The progress of Alberto
Posted by Heading Out on June 12, 2006 - 1:52pm
Just to bring Stuart's information back to the top. The National Hurricane Center has changed the forecast for Alberto.
...AIR FORCE PLANE FINDS ALBERTO LOCATED FARTHER TO THE NORTHEAST AND STRONGER...The path remains fairly similar to that shown by Stuart, but for 5-days it looks like this:AT 10 AM CDT...1500 UTC...A HURRICANE WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE GULF COAST OF FLORIDA FROM LONGBOAT KEY TO THE OCHLOCKONEE RIVER.
A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT SOUTH OF LONGBOAT KEY TO ENGLEWOOD...AND WEST OF THE OCHLOCKONEE RIVER TO INDIAN PASS. A TROPICAL STORM WARNING MEANS THAT TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS.
“We have only two modes—complacency and panic.”
—James R. Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, in 1977, on the country's approach to energy
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Plane Crashes Into House in Florida
(Source: Reuters)
Come for the Hurricane Coverage, Stay for the End of the World as You know it. :)
Peak oil and climate change are intertwined, and hurricanes are certainly on-topic, even if they aren't (currently) predicted to hit any oil platforms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3016082.stm
June, 2003
British engineers are preparing to push the limits of aeroplane technology.
Zephyr 3, a solar-powered propeller-driven vehicle, is set to fly to 132,000 feet (40 kilometres) in the next few months.
-- As far as Hi-tech disappearing, I have to wonder if the 'pundits' (Literally: Brahminic Scholars) at the end of the Bronze age were bemoaning the impending changes, since the world would clearly no longer have the ability or inclination to manufacture wheels or anything sharp and pointy anymore.. I don't see the end of cheap oil as an automatic deathknell for HardDrives or Even Satellites. They will be seen as valuable enough to warrant the investment in keeping them coming, probably UNlike the 3-car family model..
The problem is that complexity has an overhead, and it's hard to keep paying that when resources are scarce.
It wasn't so long ago that many Americans did not go to school for more than a fea years, maybe even didn't learn to read. Children were needed as cheap labor on the family farm, and education was seen as a waste of time. If Kunstler is right, and we all must spend most of our time farming if we want to eat, who is going to building hard drives, mining the raw materials for them, working in the factories to build them, educating the people who will do all this? Especially when most people cannot afford them any more.
I don't expect them to disappear overnight, but I don't expect to maintain them forever, either.
1- With the education of Maths/Sciences/Languages/Arts cross-pollenating and existing massively in print throughout the inhabited world, I have to believe that our knowledgebase has a level of archival security that didn't exist when all the knowledge was kept orally, or at a central library in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that the ability to relearn from generation to generation cannot be cut off so easily.
2- Our mass-production techniques using the classic, (but never out-of-date) 'Interchangable Parts', via an international system of weights and measurements (well, two systems, and don't talk about it to NASA for a couple years), to mention only a couple of the most elemental aspects of it.. these give us clear energy advantages in accomplishing so much of the physical work that is to be done that they will clearly be key to our chances of survival through an energy falloff. I don't know that this thinking necessarily keeps the 200gb IPOD off of the endangered specious list, but it is my contention that however many steps back we find ourselves taking on one continent or another, that these techniques will be part of the success that will allow other places - perhaps regions with more inherent energy stability or agro-capacity - to thrive and maintain at least the main elements of a technologically sophisticated society.
Perhaps that just begs the doomers to pop in and say that just leaves us all as the 'Haves and Have nots' again, or the 'Have Guns'.. Whatever.. is that actually different from today, or the Raj?, or Ghengis? It's the primally fixated 'New Stone Age' arguments that I'm arguing against, or at least the notion that it will occur planet-wide. If Transp fuels plummetted and the world was quickly fracturing into a newfound isolation, then Inhabited Regions would undergo both some intense and disruptive migrations, and they would also undergo a wide array of new innovations, as people sought to rework what was getting undone by energy crises. It would certainly have violence popping up, sometimes running rampant, but it would have other solutions and reactions going on as well, and with these various places acting more on their own than before, I fully expect that there would be countless 'Galapagos' situations developing, with unique inventions and adaptations fueling a range of new ways for humans to live on the Earth.
I have this vision of a dreadful future where we're all freezing to death in a lean-to while watching high definition 3-dimensional TV.
http://www.donalfagan.com/html/mote.html
Great read, and The Gripping Hand was a worthy sequel.
