90 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, November 11, 2023”

  1. Dear OFM,

    I am a big believer of recycling, BUT very little of what we consume is recyclable. Steel and aluminium are realtively easy but polymers are another ball game. We cannot even recycle tires( tyres in the EU). The idea of a circualr economy is decades away. Currently if we managed to recycle PE we would get about 30% as ethylene if we were lucky and we would need lot of pretreatment. Every polymer process I have reviewed consumes much more energy than the virgin resin.

    1. Carnot, one of the problems of recycling is that very little is fit to be reused for original purpose. Recycling and the theoretical circular economy tend to be spoken about in the same breathe, but in the real world it’s not happening, nor has anyone bothered to model the amount of energy required to do so properly.

      Take glass as an example ..
      https://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/news/news-articles/using-recycled-glass-fines-in-construction-and-product-design

      … so much is used for ‘other’ purposes, not the original purpose. So new mining for new materials is needed for original purposes.

      Then there is plastic.. The graphic here says it all…
      https://www.oecd.org/environment/plastic-pollution-is-growing-relentlessly-as-waste-management-and-recycling-fall-short.htm

      From any of the people that propose the bright green future of modern civilization, please tell the rest of us where the plastic will come from, or what the replacement will be? No plastic means nothing electrical, because all wires are insulated with plastic of some type…
      Please don’t use the excuse of “We’ll have FFs for plastic for a long time”, because I’m asking about when there is none..

      1. please tell the rest of us where the plastic will come from
        Most plastic is not really needed. About 40% is used for packaging. Not having a you trash can stuffed to the rim with packing material is not the End of Civilization As We Know It.

        Plastic is wonderful stuff, but we need much less of it that we currently produce. Anyway plastic can be made from natural gas, which is currently flared off in vast quantities.

        The World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Tracker, a leading global and independent indicator of gas flaring, found that in 2021 144 billion cubic meters (bcm) of associated gas was flared.

        1. Maybe you should doa little more research. Much of the polyethylene (PE) is used in packaing material. Films, bottles, drums, elecrical insulation. Polypropylene is also widely used on packaging and also durable goods (car interiors). Then there are to other polymers such as PET, PS and EPS, as well as PVC all of which have various applications.

          Recycling these polymers post consumer is challenging and still in early stages of development. The circular economy is anything but. Deconstructing tyres and making new tyres from the waste tyres is simply not possible.. The sidewalls and tread are not the same. Inside the tyre is a layer of rubber tat is impermeable. Then there is the wire and fibres. Some tyres are recycled into carbon black which is used to make new tyres.

          You claim that polymers can be made from natural gas. There is huge misunderstanding about natural gas. Natural gas typically refers to methane with a small amount of ethane. The only process that can produce feedstock for polmers is the methanol to olefines process (MTO). This process is only used in China. Ethane and propane are natural gas liquids that can be used to produce ethylene and propane cracking will produce ethylene and propylene – two important intermediates. The other
          base petrochemical include butadiene, benzene, tolune and xylene. Two intermediates that are produced form methane steam reforming are methanol and ammonia. Without these intermediates you can just about forget about producing any polymers and many more products, such as glycols, detergents, thermoset resins, coatings, adhesives. What would you like to forego?

          1. You say, I should do some research, but you fail to provide any citations for your claims, and they may well be out of date.

            According to this website, 94% of PET bottles (in Germany) are recycled. The site also claims that about 30% of the material in new PET bottles is recycled.

            https://newsroom.kunststoffverpackungen.de/2020/10/30/studie-pet-wertstoffkreislauf-pet-flaschen-umweltschonender/

            Currently a lot of recycled PET is use for single use packaging like tomatoes, in Germany at least, ends up being burned for electricity and district heating. There is a trend towards using paper for single use packaging instead, but that has its limits.

            It’s also worth noting that many PET bottles are sold with a hefty deposit, €0.15. As a result, bottles are commonly reused.

            I agree with you that a lot of work needs to be done, but it is not true that nothing has been done or can be done.

        2. I ask about plastic after FFs, and include this bit…
          “Please don’t use the excuse of “We’ll have FFs for plastic for a long time”, because I’m asking about when there is none..”

          Which is very clear about AFTER fossil fuels…

          and you answer “Anyway plastic can be made from natural gas”.

          To me it seems there are people that can’t get their heads around the long term, being in the hundreds of years, instead they think in the next decade or so as the long term. We are going to have plenty of fossil fuels in the next decade, too many as it will turn out for planetary boundaries. That’s short term to me. I’m thinking of my nephews grand children when they are in in their 60’s!! (none have children yet!).

          The mad scramble to keep the modern civilization going at any cost, guarantees a worse world for these future people with much less biodiversity, a climate in turmoil and a bigger crash when it comes.
          Solar, wind, batteries and nuclear are all just derivatives of fossil fuels, without fossil fuels we can’t and are not making or maintaining them.

          1. Woopsie daisy, I thought we were talking about the world ending in the 2030s and everyone dying for lack of plastic.

            In hundreds of years petroleum will be about as interesting as a raw material as whale blubber.

      2. Electrical was around before plastics, I am old enough to remember when wires were insulated with asphalt impregnated cloth. Not renewable or green either!

        1. Our house built in the 1920’s still has some old wiring with some kind of rubber insulation that crumbles if you try to move it. The local electrician told me the older houses with impregnated cotton insulation are much safer 🙂

          1. That electrician has his head up his ass.

            That old wiring was ok back in it’s day, but any still in use is so brittle that any disturbance at all results in the insulation breaking up and falling off the wire inside it.

            Been there and tried to repair some of it a couple of times. Told the owners to either do a complete new wiring job, or get rid of the house. ( No, I’m not an electrician as such myself, but it’s a LONG way from rocket science, and my IQ is at least a few points above the idiot level, lol.)

            Old houses settle, earthquakes are real things. A piece of rotten lumber under a leaky window or roof with a wire attached is about the same thing as a land mine, in terms of fire hazard.

