“If you don’t want it to be the most expensive year [for gasoline prices,] you’re surreptitiously rooting for an economic debacle.”
– Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service (via the Washington Post last week)

(Illustration found here).

Yesterday, I put another $20 worth of fuel in my old Jeep Comanche and still at $4.09 a gallon for regular. The big sign at the Union-76 seems stuck, or lost in some Twilight Zone episode, where this guy wakes every day for weeks, thinks he’s a groundhog, but gas prices are the same.

Last time the pump price was way-high around here was in early June — then at $4.29 a gallon.

Oil is acting as crazed as a GOP de-bate — from Time last Friday:

The price at the pump was supposed to be a heckuvalot cheaper by now.
In early August, gas prices appeared poised to plummet, with experts forecasting the national average for a gallon of regular would decrease by 1¢ per day.
For all sorts of reasons, the dip never occurred, though.
Gas actually cost more one month after the predictions were made.
Now, however, with average prices dropping 7¢ over the last seven days, it looks like the extended, long-awaited price break at the pump is upon us.

Despite all kinds of negative influences, from war to directly causing massive environmental harm, everything oil keeps on keeping on — Time reports the current national average for a gallon of regular is at $3.54, while noting the average at the same time one year ago was $2.72.
About the same time in 2005, the average pump price stood at $2.62 (and that in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina).
In March 2000, just more than 11 years ago, it was only $1.54.
Grinding on upward — the US is getting closer to European prices (scandalous to Americans): England in the area of 130.68 pence a liter ($8.06 a gallon), or Italy, 1.438 euros a liter ($8.17 a gallon).
US peoples have had it easy at the pump, but we like to gripe.

Even as we truck to the gas pumps worldwide, that conveniently-speedy mechanical existence so taken for so granted for so long is inconveniently-quickly now so-near.
Since modern civilization exists through oil, the world is approaching what’s been considered as a mega-serious “resource crunch.”

The Guardian in October 2008 discussed The Living Planet report just then released from the conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund.
Key note:

This had led the report to predict that by 2030, if nothing changes, mankind would need two planets to sustain its lifestyle.
“The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means,” says James Leape, WWF International’s director general.
“But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch.”

And that living beyond our means will soon include gas for my Jeep Comanche.

As we ponder through our days, going about our normal-maybe-mundane lives, working, running around paying bills, doing laundry (which I did this morning), grocery shopping, making lunch, talking with the kids and so on — just doing life nowadays creates a kind of mass fantasy, the reality of this resource crunch is hard to fathom.
Peak oil isn’t the end of oil, just the beginning of the end of the cheap shit, and gas will soon be either unavailable or just too expensive for the average Jack American.

From Professor Bulent Gokay of the UK’s Keele University, co-author of a report about oil and the future: Oil ruled the 20th century and shortage of oil will rule the 21st century. This is the secret ticking time bomb under the global capitalist system; we are nearing a real emergency scenario. In less than 10 years, many ordinary people will not be able to afford to use their cars.”

Last year, a report emphasized this crunch is coming fast.
According to the research, carried out by consulting firm Arup and funded by the U.K. Peak Oil Task Force (fronted by billionaire Richard Branson), the crunch will start to destabilize economies, politics and society in general as early as 2015.

Can the world keep churning, keep on its current course, especially with a gnarling, energy-insatiable China.
Despite some recent indicators showing there’s a possible slowing down of the giant Chinese economy — China’s growth rate to be more than 9 percent this year — the country will continue to be an enormous suck hole on the world’s resources for years to come.
And most-likely, a fatal suck hole.

Too many people and too many vehicles.
In keeping with that futuristic scenario, there’s a most-interesting piece at Energy&Capital on China and its massive need for power to keep its industrial engine running — a look at 2035 China vs the rest of us.
Some key points:

• By 2035, income per person in China will reach the current U.S. level.

• China’s 1.38 billion people will use 80 percent as much paper as is produced globally today. That will leave 20 percent of the paper for the remaining 84 percent of the population.

• China would also need 1.5 billion tons of grain annually to feed those 1.38 billion people. That’s 70 percent of what the world produces annually. Will the remaining 30 percent of grain be enough to feed the remaining 7.1 billion people in the world?

• China will also have 1.1 billion cars by then. That’s as many as are currently in the world, so imagine every car in the world today being in China…

• By 2035, China would need 85 million barrels of oil per day. That’s about equal to the TOTAL daily global production.

• Yes, China will need all the oil in the world.

Indeed what’s left is nothing.