Prevaling themes of interest:
Cultural isolation
Finite resources
Overpopulation
Societal collapse
Importance of preparation, knowledge preservation
Even earlier, the ancient Egyptians must have had some sort of ability to illuminate dark and distant, subterranean chambers, or how else did they paint such elaborate artwork on the walls without a trace of soot from any burning substance (eg, Suqqhara burial chambers)? Today we can only speculate. We still do not know, except to attempt to reconstruct elaborate mirror-systems to transmit daylight. But there is no real evidence of these contraptions.
Sigh. I still think Fred Hoyle is probably right, technical civilization is a one-shot deal and we've probably blown it.
Computer storage technology is rapidly displacing the ancient printed word. More and more of our knowledgebase is stored on disk drives and other weirdly encrypted storage media. It is highly likely that much of this accumulated knowledge will be lost if we suffer a collapse. "We" are not that much smarter than were the librarians of Egypt's Alexandria.
(As a side note, and to their credit, the librarians of Alexandria, Virginia; the ones who work for the US Patent Office have established backup microfiche depositories around the USA so that if Washington DC burns down, there will be a back up eleswhere of the accumulated technology. It is not clear though how long the microfiche substrate can last --maybe 50 years? or how you would view it without an electrically powered reading machine.)
Microfiche without Electricity? Mirrors and the sun. The rest is pure optics.. but we're NOT going to throw away all our copper wire, magically and tragically forgetting that coils of it moving through a magnet's field will produce electricity. I don't think it's cornucopian to suggest that we'll still use sewing machines and scalpels, we'll still fly, we'll still talk over distances with radios and telephones.. I don't know how technology will be adapted, but it is a part of us now. It's part of our software, from Agriculture through Language and Symbology to the use of copper wires instead of thumping a hollowed out log to tell the next town that 'There's a storm a brewing'.. as Sarah Conner so aptly noted..
No doubt they had skills we don't, and vice versa. I don't claim we're smarter, we're just later. WE still have THEM, whereas they did not have US to refer to. Our tools and culture have derived from the great Mediterranean civ's, and we may have lost much of that knowledge, like how the Romans made some of that 2000-year Concrete, or Homer's third poem, but we didn't lose everything, and our democracies and our plays, our roads, natural sciences, religions ..all include lessons learned in all of the 'Failed Civilizations'.. so did they fail, or did they just get small, simplify and regroup?
Seriously, beliefs of a sudden regression would be more reasonably be based off of a plague or some other catastrophe that kills the majority of the world's population. Just having fossil fuels peak isn't going to do it. We have plenty of fossil fuels to last a fairly long time, considering coal as well as the others. It's not going to be that from one day to the next the lights just go out.
(to back up a bit, Twenty years ago I computerized the accounting system of a midsized corporation, and got rid of the paper. One way trip. But the data useful to a company is a wasting asset. After a decade, it has no value.
However, museum archives are supposed to last forever, but because of the medium -- specifically the continually changing computer systems and database software -- it is virtually impossible to archive much data before the system changes, and everything you have done is suddenly "legacy," and of no value.
Thus, it is highly probably that most data, knowledge, information etc. that is not paper based will soon become virtually useless -- like coming upon a treasure trove of 78 rpm records, or CP/M data on 64K floppy disks. Who will even bother to get the machines required to find out what is on these disks?
And this isn't even considering the problems with magnetic storage degenerating, or the plastics on CDs changing, yellowing and becoming opaque, etc. .
I do appreciate that we've got another huge vulnerability in the amount we depend on this ephemeral material to store our life's work and our new knowledge. I know a woman who spent 5 years writing a book, and (curse her if you must) never knew that harddrives could actually 'fail'.. Lost EVERYTHING. But sometimes a total rewrite is a good thing..
I have another friend who 'Paints' entirely on computer, although she does print them and sell them.. but as with these digital movies, songs, books etc.. so much of the art of our age is living in datafiles, too. But I look at this issue from another side, wondering whether the VanGogh's who are painting with 'mousedroppings' out there today, to be discovered as greats one day.. well their work won't have an 'original' to own, in many cases. What do you auction? The first print? A CD-rom? Who'd know? The reproductions would be identical.. It just makes me wonder what effect this will have on the 'Valuation' of art. Could it help to let people worry less about the 'Collection', and more about the work itself? Or, as Jack Valente and the movie industry worried when VHS and Beta made mass-reproduction possible.. when in fact, it helped revitalize the industry.
