DrumBeat: July 7, 2006
Posted by threadbot on July 7, 2006 - 9:45am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Oil prices hit a fresh intraday record high Friday morning, on the heels of a run of record highs earlier in the week.At 8:45 a.m. ET, light, sweet crude was up 42 cents to $75.56 a barrel, after rising as high $75.78 in electronic trading. The previous record of $75.40 was struck Wednesday after the Energy Information Administration's weekly stockpile report.
IGNACIO, Colo. (AP) -- Gas production in La Plata County is falling for the first time since the beginning of the coal-bed methane boom -- a little-noticed fact that will carry long-term consequences for local residents and even the nation.ENERGY IMPACTS: Fuel prices eat up farmers' profitsThe evidence -- hidden in mountains of government data -- is unmistakable: Since July 2003, the amount of gas taken from the county has been slowly slipping, according to a Durango Herald analysis of state records. Despite 270 new wells drilled between 2003 and 2005, the average take per well is falling, and total production has fallen by 3.5 percent.
"I spent $12,000 for diesel fuel in October," said [produce farmer David] Ruhlig, who must power up 18 tractors each day to work the fields at the Ruhlig Farm and Greenhouses in Carleton. "Three years ago, I didn't spend $12,000 for the entire year." ...The 1,000-acre family owned produce farm has seen its fertilizer bills increase almost threefold in the last three years. The price of cardboard packing containers -- because of higher petroleum costs -- rose from $1.25 to as much as $1.65 per box this year.Gasoline Shortages Frustrate Iraqis
Iraqis need the fuel, not only for their cars, but also for cooking and to power generators. With government electricity in short supply across most of the country, generators are essential, especially in summer heat, which can rise above 50 degrees centigrade. At another gas station across town, this one for private cars, Ismail waits. "This is not a life; we do not have fuel, we do not have electricity," he complained.Future scenarios: Peter McMahon lays out four possible outcomes of the global warming crisis.
Tom Whipple takes on Energy and Buildings.
Power Down, Pecker Up. A rather flip overview of the peak oil issue, with links to resources. Might be useful for introducing the topic to newbies.
Update [2006-7-7 10:47:44 by Leanan]: Race to the world's energy hotspots
Money no object as the big players grab what is left of a diminishing resourceThe decision by Sinopec of China to pay $1bn for the right to explore for oil in deep water off Angola has shocked the west, which fears it could be left behind in a global scramble for resources.
Similar oil prospects off the coast of the impoverished African country were selling for $35m (£19m) less than a decade ago, when western oil giants such as BP and Shell had the field almost to themselves.
I'm also building up stocks of firewood, to reduce oil consumption. For reasons of capital costs, I don't want to go cold turkey on the fuel oil yet. Though that could change pretty quickly... the pain threshold already got passed last winter.
Orientation issues, trees, etc. may hinder this; but worth considering.
In a 11/1/04 Forbes column, Yergin was quoted as predicting that oil prices on 11/1/05 would be at $38 per barrel. Yergin spoke pretty dismissively of Peak Oil concerns. (Note that oil prices crossed the $60 mark prior to the hurricanes.)
I don't feel that Yergin gets sufficient credit for doing so much over the past few years to (effectively) encourage Americans to continue buying and driving large SUV's to and from large mortgages.
When the near month contract crosses the $76 level, i.e., two times $38 (either intraday or closing), I propose that we designate that day as "Daniel Yergin Day," in honor of Dan's encouragement of so many American's descents into future bankruptcies.
I also propose a new unit of oil price measurement, a "Yergin," or an incremental increase of $38 per barrel. So, at $76, we would be at two "Yergins."
Indeed, the mainstream media (and I've noticed this particularly on the Lehrer Report0 appears to have a more or less fixed stable of 'experts' on various topics that they draw upon to comment on various news developments as the need arises.
As best I can tell, the main criteria for becoming such a TV expert is i) experience in a high-visibility position in either government or academia, ii) being articulate and reasonably photogenic on TV, and iii) a committment not to say anything too extreme or too divergent from the current 'received wisdom'.
When there is a panel of such people, the atmosphere is generally very chummy, with very little open discord. I recall one rather well-regarded military expert who was on the Lehrer Report during the early days of the Iraq occupation. He said something that went totally against the grain of the other experts and did so quite vehemently. I have not seen him back on the program since.
When looking at this issue, the only thing you need to know is that, first and foremost, TV is entertainment.
Hence the modern expression "pundit." Yergin is the best example of a mass media pundit, but if you'll pardon a ribald touch, it seems to me the book he recites from is the Kama Sutra.
Forbes seems to be good for absolutely nothing.
How do you get filthy rich ? Ya gotta "climb every Malcom, Forbes every stream....."
Besides, if the MSM saw the reality that you and I foresee, they would know their days are numbered and have to rush to the toilet.
Westexas can write the essay, to be posted here or at EnergyBulletin, and we can link to it.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 47 for danial yergin day. (0.54 seconds)"
Since "daniel yergin day" only has 47 results, I think it can be leveraged.
Me.
This is what it finds:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/5/1/181751/9406
It looks like Dan is safe today. The EIA natural gas report seems to be pulling down oil prices somewhat.
Don't forget CERA's testimony in front of a congressional committee in December, 2005, to the effect that they don't believe that we are near the peak. I thought that the timing was interesting--exactly when Deffeyes was predicting that we crossed the 50% of Qt mark.
Right after that happened, I got an e-mail entitled "Your web site has DROPPED out of the Search Engines!". It was full of multi-colored font, bolding, and lots of emphatic text. They explained that they can fix this problem for $100. It reminded me of a mob protection racket. I couldn't figure out how (or if) they had manipulatd my site, but it would have certainly been feasible using Google Bombs.
Cheers,
RR
I think the "honest" way to do it is to create content (Google likes content, paragraphs of text at the source and destination end), and each of us link to a Westexas essay on "key words" from our own essays (with a different name, but with "key words" in the link).
(There are other ways to change your Google Rank using your own page design. Those $100 guys might be selling a site overhaul. Wikipedia has a good page on Google Rank and how it works.)
They may have also been deploying 301 Redirects against you, though I thought that problem had been solved by now.
I was going to suggest that "Yergin" be made a verb
yer-gin Audio pronunciation of "yergin" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (yr·gn)
tr.v. yer·gin·ed, yer·gin·ing, yer·gin·s
1. To be blithely reassuring but opaque: A great effort was made to yergin the situation.
2. To render complacent: His article yergined the public outcry.
3. (astronomy) To report a UFO.
-C.
http://www.time.com/time/globalbusiness/article/0,9171,1050297-1,00.html
In April 2005:
"And with markets this tight, you'll see a lot more volatility, and you could see prices spike up as high as $65 to $80. How high they go depends on geopolitics and market psychology."
I think he has made more critical errors in judgement,such as:
"By the time oil production plateaus, he says, ''I think we'll be driving cars that get 110 miles to the gallon, 120 miles to the gallon." To assume we won't be able to adjust in time, Yergin says, ''means you think the technological revolution that began in the 18th century is going to end."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/02/26/oil_futures/?page=full
I think an interesting post here would be for someone to really look at all his predictions vs. current reality.
Dan is a one man wrecking machine. So, when will we hit 3 Yergins? Recent price rises seem tied to nothing but tightness of supply. I believe the "concerns" about Iran are not driving the price. That is not to say I dismiss the possibility of a catastrophic outcome there. In fact, I think it has a probability over 50%. These neocons will be in power for only another 18 months. That's their window of opportunity for ruining the world. If they bomb or allow Israel to bomb, they can trot out Karl Rove's favorite trick one more time -- wrapping yourself in the flag and calling anyone who criticizes you unpatriotic if not treasonous.
Danny boy reassuring us all the time lays out happy scenarios that help pave the way for irresponsible geopolitical actions. Unlike you or me, he is well paid for his statements.
Einstein:
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe".
Bertrand Russell:
"Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do."
and for some examples, from Tom Delay:
"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills. [on causes of the Columbine High School massacre, 1999]".
Daniel Yergin:
"The interdependence of producer and consumer is evident with LNG - the resources flowing out are balanced by the financial liquidity they give companies".
Of this last quote, this is a novel interpretation of the relationship between the drug supplier (Qatar) and the drug addict (America). In mental health programs, they take the opposite approach: cure the addition.
later, Dave
What are we going to do when it turns out our dealer is dry?
"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.
I know this is an oil site -- but how can anyone take Republicans seriously when they spew out crap like this?
Evolution in school?
Working mothers taking birth control causes crime?
This is what's wrong with America -- abstract, non-empirical, ideological 'faith' trumping reason.
Only the supremely powerful can afford to ignore reality or afford to use faith, secular or religious, instead of reason when making decisions. How much power and how many resources will we waste trying to prove 'faith' is more powerful than reason?
I don't believe Yergin has any influence over American consumption, but histortically low interest rates most certainly did.
