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DrumBeat: March 26, 2008
Posted by threadbot on March 26, 2008 - 9:21am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Now for some wise words from the readers of The Oil Drum...
Biofuel comment
that poster has been linked to a coulpe of times already, and yes, it still is chilling
Yes, that image is likely to become a classic.
Especially when food price escalations become really painful.
I wonder how the wealthy, whose whole lifestyles often revolve around wasteful practices, will cope when conspicuous displays of consumption are about as socially acceptable as shitting on the sidewalk? I am talking about a entire class of people whose lives center around etiquette... how to eat an artichoke, proper placement of silverware, and always saying please and thank-you.
And what of Bubba with his dually pick-up ?
Alan
It'll rust in his front yard, once he stops being able to afford the gas for it.
Perhaps Bubba can keep it running by converting corpses to biodiesel. Dead obese Americans are currently an underutilized resource. This may change...
When the paper money has no value, "please and thank you" may actually be all that's left.
Good point. Even after the revolution, or whatever, we don't want to become barbarians.
In the meantime, the hypocrisy is sickening. It reminds of an incident from long, long ago. I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and in a big European store in Ibadan. Outside there were beggars with withered legs, sitting on skate-board like devices, pleading "dash me master, dash me" (give money). Surrounding the store was an endless vista of tin-roofed mud huts. Inside there was a matronly British woman asking for donations to a group devoted a preventing cruelty to animals. (To be fair, none of escape this hypocrisy.)
The largest animal rights organization in Sweden "Djurens rätt" had "Animal rights in war zones" as a theme in their latest newspaper no 1 / 2008.
I have read the other day that the EU environmental commisioner defended the 10% biofuels targert and denied that it was causing food prices to rocket. That guy is totally stupid or totally corrupt. As an EU commisioner he is probably both.
In order for the United States to reach the grain ethanol cap scheduled for 2016 might require 40% of the 2007 size United States grain harvest.
Europe is likely to have similar problems as the ethanol yield of a bushel of grain is low and 10% of Europes transport fuels is very high.
Global warming is causing Himalaya glacial melt and might shrink rivers in India and China exacerbating the needs of their growing populations.
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update71.htm
Using all the grain in the United States each year to make ethanol might satisfy 12 percent of our oil needs, but would create a hell of a food shortage. As if food and gas prices were not bad enough; they might easily get worse unless some sort of change is wrought.
Using the entire corn and wheat harvests (14 billion bushels) to make ethanol would yield about 38 billion gallons of ethanol (2.7 gallons per bushel). The United States used more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. One barrel = 42 gallons. U.S. oil usage was more than 840 million gallons of oil per day; that is about 307 billion gallons of oil per year.
One can just as easily have the same message if you replaced the "run my car" with "make my beer". How much foodstuffs get made into ingestible alcohol just so people can get stoned every weekend? Likely more than is made into biofuels.
Yes, thank you. Or Pepsi or cattle feed etc. It will be a long time before we use as much corn for fuel as we do for these other non food sources. Nobody seemed to mind when Wild Oats started making their "plastic" containers from corn.
Actually beer is among the most nutrient/ (calories) liquid there is … have a beer-party and skip all meals the next day (a triple super whopper in other words... :-))
If every person (300 e6) drank 6 beers per day 365d/year that would equal 1/2 the current US ethanol production.
Great, how do we get the average American to cut down to only one six-pack a day?
where can i get a link to this poster?
Hover mouse on any image … right-click … select properties … copy/paste
http://www.energyfarms.net/files/user299/foodforcar.jpg
I heard some soon to retire Shell Oil exec going on about all the oil which is there to get.
And it occurred to me that the oil extractors go for the biggest bang for the buck - the easy to extract oil.
But if you push the price of oil up and up and up, what used to look like uneconomical oil to "go after" suddenly looks profitable.
So my question is; Can the rising price of oil be a strategy not only to increase profits per unit extracted, but to put the harder to extract into play now and at the higher rate (though lower ROI per unit extracted)?
While this may not be the sole cause of the price skyrocketing, could this be part of it?
But as the price of oil goes up, the extraction costs go up too. All of those drilling rigs, ships and helicopters and a lot of the other equipment that they commonly use will burn a lot of oil. It also takes energy to make steel and other supplies.
So while in theory it may seem that some of these other things may suddenly become economical, the law of receding horizons may intervene to make sure that it is always just out of reach.
I think that is more the case with the tar sands - and not with lower EROI oil reservoirs, you are correct that such equipment costs oil (and thus adds overhead that increases with the price of oil) but all that means is that the price needs to be $120 instead of $110. The margins do catch up eventually.
But it seems that the tar sands (apparently a mining operation) the margins never increase as the price goes up.
