[E. Swanson]

Last year, as the situation in the Ukraine began to boil, I read a book called “Lost Victories” by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who for a time commanded the southern end of the Russian campaign of WW II. He made it abundantly clear that the main reason the Germans lost in that effort was Hitler’s insistence on running the war, micromanaging the generals in ways which ultimately led to the defeat by the Russians. Perhaps the best example was the siege of Stalingrad, where Hitler refused to withdraw the German army because he wanted to hold the territory, especially that which was named for Stalin. There were numerous other examples of such bad tactical and strategic direction, which led several high ranking officers to rebel and attempt to kill Hitler. Hitler was a gifted politician, but his military abilities were clearly lacking. Not to ignore the Russian’s resistance and sacrifice which led to ultimate victory, if Hitler had listened to his generals, we might all be speaking German today…

[E. Swanson]

Regarding the story about Canada and oil (Canada Mauled by Oil Bust), there’s a similar report about the tar sands industry in today’s NYT:

Lower Oil Prices Strike at Heart of Canada’s Oil Sands Production

But, not to worry, the NYT also tells us that the Slump in Oil Prices Brings Pressure, and Investment Opportunity. Of course, the banksters will make money which ever the way the market bounces…

[E. Swanson]

Dr D, Booker is just another denialist stooge, repeating the latest from Anthony Watts and friends:

Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker’s Temperature Conspiracy Theory

He apparently can’t grasp the fact that the surface data has many problems, such as missing data, changes in location and time of day of reading and the change to digital instrumentation, all of which must be corrected before a long term trend can be determined. Then too, there are other data available, including other analytical approaches to the MSU/AMSU satellite data set, as well as passive microwave data for Arctic sea-ice and temperature data for the oceans, which also point to a warming Earth.

Here’s piece about Booker which is written for folks (like you?) who use character assignation instead of reason:
The superhuman cock-ups of Christopher Booker

[E. Swanson]

Nassim, Ever heard of War Crimes? The winner often charges the loser with such offenses. Of course, forensic investigations routinely keep evidence hidden until trial. Here’s a look at the quick view as it appeared in the Mac Paper 5 days after the “incident”.
Cockpit of MH17 found sawed in half at crash site

Scroll thru the photos in the article to get a sense of the level of emotions from the “incident” …

[E. Swanson]

Nassim, the Russian version for the cause of the crash sounds bogus to me. I looked at the photos of the cockpit, with lots of holes apparent. The idea that a 30mm cannon could have caused those is clearly silly. Both aircraft were traveling at more than 600 miles per hour, the intercepting craft would need to fly even faster. A cannon firing repeated shots would spray projectiles over a wide area, especially as each “bullet” would experience large aerodynamic forces. The attacking craft would not maintain a constant pointing direction, as the need to maneuver would give each projectile a slightly different direction.

Furthermore, a 30mm projectile isn’t like a rifle bullet, such as the .50 cal US/NATO bullet, which is “only” 12.7mm in size, (but quite powerful). The much more massive 30mm projectile would pass thru the entire cockpit, including the pilot(s), then exit the other side. That is, if the projectile weren’t of the exploding variety, in which case, there would likely be nothing left to recover. I seriously doubt that an autopsy of the pilot would point to an attack by a 30mm cannon. I must conclude that all those holes in the side of the aircraft are most likely the result of an exploding warhead delivered by a supersonic missile.

Remember the old saying; “In war the first casualty is the truth”. Remember the photos of the mysterious men in green outfits with no insignias who rolled thru The Crimea. Are you going to claim they weren’t Russians???

[E. Swanson]

Whether one is a neoconservative or neoliberal or some other version of economic persuasion, all the words spewed in the media tend to ignore the real problem. That is, our notion of economic growth requires energy, which has up to now been provided almost entirely by fossil fuels. Our industrial societies have grown so large that the remaining stocks of such fuels are becoming ever more expensive to extract and the renewable alternatives are not likely to provide anywhere near the same rate of energy supply which our industrial economies require. Indeed, the rapid rise in the price of oil in 2008, briefly hitting $148 a barrel, surely was a major factor in the resulting economic crisis. The recent glut due to fracking and demand decline has not changed the fundamental problem. That our economic dogma has led to massive increases in the debts of nations means that we have mortgaged the future consumption of these resources, assuming that the energy will be available in the coming decades, when the fundamental facts of physics and geology tell us that these resources are finite and decline with each passing year. The oil glut is likely to be only a temporary respite in the long term increase in energy costs as the easy to extract, cheaper resources have been extracted first, with ever more difficult and expensive oil still to be gathered.

