Krugman at 4 AM — Resources Gone Bye-Bye
Filed Under Economy, Energy, Environment | 1 Comment
(Note: To those few readers of this blog I hope you had a decent ‘holiday period, part one.’
I have a great hatred and loathing for anything that’s a lie — the Lottery, our current ‘terror war,’ the entire GOP, Hugh Hefner marrying for love, and among many, many other entities, ‘Christmas’ — and the image of a Santa Claus creates an enormous pissed-off feeling way-down into my bowels.
Reality and myth collide — reality loses.
Now, back to our unscheduled programming).
As the world watches, and endures, another high-balling winter season, the resources to sustain and maintain that endurance is steady, easily going down the consumed drain.
Everything is running out:
Although global warming is probably the greatest problem humanity has ever faced, the most immediate issue is the finite nature of fossil fuel that has supported the presently high standard of living (in industrialized countries). Without cheap oil there is no cheap food. There is no cheap water, healthcare, travel, housing, or recreation. Without cheap energy, the world contracts to using local resources and local activities. As food availability and diversity decline, it may lead to a decrease in the human population. This is contrary to the forecasted increase from 6.7 to over 8 billion people in the next 20 years.
And so it goes — everything is so stretched out of shape (like that photo at left) it becomes to look freakish.
(Illustration found here).
In order to keep the planet rockin’-n-rollin’ into the immediate future, there has to be a shitload of energy-producing stuff, but it just ain’t there.
Not only is climate change tearing into this fabric of modern life, but the very earth itself can not bear the never-ending need required to sustain life.
Scarcity has become the word tacked onto illusion:
The illusion is that we have a choice about using sustainable energy.
The media would like us to see it that way.
We are not engaged in choice at this point however, we are engaged in damage control.
We now hear and see the new media programming, the glamorizes clean energy and that all is under control.
We hear the message of peak oil but does it register?
Oil is connected to your food, your car, your heat, your light, your computer, your airplane, your cruise, your cell phone, your jar of peanut butter, your toothbrush.
Oil is presently depleting across the planet and warnings have been provided to us by scientists who knew as far back as the 1960′s, that we would reach peak oil and we have, so I won’t cover that here.
The side affect of our media now feeding us this new rosy sustainable energy picture, is just more of the same, and we remain disengaged from what’s really going on to spend more time understanding how our hand-helds work.
Unfortunately we can’t find out much about what’s going on by looking to the media, but damage control multiplied is what we will face in the coming years if we continue to listen to media.
Yes solutions are in the works and much progress has been made to saturate the market with sustainable energy solutions but so much more needs to be accomplished.
Without correct energy policy the market will do what it wants, but it must be guided by sound policy to be successful in meeting real world energy demands.
Paul Krugman in his NYT piece this morning touches upon the tombstone of this idea.
Although Krugman is a mainliner and a vital part of the MSM, he still can see the oil fumes in the air and how life is amiss without a never-ending source of fuel.
And those supplies aren’t keeping pace.
Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived.
True, alternative sources, like oil from Canada’s tar sands, have continued to grow.
But these alternative sources come at relatively high cost, both monetary and environmental.
Also, over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices.
And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common.
So what are the implications of the recent rise in commodity prices?
It is, as I said, a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding.
This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse.
It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources.
A ‘Mad Max-style collapse,’ however, in reality is indeed coming and it will make Mel Gibson’s loco trip resemble a walk in the park.
Forked Tongue on a ‘Wicked Problem’
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
As the Afghanistan experience slithers into the aftershock of a bad acid trip, the war pushers are saying one thing, and doing another — white assholes talking with big, ugly forked tongue.
From the Army Times on 18,000 new troops for the Afghan theater:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed the deployment orders a day after President Obama said he will start bringing troops home from Afghanistan in July.
In the same breath, he said the U.S. will not finish transitioning military forces out of Afghanistan until 2014.
What a deceptive mess.
(Illustration found here).
Rose-colored glasses for lying lips.
Despite even a winter coating on the war, the UN envoy to Afghanistan said Wednesday the shit is about to really, really hit the fan.