No, the margins truly don't catch up eventually. When the price gets to $120, the costs of production go up still more.
Margins on "heritage production" (the big old wells that are still returning a very high EROEI) go up, but margins on new production pretty much don't go up.
What happens as energy gets more and more expensive is that very gradually the price of everything becomes, in effect, the price of energy.
For example, we think copper has value in its own right because energy has always been so cheap. The energy component of copper's value has been pretty much invisible to us. But copper only has value when energy is applied to it. Without energy to apply to it, copper has virtually zero value.
This is deliberately simplified to make a point.
"When the price gets to $120, the costs of production go up still more."
i dont think you said what you wanted to say here. if that be the case, every oil co worldwide exploring for oil might just as well fold up the tent. production costs for publicly traded oil co.s are increasing, but not faster than the price of crude oil.
No, I meant what I said, elwoodelmore.
Oil company profits are doing well because they own a lot of that valuable "heritage production." This stuff has a lot of value, because it remains pretty cheap to produce. As olepossum pointed out in a post the other day, oil companies should probably be viewed pretty much as royalty trusts from this point on. When you buy oil company stock, for the most part, you're now buying those heritage reserves.
The reason Exxon projects flat production through 2012 is because even at projected higher prices, profit opportunities from new production rather suck, because costs on new production are so high.
And we haven't even hit the point yet where all prices are essentially set by energy prices--we're still only approaching it.
The idea that the oil companies are folding up tent is essentially the same point that Matt Simmons made the other day when he said that the independent oil companies are essentially liquidating.
could you give me an example of a public traded company whose production costs, on new production, exceeds the current price of $ 106/ barrel?
Maybe it's not enough to keep your costs on new production under $106. It's about creating a large enough profit margin to be attractive to stock buyers and stockholders. The latter will vote you out of your job if your margin isn't as good as the "legacy" producers they would use as a reference point. The buyers are always looking for hyperprofits, and if the established oil giants weren't doing so well lately, they'd probably find it in another industry, or another currency, or another form of risky financial speculation.
So I guess we've got a high barrier to entry.
It's not. But the cost of replacing reserves has to be factored in. Should oil companies just produce what they already own, then they'll make a lot of money. But when they try to find reserves to replace what they sell today so they'll have something to sell tomorrow, the costs are going up exponentially.
I disagree. A lot of current domestic activity is from independent oil companies developing resources that were discovered decades ago, but have only become economic again in the past several years. An example of this is Newfield's development of the Monument Butte field in Northeast Utah. This is a very large waxy crude field that is stratagraphically complex. The industry has known about it for years, but it was obviously uneconomic in the late 1980's and 1990's. Now Newfield is out there drilling a hundred or more wells a year and ramping up production.
Another example is the Spraberry trend in West Texas. Industry has known about this field since the 1950's or earlier. It was partially developed from the 50's through the 70's and a lot of drilling occured in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Once oil prices dropped it then became uneconomic. I have a copy of an old SPE paper that refers to it as "the largest uneconomic oil field in the world". Now that oil prices have come back up industry is probably drilling 1000 wells per year in the trend.
In my opinion the Bakken play in the Williston Basin also fall under this same category. There is no doubt that development cost have risen dramatically in the last few years, but these fields are still economic for these companies to develop.
It might be a plausible hypothesis if oil were our only energy source.
Its not.
Well you are correct, There is always a lag, first you purchase the equipment then you produce the product.
As Matt simmons said, that is exactly what they are doing. All the oil majors are buying back their shares and somebody has worked out that at the current rate they will have wound themselves up by 2020. That is quite close now.
Production costs are not the issue (not in this context anyway). The issue is the cost of exploration. In some years this exceeds the value of discoveries. Even when it doesn't, the sums are so huge nowdays (USD100m for one deep water well in the GOM) that exploration is very risky.
If you were an oil exec; and your job was to maximise shareholder return, would you spend $100m on a share buy back with a guaranteed return of x% (cost of capital) or would you blow it on a deep water well?
What the IOC's are saying by doing these share buy backs is that management cannot invest the money (in the energy business) with any expectation of a reasonable return and it is therefore better to return the money to shareholders so that the money can be better invested elsewhere.
It should be possible to start substituting other forms of energy for extraction energy inputs that used to be supplied by oil (or other FF). For instance proposing Nukes for tar sands. Or using time variable renewables, such as solar or wind to pump oil when they have power. At some point it is possible that oil may become expensive enough that we might be pumping it despite having an EROEI of less than 1.
It will never be a "power source" with an EROEI<1, by definition. I would hope that by the time it's worth pumping out of the ground with wind power we wont need it for fuel any more and are pumping it out only to make plastics or other useful materials.
It certainly wouldn't be a net power source, although it might be used for specialty fuels. If you had "stranded" solar of wind power, and were able to use that to generate (or pump) some sort of transportable fuel, it *might* be considered worthwhile.