    2. About half of the material from tires is currently recycled in the EU (and UK). The collection rate is 95%

      Out of the approx. 3 million tonnes of tires reaching end-of-life stage, 1.6 million tonnes are recycled into rubber, steel, and textile fibres. Nevertheless, still more than 1 million tonnes of End-of-Life tires are used in co-incineration in the cement industry.

      https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2022/07/11/eu-wide-end-of-waste-criteria-for-elt-derived-rubber/

    3. I suggest that, assuming a relatively slow collapse / contraction of the economy, we will either by choice or NECESSITY find ways to get along without nearly all of the stuff that’s currently being thrown away.

      Lots of people a lot smarter than yours truly believe otherwise, I’m rather optimistic that wind and solar power, plus maybe tidal and wave power, etc, can be built up to the point a renewable energy industrial economy is a real possibility. Keep in mind that we will be maintaining rather than building new highways, new housing, new shopping centers ( most of which will be likely subdivided into apartments or maybe have the roofs replaced with glass and converted into greenhouses.

      People will be delivering food and other purchased products for hire, with one gallon of gasoline in one car getting as much stuff to the consumer as ten gallons in ten different cars.

      I dress well, in clothing well suited to my lifestyle in terms of being presentable and comfortable while actually NEEDING one new pair of pants and one new shirt once a year or so. I have friends who buy more new clothing every month, and toss most of it within a year or two.

      Motor oil used to come in steel cans, and milk came in glass before it came in paper.

      Furniture made entirely from wood, minus some screws and upholstery, can be made to last just about forever. I have a house full of such furniture.

      There’s no reason, in technical or engineering terms, that a car or truck can’t be built to last fifty years or longer, with very close to one hundred percent of the materials used in it being easily recycled at the end of it’s service life.

      Now I’m NOT an engineer, but I am a world class jackass of all trades, and I personally own farm machinery that’s built this way, and a truck this old as well, which would last at least a million miles, if properly maintained and worn out parts are replaced as necessary.

      People in the industrial mechanical trades buy motors, switches, wiring, breakers, belts, gears, pulleys, bearings, etc, that are off the shelf and FULLY interchangeable with the same items going back seventy five years or more.

      A heavy truck mechanic in a properly equipped garage can actually swap out the engine in an eighteen wheeler quicker and easier than a Chevy mechanic in a dealer can swap out the engine in a Chevy sedan.

      The owner can put in a new engine that will bolt right up to the existing frame work and transmission, with only the wiring requiring an upgrade from older models.

      Furthermore we will, as a matter of necessity, get along with one truck for every four or five we have today, one car for every ten we have today.

      Food will be sold in bulk packages, in more nearly it’s natural state of being harvested, with the containers being recycled. We’re already recycling most of the cardboard boxes used to deliver fruit to supermarkets. I get them for one third the price of new ones, and they can be reused as much as five or six times.

      We’re harvesting apples now in eighteen bushel bin boxes, built from rough hardwood lumber. These bin boxes last twenty years or more if stored covered during the off season, and here and there you will see them at retail stores and markets now, with the store people putting the fruit over onto open displays, where customers bag it for themselves.

      Back when I was a kid we sawed our own lumber and made our own one bushel boxes, buying only the nails.

      And for one reason or another, the population IS going to contract anywhere from maybe a third to as much as ninety percent or more, meaning a hell of a lot less of everything will be needed.

      Supply chains can and will be shortened, with the more prosperous and powerful countries bringing ESSENTIAL industries to their home turf, again assuming the contraction plays out slowly rather than abruptly.

      It’s NOT going to be a business as usual world by any means, and there’s no guarantee this scenario will come to pass.

      The very biggest single problem may actually turn out to finding ways to support the tens of millions of people who lose their jobs. Some of them can be put to work on public works jobs such as reforestation of former farm lands or whatever. But most of them may live out their lives on whatever welfare is available.

  2. Cost is only a near term indicator for the attractiveness of renewables, maybe only really applicable over a few months (EROI analyses are better), but longer term there is a huge question over whether there are enough resources (materials, time, energy and human skills) to build out very much of the desired infrastructure and there are two other fundamental issues.

    Renewables can support a civilisation, but not one as sophisticated and integrated as this civilisation because their overall EROI is too low. However the sort of renewables we are developing and installing can only be supported, maintained and replaced by a civilisation like this one, which presents a bit of a problem.

    Renewables do not address the main problem of overshoot. If deployed to the extent proponents hope, i.e. to maintain BAU, they will significantly increase environmental damage and biodiversity loss. In terms of Limits to Growth type models they would move things towards the high tech runs that end in harder crashes and deeper undershoot, which are worse outcomes in the long run.

    1. Cost is only a near term indicator for the attractiveness of renewables, maybe only really applicable over a few months
      This is an odd statement because the reason renewables are cheaper is that they don’t require fuel to keep the running. The up front costs are the expensive part.

      1. “The up front costs are the expensive part.”
        That may be true enough . . . but . . .

        I often wonder about the costs of keeping a wind farm running, especially an off shore one.

        All those bearing surfaces wearing . . . and the blades, there must be wear on leading edges.

        Can’t get my head around it actually . . . they are not like the little Dunlite we used to lower for a lube job and check out every Christmas.

    2. Price is the near-term indicator and can change with the wind. It’s just $$$.

      Cost, on the other hand, is more intractable–and long-term. This is what I think you mean when you reference biodiversity losses and environmental damage.

      (As Nate H. might put it.)

      1. Price would have been better, but I was trying to include capital, subsidies, interest rates, insurance etc. Maybe “estimated overall discounted lifetime financial outlay including risk premium”. Except by the time you get half way through that you’ve probably moved on to the next comment.

    3. George,

      Spot on. The idea that we can rely on unreliables to maintain BAU is wishful thinking. Properly cost in all the full cost of providing storage and/or back up generation and the cost goes out of sight. So much for low cost electricity.