We are almost certainly now behind peak production. Global production has been steadly declining about 100,000 b/d every month. I seriously doubt that the new projects coming will be able to exceed declines. The existing field production declines will accelerate as will nationation of oil and gas assets.
Since were are already past the curve is pointless to enlighten the masses of the pending crisis. It would be far better to make your own preprations before time runs out and hell breaks loose rather than gamble on some gov't level effort to address the issue.
Once the world recognizes PO, exporters will almost certainly end or radically reduce exports to save their remain reserves for domestic use or to stretch out exports for trade. To believe that that the US or any country could initiate an manhattan/apollo scale project to address the issue is silly. There no longer remain sufficient resources to make long term preparations. When the crisis begins global stability will fall off the deep end as people and gov't panic over what to do and finger pointing becomes the norm. We have already seen the smoke, Nationalization of energy assets in Russia, and South America, China locking up energy with long term contracts, declining production at all the largest fields. It won't be too long before we start to see some flames.
So the Russian need for hard currency and the Saudi's flooding hte market driving down oil prices had NOTHING to do with the present consumption patterns?
It would be far better to make your own preprations before time runs out and hell breaks loose rather than gamble on some gov't level effort to address the issue.
Standard advice. If you prepare too well, the sniper with a .50 cal can and will take 'em from you however.
To believe that that the US or any country could initiate an manhattan/apollo scale project to address the issue is silly.
Which issue? Production, consumption, the money systerm, government level of spending.....So many issues are tied together, its not as simple as 'cheap money', lack of the currency being backed by anyhting,
thats a tough balancing act.
to be prepared enough to survive but not too well to become a target of not only hungry people but the government needing to get a hold of resources or to dispose of possible threats.
Everything I tell you is true.
But you already knew that.
Every day in every way, I am becoming better prepared. As are all my family members . . . .
This has to be a joke. What percentage of people buying an SUV in the US has ever heard of Yergin or was familiar with his prognostications, even without attaching them to his name? One tenth of one percent? Less?
There are WAY more important things we can be doing aside from chasing people like Yergin in circles.
It leaves me wondering if Yergin is popular because he is believed, or just because he enables.
Please let us bury dead horses rather than beat them over and over and over and over again.
In such a situation, is "attacking Yergin" a side or non issue?
I am reading Lester Brown's "Outgrowing the Earth". It is about food production. One fact that he keeps mentioning is that grain yields drop 10% for each 1 degree Celsius rise in average temperature. Global food production (with the exception of aquaculture) seems to be maxed out, so further increases in temperature will be devastating to crop yields.
http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/2006/05-06/graintoc.htm
From that chart on the right in your link--it looks like Peak Grains has been occuring for sometime--Yikes! Total grains inventory down almost 50% [my eyeballing it] from 98/99 year.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
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Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4824433,00.html
FasTracks faces choice
Denver-Longmont, DIA trains could be diesel or electric
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
July 6, 2006
FasTracks' next big question: diesel or electric?
It's already been determined that the trains serving the Denver-Boulder-Longmont and Denver International Airport lines won't be light rail, but now planners are considering whether they should be electric or diesel powered.
Electric is more expensive to build; diesel may be more expensive to operate.
In the original FasTracks plans, the U.S. 36 Corridor serving Boulder and Longmont and the East Corridor serving DIA were assumed to be diesel-powered commuter trains, which are more like regular railroad passenger cars.
But with diesel fuel prices rising, the electric option is back in play.
With lower upfront construction costs, it seems at first glance that diesel cars - propelled by internal diesel engines - are the way to go.
Though they are more expensive to buy, at $3.6 million per car - compared with $2.8 million for an electrified car - it costs about $2 million more per mile to build overhead electrical power lines for electric trains, according to RTD data.
But committing to many years of diesel fuel use could lock RTD into a system that's more expensive to operate in the long run.
"If I add electrification, that's an added capital cost," said John Shonsey, senior engineer for the Regional Transportation District, which is building the $4.7 billion FasTracks rapid-transit system. "But where you have your biggest difference is in the cost of fuel, and we want to find out how long it would take to reach the break-even point between electric and diesel."
RTD calculates that an electric train car would cost between 55 cents and 80 cents per mile to operate under various scenarios.
A diesel-powered vehicle would cost between 67 cents and $2 per mile to run, depending on various cost assumptions and operating conditions.
Another factor is that electric cars accelerate faster, making total trip time from downtown to the airport 29 minutes, including station stops, compared with 34 minutes for the diesel cars.
The Boulder-Longmont rail corridor is 38 miles, starting at Denver Union Station. It follows the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe tracks along the Boulder Turnpike and continues along the Longmont Diagonal Highway. The airport line is 23.6 miles to the DIA terminal.
RTD may face the same electric vs. diesel choice on the North Metro Corridor through Commerce City and Thornton, an 18-mile line on which environmental study is beginning next month, although light rail is still an option.
-----------------
Dear Editor,
Your July 6th article about the whether the Denver-Boulder-Longmont DIA rail line will be electric or diesel powered underscores truths that we all must understand. The first is that American transportation depends largely on liquid fuels that will be increasingly more expensive, while electricity, coming from many sources, will continue to be relatively cheaper and more available than fuel that goes into a tank. Calgary, for example, powers its CTrain with windmills at the base of the Canadian Rockies.
Dave Dobbs
Publisher, Light Rail Now!
I left out the guts of Dave Dobbs letter.
----------------
The second telling point is that rail cars using the electric grid are faster over the same route because acceleration power is not limited to the motor/energy on board. Electric traction vehicles can briefly and without damage, effectively double their horsepower starting from a stop because the external power is available. The five-minute savings with electric rail from downtown to DIA translates to a 13-minute timesavings from Boulder to DIA.
Electric traction costs more initially, but lower operational and maintenance costs, plus increased ridership on faster trains will quickly recover the difference
What really bothers me is that if things turn bad and resources go scarce, such dilemmas will increasingly be solved in favor of the short-term patches. I've seen that happening in the collapsing ex-socialist countries - one of the most evident being road maintainance. With governments short of cash, the roads get patch almost every other year, which in the long run costs many times more than a if it was being done properly.
IMO to avoid total collapse in the long-term we need to set up the rules for best practices now, while we still can. Any thoughts about how to do it?
And, perhaps, a mark of economic decline due to Peak Oil?
-best,
Wolf
Our genes are not our friends--the collective will ultimately fail, whimpering into oblivion, unless a full tilt paradigm shift begins to optimize the Dieoff Bottlenck:
From Duncan's Olduvai Gorge Theory:
------------------------
ODYSSEY: MY QUEST FOR THE OLDUVAI SIGNATURE
I would rather discover a single fact, even a small one, than debate the great issues at length without discovering anything at all.
-- Galileo Galilei, c. 1640
My Odyssey with the Olduvai theory began thirty-two years ago during a lecture series titled, Of Men and Galaxies, given at the University of Washington by cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle:
*****
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Hoyle, 1964; emphasis added)
***********
I was fascinated--and stunned. His soft-spoken proposal seemed incredulous, bizarre, preposterous--and possibly inevitable. A return to the Stone Age? Deep cultural and material impoverishment? However nobody else in the audience seemed the least concerned. Perhaps Hoyle was just giving a lead-in to his next science fiction thriller. So for the next decade I went about my way: raising kids, building airplanes and teaching engineers. Haunted by Hoyle's hypothesis.
-----------------------
http://dieoff.com/page125.htm
My theory is that Foundation might give us a chance. Time will tell.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
personally i think this chance was thrown away after Apollo was stopped due to lack of public interest. though that was caused because we went into space for the wrong reasons.
Sorry Steve we can't do that.....
Humans will continue to kill each other on a mass scale that made the 20th century look like a walk in the park. And as for the space delusion, there is alot of radiation out in space or on the surface of moon and that is a big problem, OK... , we can live in caves on the moon, brilliant.
Where are all the predictions of the BS futurists from the '60s, '70s ' & 80s... ?
TOD is a multi-generational site.
We seem to have here:
1. 1940's-born geezers (like Sailorman) who's childhood years were deeply molded by the end of World War II,
2. 1950's-born geezer wanna-be's (like me) who formed the bulk of the 1945-1955 Baby Boom generation and who's childhood years were deeply molded by JFK's race to the Moon, the cold war, the Bomb, the Vietnam War
3. 1960's-born Generation Xers (like ... 40-something TODders, identify yourselves) who seem to have been lost in the shadow of the Baby Boomers but whose childhood years nonetheless were deeply molded by the dawning of the microcomputer age and by the actual landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong in July 20, 1969, (Conjunction junction anybody? wha?). It seemed back then that "progress" would be perpetual, that we would keep going and going, beyond the Moon, to Mars, to the Stars, on a glorious Star Trek ride
- 1970's-born and current 30-somethinger's who are probably too busy struggling with raising families and making a buck to have time to pay attention to PO,
- 1980's-born and current 20-somethinger's whose childhoods were governed by that City-on-the-Shining-Hill happy face Raygun Guy, by the rise of He-Man and the Cabbage Patch Doll take over
- 1990's-born and currently teenagers or early college --any of you actually visiting here? If so, what do you think about all these geezers and subgeezers yapping about End-o-Oil?