Ok, I see what you're saying and I agree. Rocket fuel or jet fuel are both good examples.
In 1967 a 29 Kt nuclear explosive device was detonated at the bottom of a 1,555 m hole in the Carson National Forest in northcentral New Mexico, for the purpose of fracturing rock to facilitate natural gas extraction. Rather than fracturing rock, heat from the nuclear explosion served to seal the rock, and what natural gas was recovered from the site was too radioactive to use. Nuking the Earth for the purpose of fossil fuel extraction was a dumb idea in the 1960s and it's an even dumber idea now.
What is proposed is not to use nuclear explosions, but to heat up water using nuclear energy, and pump in this hot water - all that is changed is the heat source from natural gas to nuclear energy.
You're talking about John Hofmeister, Shell Oil CEO, appearance on the Charlie Rose Show last night. John made reference to this countries efforts to curtail production on environmental concerns but he made very reasuring statements about "massive sources of oil" which he mentioned the Artic Shelf and certain parts of the U.S. and costal areas (not ANWR BTW, he said it is too small) which "at the current prices makes those sources available". He talked optimistically about the Oil Sands as a major source of those "other supplies" without making reference to "potable water" as a finite resource that would substantially limit what is recoverable from oil sands.
Here is John's response to Charlies Question: "Do you believe that human activity is the root cause of Global Warming?"
John: "Of course. In the U.S. alone we are burning a swimmingpool full of oil every second. The debate is over and we need to stop wasting time and move quickly to solve this problem..."
How we're going to solve this problem while trying to ramp up fossil fuel drilling he made no suggestion. (lip service)
The term "peak Oil" was never brought up however.
I was talking to a retired oil exec myself last night ( my neighbor ) about why we have a glut of oil in reserves yet the price at the pump is high.
The reply went down the line of that the oil companies, for tax reasons, do not want to sell oil they have - they want to sell oil they can buy, because then they can claim losses against profits, justify increases at the pump, and not have gains from selling old stuff at the new price.
So, they keep their old stuff and buy/sell new stuff.
It justifies high asking price at the pump. It provides additional cash flow and stimulates additional production. For example, OPEC did NOT cut back this spring.
Later there will be a glut of oil as money is poured back into production from those hoping to sell new production at this price.
In the long term it will be better because we will now have developed the infrastructure for producing excess oil.
But for now, keep the old cheap stuff, buy whatever you can at whatever marginal price you have to pay, take the hit against profits, and - most importantly - justify a price hike.
Higher marginal costs only justify even more price increases.
Its all passed to the pump.
Its the way we have of getting more money NOW instead of after we let the infrastructure deteriorate from lack of funding.
I do not know if any of this is true, but the person telling me this is the most financially clever person I know, yet has about as much compassion as my power saw.
But maybe that what it takes for leading a business, as this person is impeccably logical in a financial sense, albeit I see that person in the cartoon above.
Your neighbor has a fundamental misunderstanding of LIFO accounting, which appears to be the conept you are alluding to re: buying "new oil" at higher prices. The outrage of the tax break bestowed upon oil companies, as a result of LIFO, is that oil companies are allowed to record the "cost" of that "old oil" as higher than the cost of exploring, drilling etc. In other words; Companies that use LIFO record the cost of inventory at the latest price paid for those materials in the open market, even though they are selling goods often bought at a lower value. This increases a company's cost of goods sold, which in turn reduces profit.
As an aside, there is no "old oil" that is being held back/shut-in that I am aware of. It's full-bore baby, and it still ain't enough.
Care to elaborate on the "glut" of oil?
imo, this " retired oil exec " was filling your "hardhat" full of gibberish.
Hugo can't seem to leave the golden goose alone and is purposing another round of taxes on the Oil and Gas producers. His $$$ desperation continues to grow as his production continues to decrease. Time is ticking on his rule
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/25/content_7855217.htm
Just what was said about Fidel.
And when he is overthrown or retires, and a right-wing corporate stooge is put in his place, you will completely lose all interest in what happens to the poor majority in his society, at the mercy of their ancient enemies, just like you lost interest in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Haiti after pro-US businessmen were declared in power there (temporarily). You never even had interest in what happened to the poor majority in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, etc, etc, as pro-American policies were adopted in the 1990s that ruined so many lives as to radicalize the population.
At what point do you admit that Huey Longs like Chavez will keep arising and threatening our resource addictions because businessmen and American policy treat the poor as the enemy everywhere in the world? You only notice your plantation when the slaves get uppity.
bravo. couldn't have said it better.
I wouldn'say they treat them as the enemy...more like slaves really, or they treat them as if they don't exist at all. 'Enemy' would be too big a name to give to people you trample on every second of your life.