From AFP:
“We are detecting from the anti-government elements an attempt to show, on their side, spectacular attacks,” Staffan de Mistura said at the United Nations.
“I’m afraid for the next few months for a tense security environment… Our assessment is before it gets better it may get worse,” he added.
He went on to say that the best hope for lasting stability in the war-torn country was a political settlement between the Western-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and insurgents bent on overthrowing him.
“Everyone recognizes there is no military solution. Frankly, even the Taliban do, even if they will not say this publicly,” de Mistura said.
The Afghan UN guy quickly refuted: “Despite isolated incidents of attacks and suicide bombings by the Taliban and other extremists, overall security has improved,” Zahir Tanin said.
“The latest assessments show that Afghan forces for the first time in the last two years have begun to regain the military initiative.”
This is real, honest-to-goodness bullshit.
According to the Afghan defense people themselves, more than 800 Afghan troops have been killed this year, a 25 percent increase from 2009 — the country currently has about 150,000 of its own soldiers and there’s hope to increase that number to 300,000 by next summer with a required end-need of at least 400,000 to keep it secure.
However, Jason Ditz at antiwar.com reports on the local dead toll: Unfortunately for them, NATO’s efforts to increase the size of this force have not only been struggling on the basis of their shortage of trainers, but because these jobs are often so dangerous that many of the soldiers abandon their posts after receiving a paycheck or two.
All this in the face of another grim view, this time from a semi-official think tank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) — retired Gen. David Barno, former NATO commander in Afghanistan, and Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger, report things aren’t so rosy:
In a sober assessment, the report warned that “No immediate solution to the war in Afghanistan is likely.” After nine years of “inconclusive fighting,” write Barno and Exum, Afghanistan increasingly resembles a “wicked problem” in which “all outcomes are likely to be suboptimal for the United States, its allies, and the Afghan people.”
The impact of the $336 billion that America has spent in Afghanistan to date has been “deeply disappointing,” they said.
The authors argue that America will soon need to scale down its operations — and its expectations.
“Recent disappointments combined with Afghanistan’s long history of weak central government argue for a more realistic objective: limited central government with power devolved to the provinces and districts.”
No shit Sherlock.
Curve Ball
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Politics, Weather | 1 Comment
A lot of different stuff need debate — tax laws, wars in foreign lands, and so forth.
However, if something is near-overwhelmingly obvious any kind of debate just wastes time in seeking a solution to the debatable question.
Global warming, i.e., climate change is one of those — the evidence is startling and should not be batted back and forth by the ignorant to imperil the masses.
And what makes this so important, the ingredients for global warming are increasing, accelerating and pushing the livable envelope for humanity.
(Illustration found here).
The main factor is carbon dioxide, or CO2, which is increasing even as I write, or you speak.
In a terrific and long piece this morning in the New York Times, a profile of Charles David Keeling, who put together the machine for measuring CO2 in the air — and since the 1950s the apparatus has been churning up numbers on an upward spiral.
From the Times:
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million.
That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million.
Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400.
Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
…
When people began burning substantial amounts of coal and oil in the 19th century, the carbon dioxide level began to rise.
It is now about 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and humans have put half the extra gas into the air since just the late 1970s.
Emissions are rising so rapidly that some experts fear that the amount of the gas could double or triple before emissions are brought under control.
The earth’s history offers no exact parallel to the human combustion of fossil fuels, so scientists have struggled to calculate the effect.
Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit.
While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet.
The warming would be higher over land, and it would be greatly amplified at the poles, where a considerable amount of ice might melt, raising sea levels.
The deep ocean would also absorb a tremendous amount of heat.
Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook.
They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.
And in a bit of irony on GOP-fueled climate deniers — Keeling’s widow:
“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”
Most scientists think 350 ppm is the living/dying point.
Read the entire Times article, enlightening and persuasive.
One must keep in mind that global warming greatly influences our weather, everywhere.