      The real sting is the maintenence costs of wind turbines. Have read up on leading edge erosion and brinnelling of pitch change bearings. My guess is that 5MW will be about the largest turbine that can be built and operated for a decent length of time until the blades and bearing fail.

      1. We’ve been farming and surviving for thousands of years now……. depending on that same unreliable weather that makes renewable wind and solar power unreliable, lol.

        People like Carnot have a very good point about renewables being unreliable in terms of TODAY’S economy.

        But as smart as they are, and they’re often better trained than I am, they don’t seem to be willing to consider the fact that today’s economy will inevitably morph into tomorrow’s new economy that can cope with intermittent energy issues….. assuming of course that there’s time enough for us to make the necessary changes.

        Shutting down a sawmill when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing will make lumber more expensive, because the capital cost of the mill will be higher in proportion to the loss of production time……. but lumber will still be available.

        Maybe we won’t be buying beer and soft drinks shipped hundreds of miles by truck anymore. Beer can be made locally, at affordable prices, as it’s been made for a thousand years, and shipped five miles or ten miles……. or even brewed in the back and sold up front.

        And barring outright hot war, we will have enough oil and gas to run the grid as necessary for quite some time.

        We don’t have to solve the energy supply or resource supply issue for whatever people are still around a century or a millennium down the road. We just have to get thru the next few decades, the next century, without mucking up the environment to the point every last one of us perishes.

        After that,’ if a few remaining people are living a subsistence lifestyle similar to the one lived by my great great grand parents, using a little metal for tools and weapons, a little glass, and maybe some shipped salt and spices, etc, so be it.

        It’s an academic question.

        In the meantime, I just don’t see giving up, or advocating any course of action that’s an absolute non starter for political and or economic reasons.

        1. It’s in most times waste to run a factory only when the intermediate energy is there – you need 2 or more factories to produce the same. And the double for producing the factory equipment. Doesn’t work good.

          You’ll have to store the energy. That was already done in old times whenever technical possible – not per battery, but here water mills at small creeks had ponds that covered a working day. They turned off the flow in off times. So they had 100 KWH batteries at their power facilities already in the mediaeval because they wanted more control and efficiency.

          1. Numbers can only be very roughly estimated, and in any case I don’t have any specific numbers, but I know a lot about manufacturing, by way of my rolling stone life style.

            A lot of manufacturing operations run only a day shift, with the equipment idle at night and on weekends. Arranging to work at any time energy is available would be a hell of a job, in terms of hired employees, but if it’s necessary, it could be done. And in some cases production could be warehoused by working extra hours, when energy is available.

            A key fact here is that at least half of everything in the way of cheap consumable goods is basically wasted, in terms of real needs. I buy stuff every week in packages that probably cost almost as much as the goods inside at hardware stores.

            And in a shrinking economy, with a falling population, there’s going to be a HELL of a lot of stranded and near worthless manufacturing infrastructure …… all of it sunken costs that can’t easily be recovered. So the cost of such a factory is basically irrelevant. The issue is whether it can be operated intermittently at a profit.

            It’s hard to find data about which industries can operate intermittently without dealing with serious technical issues. I once worked a few weeks in a plastics extrusion factory where a loss of electric power was a minor disaster. The plastic in the machines would cool off and harden up and getting them cleaned up took a whole day or longer for two men for each machine.

            And I worked in a factory making wooden furniture. If the power went off there, the only serious problem was paying the workers taking a long extra break on company time, as much as a couple of hours once while I was there.

            If the contraction / collapse plays out over a few years, industries considered essential to national security or national welfare will likely be at the top of the list of priority customers if they HAVE to run continuously.

      2. The idea that renewables should maintain business as usual was never propagated by the renewables industry. They prefer the term disruption, which is sort of the opposite.

        You are attacking imaginary foes.

  3. In case you were wondering.

    The Pacific Ocean continues running a fever as the northern hemisphere heads into the winter months, and forecasters see the chance for this El Niño pattern to grow even stronger in the weeks to come. OAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) issued an El Niño advisory in its monthly update on Thursday, a formality that makes official what we’ve long known—El Niño is here, it’s strong, and it could affect our winter weather.

    https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/severe/el-nino-turns-strong-and-still-growing-as-winter-fast-approaches

    1. The El Niño phase is here since a few months. No surprise for this, even in CPC papers. Secondly, this is a weak or moderate El Niño as it has not been able to threshold the level of 1,5°C of temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 area. The temperature anomaly in the Niño 1+2 area is in decrease since the end of August (1°C of temperature anomaly lost between 3°C and 2°C). Interestingly negative temperature anomalies appeared in western Pacific but also recently in Eastern Pacific suggesting a rise of thermocline in Eastern Pacific. The more recent ENSO forecast advisory of CPC is suggesting a moderate to strong El Niño (1°C to 2°C) for the next months and the return to ENSO neutral conditions next summer.

      1. Wrong, this El Niño has now met the threshold for a “strong” event! The August–October Oceanic Niño Index, which measures the three-month-average sea surface temperature in the east-central tropical Pacific (the so-called Niño-3.4 region), was 1.5 °C above the long-term average (long-term is currently 1991–2020).

        https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/november-2023-el-nino-update-transport-options#:~:text=First%20stop%E2%80%94this%20El%20Ni%C3%B1o,is%20currently%201991%E2%80%932020).

            1. High Paul and Doug,

              How about a few explanatory remarks concerning this AMO spike for those of us who aren’t so well informed? Thanks!

        1. Picky. picky.
          I assume that M. Fleury is not a native English speaker because the grammer is just fine in Latin languages. Let’s see what kind of a grammatical sentence Alibiquted can form in another language.
          I had a foreign engineer working for me several years ago. He told me that if you spoke three languages you were tri-lingual. Two languages make you bi-lingual. One language makes you an American. Like me. I think it’s very funny.

          1. It’s not just Latin languages by any means. Germans and Dutch make the exact same mistake. My wife teaches English to German 10 graders, and it’s in the curriculum, but they don’t pay much attention.