Anyone read the Financial Sense Warap up for yesterday by Frank Barebera:
http://www.financialsense.com/Market/wrapup.htm
He does an Elliot Wave analysis, 5 stage on that and estimates up to 500 USD in 5 years but could stay down to around USD 80 till end of the year just on chart analysis.
Fundamentals overrule Elliot Waves. The price is on its way into the lower $120s right now, and will have another leg up before the end of the year. We've now had three buy signals since the bottom of this correction.
Moe, I don't know much about buy signals, but you seem to have pretty much nailed these predictions over the past few weeks.
I've been doing pretty well with trusts like PBT and tracking funds like DBA over the past few months, they work pretty well for someone without a whole lot of knowledge but enough to know which way the wind is blowing.
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/350749
Did the ocean water level rise by any measurable amount as a result of this?
Although I can note climate change, I still highly question the claims the ocean water level rises after observing a cup full of iced soda pop melt and noting that as the ice floating in the beverage melts, the fluid level on the glass stays the same.
The ice is less dense than the water so it floats.
When it melts, it takes up only the volume of water it had been displacing as a solid in order to float.
The reason why we will have such enormous amounts of water enough raise sea level to flood Florida and New York has not been explained to me in a manner which makes sense to me.
I know the earth is always in a slow state of change (tectonic plate movements) and some places on earth will change elevation over time, possibly leading to flooding.
Denver, for all I know, may be getting higher, but if the Maldives get lower, its quite noticable.
Our North Pole no longer points to Polaris. This gyroscopic precession of the Earth has got to lead to varying patterns of insolation at the surface.
I mean this as a serious question. Not a flamebait.
I want physics.
Not computer graphics.
Seems to be a pretty clear description here:
http://www.desmogblog.com/video-of-wilkins-ice-shelf-breakup-in-antartica
An ice shelf floats on water, and as you say, when this ice melts it does not contribute to sea level rise. Ice sheets rest on rock, so if they melt they do contribute to sea level rise. The potential rise is calculated based on the volume of this ice, it's fairly easy to do a rough estimate.
Ice shelves act as a physical and thermal buffer to the ice sheets. As the ice shelves retreat, it tends to accelerate the collapse of the ice sheets.
Note that expansion of the oceans due to increased temperature is also a significant effect. About the half the rise so far is due to this.
As you note, coasts also rise and fall due to motion of the crust, and local conditions. A lot of cities built near river mouths tend to be sinking, because river deltas contain lot of silt deposits, which exacerbates the effect of sea level rise. Manhattan island is a notable exception, the reason all those skyscrapers are possible is because they are based on firm bedrock.
As you've correctly pointed out, ice floating on water can melt without affecting the water level. This is the case because something floating in water displaces its weight in water regardless of its volume so when the ice melts its volume changes but the water level doesn't change. However, when ice is on land as it is in Greenland and Antarctica it isn't displacing any water because it is supported by the land it is resting on. When this ice melts and flows into the water it will increase sea levels.
I hope this explanation was clear.
Ice and snow that is currently on land (in Greenland, northern Russia, Alaska, northern Canada and Antartica, for example) will melt and run into the ocean, raising the sea level.
As the water temperature warms a few degrees, it will expand. Suppose the water expands by 0.2% due to being warmer. That doesn't sound like much until you realize that the average sea depth is deep--let's say 5000 feet on average (I really have no idea how deep it is). 0.2% * 5000 feet = 10 foot gain in sea level.
Ice is very light colored and thus reflects some portion of the sun's energy directly back into space. As it melts, the underlying rock or ocean will become exposed and radiate less of the sun's energy. This is a positive feedback loop: when ice melts, the sun will warm the earth more than it did in the past; that extra warmth will then melt remaining ice at an even faster rate.
It completely a matter of quantities.
The hydrosphere (oceans) takes up a volume of about 329 million cubic miles. It has an area of 139.4 million square miles. [1]
If you were to approximate the ocean as a cube:
Assuming the surface area of the oceans (139.4 millions cubic miles) is widthxlength, you can approximate the change in average depth h for a given volume of ice melt. The volume of ice in West Antartica is about 25.4 million cubic km or 6.2 million cubic miles[2]. Adding that to the volume of the ocean represents a change in h of about 0.044475 miles, or 235 feet. So the idea of a 20 foot rise in sea level doesn't require all the ice to melt. Just about 1/11 of it, which is realistic, because I would expect there to always be some amount of glaciation in west antarctica.
Also, you're right about the floating cubes. That whole seqment of AIT is really just to hammer home the danger of some of those land based glaciers sliding into the ocean. But of course the sea based ice also has an effect. What the measurable effect of this will be I'm not sure. Probably only something on the order of an inch or so. The big show hasn't happened yet. Anyone see any estimate for the volume of ice breaking off?