So to talk about the "BS futurists" of the 1950's, of the 1960's, and of other eras does not make sense unless one knows what generation these futurists were talking to and how the audience received the messages.I suspect that the current 20-something generation is more into foreboding Matrix mentality than into happy George Jetson day dreams. The world is so much more crowded, so much more "competitive" for current 30-something and 20-something folk than it was for us Happy-Days 1950's-1960's hoola-hoop rotaters.
Everyone here has seen a different Happy-Future forecast.
As for myself, growing up in the triumph-of-science 1960's it seemed that progress would stretch out forever. Each space mission: Gemini, Mercury, Appolo, the Moon, communication sattelites, transistor radios, color TV, etc, was another leap forward toward that utopian future. There was no holding mankind back now, we had conquered Nature itself. Yes there was some noise in the 70's from those gray-haired Club of Rome doomsters --but what the heck could they know? They were so old school, so not cool. Malthus had been wrong all this while.
Where's my air-car, goddammit!?
Now quit complaining. Shucks, you even have the Internet, which can be a good substitute for lack of a social life;-)
One can imagine an alternate history in which polymer chemistry, not metallurgy, is developed early. One could even more easily imagine a post-collapse civilization, having retained knowledge of atomic theory and the scientific method, rebuilding with carbon fiber, and perhaps buckytubes, instead of metal.
Chemistry might also be useful for energy storage; less need for fossil fuel if you can store intermittent natural sources at high density.
Chris
With alloys, aluminum can perform MANY tasks. A polymer, ceramic & aluminum technology is very possible.
Hydroelectric power alone could sustain a lower density population. Add wind and/or solar and the upper limit increases dramatically.
To be honest - I'm on the salmon's side. I don't trust their accounting but admit that NOT killing every last living thing is more expensive than total disregard for ALL ELSE.
I don't disagree that hydroelectric alone could power a 'powered-down' civilization, but if another segment of the population is killing all the fish, to me, it just demonstrates how we take two steps back for every step forward, or, perhaps more appropriately, how everything is attached to everything else, or some such, as John Muir said a while back.
We would either need to have a drastic population cut (a nuclear war?) and/or return to an end-of 19 century lifestyle for this to happen. Yes, theoretically wind and solar can provide for the rest of our current needs, but theoretically we can also conquer the space, right?
Abandoned water mill sites are ripe for redevelopment. IMHO Last I checked the electric companies were fighting to stop this from happening. Evidently if they don't own the asset they don't want it hooked up to their grid.
A silted up reservior will still have water coming down, but no place to store it i.e. a run-of-the-river scheme. So we get more energy, but not when we want it.
The US has developed large storage schemes but not large run-of-the-river schemes. We still have the Qatars & Iranian gas fields.
I think that we could several percent of US electricity demand from small hydro.
Conventional wisdom dictates you are wrong - the power produced will be the same at best. Given that this best case would mean reducing demand following capabilities, the net result I think will be definately negative. After that if/when the silth reaches the valves, then what? (just guessing here we need somebody in that business IMO)
Seasonal shifting of power is very common for large reserviors. Water may fill the reservior in the spring (maximum head) and then drawn down (lower head) during the summer (or following winter). The cubic meters of water that go through the turbines at lower head generate less electricity (directly proportional to head, ignoring any effects from suboptimal design; turbines have a single point of highest efficiency; lower heads often drop efficiency by 2% to 3% or even more).
More energy would be generated (a larger power plant might be required) if the reservior was kept full at all times (some reserviors in a chain of storage dams on a river are kept full at all rimes except dire emergencies).
The economic value of "run-of-river" power is less than storage "on demand" hydroelectricity, but there would be more of it.
This dam will displace Argentian natural gas. Since NG is used pretty much 24/7 (AFAIK) to generate electricity in Chile, it matters little when it is displaced.
This scheme drills a tunnel between a high point on the river and a lower point with a power plant. Mhttp://www.norfund.no/article_news.asp?id=137&infoid=84inimal environmental impact.
This dam will displace Argentian natural gas. Since NG is used pretty much 24/7 (AFAIK) to generate electricity in Chile, it matters little when it is displaced.
This scheme drills a tunnel between a high point on the river and a lower point with a power plant. Minimal environmental impact.
http://www.norfund.no/article_news.asp?id=137&infoid=84
In the years before silting up, the turbines saw :cleaner: water because some of the silt load had been deposited in the reservior. The silt load would increase to what came down river, without any reduction.
Is it still true?
Will it be true when we have a lot more wind and solar power on the grid??????????
I said " if we got cut off from all the fossil fuel right now, would civilization survive?" and then went on with Fred Hoyle's ideas about the one-shot try per planet.
She said " Hoyle is wrong. look at the Incas, Chinese, Greeks, and so on, they had none of our energy stuff, but had astronomy social structures, ag, roads, and so on. If we started from there, with everything we know (she was a physics and chem major and grows most of our food), we could do windmills and solar thermal and biomass, we could go on just fine, after all, if you have science and electricity, you can get all the hardware you need by reworking the trashpiles. But a lot of people would have to die off right quick."
That sums up my feeling too, and same with a lot of my friends. So around here the collective wisdom seems to be pretty solid- way too many people, not anywhere enough wisdom to apply what we already know, and just a heck of a lot of plain lazyness --probably induced by cars and TV.
But we have another consensus that is almost never spoken but is solidly there- dogmatic religion of any stripe is a very serious threat to the life of any sane society. Read "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.
BTW, most of us are pre-WW-2 types who think the 50's were just yesterday- and not all that bad either.
none of the alterntives can be made or even maintained past one life cycle without what we have in place right now.
Hydroelectric powerplants need major overhauls every 40 to 50 years, but they can get by without them. Witness, Albania, North Korea and Zaire, where hydroelectric facilities are their most reliable source of electricity during decades of neglect & isolation. Their life cycle is multiple centuries.
Wind turbines are fairly easy to build & maintain.
Geothermal, biomass and landfill gas plants are not terribly difficult to build with the installed technology base. Nukes are.
with reduced power output no less.
they are now because they depend on cheap energy to be made, there is no guarantee they will stay that way. much smaller scale wind power which is too small to generate electricity but useful for mechanical uses such as pumping up water for consummation or grinding stuff for flower
geothermal is region specific.
biomass fed eclectic plants will rob people of food, and destroy our soils by proxy by robbing the topsoil from nutrients better recycled into the soil rather then burned for power.
landfill plants are limited to a even more limited resource, our own throw away waste. it will also have to deal with any rise of recycling no doubt there are many things in those landfills that will be worth more then the amount of methane they release.
it cut off. "is sustainable"
from this sentence.
"much smaller scale wind power which is too small to generate electricity but useful for mechanical uses such as pumping up water for consummation or grinding stuff for flower"
When Albania rebuilt theirs after decades (since 1930s) of neglect. by 8% to 12% per conversation with poster at a Hydrovision confernce.
One can project the costs of windmills into a higher cost energy but lower economic activity future. Thw costs should stay competitive. Recycle titanium from aircraft for "forever" blades, recycle copper, steel, etc. from other sources to first generation wind turbines, and then recycle them again for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, generation WTs. Electricity is often used today for recycling even when not used (today) for primary production.
Landfill methane comes from stuff that is not easily recycled (except, perhaps, paper) like spoiled/waste food. Perhaps less of that in the future.
If you get tired of stirlings, try steam. Lear gave up, but I think that was because he was trying for too much efficiency.
I say . . . go back to the Stanley Steamer! Or the Doble! Now there were a couple of fine external combustion-engine
cars. No transmission needed.
Oh, and bring back steam locomotives and steamships with auxilliary sails.
Back to the future . . . .
anyhow, no harm. There will be a stirling guy and a steam guy and lots of others, and the best will win, just as it should be. Most likely, one kind here, another there. Where I happen to be in the hills of appalachia, stirlings running on the cast offs from whisky stills, the whisky going into rebuilt fords and their drivers.
Sailboats are great. How about a boat with one of those 3 megawatt windmills on it??? think of the photo opp!
Did you know that Columbus's ships were so well designed and built that vessels of this type had somewhat better than a fifty percent chance of surviving a hurricane? Those that did not survive frequently were blown onto an island or coast that destroyed the ship.
There are three things I look for in a sailboat:
Only kidding, sweety already found...
If I were going to edit a book of Oil Drum posts, that one would be on it. Pretty well sums up everything I believe as well. Of course there are some wild cards, one that greatly concerns me is that some people will still have oil and can use it to upset your survivable location, if you have one (not to mention global warming). I also believe that the further out we go without fossil fuels, the lower our standard of living will become. Keep up your work on the solar powered stirling engines, too!