            To be fair, English verb tenses are complex and very tricky to learn. In this case, the perfect tense is being used to describe a state the currently exists, so it’s no surprise when people make mistakes.

  4. Let’s try to back off far enough from the trees to actually see the forest, and what will be happening to the forest itself, in either case…… going renewable, or otherwise.

    The otherwise case is that we continue the usual fossil fuel bau path, the fore going conclusion being depletion, climate troubles, loss of biodiversity, economic collapse, maybe WWIII, etc.

    Maybe the best case result of going renewable, to whatever extent we can, will be pretty much the same.

    The difference isn’t really very important, except to people who think of the environment as something sacred. That’s a sentiment I happen to share myself.

    Mother Nature doesn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about biodiversity. She’s not sentient, she’s not sentimental.

    Life will continue on.

    We’re not likely to do anything even remotely comparable to major asteroid hit by way of example.

    What ever survives us will evolve and create a new biosphere, based on what’s left of the old. Whether it takes a few thousand years, or a few million, or tens of millions, is entirely irrelevant.

    But going renewable to the extent possible means it’s at least more likely that some of our offspring will be able to continue to live a more or less civilized way of life for at least a generation or two, and possibly for a very long time.

    I’m personally PROGRAMMED to care more about the future of humans than I am biodiversity as a general proposition……… but I DO understand that our own survival may very well be dependent on a continued high level of biodiversity.

    Nothing’s ever simple anymore.

  8. https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/expert-details-the-impacts-the-great-trucking-recession-will-have-on-americans

    The gist of this keep’em scared and mad right wing propaganda pieces is that the trucking industry is in trouble……. which it is, incidentally.

    But you have to be as dumb as a fence post to swallow the idea that because truckers are in trouble BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY TRUCKS AND TRUCKERS the overall economy is in trouble………. but that’s exactly the basic premise of this article.

    Anybody who understands even the abc ‘s of business economics understands that too many truckers mean shipping price wars………… which in turn means everything shipped by truck actually costs less than otherwise. GREAT for everybody else.

    But once your MAGA mind is made up…….. thinking something as simple as this thru just doesn’t happen.

  10. Hickory and I have recently been commenting on the apparent stalemate in Ukraine.

    Yesterday I watched an interview with Rachel Maddow where she described speeches of Nazi sympathisers in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. People like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and Sen. Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) gave anti-interventionist speeches for the America First Committee. Maddow says that their most compelling argument was that a war couldn’t be won, would be an incredible expense for no gain, so better to just accept the reality on the ground (most of Europe under Nazi occupation).

    Maybe it’s the same with Ukraine? We have pro-Russia sympathisers (Trump, a lot of the GOP – especially MAGA, some Democrats) saying we should accept the situation on the ground and not intervene further? Ignoring the rape, the murder, the torture, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the taking of 700,000 Ukrainian children to be russified [Snyder]? Scary.

    Maddow interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvyzRCIWfVI

    Snyder article: Would you sell them out?
    https://snyder.substack.com/p/would-you-sell-them-out

    1. In a gridlocked war of attrition, essentially what we have today, the numbers suggest that Ukraine will loose. I find Peter Turchin’s analysis to be very convincing. https://peterturchin.com/war-in-ukraine-iv-projections/ All of the moral arguments aside, perhaps it is time to sue for peace, accept the loss of real estate, admit Ukraine to NATO and fortify the boundary.? This is not a popular idea due to the moral arguments. Russia doesn’t care as they hold a pretty good hand right now.

      1. Putin is waiting for the energy crunch from Post Peak Oil to bite.

        He knows its coming and he knows USA Shale is what is holding it up.

        He also knows the ferocious decline rates of USA Shale aren’t sustainable.

        He has the oil importing NATO and oil importing China on his borders.

        Demographics are not on his side.

        But he has a good hand in a resource war, which is inevitable and happening in the Ukraine.

        1. Russian oil production is in decline whatever Putin wants to do. The last event, the ban of all oil products exportation, shows that the Putin regime is in a high state of disorder.

    1. That’s the way I’ve seen it for a long time

      Right out of the Hitler play book

    2. Thank goodness a few people finally had the gumption to say NO to him.
      What the fuck took them so long? Christie and Haley, Barr and McConnell, Miley and all the others.
      They all should have known from the earliest moments in mid 2010’s.
      The racist attack on Obamas citizenship was enough for anyone with half and eye open to know the score.

    3. Many of us were aware this shit eight years ago and we barely knew the dude.

      Anyone who advertises steaks in the back of magazines . . .

  12. Here is the latest peer reviewed “We are screwed in so many ways” paper.

    Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability

    The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping. We identify 14 traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps.

    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0261

    The whole issue of the proceedings is pretty good: Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis

    (There seems to have been a drop in “We are saved because …” papers, and still more in “Do exactly what I tell you and we’ll be fine” TED talks.)

      1. Won’t change everything but is sure makes posting stuff online easier.
        Consider Carnots’ statement (picked by me at random):

        So I am slightly better prepared than most and I live on a small farm that we can sustain ourselves longer than most.

        Here’s a bunch of rephrasing:

        I live on a tiny farm where we can support ourselves for longer than most, thus I am a little more prepared than others.

        I therefore live on a small farm where we can support ourselves for a longer period of time than most, and I am marginally more prepared than most.

        Due to my tiny farm where we can support ourselves for a longer period of time, I am therefore a little more prepared than most.

        Because of this, I am a little more prepared than most and I live on a small farm where we can maintain ourselves for a longer period of time.

        This is very cheap and an easy way to pretend you are lots of different people saying the same thing. Social media are already being flooded with this kind of robotic content. It has real political consequences.

        For example, Texas Senator Cruz was recently observed checking social media for reactions immediately after making particularly incendiary remarks on the Senate floor. Does he know his followers are bots? Does he care? Does it matter?

        1. It matters that there are fifty million or more or who will vote for him because he’s a trumpster ass kisser type with similar values.