And amongst those GOP nit-twits debating bullshit topics Wednesday night, one aspect Republicans hate is the very mention of climate change, the very things that keep foodstuffs so high — even the US is feeling the impact in its gut — the Midwest’s so-called breadbasket of the world.

(Illustration found here).

The US has indeed been the last half century the world’s breadbasket — this year, this country planted 2,839,000 acres in oats, 3,018,000 acres of rice, 16,792,000 acres of wheat, and 92,178,000 acres of corn (amongst other major crops like soybeans, hay, barley, etc.), the vital substances for any foodstuff menu.
The US accounts for 50 percent of the world’s corn and 30 percent of wheat.
Corn is the biggest US cash crop, valued at $66.7 billion in 2010, followed by soybeans at $38.9 billion, USDA data show, and exported 46,360 metric tons of that corn so far this year — and corn production has declined: National Ag Statistics reported a U.S. average corn yield below trend value due to adverse planting and growing conditions in many parts of the country and extremely high temperatures in July…
And it’s going to get worse.

Changes in climate is already taking place and it has/will have a major impact on the breadbasket.
From Reuters:

Some scientists and agronomists are becoming increasingly concerned about the real effects they see now on growing conditions in the Midwest, the vast black-soiled region long the core region of the U.S. agricultural miracle.
They also say that not only skeptical farmers but also government authorities are trying to quietly adapt, from equipment to planting to research.
“We don’t have a long-term reserve. We have a global food supply of about 2 or 3 weeks,” said Eugene Takle, Professor of Agricultural Meteorology and Director of the Climate Science Program at Iowa State University.
“We’ve become insensitive to climate — with air conditioning, irrigation and better practices,” he said. “Well, I think we need to rethink that.
Just how vulnerable are we?”
Takle and others say the future is now.

“It’s not the long-term climate trends,” Takle says,
“It’s the variability.
It’s the extreme events that have brought the vulnerability of agriculture to climate into the forefront. We think about, and wring our hands for awhile.”
…
In June 2009, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, demanded action to address global climate change that “is happening even faster than previously estimated.”
Takle said Midwest farmers are already adapting.
“Farmers say they don’t believe in climate change, but you look at how they spend money and are adapting,” he said.

And from the US Global Change Research Program:

Agriculture covers 70 percent of the Great Plains.
As temperatures continue to rise, the optimal zones for growing certain crops will shift.
Pests will spread northward and milder winters and earlier springs will encourage greater numbers and earlier emergence of insects.
Projected increases in precipitation are unlikely to be sufficient to offset decreasing soil moisture and water availability due to rising temperatures and aquifer depletion.
…
Climate change is likely to combine with other human-induced stresses to further increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to pests, invasive species, and loss of native species.
Breeding patterns, water and food supply, and habitat availability will all be affected by climate change. Grassland and plains birds, already stressed by habitat fragmentation, could experience significant shifts and reductions in their ranges.

Can a hoax pull off this shit?

Yesterday, I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep, this time at $3.99 a gallon, which is a dime drop since the last time a couple of weeks ago.
Oil prices, after making a drastic dump early last week, are apparently working back upwards again.
From liveoilprices this morning: In London, Brent crude oil futures for October 2011 delivery was trading at $109.69 a barrel, 07.45 GMT this morning on the ICE Futures Exchange. The September Brent contract expired yesterday.
And WTI likewise: US Light crude oil futures for September 2011 delivery was trading at $87.34 a barrel, 07.25 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.
Just more than a week ago, Brent crude was down to $105 a barrel and WTI had descended to $81 a barrel at the same time.

In this most interesting age we currently live, one of the most important aspects of actual living is being aware of what’s happening around us, and understand the perilous legs upon which mankind now stalks its future.
One of my personal fears is delusion, especially self delusion — not being fully conscious of events nowadays can be dangerous.
My children sometimes tell me I’m too pessimistic, that there’s always a silver lining to a dark-ass cloud.
Wrong, not this time, kids.

There’s no historical precedent for the now.
Never in human events has such a perfect set of perfect storms come together to form a breaking point — peak oil, climate change, an international financial operation feeding off itself, a US political system so broken its near un-workable.
In this conflagration, one must have situation awareness on a grand scale, which in reality involves being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future.
If you’re not, then expect shit to lap up to your eyeballs.