Smaller sites are actively discouraged by US licensing requirements (less than 10 MW, the papaerwork costs more than the electricity it can provide).
Run-of-river schemes are almost unknown in the US. We could get another 5% to 10% from existing hydro power plants. TBMs make run-of-river MUCH more practical today.
India has found sites for 60,000 MW of hydro and wants to build many of them. Over half run-of-river schemes in the Himilayas. Canada had many hydro sites left, etc.
India might be unpleasantly surprised if it bets on hydro in the medium term. Himilayan gletchers are retreating and unless we stop GW tomorrow I expect a very poor future for Indian hydroelectricity.
Overall USA and Canada are blessed with quite more hydro resources than the world average and still hydro is even behind nuclear in the energy mix (in a tie in Canada, but far behind oal, coal and NG). Now consider Africa, most of Europe, central Asia etc. etc. - what are they going to do?
(Though oal sounds like a good synthesis of what our civilisation runs on :)
But local rain will coem down the rivers.
GW will change the distribution of rain (those with more will need larger power plants), but in toto rain should increase with GW.
If water falls in early November in the Himilayas as rain and not snow, it will still generate power, just in late Novemenr and not April or May of next year.
The question for Indai is total annual rainfal (and not just in the Himilayas).
Regardless, Diesel doesn't seem like the way to go. Thinking long term, they may be forced to replace it because of future oil shortages. Better to bite the bullet now with higher capital expenditures.
I have been wondering what consumption looks like if viewed in the price domain, rather than the time domain as is mostly done here. Seems this sort of thing might be helpful in modeling post peak outcomes vis demand destruction
From "This Week in Petroleum page" (thanks to Oil CEO for pointing me to the data) I did a scatter plot and trend fit (Least mean squared error polynomial of the 3rd order)of retail gasoline price vs barrels supplied, from Feb 1991 to present, to try and derive a simplistic "consumption curve" for US Gasoline.
The idea as I understand it is that up to some point higher prices encourage increased supply from producers i.e. they move the supply curve by bringing more gasoline to the market, but beyond this point consumer resistance to price becomes dominant i.e. demand is "destroyed", or at least surpressed, in the face of the high prices.
This is not new by any means, but what I was able to find out there imposed large amounts of presumption in the form of elaborate "market model" equations on the data, and I think if nothing else there is merit in going back to raw as a starting point for getting ones head around such things...
As a means of evaluating the predictive utility of the fit function I extended it to the realm of $4 / gal gasoline... Time will tell?
Here's the graph:
IMO you could be right that up to 2-2.50$ price was essentially irrelevant to the the demand side of the equation. Consumers just filled up without giving much of a thought. But you are probably wrong that the upslope was due to suppliers interested in bringing more gasoline to market - basicly what they would want hardly matters if the product they try to "push" is not demanded at such prices. They could do sime advertising, lobby for bigger cars etc. but in the case of gasoline I don't think this has a great effect.
In this timeframe I see the other factors affecting demand (e.g. population growth, income growth, shift to SUVs) coinciding with the price rise and that's why you get the upside of the curve. Now that we are on the downslope I would suggest that it is too early to estimate and/or model how demand responds to the price - the data points are too few for that and price need to be rising significantly more.
It is a graph of the actual gasoline supplied to US market plotted towards the price and nothing more. By definition demand and supply curves represent what consumer and producers would want buy and sell at a given price. The graph shows where these curves have intersected over time and I translate it as follows:
- Up to 2-2.50$ demand has been essentially insensitive to price (low price elasticity at these prices implying a flat demand curve)
- Higher elasticity above such prices, implying that consumers already feel the pain and change behavior.
Again as always the suppliers are in a "demand-following mode". They can not bring more to the market than the people are buying - where would that store that extra gasoline!?Right, if we think of the classic 2 line supply demand graph from micro-economics the points scattered on my graph are the intersection values of those 2 lines since '91 in the US gasoline market, and as such refect both supply and demand side factors. To the extent that it sucessfully models anything it models the market behaviour as a whole, not the seperable responses of buyers or sellers IMO
"I would suggest that it is too early to estimate and/or model how demand responds to the price - the data points are too few for that and price need to be rising significantly more."
I agree very much, given that there are very few of the data past the inflection point, and the fit is very noisey, that end of the curve is very loosley constrained by the regression equation. "The data is what the data is".
I was mainly just trying to get the idea out there for discussion, a 3rd order LMS polyfit might well not be the equation to use... just a first little more than guess on my part, like I say I'm out of my depth here...
As to the other points in the prior comment I'm "black boxing" the system, and not speculating as to "driving" (sorry for that pun) factors beyond what I said in my original post
Also, the concept of using inflation-adjusted vs. non-inflation adjusted data for the price.... perhaps instead of nominal prices using a ration such as nominal price/average hourly wage might be more enlightening.
Yeah... things of which Economics masters theses are made....
Right, which is what I'm NOT trying to do. I'm not an economics student, nor do I aspire to become one :) In the Humanities I find mythology, and symbolic logic much more to my liking than solving pages of simultanious linear equations...
Humans love to see clean lines in deeply noisey data. I know this from years spent writing numerical methods software for scientific researchers, and more recently from reading this blog ;) There is no such thing as "too smooth" and when you set off down that road you can "smooth model" just about anything. The predictive valdity of those models however....
I'm black boxing the system and seeing if it will yield a useful huristic property or 2, thats all that curve is meant to be is a description of the box from the outside, not of the systems within it that create its behavior, using a simple and replicatable method with no "magic number" co-efficients in it. You might have guessed by now that I really really hesitate to put a magic number in a systems model to make it do what it needs to, though I have and will again if needs be.
I will say though that there has been a LOT written here about how "everyone just keeps driving their SUV regardless of fuel price in the US" etc etc and maybe this is a way of suggesting to those writers that there is more than that going on with regard to price signals even within the US where you will need to "pry my cold dead fingers from the steering wheel" (Gotta love that one). As the "Bug" said in the movie "Men in Black": "The terms you propose are acceptable!"
While I'm thinking of things "Numerical methody" Has anyone here run any spectral methods i.e. FFT or some such on the monthly production curve that we keep seeing to see what it looks like in the frequency domain? I was wondering if the choice of a 13 month avg was just a "seasonal" guess or if it was a designed choice. If you want a smoothed line why not run a designed digital filter across it based on the spectra rather than just an average?
The problem isn't so much doing it, as spending the time putting it in a form that can be presented here to everybody else. Stuart, Khebab, and I are the only three that do it on a regular basis as far as I know. My offer stands, and I only speak for myself. If you have specific data and a plan, you can send it me in Excel spreadsheet format only. The best way is to learn Excel charting yourself and learn where to get the data.
I'm waiting for some turbulence in the gasoline market before updating some stuff I've done before on that subject. Much will be revealed.
Is this site now going to be "R" rated? "X"????
- Time trend effects. 15 years ago, gas was cheaper, there weren't as many people, and cities were smaller and didn't require each person to drive as far. So a lot of the lower left corner of your graph is probably that.
- Seasonal effects: on average, in the winter, gas is cheaper and people use less of it.
So I think you need to de-trend and seasonally adjust the data somehow before we can understand what the situation is now.This is why economists use multiple regression models so much.
On my graph we are at june 28 / 06 at 287 cents per gallon and 9645 Kbbls/day (its the rightmost of those 3 points up at the top of the scatter)
In the big picture I think we are at or past peak more or less now based on Hub. Liniar. method but that there is too much deep noise to say much more than that, this does not concern me because for any practical reason I can think of other than perhaps speculative investment high precision is not really required. I prefer poker to the stock market (Dealers Choice, not that Texas Holdem stuff which I think could well wreck a good game!)
Big Oil's Big Profits, and the Big Lies They're Telling to Maintain Them
No need to worry, because ethanol will cover our future energy needs. These kinds of comments, from someone many see as a visionary, are going to be incredibly damaging in the long run. What is he going to say when we delay serious conservation efforts due to these kinds of comments, and eventually he is forced to admit he can't deliver? His empty promises will end up having devastating effects.
Cheers,
RR
But it's interesting that the ethanol producers have been driving the molasses market in Louisiana:
Fuel Alcohol Plant - Cost Study Cases - Grain Based Feedstocks - 1986 Dollars
The economics change above the level of production that depends only on molasses as input, although Brazil converts 50% of sugar to ethanol on market-based terms. In other words, they do canabalize their dugar production and find it makes economic sense.
I don't see how the LA plants would find it profitable to switch to grain unless it is cvaused by market imperfections - i.e subsidies, etc.
However, they've got the pages for the August issue set up already. I can see where the article will be when I search the site, but it's not accessible yet.
