arriving, but you barely notice it because you don’t live long enough.

        Most people have forgotten that there used to be a huge lake in southern California, and hundreds of thousands of beaver dams. The first time I was in Redwood City CA, I opined they ought to rename it Asphalt City, because redwoods are hard to find there. Nobody got the joke, they’ve lived in a parking lot their whole lives, they don’t see the asphalt anymore. The great forests in the East have also been cut down. The rivers and lakes have been fished out, the bird populations have collapsed etc, but nobody can remember what it was like even 50 years ago. Darwin remarks in The Origin of Species that there are two subspecies of wolves in the Catskills. Can you even imagine that? Place names like Coney Island and Oyster Bay seem like mockery now.

        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of-top-soil-have-eroded-in-the-midwest-in-the-last-160-years-180979936/

  13. Not good news.

    THE LAST EIGHT YEARS ARE ON TRACK TO BE THE WARMEST ON RECORD, EVEN WITH A TRIPLE DIP LA NIÑA

    “The past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, fueled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat. Extreme heat waves, drought and devastating flooding have affected millions and cost billions this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022 report.”

    https://phys.org/news/2022-11-years-track-warmest-triple-dip.html

  14. On a global basis-
    At a growth rate of 15%, it will take until 2037 for Electricity production equivalent to the 2019 [pre-covid] demand level to come from solar and wind energy alone.
    That is 15 more years.

    And, at a growth rate of 15%, it will take until 2044 for solar and wind energy
    to generate the electricity equivalent to the 2019 total Global Energy demand.
    That is 22 years.

    I suppose it is possible. 15% growth…maybe high or maybe low.

    The race against depletion and a hot house earth is on, although most people seem to be
    ignorant of the stakes.

    https://carbontracker.org/reports/the-skys-the-limit-solar-wind/
    Its a big report from last year, worth the read.

    The seven countries with the poorest solar/wind potential in relation to current energy demand levels- Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Korea, Taiwan Switzerland, Japan. These are outliers, with most countries have abundant reserves.

  15. The latest major report supporting the conclusion that we are heading for climate breakdown.

    “This State of the Cryosphere Report 2022: Growing Losses, Global Impacts especially raises up the IPCC Sixth Assessment conclusion that complete loss of Arctic Sea ice in summer is now inevitable, even with the very lowest emissions pathways that peak temperatures at 1.6°C. This finding is a terminal diagnosis for that ecosystem and its essential role reflecting sunlight as the “Earth’s refrigerator,” something sea ice scientists have been warning for decades would come with continued high emissions. No one seems to have listened.

    “But the impending loss of Arctic summer sea ice it is not the only sign of growing cryosphere collapse. This year also saw March rains on East Antarctica, with temperatures 40°C above normal; a spike in Greenland surface melt for the first time ever in September; loss of over 5% of glacier ice in the Alps over a single summer; and the first documented rise in methane release due to global warming from a permafrost monitoring site. It also saw greater shell damage in parts of the Arctic Ocean, a clear sign of acidification; and an apparent crash in snow crab populations likely tied to warming waters.”

    https://iccinet.org/statecryo2022/

    1. Oopsie poopsies, they somehow forgot to mention how Antarctic sea ice was 6M square miles a few years ago, the largest in recorded history. Also speaking of Antarctica, the Ozone hole has been closing up and going away without even having to make any massive changes to our lifestyles.

      1. they somehow forgot to mention how Antarctic sea ice was 6M square miles a few years ago,
        Are you lost? Don’t know where you are on the internet? Around here, we like data. Not bullshit, which is what this is.

        So….in future, have a reference or stop wasting my time.

      2. Is this really the quality of deniers that we’re left with – they use baby talk and can’t even pretend to be subtle with their straw men. I’ll not bother with the ozone irrelevance but this year’s Antarctic Sea ice is the lowest recorded, about as many days as not have been all time lows. See chart below. I’d say google it but that, apparently, is a step too far for you.

    2. George —

      A grim report indeed. I turn 81 in a few days and with terminal cancer probably shouldn’t be reading this stuff. What a sorry state we have left for our kids and grandchildren. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I has part of the team that discovered the Prudhoe Bay oil deposit, running the seismic surveys and happily doing Fourier calculations with our (then) state-of-the-art computers, utterly clueless about the end result(s). Now it seems Prudhoe Bay is on its last legs and the Arctic has become a totally different place. I can still remember seeing relatively warm water fossils on Baffin Island and wondering how that could be possible. One lifetime and a totally different planet. Sigh! Anyway, thanks for posting this (I guess).

      1. Sorry to hear about the cancer.
        Your posts are always insightful.
        I was in Alaska in the 60’s also.

      2. Doug – I hope things go as well as they can. I’ve always enjoyed your comments and you’re one of the few whose name I look for in the recent posts list. It’s maybe not much consolation but you may have lived through the best 81 years this planet will ever have to offer. I used to spend quite a bit of time around Kamloops (maybe we passed each other at Tim Hortons), the town has its good and bad bits, but the surroundings are spectacular. I hope your Norwegian and Canadian branches of Family are doing well.

        1. George —

          Yes, the past 80-ish years have been a great (unique) time to be alive. Too young to be involved in WW2 and here to witness so many advances in physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, etc.

      4. DL, aka Chief Reporter of The Dystopian Beat, Happy Birthday. Live as long as you can and die when you have to, I always say. I’m gonna miss you.

    3. George said

      “The latest major report supporting the conclusion that we are heading for climate breakdown.”

      Been thinking about writing a post about climate on this blog. Climate scientists have given up on trying to predict what are called natural variations and many write it off to randomness. Yet, there is very likely a predominant component driven by tidal cycles. So when the world gets hit by the next big El Nino it could conceivably be predicted. Trickier than doing conventional ocean tide predictions but it can in principle be done.

      2. Agreed. Would love to hear your opinions.

        Paul you are obviously a very intelligent guy. Can you write it in a way that the rest of us (ME) can understand?

        I tried to read one of your published papers and couldn’t understand a single sentence. It was so technical, which it should be in a peer reviewed journal. But that doesn’t translate well to a message board.

        thanks ahead of time!!

  17. Oops, yet another one of those worse than expected results.

    ICE LOSS FROM NORTHEASTERN GREENLAND SIGNIFICANTLY UNDERESTIMATED

    Ice is continuously streaming off Greenland’s melting glaciers at an accelerating rate, dramatically increasing global sea levels. New results published today in Nature indicate that existing models have underestimated how much ice will be lost during the 21st century. Hence, its contribution to sea-level rise will be significantly higher. By 2100, the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream will contribute six times as much to the rising sea level as previous models suggested, adding between 13,5 to 15,5 mm, according to the new study. This is equivalent to the entire Greenland ice sheet’s contribution in the past 50 years. The research was carried out by researchers from Denmark, the United States, France, and Germany.

    “We foresee profound changes in global sea levels, more than currently projected by existing models,” said coauthor Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.

    https://phys.org/news/2022-11-ice-loss-northeastern-greenland-significantly.html

    More information: Shfaqat Abbas Khan, Extensive inland thinning and speed-up of North-East Greenland Ice Stream, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05301-z.

    http://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05301-z

  19. BTC-USD
    16,864.98
    -1,594.05(-8.64%)

    Well, something of questionable value facing reality?

      1. Interesting

        So something worth nothing may actually be worth nothing?

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