P.S. Anyone feel free to correct my numbers, that's the first time I've ever tried that
calculationestimation.The problem is this ice shelf was helping to hold a huge glacier in place that rests atop land. If and when that begins to slide and break off into the ocean, then sea levels rise.
As you correctly point out the issue is whether the ice is floating on the water or grounded on rock and above sea level. I think this ice shelf was on water, so it will make no difference to sea level. However that is not the issue. It exposes ice that is grounded to the sea and it weakens the front between the grounded ice and the sea. If the grounded ice is also melting and water is collecting underneath the ice, it results in the grounded ice becoming more unstable.
The problem with the West Antarctic ice sheet (about 300 miles from where this event occurred) is that it is grounded, but below sea level, with its bulk lying above sea level. If the sea reaches the ice sheet it could collapse dramatically fast. Then sea levels will rise by about 5m, possibly very quickly.
Global warming is always presentled in stark black or white terms. People either fervently believe it (I do - I have read some of the science as part of a Masters degree I am busy with) or they fervently don't. Like God, nobody can "prove" Global Warming is for real or isn't. I prefer to look at Global Warming as a risk management issue. What is the % risk that it could be true? Then act accordingly.
A reasoned voice...Risk management - that's exactly the approach mentioned in Climate Code Red, too.
Thanks,
Pete
What they forget to mention is that this ice shelf is on the Antarctic peninsula and that is the only part of the Antarctic actually showing a significant positive temperature anomaly.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20080325_Wilkins.html
They also forget to mention that we actually have a significant positive sea ice anomaly in Antarctic right now and that we have a positive and growing global sea ice anomaly. Hunt around this link - it is a great resource.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&mont...
There are still grounds for concern in the Arctic, where thinning of the ice sheet over the past decade makes it more vulnerable. But there's just under a million sq kms more sea ice in the Arctic right now than a year ago. Is that good news or bad news?
Nice to see someone with common sense commenting on this subject.
I have given up on reading CC blogs both pro and con, as they all seem to have an agenda to fulfill.
For me the cryosphere is a daily read and also the monthly Pacific Island Report on sea level. The report data is collected by the Australian government.
For me sea level rise, CC, PO, the war projected for Iran, and the economy collapse are all proceeding at a much slower rate than most folks expect or hope for. These are all serious problems, that will come to a head in due time, however I do expect all of them to proceed in directions no one can for see. PO and NG will IMO cause the most unrest in the world first.
To put it simply: watching a bird feed doesn't tell you when it's going to lay an egg.
It's not common sense, it's ignorance. As in, uninformed or willfully ignorant. First of all, citing one year as a trend (unless truly exceptional like '05 and '07) is something only the uneducated should ever be caught doing. For Euan to do so is inexcusable. In his post, Euan states exactly the reality, then continues on as if he hadn't just typed what he had. He mentions mass, but gets excited about extent.
Huh?
FACT: The Arctic has lost 80% of it's mass. The ice extent, though dramatic in pictures and important in terms of albedo, tells us little about the health of the ice pack itself. The ice extent has always been, and will always be, extremely variable. What has been less variable is the age of the ice. Until quite recently a large portion of the ice was several meters thick. I.e., 3 to 10 years old. Now? 60 percent or so of the ice is brand new. How do you think this will hold up to summer?
The current ice extent vs. '07 means almost nothing in isolation. It will be meaningful **only** in terms of the years before and the years that follow. In fact, virtually every measure of nature has a sawtooth line. The ice in '06 was much more extensive than '05. These are natural oscillations exacerbated by GHG's. For there to be a "rebound" this winter is surprising and meaningful only to those who are ignorant of the facts - whether willfully or otherwise.
Either way, neither '06 nor this year are above the baseline. Read it and weep. Note the very first graphic showing current ice in white, '06 extent is in red and the 28 year average in gold. Then use your "common sense" to note the '08 maximum was below both.
Figure 4 will show you what Euan dismisses out of hand. Note: Purple is good! Red is bad!
Finally, nobody is expecting Florida to be flooded any time soon. GW is about inertia, not one year changes. What we already know is that we have already warmed the earth too much, so in that sense you are completely wrong because we are about 20 years late in arresting the rise of GHG's. GW is about inertia, not one year changes. Minus major and massive changes, I will guarantee a 1 meter rise by the end of this century. And that's conservative.
Cheers
Euan, you are one of the group of TOD posters who excel at collecting facts, but then very annoyingly twist them to suit your purpose, and make a disingenuous post appear unbiased.
However, even you should be able to take the average of this year and last year, and work out the trend. In your rush to denial, perhaps you have forgotten how to do basic maths, let alone basic science.