Haven't gotten my issue yet; hopefully, it will arrive today. But here's the snippet that searching the Discover web site gives me:
Sadly too there are many like Khosla who, once achieving some success and notoriety in one field, turn to polemics rather than science when discussing the viability of technical issues, in this case ethanol and oil.
The need to demonize oil companies stretches as far back to JD Rockefeller, and the need to present any private company as the enemy of the people is standard Bolshevism.
In a recent trip to the US I stood in a grocery store line behind a women who was complaining to the cashier about oil prices and oil companies. I was tempted to ask her about how her horses were handling the heat and humidity, but I kept quiet...
But the response comments made my day. Every single one of the 20 or so I scrolled through are flagged as "abusive." Haha. He had to be super-pleased with that. Think he'll give up after the feedback? Tough crowd over there at The Huffington Post. Think I'll go back and read some for a good chuckle. Thanks again.
IIRC consensus is growing we are talking several feet.
Inputs anyone?
As a side note, 15-35 cm sealevel rise, combined with energy depletion, is probably to much to cope with for Holland anyway
I don't think there's a consensus yet. However, the new data coming out suggests that global warming is happening a lot faster than we thought only a year ago.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth says global warming will raise sea level 20 ft. (Goodbye not only to Holland and New Orleans, but probably Houston, New York, Honolulu, Washington DC, Boston, and a lot of other cities, too.)
I was bemused to read a right-wing rebuttal of Gore's movie this morning, claiming the scientific consensus was that sea level would rise "only" 35 inches (almost a meter). Wow, that makes me feel better.
James Hanson, the NASA scientist the Bush administration tried to muzzle, thinks we could see an 80' (24 meter) rise in sea level before the end of the century. He argues that glaciers are melting much faster than the models predicted, because meltwater and mud underneath them are sort of lubricating the slide into the sea. That was not anticipated in the original models.
Sea levels rise for two reasons.
1. thermal expansion due to increased temperature of the water in the
oceans. This will be about proportional to and concurrent with the global
average temperature rise. For this a figure of 15-35cm by 2050 seems
reasonable. Only the top layer of the oceans will get warmer, the
deep ocean will stay cold.
2. Ice melt from icecaps and glaciers. This is the big unknown. Almost
all glaciers in the world are retreating, and melt rates have been measured
to have increased three-fold in recent years, because the melt-water acts
as a lubricant and accelerates the flow of the glacial ice down the mountains
to warmer, low altitudes where they melt. If the entire greenland icecap
melts, sea level rises about 20 feet. That is enough to flood most of the
mega-cities in the world and reduce fertile agricultural land by a large
percentage.
For greenland to melt, global temperatures need to be about 5 degrees C
above current (IIRC), which is well within the range of global warming
forcasts for this century, if not by 2050.
The ice will not melt overnight! The ice sheet is miles thick in places and may
take up to a century to melt completely (but given recent findings, it
could be much quicker). The thing is, once the temperature rises, the melt
is set in motion and cannot be reversed. The sea level would rise by 20 feet
eventually.
Of course, there is also the antarctic ice sheet. This is an order of magnitude
bigger, and until recently, did not see an obvious net melting. Latest results
are less clear. If that does melt in future centuries our surviving descendants
will be living in waterworld...
http://www.realclimate.org/
Where would it go? Some of it would go to refilling Lake Chad, some of it would rain out locally (the Sahara used to be much greener than it is now), most of it would probably contribute to rain in the tropics, since the Sahara is in an atmospheric subsidence zone.
There could be other places more suitable for the idea - central Asia, the Nevada or Atakama deserts come to mind. We could use nuclear or wind power to pump the water.
The Greenland ice cap is 2,930,000 km^3. If we are going to compensate for 1% of it annualy (29 300km^3) - this translates into 929 000 m3/sec. Pumping it 100 m ablove sea level will require... hm 929 GW of power. Ooops.
On the bright side I find it great for people to keep on dreaming - sometimes unexpected results come even from the wildest ideas.
I always thought about filling up the Qattara Depression made famous by Rommel. It would create some new farmland with desal.
-best,
Wolf
One question that struck me the other day: If ice takes up more volume (is less dense) than water, will the melting of floating ice-sheets not reduce the volume of the oceans?
According to Wikipedia a cubic metre of ice only contains 917kgs of water (as opposed to a cubic metre of water which contains 1000kg ). Thus when that cubic metre of ice melts, it will only be 0.917 (or 91.7%) of a cubic metre of water. This seems like a significant loss in volume.
Mind you, since ice floats in the water and sits slightly above the water's surface, then maybe the difference in volume is compensated.
Anybody got a definitive answer?
The problem is the ice that's not floating. The glaciers that are on land.
Yes, of course the glass will not overflow, because the ice actually takes up more volume than the water it 'contains' when melted.
And yes, I know that the melting on-shore ice is the main problem, I was just trying to find out if the reduction in volume of the melted floating ice may help to reduce the effect of the melting land ice.
However, I think it comes down to the fact that the ice is floating 'proud' of the water. As we learned at school, 9 tenths of an iceberg is under the surface, so if it melts down to (about) 9 tenths of it's original volume as water, then, as you say, it's a wash.
When the Industrial Revolution began, the atmospheric CO 2 level was roughly 270 ppm. The 377 ppm registered for 2004 is not only far above any level over the last 740,000 years, it may be nearing a level not seen for 55 million years. At that time the earth was a tropical planet. There was no polar ice; sea level was 80 meters (260 feet) higher than it is today.
Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
(NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
Also GW does not seem to follow the 11 year solar cycle, variation in solar radiation is small enough to get lost in the noise.
OTOH, humans ARE making a profound difference in the chemical composition of our atmosphere. See graph below with annual spring/fall variation. Mauna Loa was chosen for the first CO2 sampling station because it samples high elevation (11,000+', 3,397 m) air that has just blown accross thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm
Then hit graphics button in upper left.
Care to try again?
What about the "global cooling" which took place from around 1950 into the 1970's?
Yes, it is a complex topic but 10 years ago people like you denied global warming was even occurring. Now you argue that it is caused by anything EXCEPT humans. Do you even realize how obvious you are in your methods?
FWIW you can make a very strong case humans are not the only cause of global warming.
However you'll never be able to prove how much of the warming is man-made or "natural".
The real question is: what are you going to do about it?
It's kind of like carbon 14 dating an artifact.
CO2 levels higher than anything since millions of year past (when, coincidentally, this was a tropical planet).
Hansen's wealth of earth data at Goddard Space Flight Center showing increasing melt rates, loss of ice, and warming as much as 6 degrees average in the far northern latitudes.
The continued slow collapse of the thermohaline circulation.
Watching warming model after warming model fail in short term predictions by being far too conservative.
One could go on and on about this for years because the volume of science proving warming is overwhelming. The volume of science implicating human emission of greenhouse gases is large and growing daily. In fact, the standard method of operation by the right wing now is to admit warming, since they can no longer deny that, but to question whether we "tiny" humans can ever possibly have such an impact. They forget that with modern satellites we can clearly document that we've deforested large percentages of the earth's surface. Not some tiny fraction of 1% but much more. These same shills ignore that we "tiny" humans have destroyed fisheries around the world, destroyed entire habitats by draining great rivers nearly dry and lifeless, and have created heat islands (cities) that can be monitored from space through their widespread effects. So yes, homo sapiens can and has caused widespread change to the entire planet already. Denying that is denying the very evidence in front of one's nose.
So yes, Oil CEO, I will debate someone who wants to argue what percentage of warming is man-made but I will call a shill a shill when they pop up (here or anywhere else I frequent) and claim that all warming is due to some other natural cause like solar radiation flux. In multiple posts, "oil" has used phrases like "global warming fear mongering" and "human-kind is a blip on the radar of worldwide warming" in his writings. I can look at the sum of his posts and see that he is writing exactly as I have seen other right wing deniers write in their efforts to debunk anthropogenic global warming.
If the volume of data supporting WMDs in Iraq was as large as the body of data supporting anthropogenic global warming, we'd have found a nuclear arsenal larger than the former Soviet Union's arsenal. In other words, the right wing only pays attention to large bodies of data when it suits their agenda and when it doesn't, they fight it. Now mind you, the left wing is just as bad in their own way, which is why I watch both sides merrily trying to piss in the same boot, missing, and doing nothing useful except getting each other wet and smelly.
Solar output has been increasing very slightly over the last century at least, but the contribution to global warming is small. The thing to note, however, is that as surface temperatures are increasing, upper tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures are not, and are in fact decreasing. If an increase in solar output were the main driver in global warming, the entire atmospheric column should be warming. What appears to be happening instead is that more heat is trapped near the surface, which is why it's called a "Greenhouse effect".
I guess you could also claim that we're releasing millions of barrels a day of stored solar output -- I won't argue with that!
One question for you, how certain are you, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being absolutely convinced, that human activity is responsible for global warming?