Economics also fails to consider the other side of the energy problem, that of climate change. So far, attempts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases have only scratched the surface of the problem. It’s been estimated that emissions from developed nations, which includes the US and the EU, must be reduced by 80% if there’s any hope to minimize the warming at only 2C. The first reductions were the easy ones and some of the recent reductions were due to the the decline in production after the Great Recession. Attempts to return to a path of growth in real GNP will likely also result in a return to increasing CO2 emissions. All the while, world population continues to grow and there are still several billions living on a few dollars a day. With all this in mind, I see little hope for the future…

[E. Swanson]

I just finished reading David Stockman’s long book, “The Great Deformation” (2013).
Here’s a prophetic quote from page 703:

“But it was the Swiss National Bank which was the ultimate canary in the mine shaft: it has been forced into massive expansion of its balance sheet in order (?) offset the destructive flare-up in its exchange rate owing to flight capital out of the euro zone into the “swissie.” Indeed, when the Swiss central bank, the paragon of “hard money” in modern times, is forced into negative interest rates on deposits and an explicit policy of trashing its own money, then the currency wars have started , and there is no turning back.
…
The Japanese government has buried itself in debt building roads to nowhere and implementing every hoary fiscal stimulus device ever conceived. With government debt at 250 percent of GDP, it now stands not only as a monument to Keynesian folly, but as a potent warning about how thoroughly and swiftly financial discipline has been destroyed by the Fed and its convoy of monetary roach motels”

While I have some issues with his presentation, especially his treatment of oil and energy in general, I can’t argue with his view of our political and financial mess. Events since he wrote the book, such as the US election just past, simply confirm most of what he posits. The crash in oil price and the continuing mess within the Euro Zone appears to follow his grim projections rather perfectly. Hold on to your hat, the winds of change are blowing strong and the inmates have taken over the asylum:

New Senate Environment Chair Gets His Gavel, Goes On Rant Arguing Climate Science Is A Hoax

[E. Swanson]

I have a suggestion for Euan Mearns. Looking at your Figure 5, I think that the data would be better presented if the most volatile nations were placed at the top of the graph. I would place Libya at the top and Iraq as the next slice. Your placement causes the higher curves to be distorted as I look at the chart. My guess is that such apparent distortion would disappear with those two nations on the top of the pile.

[E. Swanson]

Snowleopard, there’s more to the CO2 impact on crops (as opposed to grasses, weeds and trees) than the fertilization effect. In a warmer world, evaporation increases and if that increase is greater than any positive change in precipitation, the net effect is less soil moisture. Also, increased rainfall intensity tends to increase runoff, thus the water doesn’t have enough time to soak into the ground, the net effect again being lower soil moisture.

The sea level reconstructions show that SL continued to rise well past the beginning of the Holocene. Indeed your GISP2 graphs show another cooling spike which has been called “the 8200 year event”, after which time the SL again rose rapidly, noted as “melt water pulse 1 C” in the link I posted above, with glacier melting essentially finished around 6,000 to 5,000 BP. The total rise of around 120 meters took about 14,000 years, or about 0.9 meters per century. But, during that time, the CO2 level also increased as a result of warmer conditions. While the CO2 level apparently lagged the glacial cycle, CO2 would still have acted as an amplifier of the underlying forcing over that time period. Such rapid rates of SL rise could reappear from melting of both the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets as the Greenhouse warming increases.

The Greenland core data appears to end during the Eemian, since the drilling hit bedrock, AIUI. Still, it’s been shown that the end of the Eemian was somewhat warmer than today, which may have resulted in the melting of essentially all the ice over Greenland. That raises the intriguing possibility that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet was a causal factor in the beginning of the following 100k year round of Ice Ages beginning at ~120k years BP.