There’s a good post at The Big Picture on awareness vs forecasting and a rundown on the most-excellent/dumb-ass pundits the last decade of so — never the twain of truth shall meet.
A couple of snips:

Situational awareness (see e.g., this and this), on the other hand, is all about knowing “what you need to know not to be surprised,” and having “the ability to maintain a constant, clear mental picture of relevant information and the tactical situation…”
It’s making sense of the world around us in real-time, whereas forecasting is an attempt to extrapolate those current events to figure out some future outcome.
In the real world, the latter (situational awareness) is an easier task than the former (forecasting). It’s hard to imagine a decent forecaster not having good situational awareness; those folks with bad situational awareness make for awful forecasters.

And a for instance:
Tim Geithner, our current Treasury Secretary blubbering in May 2007:

“Financial innovation has improved the capacity to measure and manage risk.
Risk is spread more broadly across countries and institutions.”

And a guy with some forecasting sense, Paul Krugman, in December 2007:

“But the [financial] innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses.
They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer.
What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.”

Guess the right-on guy.
Read the whole post — you’ll go WTF, these assholes were in charge?

One can see from the past that predictions can be awful.
Another for instance is Michael Pupin, who blubbered out in 1931:

This civilization is the greatest material achievement of applied science during this memorable period. Its power for creating wealth was never equaled in human history.
But it lacks the wisdom of distributing equitably the wealth which it creates.
One can safely prophesy that during the next eighty years this civilization will correct this deficiency by creating an industrial democracy which will guarantee to the worker an equitable share in the work produced by his work.

Right.
The income level in the US currently way-sucks: “Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.”
One percent owns 40 percent — that right?

And now if only Michele Bachmann can understand the difference between Elvis dying and Elvis being born, we’ll be A-Okay.

Report after report, study after study indicated the real mess of climate change will come in the future — somewhere down the line in 2020, 2030, or the end of this century, 2100, and so forth, but it appears the brains have undershot the reality and it’s here already.
Some times, I just hate being anywhere near right.

And mankind is the asshole ruler of the planet.
The human species is the polluter, even beyond the horror of volcanoes with their smoke and fire belching into the heavens: In fact, humans release roughly 135 times more carbon dioxide annually than volcanoes do, on average, according a new analysis. Put another way, humans emit in under three days the amount that volcanoes typically release in a year, according to the best estimates of volcanic emissions.
And with people like us in charge, we’re fried.

(Illustration found here).

From Nature Geoscience (full report behind a pay wall — synopsis below found at physorg.com):

Professor Paul Valdes of the School of Earth Sciences, discusses four examples of abrupt climate change spanning the past 55 million years that have been reconstructed from palaeoclimate data.
In two of the cases, complex climate models used in the assessments of future climate change did not adequately simulate the conditions before the onset of change.
In the other two cases, the models needed an unrealistically strong push to produce a change similar to that observed in records of past climate.
Professor Valdes concludes that state-of-the-art climate models may be systematically underestimating the potential for sudden climate change.

No shit sherlock.

And dang it, sherlock is right.
Apparently, the ocean’s currents are forcing the earth’s ice pack at its poles to melt even faster.
From Climate Progress on a new study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute:

Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say — a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels.
The glacier is currently sliding into the sea at a clip of four kilometers (2.5 miles) a year, while its ice shelf is melting at about 80 cubic kilometers a year — 50 percent faster than it was in the early 1990s — the paper estimates.
…
One day, near the southern edge of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, the researchers directly observed the strength of the melting process as they watched frigid, seawater appear to boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.
To Jacobs, it suggested that deep water, buoyed by added fresh glacial melt, was rising to the surface in a process called upwelling.
Jacobs had never witnessed upwelling first hand, but colleagues had described something similar in the fjords of Greenland, where summer runoff and melting glacier fronts can also drive buoyant plumes to the sea surface.
…
The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS (West Antarctic ice sheet) outlet glaciers will become.
Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle.
The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS…

And to combat this quickly spiking rise in sea levels, a new approach has been offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Don’t fight it as costly seawalls and dikes eventually fail because sea-level rise is unstoppable.
From the Washington Post last Sunday:

The analysis, “Rolling Easements,” published on the EPA’s Web site, hopes “to get people on the path of not expecting to hold back the sea” as the warming climate is expected to melt ice around the globe, EPA researcher James G. Titus said.
…
The EPA report said governments have three options to deal with sea-level rise: They can stay on the well-worn path of building expensive protection and raising streets and buildings.
They can beat an organized retreat from the shore, perhaps by offering financial incentives to people and organizations to move inland.
Or they can allow people to do whatever they want for their waterfront properties but tell them in no uncertain terms that they are on their own when the waters rise.

It’s all the same to every single member of the human race — in no uncertain terms, we’re all on our own as waters rise and the clock ticks away.