I have read that the surface temperature of the earth was a few degrees warmer 1000 years ago, which led to plagues and other catastrophes. Obviously the human presence and our attendant carbon releasing activities couldn't account for this.
For me, 9.9 and 44/100 % sure.
I am 93% convinced that human activity is causing most (>50%) of GW.
I am 60% convinced that human activity is causing all (or 90+%) of GW.
The evidence of human effects is overwhelming. The evidence of a coincident natural rise (your theory) is quite weak but possible.
It is not coming from the sun (very good data from ~1960 to prove that).
However, we may have had an unusually quiet time with volcanos in the last ~100 years and fewer massive volcanic explosions. This could be a small effect long term (large effect for 1 or 2 years then it fades).
But man is the largest effect. We use 1,000 barrels/second of oil + massive amounts of coal & natural gas.
Sick though it is, I would accept such desperate methods if the probable alternative was a billion or so unneccessary deaths. Please note that I consider 3 to 4 billion deaths almost certainly neccessary and would not support such methods until the probability of that reduction was high.
Increasing the carbon content increases the soil's ability to hold water, sometimes up to 20% more. More water in the soil and less in clouds is the way to go.
The way to achieve the carbon increase is to use organic or relatively sustainable practices such as keeping the corn stover in the field and recycling animal wastes. Organic agriculture pretty much does the same trick using multiple ways. In addition, we could recycling more of our organic wastes from processing, retailing and preparing food. And let's not forget our own wastes, properly handled.
The recycled wastes will also reduce our need for mined or chemically reated NPK. We haul tons of this stuff around all the time. Surely we can move wastes around at least regionally with a combination of truck and short haul rail.
If we do this, we may be able to move the various crop and pasture belts here in the U.S. to the east where moisture is more prevalent but still have food at least for a good=sized population if no one is obese.
Remarkably, carbon in the soil is carbon that is not in the air, helping to limit warming somewhat.
I never cut my grass.
Some of my neighbors complain.
Too bad for them; I'm zoned commercial and am in the business of saving the world;-)
However, because I am zoned commercial and because farming is a business, I make it my business to grow whatever comes up:
- mostly maple trees, including dozens of mature ones excelllent for maple syrup and sugar
- some grass
- some ferns
- Lots and lots of perennial flowers that were planted years ago and that I do nothing to water or fertilize or weed.
- Quantities of hyper aggressive jerusalem artichokes that I planted as an experiment and that show indications of taking over. Again--never watered, never fertilized, never weeded, and they flourish and spread faster than creeping charlie
- Creeping charlie and most varieties of "weeds" known to North America at my latitude.
- Diversified wildlife too numerous to list. I photograph but never kill. For food, though, I've heard that prarie dog stew is all right, and on prarie dogs alone I could probably fill my 22 cubic foot freezer with little effort. They are so tame they come right up to my sliding glass door, as do wild turkey and pheasants. Oh, there are mass quantitities of Canada geese in the field just to the south of me, not to mention ospreys, eagles, etc.
Lawn mowing is an environmental crime in my book.Back in 1998, Mike Mann et al published a temperature record now better known as the "hockey stick", or the MBH98 hockey stick (note that the figure shows the temperature anomaly from the 1950 mean global temperature -- it's been updated over the last few years.) The business about "the surface temperature of the earth was a few degrees warmer 1000 years ago" actually refers to the high values within the uncertainty of the reconstruction. Anyway, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick (M&M) published a skeptical paper in Energy and Environment showing that MBH were all wrong. In the event, M&M made some really fundamental errors (here's a place to start) that rendered their conclusions just plain wrong. That neither is a scientist, and that E&E isn't exactly a climate journal don't necessarily mean they're wrong, but in this case meant that they hadn't the expertise and that there was no system of peer review to catch obvious errors (the paper had been turned down by Nature)
That should have been the end of it, but Senator James Inhofe (the guy whose idea of a science advisor is Michael Crichton) and others seized on it to dismiss the whole idea of AGW (anthropogenic global warming). House member Joe Barton tried to intimidate Mann et al., until finally the Chair of the House Science Committee (Sherrie Boehlert, who will be sorely missed) got so fed up he called for the National Academy of Sciences to review the whole thing, taking into account M&M's criticisms (mostly it's McIntyre these days; he runs a website called climateaudit.org where he is mastering the art of obfuscation). The NAS report just came out 2 weeks ago, vindicating MBH98. There were criticisms of some of the original methodology, but the temperature record stood.
There are many things to take from this story, such as how easily science gets politicized, how difficult it is to accept that you may be wrong, and how badly people hear what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear (in this case M&M's results) doesn't make much sense. Yet in the end M&M have increased our confidence level in the temperature reconstruction, so some good did come out of it. It's a shame it took so much time and energy that could have been better used, but if that's what it takes to convince us, perhaps that was time and energy that had to be spent.
Anyway, my take on AGW? I'd put the confidence level on that as very high.
Mann's been verified by lots of studies
Global Warming Skeptics: A Primer
Guess Who's Funding the Global Warming Doubt Shops?
Posted on: 10/26/2005
In 1998, Exxon devised a plan to stall action on global warming. The plan was outlined in an internal memo (see the memo [PDF]). It promised, "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom" for "average citizens" and "the media."
The company would recruit and train new scientists who lack a "history of visibility in the climate debate" and develop materials depicting supporters of action to cut greenhouse gas emissions as "out of touch with reality."
While there is no indication that ExxonMobil paid the climate skeptics directly and the scientists may have their own motivations for participating, the company poured millions of dollars into spreading its message worldwide. Here's where some of that money went.
The information below is from Exxon documents and the organizations' Web sites: Exxon's 2003 contributions [PDF] and Exxon's 2002 contributions [PDF].
Sallie Baliunas
Member, Board of Directors
The George C. Marshall Institute
Enviro-Sci Host/Science Roundtable Member
techcentralstation.com
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
------------------------------
Stephen McIntyre
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
George Marshall Institute Expert
According to the GMI website "Stephen McIntyre has worked in mineral exploration for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada."http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1007
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
==============Willie Soon
Science Director/Science Roundtable Member
techcentralstation.com
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
Chief Science Researcher
Center for Science and Public Policy, a project of Frontiers of Freedom
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
The Frontiers of Freedom organizations received $282,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
=========Ross McKitrick
Senior Fellow
Fraser Institute (Canada)
Writer
techcentralstation.com
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
McKitrick is an economist.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
The Fraser Institute received $60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003.
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=3804&CFID=21084385&CFTOKEN=2988883 ...
=======I find it interesting that Michael Mann, in his letter to the House Committee, describes Steve McIntyre as a "mining industry executive" and McIntyre's own biography (www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/stevebio.doc) describes him as working "in the mineral business". Both descriptions are pretty euphemistic. Around the time of the writing of McIntyre and McKitrick (2003; the Energy & Environment paper) and of the above biography (dated in October 2003), McIntyre was actually a "Strategic Adviser" to CGX Energy Inc. who describe their "principal business activity" as "petroleum and natural gas exploration" (cgxenergy.ca/investors/CGX_AR03_part2.pdf). CGX Energy Inc. occupy the same Canadian address given for McIntyre in McIntyre and McKitrick (2003), an address which is also occupied by Northwest Exploration Company, another business which apparently engages in oil and gas exploration (or at least a company with the same name does). McIntyre was also President of Northwest Exploration Company.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=172
=
====The non-peer reviewed article was published in Energy and Environment, a non refereed policy magazine (not science journal) whose right wing editor admitted she didn't send it out for peer review and that it was her right to print articles which reflected her bias.
I can't find my link to this; might be realclimate.
RR, what a great question you posed, in the face of uncertainty can we afford not to act, to modify our behavior? I imagine it depends on what you want us to do, lol? If the purported changes were to include driving less, the teenies having to ride the yellow bus, and we adults ponying up for a hybrid, the answer is an unequivocal no!! Just kidding. I would love to see the results of such a poll.
Off to do more research.
This has certain implications...
A single brain must be capable of understanding and knowing the critical essentials, it is in that brain the 'click' must happen.
One must know for certain that the click has or not occurred, that is a function of the individual, their honesty, integrity, truth, perception.
One must be able to find things to develop within the system while waiting for the click. There are almost always plenty of these things which are clear requirements yet peripheral to the core logic. Often their development enables the click.
Systems do not truly work until they click. I have never developed a system that hasn't, almost all systems written by others (particularly the bigger ones) that I have seen lately just don't click, the users see / know this too.
I suppose what I am saying is: parts of the solution can be worked on and out linearly. Trying to do so often helps fundamental understanding. BUT real understanding, the knowing of truth, is a separate function. Do the linear bit on the mechanical aspects, mull over and toy with ideas that are shaping what you see, read about others' thoughts - particularly the stranger ones. Let these things percolate your waking and sleeping mind, consciously and sub-consciously. If you have not done this before be prepared to be surprised ;)
The problem with AGW is not that it will "kill the environment" -- Nature's far too resilient for that, and doesn't care whether the dominant life forms are people or beetles or jellyfish. The problem is that it's disruptive to our society. Just like the problem for our economy isn't that oil will run out, it's that cheap oil will run out and we are not prepared for the consequences. We're not even prepared to accept the possibility.