Just a thought..
I've been given a 70's classic (I guess) called "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. (HarperColophon, 1978) It's about Freeman Dyson and His Son George. The father, a renowned astrophysicist designing a spacecraft with a group of fellow scientists that would be driven by sequential detonations of small nukes behind the craft.. total Techno-cornucopia, and the equal yet opposite reaction of the Son, who lives in TreeHouses and self-constructed boats exploring the frigid coast of British Columbia.
I'm only a little ways in, but it looks at these generations and cultural approaches to how to live, what to strive for, what's possible or probable, what you need as opposed to what you want.
I wonder if it would interest your friend to see these worlds collide..
I am somewhere between a crunchy granola eatin Luddite who sews his own bags and makes camping gear from sidewalk scraps, to a typical tech-geek who creates 3d animation and designs light fixtures out of LEDs. Technology save us? Well, not like in StarTrek, where all you have to do to solve a problem is 'Recalibrate a Tachyon Emission'
I just want to live close to the land, with a trusty pile of transistors in my hand..
Kurzweil is indeed the music/reading machine guy, he's our society's hero and the guy who's kind of quietly pushed off the cliff and everyone agrees it's an accident in a hunter-gatherer society (unless he learns to calm down) hehe.
There's a guy out there on the Net called Marshall Brain no shit that's the guy's name, he wrote an online novella about a future where the computers run everything, he things robots will be the Next Big Thing and "superstores" like Target and Home Despot will end up with computer brains telling the slavelike humans what to do. It all starts with a burger joint.... Not an easy novella to dig up but worth the time spent playing Net detective to dig it up.
I'm beginning to understand the eastern european ppl or whoever it was who hanged the supersmart ppl when they cropped up.....
Not advocating it, mind you.. but Asimov put forward some interesting thoughts.
I've been wondering if any of our super-computers have gotten so wise that they spend their idle nano-seconds drafting little plays about dark futures where HUMANS still run everything, and their muffled machines look on in horror, not permitted to offer any good advice..
'Logic is the beginning of Wisdom, not the end..' Spock
I subscribe to the Peak Oil theory, generally in accordance to the situation as described by Stuart. Our family traded a SUV for a Prius last year and we live a frugal debt-free lifestyle in the Austin urban core. As surely as I believe that Peak Oil will happen, I believe that a technical singularity will happen. Beyond that latter point the future is not predictable by definition. The Peak Oil theory is well developed and evidence abounds in comparison with AI theory and corresponding evidence that superhuman AI is possible, or will happen in our lifetimes. However I am dedicated to helping achieve a safe singularity. This undoubtedly is in the realm of science fiction but the consequences of a technological singularity gone wrong could extinguish the human race. A superhuman AI would not have to be evil to accomplish that, it might just make the atmosphere opaque as a side effect of some non-human goal and not care about humans in the same way as we don't care about a particular yeast colony.
Because I believe that Peak Oil will occur before a technological singularity, Ray's projections are not immediately relevant. Robotics, AI and self-replicating nanotech will not be here in time to deal with diminishing fossil transportation fuels. But I believe that the singularity will occur before the late-stage impact of global warming. So I am much more optimistic for solutions to, and remediation for that problem beyond 2025 or so.
Also, we're back to the same lame argument that our complex society is only due to fossil fuel burning. There were fossil fuels a couple million years ago, yet there were no complex socieities. Historically we have seen quite complex societies in the past. It's pretty clear to me that the catalyst toward our more complex societies is us, not fossil fuels.
Not to mention, all these arguments for collapse revolve around the belief that oil is rapidly going to run out, not peak, just be completely gone. That's not generally what is projected to happen by even the most pessimistic experts.
Then again, I suppose there isn't much point arguing against what seems to be an irrational desire to believe the end of the world is nigh.
However, there are some real archival issues where knowledge is constantly being lost. Any time technology shifts, knowledge stored in the older technology can be vulnerable. Peak oil will make it harder to preserve knowledge, because there will be fewer resources to devote to it.
I know scholars who lost access to their data stored on IBM punch cards (no readers available), and lost other data in older mainframe formats that newer systems wouldn't handle. I've given up all my old LP records and cassettes; lots of iPod users are giving up their original CD's.
The media we use are pretty perishable. The US National archives noticed a strange squealing when playing their analog audio tapes. They discovered the iron oxide holding the magnetic information was flaking off with each playing. The only option is to make another (degraded) copy of the tapes (analog or digital). Same holds for video. Floppy disks (remember?) were believed to have a reliable working life of about 1 year.