  13. So, for how long do we keep seeing headlines like this?

    WORLD SEVERELY OFF TRACK TO LIMIT PLANET-HEATING EMISSIONS

    The world is “failing to get a grip” on climate change, the UN warned Tuesday, as an assessment of climate pledges shows only minor progress on reducing emissions this decade. Last year’s report used a 2010 benchmark and found that if the world’s NDCs were fully implemented, emissions would be 10.6 percent higher by 2030. This time around there has been “only a fractional improvement”, Stiell said, with emissions projected to be 8.8 percent higher in 2030 than in 2010.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-11-world-severely-track-limit-planet-heating.html

    1. And,

      GREENHOUSE GASES HIT RECORD HIGH IN 2022

      Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere hit new record highs in 2022, with no end in sight to the rising trend, the United Nations warned Wednesday. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization said levels of the three main greenhouse gases—the climate-warming carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—all broke records last year. Such levels of heat-trapping gases will mean further temperature increases, more extreme weather and higher sea levels, the WMO said in its 19th annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

      https://phys.org/news/2023-11-greenhouse-gases-high.html

      1. On the other hand;

        Analysis: China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy

        China’s CO2 emissions have seen explosive growth over recent decades, pausing only for brief periods due to cyclical shocks.

        Over the past 20 years, its annual emissions from fossil fuels and cement have climbed quickly almost every year – as shown in the figure below – interrupted only by the economic slowdown of 2015-16 and the impact of zero-Covid restrictions in 2022.

        While CO2 is rebounding in 2023 from zero-Covid lows (see: Why emissions grew in Q3 of 2023), there have also been record additions of low-carbon capacity, setting up a surge in electricity generation next year. (See: Solar, wind and hydropower set to surge in 2024.)

        Combined with a rebound in hydro output following a series of droughts, these record additions are all but guaranteed to push fossil-fuel electricity generation and CO2 emissions into decline in 2024, as shown in the figure below.

        We shall see. We’re only 13 and a half months away from the end of 2024 when we will find out if this analysis was any good.

  14. Overshoot by William Canton, published Oct. 1, 1980. I still have my first edition copy. Yeah, it was a “good read”. We will still be publishing studies as the wheels well and truly begin to fall off, I think the lug nuts are getting loose now. BAU rules, structurally, politically, emotionally locked in, just like the Easter Islander as he felled the last giant palm tree….
    The only real solution to our predicament is less. Less population, less materialism, less energy consumption, less possessions, less waste, less travel, etc, etc. This message doesn’t sell well. I have embraced trying to simplify my life for about 15 years now. I have cut my footprint by perhaps 30%, maybe a bit more. When i look at my stuff and compare it to what my grandfather had, I still have too much! We are products of our culture and I find it very hard to break out of it, even when I make the effort to do so. I believe we each need to become the change we wish to see, it has to start there. The age of voluntary simplicity has a shelf life, and we are approaching the pull date. Forced simplicity {aka poverty} will be a wicked master, made doubly so by not allowing us to wisely choose what we wish to bring along to cushion the long descent.

    1. I have embraced trying to simplify my life for about 15 years now. I have cut my footprint by perhaps 30%, maybe a bit more.

      Tom, it doesn’t fucking matter. You should do what you have to do to protect yourself. “Cutting your footprint” is good insofar as it teaches you to live with less. It is utterly POINTLESS as a way to make a difference in the way the world is moving.

      We stay home here as much as possible; burn firewood; grow, preserve and cook our own food; disconnect from ALL pop culture; not because “we give a shit,” but because we don’t want to DIE too awful fast if or when the collapse comes.

      We’ll die, surely (we’re old), but we’re a tiny bit prepared to weather deprivation for a while.

      1. Mike B, well said..
        Just because any one of us decides to use less of something, just means there is more for someone else to use, and it will be used, think Maximum Power Principal here.

        Having some type of preparation for the end of the world is not going to save anyone, but it might lead to a better life in the lead up to the EOTW. The Covid lockdowns didn’t inhibit us much at all, we still had the run of the farm, able to go outside doing stuff wherever and whenever we liked, and it’s a great variety of things to do. Way better than those stuck in an apartment in the city allowed out for an hour or whatever, to walk the dog.

        The type of lockdowns and restrictions placed on people during covid is likely just a modest prequal to what would happen as the EOTW becomes more obvious to governments..
        EOTW of course being end of modern civilization with collapse and chaos. Governments will try and stop chaos at extreme cost to citizens..

        I just hope Dennis is correct in the amount of world oil supplies growing for a few more years, as I’ll be older than and had more years of the modern lifestyle to enjoy..

        1. I entirely agree with Mike B and Hideaway. I have significantly reduced my energy consumption but still consume too much ( 300 litres of gasoline, 1000 cubic metres of natural gas and 5MW of electrical power) per year.

          So I am slightly better prepared than most and I live on a small farm that we can sustain ourselves longer than most.

          The real issue though will be lawlessness. A new wild west is on the cards and this will cause the collapse of basic services. Add in the immigration factor and government swill collapse and a dystopian society will emerge, if we are lucky. Otherwise it will be mob rule, which it is nearly is already.

          Just look at the Gaza issue. 2 million people governed by terrorists and whose masters live a life of luxury in Qatar, made possible by endless humanitarian aid packages that never reach the intended destination. The Hamas leaders realise that continued poverty and war only brings in more money to steal. Meanwhile the population increases by 3% per year.

          1. I have learned that we cannot be truly prepared. “Prepper” psychology is delusional.

            We can only hope to be unsurprised . . .

            1. “The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported the housing market index (HMI) was at 34, down from 40 last month. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.”

          2. Sometimes Carnot nails it.
            “The real issue though will be lawlessness. A new wild west is on the cards and this will cause the collapse of basic services. Add in the immigration factor and government swill collapse and a dystopian society will emerge, if we are lucky. Otherwise it will be mob rule, which it is nearly is already.”