This is a very important point, and one that I think many people don't understand. I have argued that we won't see some runaway Venus-type global warming. It won't even wipe out humanity. But it will be incredibly disruptive. Billions could die as productive areas are turned into deserts. We could see Florida disappear under water. We could see devastating worldwide effects. The possibility of this is much too serious to be ignored.
Even for those who don't accept that global warming is caused by humans, they have to admit their uncertainty. So, what are the consequences if they are wrong? Is this global experiment something we can afford? No.
RR
though that does not mean nature can't do it herself look back at the Permian extinction which started with the formation of the Siberian traps.
On an unrelated point - most condoms nowadays have been found NOT to be proof against HIV!!! A simple remedy will improve protection 100-fold: a coating of chilli or pepper sauce does the trick, Encona make some good ones, just put about a quarter teaspoon inside the condom and roll it around between your fingers before unrolling over your erect member.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm
If you don't want to buy it, it is available free (pdf) to read or download.
And the US is by far the largest single part of the collective "us".
And as adults they take responsibility for what they can be responsible for. Like production of carbon dioxide. Remains to be seen if there are any adults present.
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3062
From Drudge:
Jul. 7, 2006 15:05
Iran: IDF strikes will bring Islamic 'explosion'
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
TEHERAN, Iran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned on Friday that continued Israeli strikes against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip could lead to an "explosion" in the Islamic world that would target Israel and its supporters in the West.
Again, Ahmadinejad questioned Israel's right to exist. "This is a fake regime ... it won't be able to survive. I think the only way (forward) is that those who created it (the West) take it away themselves," the president told a rally in Teheran in support of Palestinians.
As I Iran continues to threaten the West, please note that their efficient top-running economy has announced, via the "Persian Journal" the following on their bourse http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_16543.shtml:
Interestingly the Island of Kish (91sq. km.) is a resort island and noted, among other things, where Iranian prostitution is a "problem."
See also: http://www.iranchamber.com/geography/articles/kish.php
Iran oil bourse at the end of September
Jul 6, 2006
Iran will start the initial phase of its planned Iranian oil bourse at the end of September. An oil ministry official told that his ministry had already presented the relevant documents to the economic and finance ministry and the bourse organization.
The building that will house the oil bourse has reportedly already been purchased in the southern Iranian island of Kish in Persian Gulf.
Petrochemical and oil-related products will be made available to customers in the first phase but the volume of the shares to be traded is not yet clear, the official told.
Economics and Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari said last April that the issue had already been agreed upon and that the oil ministry had given the go-ahead for the opening of the bourse.
The exchange will have a positive impact on oil sales, not only in Iran but in the wider Persian Gulf region and is slated to replace the current dollar-based oil exchange with one based on the euro, he said.
The International Petroleum Exchange in London and the New York Mercantile Exchange, on which oil is currently traded, both use the dollar.
Iran argues that as long as 60% of global oil and 25% of natural gas needs are met by Persian Gulf states, oil dealing in either New York or London made no sense.
Iran also wants to circumvent dollar-based oil exchanges to avoid being impacted by the United States economy.
The plan to open the exchange in Kish was raised by the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year.
It was due to be opened before the beginning of the Persian New Year on March 21 but has been postponed several times.
There is no consensus, but for quality is is hard to beat some Asian countries, and the German and Dutch and Swedish whores are good if somewhat unimaginitive and relatively expensive. The most beautiful women . . . ah . . . a matter of taste. I would score a dead heat between Honolulu, Baltimore, and Truro, Nova Scotia. Nevada's whorehouses are generally overpriced and overrated. For value it is hard to beat Jamaica or Cuba. Cuban whores are very cheap in dollars. Or at least, so I've heard.
BTW, if we are trying to establish the value of various currencies and how they change over time, women for rent is one commodity that has changed little over the past five thousand years and likely to be a huge growth industry. After all, what are all those flight attendants and pretty receptionists in the tourist and restaurant industries going to do when TSHTF?
Three guesses.
To bad I've never wanted to be a procurer;-)
What--in all seriousness--do you think people will be doing for occupations in the U.S. some years from now.
In case you did not know this, in much of Nevada prostitution is legal.
Please take your narrow-mindedness elsewhere.
Why?
Now let us bury the hatchet and agree to disagree agreeably.
O.K.?
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyid=2006-07-07T125952Z_01_S P136390_RTRUKOC_0_US-MARKETS-OIL.xml&src=rss&rpc=23
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1680717.htm
Four Corners, "Australia's longest-running and most respected investigative journalism/current affairs television program", will investigate the issue of peak oil on the 10th July - Monday Night, at 8:30 EST.
Does anybody have a digital tuner on their PC, and willing to create a torrent for international viewers?
Most interestingly:[ *Four Corners also presents a Broadband Edition on "Peak Oil?" ... See the program in full; watch extended interviews with the experts; delve into interactive maps showing who produces the oil and who buys it; browse key reports about how much oil remains untapped; learn about the alternatives; and discover the impact of peak oil on Australia's economy and way of life. ]
The site would definitely warrant its own threadbot mention (at least?) once it goes live. I hope this spreads through the blogosphere effectively.
The ABC is a publically funded network and is more independent and hard hitting then the commercial networks.
4 Corners tends to be a bit of an opinion leader and there is bound to be more follow up about Peak Oil in Australia in response to this program, regardless of the spin that 4 Corners gives.
I think this:
The decision by Sinopec of China to pay $1bn for the right to explore for oil in deep water off Angola has shocked the west, which fears it could be left behind in a global scramble for resources.
Is really troubling. A large part of the potentially devastating aspects of Peak Oil is the sea change in psychology that could occur as we head into a world of scarce, expensive oil. What we don't want is a panic by consumers to make the situation worse.
I think it will be a miracle if we get past these next 20 or 30 years without a major global resource war, one that could possibly go nuclear.
If such happens, the real reason for the war will not be overtly stated, but rather, a variety of lame pretexts will be used for invading and occupying oil producing regions and for denying our rivals access to same.
The Iraq occupation was just a preview. That one was unopposed (militarily) by any of the major powers, but what about the next one? Are China and Russia going to passively sit on their hands while the US makes its next grab?
The increasingly desperate efforts to secure access to oil and gas are liable to create a world far worse than if we just accepted the coming shortages, lowered our standard of living, and made concerted efforts at reducing energy use and at building infrastructure for renewable energy systems.
Unfortunately, the leadership of the US has been seduced into the idea that it can solve its energy problem militarily, and that is clearly a recipe for disaster.
I think this is the single and most important danger in
the years to come. If I believed we lived in a fair and sane world I would consider PO as a minor to moderate sized technical problem. Unfortunately I don't.
Errm, who said that again? :)
Right on Diamond's wavelength--I'm going over my "Collapse" notes.
I remember coming across a conversation about government knowledge of a meteorite hitting earth. Should they tell everyone so that panic ensues, or do you just let it happen with the understanding that everything will be toast anyway so no one's the wiser? I say we never knew what hit us.
And I concider it better to know about the future then to be happy due to ignorance, if that makes me miserable so be it. Pretending that the future is bright next before an emergency is almost as bad as promising people an afterlife in heaven.
This argument is like the one that justifies torture by using the completely contrived situation where you KNOW someone has planted a nuclear bomb, and that you KNOW if you torture the guy you'll be able to stop it detonating. The situation is so contrived and oversimplified as to have lost any meaning. Reality is never this clear cut, and PO is not a meteorite hitting the earth.
Sure, many will be incapable of doing anything helpful or useful with that information, but then again it's the height of arrogance to decide for others that they are not worthy of knowing because they are too stupid to use it. What if - just pretend - there is someone out there SMARTER than you, who would be able to use the information in ways you hadn't thought of?
I think the concern about not panicking people is primarily a concern about not having financial markets be disrupted - in other words, it is people concerned about maintaining wealth.
Just planting a garden and doing the 100 mile diet would be an improvement.
Throw in some gas rationing and we can extent the plateau for decades.
People and systems can adapt, given sufficient warning and motivation.
Better the wake up call comes in a presidential speech today, than an oil shock tomorrow.
Post soviet Cuba is a good example of a post peak society.
PS: Just for the record. I don't thing this president or the next one will issue a wake up call prior to WTSHTF.
I will go to the local fishermen's market tomorrow morning and buy some fresh Gulf shrimp (swimming 24, perhaps 28 hours before). Maybe something else as well :-)
Some of us will do better than others >:-)
I planted my backyard as an orchard a couple of years back.
Looks like my first crop of pecans will be coming in this year.
Pears and peaches have been doing find for the last couple of seasons.
The complete list:
Apple: health but not very productive.