[E. Swanson]

Oh, no, another denialist pops up from out of nowhere. Snowleopard, begins it’s attack with serious errors, getting the date for the warm up at the end of the Younger Dryas wrong, giving the date for the beginning of that cool down instead. In support, we are given 3 graphs of the GISP2 ice core data for delta O18 to look at, apparently without realizing that that data does not represent GLOBAL temperature, only the temperature of the source precipitation which was later deposited in the snow pack. It’s well known that the high latitudes are more sensitive to changes in climate because of the snow/land and sea-ice/ocean albedo feedbacks. The difference in global temperature between the Last Glacial Maximum (about 20k years BP) and the pre-industrial value may have been only 5K colder. In addition, the sea level at LGM was some 120 m (400 ft) below present, but the melting of the glaciers after LGM had already resulted in a rise of about 80 m by the beginning of the Y-D period.

Then, we are told that just because commercial greenhouses use increased CO2 in a closed environment with adequate water and other nutrients that we should look forward to increased plant growth and temperature tolerance. Other research efforts have shown such a conclusion is not warranted in real world situations which would likely include less water available for crops. Plant growth is limited by Liebeg’s Law of the Minimum. But, hey, don’t let a little science stand in the way of your rants.

[E. Swanson]

Dr. Diablo, you completely misunderstand the impacts of a large volcanic eruption. The CO2 added to the atmosphere is trivial as it hardly registers on the global measurements, the climate impact is the result of the sulfate cloud in the stratosphere, which causes a cooling for a few years. The atmosphere recovers rather quickly, since the mass of air is much smaller than the oceans, since if the atmosphere were a liquid with the density of water, it would be only 10 meters (34 ft) deep compared to the oceans which are kilometers deep. You apparently fail to understand that, while science never offers completely certainty, we have learned much more as the scientific method is applied and the models now capture most of the important aspects of both weather and climate.

You repeat the often debunked denialist claim that there was agreement among the climate community in the 1970’s that the Earth was entering another Ice Age. To be sure, the evidence tells us that we are in a period of recurring Ice Ages and thus another round is likely to begin at some point in the future. But, the few reports in the media, such as that in TIME magazine, or the book “The Cooling” by Lowell Ponte (a science writer for Reader’s Digest), do not prove the denialist claims. The models have improved considerably since 1979, as any effort to understand the work over the 35 years since then will show you. The so-called “Little Ice Age” is likely to have been the result of more vigorous volcanic activity, in addition to the two very big ones I mentioned. As for your claim of 10 years with no warming, please explain why the sea-ice in the Arctic has exhibited a steady decline during that period. Lastly, it appears that 2014 will be found to be the warmest year in the record, since it is almost there after the first 11 months.

[E. Swanson]

Diogenes Shrugged wrote: “If climate models included the measured effects of chemtrails, I wouldn’t be here writing this. My concern is that this potentially consequential factor is carefully ignored.”

Pardon my curiosity, but, given the claim that “chem trails” are claimed to be some sort of super secret government project, why would you expect that the civilian scientists who run those climate models be expected to include any such impacts of these classified activities? Who would the modelers be able to obtain the parameters for input to the GCM’s???

Next, you comment about water vapor, which is included in the models and is another source of warming. But, the physics tells us that the quantity of water vapor is a function of temperature, thus the value is the result of other forcings, i.e., greenhouse gases or aerosols. BTW, clouds, such as those claimed to be from “chem trails”, are aerosols, not water vapor. That’s why you can see them, just as you can see smoke. If the “chem trails sprays” can not be seen, they won’t interact with the incoming the sunlight either. If this latest version is invisible, how do you know it’s there, or, is their apparent lack now your evidence of their existence?