            The big picture IS going to hell. The only real questions are how fast, how far, and how tough things will be in the future. The old saying that every solution brings about two new problems will apply just the same during collapse as it applied during the centuries long boom starting with the Industrial Revolution.

            I’m one of the guys in a better position than most people, living on a WORKING farm in a relatively remote area with machinery and the old time hands on skills, etc, ample water, timber, good fenced land, etc.

            But my circumstances are a study in contradictions.

            I’m mostly a liberal, and I’m in favor of gun laws controlling violence etc. The gun culture in this country has morphed entirely out of control, for various reasons, the two biggest ones in my opinion being right wing politicians peddling fear and ignorance on the one hand and the gun industry itself going ballistic in the search for profits.

            But I have a small arsenal of my very own. And if anybody from Biden to trump wants my guns, they can pry them out of my cold dead hands, if they’re up to the job.

            So I’m a hypocrite, lol. I want my guns, but I’m in favor of forcing other people to pass a background check, etc, outlawing military style weapons,etc.

            There’s a small but nevertheless real possibility I’ll live long enough to see the phones dead, no cops on the road, and refugees from cities turning to robbery and murder in order to provide themselves with food and shelter.

            If things get that bad, I’ll be holed up with four or five old friends, two or three of them retired military who have been shot at ( and hit as well) over the course of their careers in uniform.

            We’ll be able to raise enough corn, potatoes, onions and beans to live, even if we have to do it by hand. With a little luck, we will have some chickens and maybe a cow or hog or two for the table. There’s gravity water from a spring, enough trees within a hundred yards for firewood for decades, and enough tools to see it out so long as we’re physically capable.

        2. I personally believe the Ukrainians can and will send the Russians home with their tails between their legs IF NATO countries hold firm and continue to supply Ukraine as necessary with weapons and such.

          Over the last fifty plus years I’ve read more history books than some history majors I’ve known by a factor of ten or more………. if they went into some other line of work, which is the usual case.

          “Peace in our time” is a phrase that absolutely must be taken seriously.

          The Russians have made their intentions perfectly clear. Nearby small countries are peeing their pants, which is why they’re in NATO or trying like hell to get in now, and spending every time they can to build up their own military forces.

          At Munich, Chamberlain got an international agreement that Hitler should have the Sudetenland in exchange for Germany making no further demands for land in Europe. Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’. Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe.

          Chamberlain and Hitler 1938 – The National Archives

          https://www.history.com/news/chamberlain-declares-peace-for-our-time-75-years-ago

          For days, dread had blanketed London like a fog. Only a generation removed from the horrors of World War I, which had claimed nearly one million of its people, Britain was once again on the brink of armed conflict with Germany. Hitler, who had annexed Austria earlier in the year, had vowed to invade Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938, to occupy the German-speaking Sudetenland region, a move toward the creation of a “greater Germany” that could potentially ignite another conflagration among the great European powers.

          The clouds of war billowed in the British capital as the hours to the deadline dwindled. As Chamberlain mobilized the Royal Navy, Londoners, including the prime minister’s wife, prayed on bended knees inside Westminster Abbey. Workers covered the windows of government offices with sandbags and installed sirens in police stations to warn of approaching enemy bombers. By torchlight, they scarred the city’s pristine parks by digging miles of trenches to be used as air-raid shelters. A knot of traffic snarled the city as Londoners began an exodus. Hundreds of thousands who planned to stay in the city stood patiently in line for government-issued gas masks and air-raid handbooks. London Zoo officials even developed plans to station gun-toting men in front of cages to shoot the wild animals in case bombs broke open their cages and freed them.

          Just two days before the deadline, Hitler agreed to meet in Munich with Chamberlain, Italian leader Benito Mussolini and French premier Edouard Daladier to discuss a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. The four leaders, without any input from Czechoslovakia in the negotiation, agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler. Chamberlain also separately drafted a non-aggression pact between Britain and Germany that Hitler signed.

          When news of the diplomatic breakthrough reached the British capital, normally staid London responded like a death-row prisoner granted a last-minute reprieve. Jubilation and waves of relief washed over London in a celebration that had not been seen since the armistice that silenced the guns of World War I.

          On a rainy autumn evening, thousands awaited the prime minister’s return at London’s Heston Aerodrome, and the thankful crowd cheered wildly as the door to his British Airways airplane opened. As raindrops fell on Chamberlain’s silver hair, he stepped onto the airport tarmac. He held aloft the nonaggression pact that had been inked by him and Hitler only hours before, and the flimsy piece of paper flapped in the breeze. The prime minister read to the nation the brief agreement that reaffirmed “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

          Summoned to Buckingham Palace to give a first-hand report to King George VI, Chamberlain was cheered on by thousands who lined the five-mile route from the airport. As the rain poured, thousands flooded the plaza in front of the royal residence. As if it were a coronation or a royal wedding, the frenzied cheers brought forth the king and queen along with Chamberlain and his wife onto the palace balcony. In an unprecedented move, the smiling king motioned the prime minister to step forward and receive the crowd’s adulation as he receded into the background to leave the stage solely to a commoner.

          After his royal audience, Chamberlain returned to his official residence at No. 10 Downing Street. There a jubilant crowd shouted “Good old Neville!” and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” From a second-floor window, Chamberlain addressed the crowd and invoked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s famous statement upon returning home from the Berlin Congress of 1878, “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

          Then he added, “Now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.” As Britain slept, the German army marched into Czechoslovakia in “peaceful conquest” of the Sudetenland. The bombers did not roar over London that night, but they would come. In March 1939, Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, and two days after the Nazis crossed into Poland on September 1, 1939, the prime minister again spoke to the nation, but this time to solemnly call for a British declaration of war against Germany and the launch of World War II.

          Eight months later, Chamberlain was forced to resign, and he was replaced by Winston Churchill. While the Munich Pact would become synonymous with “appeasement,” some historians believe that since the German and Italian air forces were twice as strong as the combined British and French airpower in September 1938, Chamberlain’s agreement gave the British military valuable time to bolster its defenses to ultimately defeat Hitler.