Gooseberry: health but not very productive.
Pear: health and productive
Peach: health and productive
Pecan: health and productive
Walnut: not yet mature
Butternut: not yet mature
Filbert: not yet mature
Oak: not yet mature
Almond: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
Cherry: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
Plum: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
China has been building a massive surplus of our dollars (promises to pay) that we've been printing like crazy (no need to raise taxes for the Iraqi war, and, of course, deficits don't matter anymore). Sooner or later, this was bound to come back to bite us. Not really surprising that payback is coming in the energy arena....
In regard to social panic, I'm very interested in the cultural and religious dimensions of this. I have a research project in mind, at the very early stages still, about the plausibility structures/paradigms into which people will fit PO awareness. [In the interests of full disclosure I am a practicing, evangelical, left-leaning Christian. I have to be careful because I'm bringing up PO issues in virtually every conversation now!]
In one recent conversation, with a friend who moved here from CA with her husband a few years ago and who have been living off their homesale equity but now must (but are having difficulty finding) work, she made explicit the link between PO and end times. In general, in regard to PO I'm not picking up such apocalyptic thinking in my Christian circles (yet, anyway), but I may well be out of conversations/denominations/traditions where such linkages are being made.
I'm wondering to what extent TODers are picking up linkages between peak oil and eschatological (end times) religious views as PO awareness spreads?
If you are truly an atheist, you have a tough row to hoe. How do you prove the NONexistence of Anything, e.g. a prime mover, unmoved?
Now I can disprove easily the existence of a Christian God (because it is logically impossible to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent and still have so much evil and unnecessary suffering in the world) but, as a logician, I'd have a hard time disproving the Greek pantheon or the early Jewish God, who was mean, vindictive, arbitray, inconsistent, cruel and jealous.
Aristotle claimed that "infinite regress" was "logically" unsatisfactory, and therefore he postulated a "prime mover, unmoved" who may have been eternal (He was not entirely clear on this point; all we have is lecture notes his students took.) but who did not care about humans, maybe did not even notice them.
Am I an agnostic? Well, that depends on definitions? What exactly do you mean by "God"?
You give me a definition, and I'll examine it.
When we finally endow robots or computers with intelligence, what do you imagine they will think in regard to their creation.
My GUESS is that Whoever created this universe was not the original creator; I think the Greeks were on to something with their several generations of gods concept.
One of the great pitfalls of modern religious discussion is the danger of falling into scientific language, and arguing in proofs and facts, as if one could use science to describe transcendence.
For me, lately, Picasso summed it up with "Art is the lie that tells the truth" .. makes perfect sense to me, but I wouldn't want to try deciphering it from a chalkboard equation. That, or, "A joke is like a frog. You can dissect either one to see how they work, but they usually die in the process."
As far as Machines.. there's always Mike (Mycroft Holmes) as described by Mannie.. "I always thought if you put honest numbers into a computer, you'd get honest numbers out. That was until I met a computer with a sense of Humor."
- Had to add that one, as it was Heinlein's birthday today, and my Daughter's, too!
Could happen more or less that way . . . .
THEN what do the theologists say?
Also, do you recall Heinlein's story, "Jerry is a Man"?
Don't recall 'Jerry', I'm afraid. How about the Asimov story in I,Robot about the positronic 'bot that was campaigning to be president? ("Evidence" , next to last story) 'What would distinguish a Robot perfectly following the Three Laws from a very fine person?..'
Fascinating question.
Heinlein's answer: Yes, because Jerry can sing (and understand) a song.
Note that it is stuff that we do not worry about that buries us deepest in doodoo. I expect an increase in slavery to be one outcome of peak oil. (There is already a lot of blatant and unambiguous slavery in Saudi Arabia and some N. African countries--not even very secret.) Now, suppose we start genetically modifying animals to get around the lack of fossil fuels?
At what point does this become immoral?
I believe the story has been anthologized more than once.
I'm like the atheist in Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse. Death goes to collect his soul to take it to heaven or hell, but to his amazement, when the atheist dies, his soul simply vanishes. :)
BTW, I think you are the clearest-thinking person on this site. What amazes me is that of the 600 or so items I've read of yours, I have yet to find a mistake (other than a rare typo).
- Are you sure you are human?
- Could you have been exchanged shortly after birth at the hospital for a godling baby?
Anthony lifted and adapted some of Plato's ideas. I don't know where Plato lifted them from;-)Exactly. I don't feel the need to disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, either. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. ;-)
Supposedly, LaPlace was confronted by someone who was offended at the idea of physics controlling the planets' motions, rather than the hand of god. They asked him where god was in his book. He replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
Dunno if that story is true or not, but it sums up my view.
By DEFINITION an atheist is one who believes in the nonexistence of any god at all. (Consult any dictionary.)
While I find agnosticism appealing and some forms of theism reasonable, I find it hard to understand the logic of people who say that they KNOW that there is no god.
Probably not, O.K. Maybe several gods. Maybe gods with limited powers. Who the hell can possibly know? But to assert that no god exists I find puzzling.
(For the record, I do believe that it can be shown with strict inductive and deductive reasoning with no holes or weak spots or tricks that the conventional Christian God does not exist. But that proof does not get us very far, IMO.)
film, "Miracle on 34th St."
Note that religious truth (according, e.g. to Mortimer Adler) is much like poetic truth. Maybe the problem is getting too literal. That is, IMO a huge problem that so-called fundamentalists have.
There is more than one kind of truth, e.g.
mathematics (deductive logic, mostly)
science (rigorous observation, record keeping, replication, etc. uses mostly inductive logic but also some deductive)
Accounting--a whole view of the world based on somewhat arbitrary definitions and conventions--most definitely a big part of the Peak Oil problem and also GW.
Economics--radically different from accounting. Tries to imitate physics much of the time and fails miserably. However, the best of economics contains kinds of truth not found in the physical or biological sciences.
Literary insight--e.g. the works of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, not meant to be taken literally, though Tolstoy got almost all his facts right in "War and Peace" about the war--which, when one reflects, is amazing.
Poetic truth. If you don't get it you don't get it. Poetry was so powerful is scared Plato. He banned the poets from from his ideal "Republic" because sometimes they told convincing lies about the gods. Irony here: Plato was himself a poet, and the "Republic" should be understood as a thought experiment rather than a recommendation for how to organize government and society.
Sociological truth . . .
Whoops, this post is too long. Either I've made my point, or I have not.
As for myself, or should we say ourselves?, I/we are quantum-theists. Both of the following statements are simultaneously true:
- God exists.
- God does not exist.
Einstein was right and wrong at the same time: God does not play dice with the universe, the dice is God and the definition of God is a dicey affair. Hmmm.What if the higher good is human development and we humans typically change very little when we are fat, happy and comfortable ?
I have the hypothesis that the "Purpose of Life" is to give us the opportunity to improve ourselves. Some succeed, some fail.
Oddly, I got this POV from a near-death survivor, a simple woman. She claimed that we had a choice beforehand on what circumstances & issues we would deal with. Like chosing a college circulum. Of course, multiple courses would likely do more good than just one. If we chose our modes of suffering beforehand, there is no cruelity etc. in using this as a learning tool.
The uniformity of near death experiences (~97% good, ~3% horrific) is an interesting experimental demonstration of the existance of an afterlife.
And in my own life, since I chose to change and explore and develop on my own (without the cattle prod approach), "bad things" no longer happen. A data set of one, but the timeline is unmistakeable.
Come to think of it, I do believe Budhha, Confucious, Jesus and Mahomet would have agreed with you.
Moses thought it was always about following God's will, but he argued with God and resented the heavy burden God put on him--said he was unworthy and unable to do God's will. Then God got angry--then relented and said, O.K., I see your point: Your brother Aaron can help you.
One thing I do like about Judaism is that ancient Hebrews were often arguing with God--and sometimes successfully, at least to some extent. Look how Abraham bargained with God to save Sodom or how Job (unsuccessfully) argued at length. I do like the notion of a God you can argue with. Christians and Muslims seem not to have this view of God; I do not know why.
Briefly:
Christians (most especially Roman Catholics, but also Kierkegaard and a bunch of other Protestants) have come up with some very interesting and appealing arguments for the existence of God, e.g. Anselm's ontological argument or the argument from design or a couple of others. Now these proofs are fascinating, because they illustrate the extent to which brilliant fabulously intelligent geniuses such as Aquinas and Descartes deceived themselves. All of these proofs have unambiguous fallacies in them. (However, it is devilishly hard to prove this point: For example, a rigorous refutation of Anselm's argument requires about eighty steps of symbolic logic; at least it takes me that many steps.)
Now the arguments of Atheists such as Marx and Freud are even lamer than the arguments of the theists. Marx said people believe in God ONLY because it is for the interest of the ruling class that they do so. Twaddle and nonsense.
Freud said that theism is a kind of primitivism or almost illness that can be "c