From AFP:
At first glance, this flurry of frostiness would seem to be at odds with standard climate change scenarios in which Earth’s temperature steadily rises, possibly by as much as five or six degrees Celsius (9.0 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
Climate sceptics who question the gravity of global warming or that humans are to blame point to the deep chills as confirmation of their doubts.
Such assertions, counter scientists, mistakenly conflate the long-term patterns of climate with the short-term vagaries of weather, and ignore regional variation in climate change impacts.
New research, however, goes further, showing that global warming has actually contributed to Europe’s winter blues.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic — increasing at two to three times the global average — have peeled back the region’s floating ice cover by 20 percent over the last three decades.
This has allowed more of the Sun’s radiative force to be absorbed by dark-blue sea rather than bounced back into space by reflective ice and snow, accelerating the warming process.
More critically for weather patterns, it has also created a massive source of heat during the winter months.
“Say the ocean is at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“That is a lot warmer than the overlying air in the polar area in winter, so you get a major heat flow heating up the atmosphere from below which you don’t have when it is covered by ice. That’s a massive change,” he told AFP in an interview.
And do go out without you’re rubbers — or your boat.
Death by Holiday
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
Ho, ho, ho.
A new study has revealed that the holidays, especially Christmas and New Year’s days, creates a strange, but opportune time to die.
The report in the journal Social Science & Medicine details how for some reason people have a much-higher tendency to suffer fatal attacks on those two holidays than any other time period of the year — maybe just plain sick of Santa’s ass.
There’s a known correlation between the holidays and death via vehicles and alcohol — two to three times more people die on the nation’s roads than any other time of the year — 40 percent of traffic fatalities during that time involve a driver who is alcohol-impaired, compared to 28 percent for the rest of the month.
(Illustration found here).
This new death research, however, concerns dying by natural causes in hospital ERs — people just dropping dead.
From Canada’s National Post:
A new U.S. analysis of mortality rates during different times of year found that people are more likely to die during the holidays — notably on Christmas and New Year’s Day — and researchers cannot explain the yearly spike.
After analyzing all official United States death certificates over the 25-year period between 1979 and 2004, a trio of sociologists identified an excess of 42,325 natural deaths — that is, above and beyond the normal seasonal winter increase — in the two weeks starting with Christmas.
…
More people die in hospital emergency wards, or arrive dead on arrival, on Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day than on any other days of the year.
“It’s not trivial,” said Mr. Phillips, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego.
“We looked at all cause categories and, for nearly every one, we found an excess of deaths — particularly for people who are dying rapidly, like dead-on-arrival or dying in the emergency department.”
The big question is why.
“It’s speculated that psychological stress can make a difference,” Mr. Phillips said.
“But to make a difference so quickly and so precisely bang-on Christmas and [New Year’s Day], for a huge range of diseases, makes it seem unlikely as a broad-scale explanation.”
However…
The reseachers noted two other, smaller single-day jumps in crib deaths in U.S. data: a 14% spike on July 5, the day after Independence Day, and an 18% boost on April 20, which the authors noted is a “counterculture holiday devoted to the celebration of cannabis consumption.”
A bowl and booze don’t mix — one of the reasons I quit drinking.
Lunar Eclipse
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Weather | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
A lunar eclipse on winter solstice — first time since 1638.
From Wired:
The Earth’s shadow will begin to blot out the moon at 1:32 a.m. EST (10:32 p.m. PST).
During totality, when the Earth is directly between the moon and the sun, the moon will turn a rusty orange-red for 72 minutes from 2:41 a.m. to 3:53 a.m. EST (11:41 p.m. to 12:53 a.m. PST).
Sky watchers in Europe, West Africa and South America will see only part of the eclipse before it is interrupted by sunrise (see chart below).
This is also the last time a total lunar eclipse will be visible from North America until April 2014.
Not much chance for a view here on the northern California coast as we’ve been inundated with rain storms for more than a week — although the night sky is semi-clear right now (near 8 p.m. PST).
There’s been some big breaks in the rolling storms (much worse in the southern part of the state), so there might be a chance of a quick look-see in the early AM.
Longest night of the year — lunacy.