          I’m pretty sure I’m the only regular here who grew up in a violent backwoods society. People in these mountains were as bad as any body anywhere in terms of resorting to violence to settle their problems while avoiding the few and far between law officers while doing so if at all possible.

          You simply cannot ignore a bully, man or country. The more slack you cut such people and countries, the greater their appetite, and their POWER, to fuck over other people and other countries.

          The Ukrainians are doing the free world one of the biggest favors imaginable, and at a TRIVIAL cost to the countries supplying the aid, in realistic terms. Most of the weapons we have collectively donated would never be used in a hot conflict by NATO countries……. given their age and lack of sophistication compared to the newer ones supplied to our own armed forces.

          We Yankees will never ship old artillery or tanks across the oceans to fight Russia or China. We will never use this old stuff to fight off an invasion here at home. Nobody is coming across the oceans to invade us……. at least not until after we have been bombed back to the stone age.

  16. The world average atmospheric temperature anomaly is setting new all time records, after five months of daily records, and as almost all of the USA is due to be above average for the next few days we don’t need to expect any parochial “it’s really cold here” bullshit. The anomalies are likely to increase more through April and by June possibly every day for the previous twelve months will have been the hottest we’ve seen. The big question will then be whether it will cool down, or is what’s causing the warmth much larger and more permanent than El Nino.

    1. Today’s Keeling curve number 421.09ppm, is Mauna Loa burping or is it just acceleration…

      This day last year 416.8ppm..

    2. Check the model runs every 12 hours, the pattern is gonna flip right before thanksgiving causing the rest of November to be much below normal for most of the USA.

    3. Another big jump of 0.05 yesterday for another all time record that is starting to approach 2 degrees over pre industrial (graph above is versus 1979-2000 average).

  17. No mention of 1.5 degrees C; is that a passe concept?

    BAYESIAN WEIGHTING OF CLIMATE MODELS BASED ON CLIMATE SENSITIVITY

    Abstract — Using climate model ensembles containing members that exhibit very high climate sensitivities to increasing CO2 concentrations can result in biased projections. Various methods have been proposed to ameliorate this ‘hot model’ problem, such as model emulators or model culling. Here, we utilize Bayesian Model Averaging as a framework to address this problem without resorting to outright rejection of models from the ensemble. Taking advantage of multiple lines of evidence used to construct the best estimate of the earth’s climate sensitivity, the Bayesian Model Averaging framework produces an unbiased posterior probability distribution of model weights. The updated multi-model ensemble projects end-of-century global mean surface temperature increases of 2 oC for a low emissions scenario (SSP1-2.6) and 5 oC for a high emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5). These estimates are lower than those produced using a simple multi-model mean for the CMIP6 ensemble. The results are also similar to results from a model culling approach, but retain some weight on low-probability models, allowing for consideration of the possibility that the true value could lie at the extremes of the assessed distribution. Our results showcase Bayesian Model Averaging as a path forward to project future climate change that is commensurate with the available scientific evidence.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01009-8

  18. SCIENTISTS WHO STUDY EARTH’S ICE SAY WE COULD BE COMMITTED TO DISASTROUS SEA LEVEL RISE

    “Scientists revealed new research suggesting collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might already be inevitable and that Greenland’s glaciers are melting at five times the rate they were 20 years ago. And another group of scientists found that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming was far smaller than once thought. At the current pace, the scientists believe global average temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in about six years.”

    https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/scientists-study-earths-ice-say-committed-disastrous-sea-level-rise-rcna124981

  19. State of Climate Action 2023:

    This year’s State of Climate Action finds that progress made in closing the global gap in climate action remains woefully inadequate — 41 of 42 indicators assessed are not on track to achieve their 2030 targets. Progress for more than half of these indicators remains well off track, such that recent efforts must accelerate at least twofold this decade. Worse still, another six indicators are heading in the wrong direction entirely.

    Within this set of laggards, efforts to end public financing for fossil fuels, dramatically reduce deforestation and expand carbon pricing systems experienced the most significant setbacks to progress in a single year, relative to recent trends. In 2021, for example, public financing for fossil fuels increased sharply, with government subsidies, specifically, nearly doubling from 2020 to reach the highest levels seen in almost a decade. And in 2022, deforestation increased slightly to 5.8 million hectares (Mha) worldwide, losing an area of forests greater than the size of Croatia in a single year.

    https://www.wri.org/research/state-climate-action-2023

    But EVs are great, aren’t they?

      1. Electrical postal cars already implemented in Norway for a while now.
        Works great; they dont have to be large or have a big battery to do “the last mile” delivery.

        https://www.tu.no/artikler/norsk-elektrisk-suksess-pa-fire-hjul/505898

        The electric car really shines in urban areas, with low weight and small battery size. In more rural regions hybrid cars are probably the most realistic option. Full size 2.5 ton Tesla like cars have to be very frequently used to make sense in the future I would guess. Well the rich could probably afford them anyway.

    2. But EVs are great, aren’t they?

      They will keep the wealthy nations on the road as scarcity bites.

      1. And they will be used by Kenyan farmers to get crops to the market.

        1. Hickory

          Maybe. Kenya have some oil projects going on, and probably would be open to most options.
          It is more interesting if Ethiopia would utilise the incoming hydro power coming online (for example the upper Nile giga project, with objections from Egypt), and in cooperation with China do something useful with the energy provided. Will be interesting to follow what the electricity will be used for.

          1. “Over 80% of Kenya’s electricity is generated from renewable/clean energy sources.”

            But you can change the world Kenya to just about any other country name in the world, and it will be electrical transport more and more as the oil system begins to fade down.
            Get used to it.

        2. Kenyan pastoralists and subsistence farmers are likely to be among the first to have there livelihoods wiped out because of drought, floods and overshoot related conflict. I doubt if EV adoption, either locally or globally, will change that. (p.s. another huge jump in temperature anomaly of 0.08 yesterday, so now around 2 degrees higher than pre industrial and 0.5 higher than that day for any previous year).