Bad science is always bad news.
Bob - this year we have a large la Nina in the Pacific which is the likely cause of the sharp drop in global average temperatures observed in Jan and Feb this year which has led to the sea ice anomalies I described above.
Since you allege bad science in my reporting facts - can you please now explain how averaging the results for la Nina (this year) with el Nino (Last year) will tell us anything at all about a global temperature trend?
I am taking my lead from this temperature chart from Hadley in the UK - this is the MET office, one of the leading climate research institutes.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/HadCRUT3.html
The destruction of the shelf reflects the trend in the SSTs. This long term HIGH LATITUDE trend is a clear signal that is not obscured by and is not a manifestation of atmospheric oscillations like La Nina and El Nino which are TROPICAL (with non-local teleconnection impacts). The plots provided by the MetO are BROKEN. Take a look at the data:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly
The annual mean graph is more meaningful yet it plots 2008 (0.127) even though the year is not done yet. There has been a relative cooling trend at the end of 2007 and into 2008 that produces the dramatic downward spike. Yet the average for 2007 (0.403) is comparable to 2006 (0.422). Even if 2008 turns out to be colder than 2007 (and there are still 9 out 12 months to go) it does not render the long term trend obsolete. This point has been covered by RealClimate on numerous occasions yet gets dredged up over and over again by professional obfuscationalists.
There's detailed commentary on the recent colder period at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/news/cc_global_variabi...
Exactly, Euan has the typical right-wing mentality when denying science. The global temperatures have been increasing worldwide for over three decades and he is pointing out that somewhere in the world there hasn't been a temperature increase. Cherry pickers from hell.
2007 Nasa link
It is typical for denialists to start arguments over irrelevant points. Some monthly/annual fluctuation is not what the ice cares about. It responds to long term temperature changes. These Antarctic ice shelfs have been around for thousands of years and some plot showing a variation over a few months is not contributing anything informative.
I think of it in business terms. In a business, you may have some good weeks and some bad weeks, some weeks of profit or of loss, or of big loss and small loss, and so on. But over time there'll be a clear trend, either that you're doing well and should expand, or else that things are going badly and you need to change or you'll be going broke.
I've worked in retail and hospitality a fair bit in my life, and it's really tempting for the owner to say, "wow, we had a $5,000 day, that means $150,000 in a month, awesome!" and then the next day, "we had a $500 day, only $15,000 in a month, oh no what a disaster." Day-to-day in a business that's supposed to last years doesn't mean much, and month-to-month in a climate that takes centuries to change doesn't mean much, either.
But when you sit back and look at it all together, you can see a clear trend. Just go visit the marginal places in the world, the Canadian north, or places where they're doing pasture on the edge of desert or savannah - they'll tell you there's a clear trend over the years, things are warming up.
Or you can just sit in your business getting excited or downcast each day as you tally up what came in. But then that doesn't let you know if you should change anything so that you can end up with more good days than bad.
So it doesn't surprise me that people say, "oh but it's snowing outside, how can there be global warming." I'm sure the guys trading in CDOs a year ago thought there was no way it could all end. The guys in Bear Sterns weren't looking for new jobs in April last year. But people who could see beyond the day-to-day knew trouble was coming.
Same thing with fossil fuels and the climate.
Exactly, Euan has the typical right-wing mentality when denying science.
Actually I get a perverse pleasure in knowing they will find themselves living in the world they helped create and denied was coming.
I'm old and will probably not live another 20 years. But many of these denialists are young and will have to suffer what they have wrought. They will actually have to lie in the bed of their own making. A miserably hot world with no energy for air conditioning.
Famine, lack of water and death all around. A better Hell they could not have made for themselves.
I get no pleasure from knowing a fellow human being will suffer.
Even if he is stupid.
Particularly if he is stupid.
(Smart & evil is another thing.)
Cid, you can be certain they'll blame everyone but themselves for the situation when it gets bad. Probable scapegoats include the gays, the liberals, the browns, the scientists, the Jews, the Arabs, the Catholics, the farmers, the poor, and the indigent. But not the oil companies; they'll protect their own.
Cheney provided us a seminal example of this blame shifting last week. He ordered a war against a nation that nothing to do with 9/11, had not attacked us, had no plans to attack us, nor had any weapons with which to do so. He invented the intelligence and manipulated the media to start the war. Then when asked about the war in the 5th year, 4000 US military deaths, and the toll on American families he had this to say:
So, the hardest toll of the war is borne by the president, and, well, those 4000 dead? They volunteered.
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/story?id=4513250&page=1
Yeah, you can always rely on Cheney to show what an evil, mean-spirited, ugly, nasty son-of-a-bitch he is. I mean, he shoots his friends, just imagine what he'd do to you. This guy would have made Nixon blush. I wouldn't hold it beneath him to organize Bush's demise just before Bush is supposed to give up his powers, put in martial law and then blame the terrorists. If you never before thought there was a reason to think about the second guy on the ticket, then Bush-Cheney should have changed your mind by now.