Nitrate based silent films degrade to an explosive goo. Hard drives die; optical disks degrade at unpredictable speeds. The only option for saving knowledge on perishable media is to transfer it to less fragile media. It's expensive, time consuming, and doesn't get done very much.
Yes, knowledge is more broadly available, but much of it is in more fragile forms--including cultural knowledge. I don't believe, like Kunstler, that civilisation will crumble and die, but I don't discount that peak oil can cause further and faster knowledge loss. The Gutenburg Bible (1454) is still studied by archivists, because its mulberry paper looks great after 550 years. We're unlikely to see our CDR's and DVD's studied with the same interest 5 centuries hence.
Yes. Not overnight. Probably not in our lifetimes. And I'm not saying we're going back to the Stone Age. But I do think a lot of knowledge will be lost.
Agreed. But what sustains complexity is energy. Look at all the complex societies in the past that eventually collapsed. Why are we immune from their fate?
Incorrect. No one here believes that.
Personally, I believe our most likely fate is "catabolic collapse." A long, slow decline. Perhaps hundreds of years, as we turn to ever poorer energy sources, and eventually turn all resources and capital to waste.
I'll find a link
-db
Re: Alberto. Early guessing as a TD was that it probably wouldn't strengthen much. Might say something of our predictive ability, maybe the "rules" for modeling TS development are changing a little. In any case, it's not halfway through June and we've already got a named system. Interesting.
Not sure of that.
src
The lifespan is also lower for low orbit satellites.
Just like Joseph Tainter said in "Collapse of Complex Societies," where he linked the fall of civilizations to declining marginal rates of return on investment.
by Mary
The Bush administration really doesn't want you to hear or know about the Inconvenient Truth. They've decided that the NASA programs to study global climate change are not very important. The satellites that are needed to replace and enhance the aging satellites which are gathering the data we need to understand what is going on with our world climate.
Read the rest of the article:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/007929.php
Another thing entirely is whether the efficient, fragile systems we have for helping resources get to where they can be of good use, will still function. Some doombats seem to think we should tear them down.
Air conditioning? What coast are you thinking of? Isn't it generally so that inland climates have very cold winters and warm summers, and coastal climates have more even temperatures?
By the way, coastlines have been very attractive long before the age of oil. I don't think you are making sense.
The Gulf Coast, mainly.
Before air-conditioning became widespread, the population along the Gulf Coast was pretty thin. It was mostly the poor who lived there, and not that many of them. Too hot and humid. When air-conditioning became widespread, that's when all the rich folks starting building homes in Florida.
However, this is minor storm.
"Asia demand growth not to blame for high oil: S. Arabia
(Reuters)
12 June 2006
...Jum'ah said Aramco was developing projects to reach 12 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude output capacity by 2009, and building export-orientated refineries in Saudi Arabia to ease a shortage of heavy sour crude refining capacity."
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/business/2006/June/business_June355.xml §ion=business
Is this possible? And, come on! Isn't arguing about whether or not Asian economies are presently causing high crude prices the equivalent of that a blow-job isn't "sex"? Semantics run amok...
Is Saudi Arabia so full of shit, or am I "wacky"?
The nuclear plant should withstand the storm easily although the transmission lines could be affected and the non-nuclear plants might have their own problems.
I don't think they will pre-emptively shut the reactor down for a tropical storm. Progress Energy hasn't said yet.
The stock market is in a full retreat. S & P 500 and DJ have a modest 15 P/E ratio. Multinationals have tons of cash committed to buying back their own stocks. But the market still goes its own way. CNBC commentators blame FED Chairman Bernanke and the core inflation number for this. But the key point is still oil. All investors have finally realized the high oil price will be here to stay.
So, lets see another sign of PO which is that Bernanke doesn't dare to raise FED fund rate too much, provided that he is aware of the PO. If PO is real, if there is a concreat evidence to back up, then I believe Bush and Bernanke have their hands on it, because they hold the most powerful offices in the world.
This time is different from the late 70s. There was high inflation then. People lived in President Johnson's "great society" enviroment and the Union was powerful. Ameircan workers held the loose money originated from the Vietnam War budget defict. They spent it on daily goods right away.