[E. Swanson]

Diogenes Shrugged suggests that the “chem trails” story is the cause of recent climate changes. I watched the video you posted and I’m not at all convinced. For starters, local weather modification isn’t the same as global warming. The US lower 48 is less than 1.8% of the surface area of the Earth and those “chem trails” would need to have a much larger area to have an impact on global climate. I’ve not noticed anything which looks like the claimed “chem trails” around here, though I’ve seen low level smog blowing in from the flat lands. Those videos looking skyward probably include local smog in the picture and there’s no way to separate the two from the video. One of the conference participants claimed that the “chem trails” were the result of injecting aluminum oxide into the jet engines, which was supposed to be reduced to pure aluminum during combustion. But, aluminum normally burns rapidly when heated and the hot exhaust would quickly mix with the air, providing lots of oxygen to return any pure aluminum nano particles to oxide. Besides, what sane pilot would mix the very abrasive aluminum oxide with the fuel which keeps the aircraft aloft? Lots of other hype on the video as well, for example, how often is this “spraying” done and where? Without considerably more hard data, I remain skeptical.

[E. Swanson]

Dr. Diablo clearly fails to understand the physics of the situation. The surface temperature is a balance between the incident solar energy and the radiant energy energy leaving at the top of the atmosphere. There has been very little variation in the solar input and the energy which exits the atmosphere is a function of the fourth power of the temperature (mol). Those two facts imply that the Earth’s temperature has been relatively stable in the recent past. Sure, we know that there were Ice Ages, in fact, we are still in a period dominated by Ice Ages. No one in the scientific community suggests that temperatures will “get infinitely warmer until it resembled Mars”, which BTW is very much colder than Earth. Perhaps the “D-Man” is thinking of Venus, where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, but what the heck it’s just a small typo error, right?

The rest of the post is also full of errors, like the claim that “the earth is a living organism that absorbs incredible inputs (like volcanic dust and gasses) and still adjusts to near-homeostasis”, when we know that a single large volcanic eruption can cool the Earth temporarily due to the sulfate cloud introduced into the stratosphere. To be sure, the impact fades as the cloud dissipates, but what humans are doing isn’t going to fade for centuries. Other very large eruptions seen in the geological record have had serious impacts, such as Kuwae about 1452 CE, which caused major crop failures in China and elsewhere, such as Greenland, and the Tambora eruption in 1815 which is said to have resulted in “The Year Without a Summer” in New England during 1816. Even a relatively minor eruption like Pinatubo is said to have reduced the average temperature about 1 C. Such evidence tells anyone who is listening that the Earth’s climate is much more sensitive to changes in the atmosphere than the “D-man” contends.

[E. Swanson]

Looking at country based emissions of Carbon, aka: CO2 can be rather misleading. That’s because there’s a large component of the emissions which are counted for developing nations is actually used to produce products for the developed nations. Thus, the apparent reduction in carbon emissions seen in the data for developed nations, such as the US, is an illusion as we still are the ultimate cause of the emissions. Further more, the emissions from cross ocean shipping between nations is not credited to any nation, even though the fuel used promotes the trade and the final consumption in the developed nations.

That’s the result of the globalization process in which major corporations have shifted production from nations with high labor costs to nations with much lower costs. The process has been facilitated by various trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the WTO. The result has been massive shift in imports of manufactured goods from Asian nations to the US and the EU. The next step in this process is the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. As Naomi Klein reports in her new book “This Changes Everything”, these treaty agreements have been used in legal challenges to prevent various renewable energy projects based on supposed free market limitations. The multinational corporations have gone to great lengths to lock in the present patterns of carbon emissions and thus there’s little chance that the world’s governments will actually reduce emissions, as seen by the fossil fuel industries virtual capture of the US government as the result of the last election.

The fact that the Earth is a finite place and that fossil fuels are of finite quantity never seems to enter either the political or economic discussions and the climate limits are routinely ignored. So, 2 C is likely to be just a place mark on the rush to burn it all as fast as possible. It would appear that humanity is headed for species suicide as we continue to destroy the only known planet upon which humans can survive.

[E. Swanson]

Point of interest regarding one shale producer:

Goodrich shares slump after company says to explore sale of shale asset

Goodrich Petroleum Corp…. said it’s exploring strategic options for all or part of its Eagle Ford Shale asset in the first half of 2015. The company said it has a preliminary capex budget for 2015 of $150 million to $200 million, which may be increased if oil prices improve and it is able to monetize the shale asset. The company’s 2014 capex budget was $375 million, according to a February statement.

[E. Swanson]

It’s official:

OPEC keeps oil output on hold despite low prices

Let the price wars begin…

[E. Swanson]

Here’s a story for tomorrow’s Debt Rattle:

Oil services sector rocked by plunge in SeaDrill’s stock

How many more will hit the skids if OPEC decides not to cut their output???