Thanks guys for an entertaining series of comments. I suggest you all go and read what I wrote with some care. In particular spend some time looking at the cryosphere data.
I was as freaked out as most last year at the prospect of Summer Arctic sea ice disappearing and as noted above still have concern about ice thickness and volume. I will follow developments here with keen interest. Its worth studying these ice density maps (note this is not thickness). If the Arctic sea ice disintegrates quickly this year then there would be clear sign of metasability. If it does not, then I for one will accept that as good news.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=03&fd=26&fy=2007&sm...
As for the comment above attributed to NASA - it is simplistic. It is well established that the atmosphere - ocean system has significant inertia and does not respond from year to year based on the sun spot cycle - if it did we would go from extreme hot to extreme cold over the 11 year cycle. NASA / IPCC in fact attribute very very little forcing to varying solar activity - so its a bit strange for them to comment as they have done.
Good site for sun spot data:
http://sidc.oma.be/
We are currently between sunspot cycle 23 and 24, and the start of cycle 24 appears to be rather late.
Here's the NASA global temperature charts:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.lrg.gif
There are some rather subtle differences between this and the Hadcrutt3 data.
As for attributing a presentation of data from some high value web sites as being right wing - hahahhahahah.
Whoever it was that linked to the Hadcrutt tables, that was helpful - I don't know why they have not updated the web page. But to draw the conclusion that the data are broken is strange - the NASA data for Jan shows virtually identical drop to Hadcrutt3 (see links above).
Christ... another sun worshiper.
The sun being responsible for current warming has been shown so thoroughly to be crap I seriously doubt the intellect of anyone who spews this stuff.
The cons ahve been linked here far too many times for you not to know this, Euan. I therefore dub thee Sir Will Fullie IGnor Antus.
Cheers
Arctic Ice may 'melt away' this summer
The loss of old, thick ice has continued through the winter months, despite the unusually cold weather deriving from La Nina conditions (the other extreme of the El Nino Southern Oscillation) in the Pacific.
The winter ice loss is thought to be driven mainly by the transport of old floes from Arctic waters out into the Atlantic Ocean. The currents driving this are stronger than usual as a consequence of another natural cycle, the Arctic Oscillation.
The net result is that most of the cover consists of ice that has formed since last summer.
With the ice pack containing such a high proportion of thin, salty ice, the scientists believe another major melt is likely in the summer.
"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away," commented Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder.
"It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7303385.stm
This is strange because according to the NASA GISS website the Antartic temperature this summer was below normal. Anybody know whats going on?
Antarctica is a somewhat strange beast. The cold air over the interior is somewhat bottled up by the circumpolar winds just to the north of the continent. CC has made these winds stronger, so that the transfer of heat between Antarctica and the rest of the globe has been somewhat reduced, leading to the main body of the continent actually cooling somewhat. The Antarctic peninsula sticks out far enough north to be outside of that influence and has been rapidly warming. These recent breakups have been to ice shelves bordering the peninsula. The land glaciers feeding these ice shelves invariably speed up once the shelves are gone, so any contribution to sea level will occur over the coming years and not immediately.
See the first link I posted up thread.
I'll see your link and raise you one. Mine, however, is a Royal Straight Flush.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217299main_NSIDC_Fig2_iceage_500.jpg
You lose.
I am not a climate science expert - can you explain what that chart illustrates? If 'ice age' is the middle scale - what are the right and left of that scale?
They are clearly labeled with dates. Perhaps your monitor or setting can be adjusted or you simply missed them?
The left shows the avg for a baseline period ('85 - '00) when the ice was relatively stable in its yearly fluctuations. The right shows the age of the Arctic ice as of last month.
Cheers
It is not uniform. Some parts are cooler, some parts warmer. Even if on average it is cooler this year, some parts are warmer as part of the the long term trend and anomalies as Euan pointed out above. The West Antarctic ice sheet and its potential 5m sea level rise is part of that disconcerting trend.
I personally have given up. There is no hope of meaningful action. Politicians (here in Australia anyway) are arguning over CO2 reductions in 2050! As James Hansen says - enjoy your life now.
The concept of non-uniform temperature trends is too much for the brain of a typical ideologue to handle. They want one number for everything.