All the evidence harshly points to the planet being near the midpoints or closer to the bad end of a catastrophic break down of the natural world enhanced by mankind’s arrogant, greedy desire for civilization’s tiny, tiny perks.

(Illustration found here).

One of the biggest differences between climate change and other worldly problems is about like the difference between a skeptic and a denier — one has room for change, the other no room at all.
Despite the overwhelming evidence from many divergent sources that indeed the planet is going through a shake-and-bake downsizing, there’s an enormous amount of denial, in other words, denying reality and truth, from a whole shitload of people.
A good look at the skeptic and the denier can be found at ABC News’ The Drum: Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.
The horror of this: The biggest mouth can make the biggest impression on the enormous mob of unwashed masses.

Another good post on denying the undeniable is at Transition Voice, where Erik Curren now thinks even horrible, weird weather won’t change people’s minds about climate disruption:

When it comes to climate change “denial is still the dominant response,” writes Paul Gilding in The Great Disruption.
“We won’t change at scale until the crisis is full blown and undeniable, until the wind really kicks up speed. But then we will change.”
When I read Gilding’s book I thought it would take something like this year’s historic storms and floods in the Midwest and South to wake Americans from their stupor on climate.
But now I’m not so sure if even climate disaster will be enough.

Curren concludes: The weird weather is here. But the climate denial still isn’t gone. So we clearly can’t count on weird weather to do our political dirty work.

There is some light shining in the darkness.
In a Washington Post editorial earlier this month: Climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three. And their recalcitrance is dangerous, the report makes clear, because the longer the nation waits to respond to climate change, the more catastrophic the planetary damage is likely to be — and the more drastic the needed response.

Even as the denials are shown to be dumb-ass, assholes, the world continues to contort, rumble and get more, and more dangerous.

Next week is the annual World Oceans Day, which has been going on since 2003 in order to celebrate and honor the body of water which links us all, for what it provides humans and what it represents.
However, the oceans ain’t pretty anymore.
From the BBC:

Findings from a “natural laboratory” in seas off Papua New Guinea suggest that acidifying oceans will severely hit coral reefs by the end of the century.
…
The oceans absorb some of the carbon dioxide that human activities are putting into the atmosphere.
This is turning seawater around the world slightly more acidic – or slightly less alkaline.
This reduces the capacity of corals and other marine animals to form hard structures such as shells.
Projections of rising greenhouse gas emissions suggest the process will go further, and accelerate.
…
“The results are complex, but their implications chilling,” commented Alex Rogers from the University of Oxford, who was not part of the study team.
“Some may see this as a comforting study in that coral cover is maintained, but this is a false perception; the levels of seawater pH associated with a 4C warming completely change the face of reefs.
“We will see the collapse of many reefs long before the end of the century.”

And the situation is getting worse.
From AFP (via Raw Story):

“Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history, according to the latest estimates,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a statement.
After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt), a five percent jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt, the IEA said.
…
“This significant increase in CO2 emissions and the locking in of future emissions due to infrastructure investments represent a serious setback to our hopes of limiting the global rise in temperature to no more than two degrees C,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist.

The only skepticism I have about climate change is time.
Although in the goodly chunk of those scientific papers on climate there’s talk of real-real-bad shit coming in 2015, or 2020, or the end of the century, etc., but based on evidence outside my window, I think in my total-non-science brain this stuff is already here.
Yes, Virginia, Chicken Little is right on, the sky really is falling.

In a thorough post at the Daily Beast, Sharon Begley, science columnist and science editor of Newsweek, takes a mean-and-nasty look at climate change, taking in account the current freakish US weather — record tornadoes and flooding — and shit going down worldwide, from the heat wave in Russia, floods in Australia and Pakistan to a months-long drought in China.
Some highlights:

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty.
The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone.
Which means you haven’t seen anything yet.
And we are not prepared.
…
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction.
“The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
“We [are] past the tipping point.”
The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject.
Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt.
“Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center.
“If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.”
In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them.
The legacy of that: State efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent.
“There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
…
So what lies behind America’s resistance to action?
Economist Sachs points to the lobbying power of industries that resist acknowledgment of climate change’s impact.
“The country is two decades behind in taking action because both parties are in thrall to Big Oil and Big Coal,” says Sachs.
“The airwaves are filled with corporate-financed climate misinformation.”

Maybe, the only thing we can actually do now is “hold on to your butts.”

Or be like the next US president, Sarah Palin, blubbering nonsense again this past weekend while astride a big, ole Harley, “I love that smell of the emissions.”