[E. Swanson]

I followed Jay Hanson when he was posting his thoughts on sci.environment, starting back in 1996. I still have about 60 posts which I archived before he moved most of his writings to his web site. I like to think I contributed to the evolution of his thinking, as I has already found “The Limits to Growth” and other later ecological writings, such as Howard Odum, as well as the concepts of Net Energy form work after the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo.

From a physics point of view, “power” is the rate of use of energy. That definition may well apply to the use of the word “power” in a political context in that the group which can deliver the energy at a point at the greatest rate will prevail against others which can not. Before the rise of the industrial west, most energy was taken from the natural environment thru crop production and animals which could be fed by plants, which meant that the more land which one controlled, the greater the supply of energy available in the form of food, which thus allowed one to deliver more “power” to maintain one’s status. All that changed with the discovery of ways to recover and utilize fossil fuels, so that now one nation can exert power levels which will exterminate entire cities in one blow from half a world away.

But, we don’t “make” energy, we can only convert it from one form to another and all such conversions necessarily result in less energy out than that which was initially available. As the fossil fuels become harder to recover from the Earth, the net energy available will decline even faster. As the fossil fuels are ultimately finite, there will come a time when there won’t be enough to satisfy the basic needs of humanity and the economic growth which depends on ever more resources will stop and then enter decline. We now appear to be at the point at which geology is telling us that the Age of Oil is rapidly drawing to a close and the cheap oil is already gone. One interesting aspect of the situation was revealed in the latest IPCC report, which claimed that half of humanity’s CO2 addition to the atmosphere since 1750 has occurred (roughly) over the past 40 years or so, i.e., since the OPEC Embargo.

What ever the future brings, it’s going to happen rather quickly and our social organizations may well fail to cope with the changes, especially given the typical inertia in any organization. Worse, there are those who will actively oppose any attempts to solve the foundational problems, such as those in the Climate Change Denialist camp. All the commentary in addition to that which Jay provided just drives me deeper into thinking that die-off is inevitable. I do not, however, expect that this will be a global affair, but that certain nations will fail catastrophically because they are closest to the edge from an ecological point of view. The turmoil in the Middle East may be a symptom, with Egypt becoming an oil importing nation or Syria and Iraq, with the newly proclaimed Islamic State . A failure of the monsoon could push India and/or Pakistan over the edge into chaos and dog-eat-dog killing. A nuclear war between those two nations might also kill the rest of us thru the resulting Nuclear Winter.

Time for my occasional beer and popcorn break…

[E. Swanson]

Re: US Gasoline Consumption Plummets By Nearly 75% (Jeff Nielsen)

As always, one must be careful with the definitions used in order to understand data. From the EIA definitions link:

“Retail Outlet – Any company-owned outlet (e.g., service station); selling gasoline, on-highway diesel fuel, or propane for on-highway vehicle use which is under the direct control of the firm filing the EIA-782 by virtue of the ability to set the retail product price and directly collect all or part of the retail margin. This category includes retail outlets: (1) being operated by salaried employees of the company and/or its subsidiaries and affiliates, and/or (2) involving personnel services contracted by the firm.”

“Total sales to end users includes sales through retail outlets as well as all direct sales to end users that were not made through company-operated retail outlets, e.g., sales to agricultural customers, commercial sales, and industrial sales. ”

In my area, BP used to sell thru several company branded stations. They have all been changed to CITGO stations. Thus, the data given likely represents a steep drop in sales thru “company-operated retail outlets” and thus does not represent a drop in total sales of gasoline to the US consumer, as the article implies.

It’s worth noting that the latest EIA release last Thursday for “Product Supplied” indicates an increase in YoY amounts of gasoline (+2.2%) and distillate (diesel) fuel (+5.4%) in the latest 4 week averages. These data do not include the full impact of the Memorial Day holiday, which is the traditional start of the summer driving season. I would not be surprised to see these trends continuing thru the summer…

[E. Swanson]

Victoria Nuland’s father just died. His obituary provides a bit of insight into her family history.

[Author]

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