A member of my extended family bought a Prius a couple of years ago, replacing a mid-sized SUV (Chevy S-10 Blazer I think). He champions a lot of left-leaning causes, and I'm assuming that his purchase was motivated, at least in part, by his desire to be more green. He lives in southern California, so I assume he drives a fair bit, but I can't really guess how many miles. I've taken the opinion that if he really wanted to do the environment a favor, it would have been better to keep and maintain the car he already owned and strive to drive less. I've heard that ten percent of the energy that the average car will ever use goes into its manufacture, not to mention the other resources used to make a new car. I'm also considering Jeavons Paradox in forming my opinion about his new Prius. Am I probably right here, or do I need to shut my mouth?
"I've heard that ten percent of the energy that the average car will ever use goes into its manufacture, not to mention the other resources used to make a new car."
I've heard a number of figures, most of them considerably above 10%, but no real reference. Does anyone have an authoritative figure on this?
Lets set some dollar limits. Consider a 22,500 dollar car that gets 20 miles per gallon and lasts 150,000 miles. Over its lifetime, the car will use 7,500 gallons of gasoline for a total cost of 22,500 dollars. Clearly a shift to a new 22,500 dollar car that gets 40 miles per gallon is likely to save energy as well money for the consumer. As I understand it from the comments, the Jarvis paradox suggests this saved money will be spent using energy equally poorly resulting in equal energy use – that doesn’t seem possible. However, if we are at peak oil and all oil is consumed by someone, then no change in gasoline use will alter total consumption. I would suggest the political impact of taking action and its effect on others is the most important reason for bying the Prius. Personal action by many seems to be a primary method of developing political force for change.
Of course if gas were 6 or 10 dollars a gallon. your relative would be a very thrifty consumer.
Jevons paradox
Some points:
-Gasoline is STILL CHEAP in the US. Over here in the Netherlands it costs about 6.5 Euro's per gallon. That's 10-11 dollars per gallon. We live with it.
-Commute less. Period. Live closer to work. And if you do have to commute, don't buy the biggest car you can find. You don't take your family to work do you, so why do you need that huge truck? For your briefcase?
-Hybrid drivetrains have added costs, about 3 to 5000 dollars. Only factor in the costs you save in fuel. If you use 3750 gallons in it's lifetime instead of 7500, then it's only the cost of 3750 gallons that you save. A few years ago, at 1 dollar a gallon, it wasn't worth the cost. Of course, at 4 dollars a gallon, factories can't pull them out of their hat fast enough.
-Of course in Europe, where fuel already was expensive, and in Japan, where EVERYTHING is expensive, hybrids make good sense already.
-Low mileage cars have huge inferred costs. Like medical costs that are caused by increased pollution. Of course, big industry and it's bought politicians (come to think of it, are there any non-bought politicians?) don't give a shit if your child dies from pollution. The question is, do you?
-Electric cars are by far the best option. Even if you burn petrol to create the electricity. Electric cars have less stuff that can go wrong as well.
I haven't seen a calculation of embodied energy in car production that takes into account the full range of energy required to produce the car. I like to use the proxy of the market price of the car as a means of capturing the full spectrum of embodied energy--as a disclaimer, this process creates a very rough estimate, and is distorted by things such as subsidies, non-costed externalities (pollution), etc. I've written about this method here, and while certainly imperfect, it does provide one way of comparing the energy used to manufacture a car to the energy that car will use over its life.
Two examples, using varying assumptions:
Example A: Assumptions: $20,000 vehicle, 20 miles per gallon, 100,000 mile life, $4/gallon gasoline. Ratio of cost of car to cost of gasoline used over life is $20,000:$20,000, or 1:1, or 50% of the energy ever used by the car goes into its manufacture.
Example B: Assumptions: $15,000 vehicle, 35 miles per gallon, 250,000 mile life, $4/gallon gasoline. Ratio of cost of car to cost of gasoline used over life is $15,000:$28,571, or almost 1:2, or 33% of the energy ever used by the car goes into its manufacture.
Admittedly very rough, but I think this supports that the figure is closer to 50% of the energy a car will ever use goes into its manufacture than it is to 10%.
Using cost as an estimate of embodied energy is going to seriously overestimate it. That said for the most part the used vehicle will very likely continue to stay in the markey for several more years. Buying a more efficient vehicle, will have a local effect on oil consumption, but averaged over the entire globe, and assuming oil demand is supply constrained it would not effect world consumption -but by reducing nominal demand it should slightly decrease the price. It will have local benefits however, such as reducing the US trade deficit (some of the oil you didn't use would go to another country).
Whether a more efficient vehicle makes sense for you, depends upon an estimation of its total costs for the lifetime you expect to keep it. It is possible that if gas prices rise strongly, that the more efficient vehicle will have a better resale value. Most likely if you are driving under 10-15000 miles per year a Prius won't pay. If you drive 80 mph on the freeway, the hybrid part won't do you any good, but if you do a lot of low speed (say <45mph) the savings will be substantial. Make your estimates of your usage, and some hard to know things like maintainence, resale valu