          1. Kenyan pastoralists and subsistence farmers are likely to be among the first to have there livelihoods wiped out because of drought, floods

            The good news is that rural Kenyans (unlike Americans, who blithely drive desertification while demanding cheap water from the federal government) seem to have a very good understanding of hydrology and have invested massively in rain catching, soil conservation and flood control in recent decades. They use a locally developed terracing method called fanya juu.

            Satellite images show the result:
            https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kenia/@-1.5574166,37.3654867,785m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x182780d08350900f:0x403b0eb0a1976dd9!8m2!3d-0.023559!4d37.906193!16zL20vMDE5cmc1?entry=ttu

            Meanwhile in the man-made desert of Las Vegas:
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPCBEyczlU8&ab_channel=ABCNews

            Adapt or die.

      2. Mike B – I only wrote that because, usually, the first thing that happens when you highlight how poorly we are addressing climate change is that someone links to the latest EV technology. Given that EV roll out is the only one of the 42 goals that we are meeting, spending money on new developments there is probably the least productive use of it. Also EVs can, at best, only address about 6% of emissions, but as all the oil that can be produced will be, it’s too good not to, in the long run it’s more like 0% (there may be an argument that saving the gasoline now allows it to be used for chemical feedstock later, but there’s not much evidence of that happening).

        I also always keep in mind that climate change is only one and, until this year’s horror show anyway, not necessarily the worst of all the planetary boundaries we have transgressed as indicators of overshoot.

  20. So, is next step 2 degrees C?

    U.N. CONCEDES GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WILL WARM 1.5 DEGREES CELSIUS EVEN IF COUNTRIES FOLLOW CLIMATE PLANS

    And, “this year is set to be Earth’s hottest year in recorded history, climate scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently said, adding that last month was the hottest October ever recorded and 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the average October during pre-industrial times.”

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/britneynguyen/2023/11/14/un-concedes-global-temperatures-will-warm-15-degrees-celsius-even-if-countries-follow-climate-plans/?sh=568031471b7f

  21. Sam Altman cofounder and most public talking head of OpenAI, which built ChatGPT, just got fired. The guys who fired him are Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, I guess. Strictly speaking Musk is gone, trying to compete with a Tesla product, but I think he may still be involved. Like Musk and Thiel, Altman is more a fast talker than a boy wonder. The big money (and a lot of the tech) came from Microsoft.

    The news is very fresh, and there hasn’t been much speculation as to why.

    Maybe they are having problems generating income? Seems a little early, since the hype is still very hot.
    Also Microsoft is using Chat GTP already. For example, when I type

    =AI.TABLE(“Top Oil exporting countries”)

    In Excel, Excel returns

    Rank Country Oil Export (Barrels per day)
    1 Saudi Arabia 10,460,710
    2 Russia 5,225,864
    3 Iraq 3,990,456
    4 United States 3,770,000
    5 Canada 3,592,000
    6 United Arab Emirates 3,106,077
    7 Kuwait 2,923,825
    8 Iran 2,445,000
    9 Nigeria 2,318,000
    10 Angola 1,769,000

    =AI.TABLE(“Japanese names of the biggest cities in Japan”)
    Gives me
    English Name Japanese Name
    Tokyo 東京
    Yokohama 横浜
    Osaka 大阪
    Nagoya 名古屋
    Sapporo 札幌
    Fukuoka 福岡
    Kawasaki 川崎
    Kobe 神戸
    Kyoto 京都
    Saitama 埼玉

    That’s ChatGTP talking. Seems like a nice feature for Microsoft, so I guess it’s more an ego clash at OpenAI than a cash problem, since Microsoft has deep pockets. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how Microsoft will actually make money here.

    1. Not impressed. Saudi Arabia produces 10 million b/d of crude, but does not export anywhere near 10 million b/d. Kuwait is also wrong.
      Worse still a significant part of the export volume from KSA goes to refineries that Aramco either owns or has an interest in.
      As ever do not believe everything you read on the internet.

  22. Healthy raise in CO2 continues unabated
    Nov. 17, 2023 = 422.43 ppm
    Nov. 17, 2022 = 417.37 ppm
    1 Year Change = 5.06 ppm (1.21%)

  23. “Ford/UMich study finds EVs have 64% lower life-cycle emissions than ICE vehicles”
    -The researchers looked at three different powertrain options—fossil burners, hybrids and EVs—in three different vehicle classes—midsize sedans, midsize SUVs and full-size pickup trucks. They found that, on average across the US, light-duty EVs have approximately 64% lower cradle-to-grave life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than ICE vehicles.

    https://chargedevs.com/newswire/ford-umich-study-finds-evs-have-64-lower-life-cycle-emissions-than-ice-vehicles/

    Not trivial.

    Similar-
    https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-life-cycle-greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-a-mid-size-bev-and-ice-vehicle

    Similar-
    When do electric vehicles become cleaner than gasoline …
    Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com › business › autos-transportation
    Jun 29, 2021 — Its “well-to-wheel” study showed the typical break-even point in carbon emissions for EVs was about 15,000 to 20,000 miles, depending on the …

    1. Comment- The people of the world are not about to stop driving or stop demand for products from beyond walking distance just because many of the commentators here are old now.
      The more of those miles yet to be driven are not propelled by Combustion Engines, the better.
      I do think we are on the path to 2C temp rise, hopefully not 2.7C

      1. A little bit of not-so-bad data:
        Global relative humidity values are decreasing.
        The significance of this is that I understand most of the climate models assume that as the global temperature rises relative humidity remains constant, implying a dramatic rise on the amount of water in the atmosphere which then generates the lions share of global warming. The amount of water in the atmosphere is certainly increasing and contributing to warming, just not as much as expected by the models.
        Which models are right? With the passage of time we will find out because humans will burn every scrap of combustible material the can lay their hands on during the descent on the backside of the Club of Rome curves

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