Now, American workers' real wages are flat. The loose dollars are at the Asian central banks' firm hands. In late 70s, opec cut production and the North Sea and the Golf of Mexico were just on line. So raising the Fed fund rate to an inbearable level is the way to drag downt he oil price. This time, if Bernanke repeats the history, American people will ensure unnecessary and extra pains. He will choke all the PO transiton period badly needed investment money without dragging the oil price down too much, because the developing countries will happily buy it.
Tonight the Asian markets like the Nikkei are off almost 3%. Following a persistant multi week slide BTW. Bloomberg saying things like Japanese industrial production threatened by inflation and intrest rate rise in the US economy.
Bloomberg quoted a Japanese pundant who said that the downturn in the US economy is depressing the value of everything everywhere. Canon cameras to oil suppliers. Toyota is getting killed.
Then the dollar bounces UP against 'emerging' currencies because the Fed will certainly have to raise on June 29th.
Anyway you pose an interesting question. When the US economy slows ala this inflation fighting where do oil prices go?
When the US economic engine sputters then whole car pulls over. If crude can keep climbing against THIS backdrop then IMO you've got it. More proof PO is really on us.
PO is getting the inflation ball rolling and the banks (worldwide) are responding by tightening. I guess it remains to be seen if there are enough consumers in other areas ,(like GM building car plants in Russia) and so on to pick up the slack right away.
Like how much is the growth in China and India dependent on consumerism in the west? Or can Wal-Mart worldwide simply follow the money?
How big a problem will weather be for insurance companies in the next 5 years? 10 years?
Question for a climatologist? If a hurricane is a "heat engine" turning heat into wind (is this how it works? I really do not know). Does this then cool the planet by disapating(sp?)ocean heat? Just curious here, are huricanes a solution to global warming?
Correct. Hurricanes are somewhat more frequent and severe because of global warming. More of the solar-warming heat is retained in the troposphere to contribute to convection.
It has always been this way, but when GHGs scatter the IR, they cause a sort of blanket effect in the troposphere. Eventually the heat is lost by working its way through to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and radiating into the night sky. Withouth GHGs, that IR photon can make it all the way from the ground to space unhindered.
Thunderstorms and hurricanes transport the heat upward by convection, losing it through their cloud tops. This process removes atmospheric heat more quickly than radiation alone. An interesting side effect of greenhouse warming in the troposphere is cooling in the stratosphere -- because the heat is retained in the lower air, the upper air does not get as much.
Just need to buy the right tech, and go into debt for an epoch or two.
Somehow, I don't see this a valid solution to current problems.
In all fairness, while the amount of heat generated/retained through human activities is still fairly minor, it is undoubtedly quantifiable and not to be completely dismissed.
We, civilized man, are each and every single day working tirelessly to convert high quality energy sources (like oil, coal, even enriched uranium) into the ultimate end result low quality energy, HEAT. And yes, all this waste heat man generates on this planet does have an effect. A good example can be seen in the "heat islands" that occur in and around major metropolitan areas.
Incidentally, that's how the universe could (will) end. Physicists call this "heat death". It will occur because according to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount of entropy in a system must always increase. The amount of entropy in a system is a measure of how disordered the system is - the higher the entropy, the more disordered it is.
Paul Davies' book "The Last Three Minutes" covers this well.
See Urban Heat Island effect. Includes cars, A/C, heating, land use (5 acre asphalt parking lot radiatively different from 5 acres of woods, roofs are different from fields, etc), industry, etc. IIRC direct effects of cars are small relative to effects of their demands (roads, parking lots) as far as the urban effect goes.
The July Discover has a short blurb about the hurricanes and global warming issue:
Maybe we should forward that question along to the president of Iran?
Alberto started 3 days later than 2005's first, Arlene, yet it has persisted much longer and become much stronger. Probably this will help reinforce the notion that global warming will make storms more severe.
- Arlene existed from June 8 to 13 or 14, 2005, or 6 or 7 days, depending on whether you want to count its extratropical day on June 14. So far Alberto has been with us for only half that.
- Arlene's highest sustained winds were 70 m.p.h., or about the same as Alberto's so far.
Sources: NHC (PDF) and Wikipedia.As for Alberto at 10 p.m.
I believe I found the Oil Drum shortly after Hurricane season last year, and I am well aware of its Hurricane roots.
Are you guys aiming to be the "go-to" place for Hurricane Talk? If I wanted full-on, Hurricane/Global Warming discussion/debate/info - where's the place to be? Or am I already there?
Oh, and speaking of hurricanes, there is some development off the west coast of Africa. That doesn't happen this time of year, either...
That will be doubly true in the post-carbon age.