Batteries for Buckwheat

                                 Batteries for Buckwheat

An Australian mining firm wants to turn a Nevada valley into a quarry for lithium and boron – key elements for green technologies – but a rare plant may stand in its way. Researchers say that biodiversity and clean energy should not be in opposition.

The company, Ioneer, says the quarry in Rhyolite Ridge valley would be the first US quarry of its kind, able to supply lithium for 400,000 electric car batteries a year and boron to power wind turbines. But soil containing these elements is also the perfect environment for Tiehm’s buckwheat (Eriogonum tiehmii), a plant that looks like a pile of leaves. When it blooms, it could be the dandelion’s fuzzy cousin.

There are only about 40,000 specimens of the buckwheat, and its namesake, Arnold Tiehm at the University of Nevada, Reno, says its closest relative is more than 80 kilometres away.

Most of the buckwheat’s natural home lies in the area mapped to be dug up for the quarry. “That puts the buckwheat on a one-way path to extinction,” says Patrick Donnelly at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nevada. Ioneer will remove 65 per cent of the buckwheat’s population if the first planned quarry goes ahead, the company confirmed to New Scientist.

Although rare, the buckwheat isn’t yet considered endangered, but that may change. Following a petition by the CBD, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced in July that the plant is both valuable enough and under sufficient threat to warrant a year-long review to decide whether to list the plant under the US Endangered Species Act. The listing would spell the end for the quarry as currently planned. )New Scientist)


So the culture thinks it is so rich that it can sacrifice its growth for that of a minor buckwheat.

Non-nonrenewable

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. -Saul Bellow


Went to City of Asylum for dinner and Black Poets night. Interesting and fun. One poet was quite likable.
Leave for Williamsburg today. Chris gets back tomorrow.

Marie Curie, her husband, their daughter, and son-in-law were all Nobel Prize winners. Imagine dinner.

If Capitalism has got to be brought to heel to solve Global Warming, why is the largest--and most expanding--carbon producer Communist China?

Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor sex crime for allegedly groping a woman’s breast at a New York City rooftop bar, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said. (wsj)

All the politicians are proposing eliminating student debt. (Too late for me.) But there is over 550 billion dollars in college endowments--and they are responsible for this mess, right? So why don't we just take it and give it to the students?

U.S. prosecutors accused Abraaj Group founder Arif Naqvi of misappropriating more than $250 million in a widening investigation into the world’s biggest failed private-equity firm. $250 million! 

For paper bags to have the same environmental “footprint” as plastic bags, they need to be used 3 times. For cloth bags to have the same footprint, they need to be used 131 times. How likely is that?

Conservatives and liberals will never admit it, but when they claimed that a loss for their preferred presidential candidate in 2016 would mark the beginning of rapid American decline, they were thoroughly insulting the country they claim to love. If one person can wreck a country, it’s arguably not worth saving in the first place.--Will

In 2018, the California legislature passed a law requiring that organizations feeding homeless people must use licensed state-approved kitchens. Deliverance San Diego, which had delivered about 110 hot meals to homeless San Diegans every day it operated, announced that it shut down because of those regulations. If you want to discourage something and can't freeze its price, regulate it.

This is discouraging:




On this day in 1940 the German Army invaded Paris.


                                                        Non-nonrenewable

A recent bill in California to allow two utilities, in the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts, to be able to categorize as renewable energy electricity that turbines at the Don Pedro Reservoir generated. It failed, and the story is telling.

The effort was in response to the questionable decision of the state to demand that utilities produce 60% of their power from renewable sources by 2030. No one argued  that hydroelectric energy is not renewable energy. They argued this, from the Bay Area News Group:

"The bill drew stiff opposition from environmental and health groups, from the Sierra Club to the American Lung Association. They argued that if Don Pedro’s electricity was counted as renewable, then the owners of dozens of other large dams would want the same treatment. That would mean that demand for solar and wind power could falter."

These special interest groups have decided that the way to meet the renewable energy goal is to have more solar and wind power even if hydroelectric power is cheaper. They don’t really want renewable energy. They want solar and wind power. Period.

The IPCC Special Report

Sandra is pretty mad about global warming. So is the Nat Geo and Sandra sent this article on global warming from National Geo. It is a pretty wild-eyed.

(This is representative: "The IPCC’s Special Report lays out various pathways to stabilize global warming at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). These solutions all require unprecedented efforts to cut fossil-fuel use in half in less than 15 years and eliminate their use almost entirely in 30 years. This means no home, business, or industry heated by gas or oil; no vehicles powered by diesel or gasoline; all coal and gas power plants shuttered; the petrochemical industry converted wholesale to green chemistry; and heavy industry like steel and aluminum production either using carbon-free energy sources or employing technology to capture CO2 emissions and permanently store it." This is directly from the report.)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-climate-change-impacts-forests-emissions/

​

Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns www.nationalgeographic.com The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world is headed for painful problems sooner than expected,as emissions keep rising.

​

And she wrote:

And President Trump does not agree by pulling out of the Paris agreement..and we were warned about this at least ten years ago..what sort of world do we leave for our children and their children..

Sandra

​

I wrote back,

Hi Sandra,

The ten year disaster predictions are beginning to look like the Russian Five Year Plans.

But, regardless of what you think about the Paris Accords, there are very straightforward solutions to carbon production in the world. The first, second and third worlds could all contribute.

First, the Americans. The Americans have dropped their production dramatically over the last years, more than anyone else, but could go further by attacking the major carbon producer, the military. So a retraction of American military usage would be a step. Start there.

Second, deforestation. Preventing slash and burn techniques in farming areas--especially Brazil--would be a start. Outlawing primitive areas' use of coal, wood and peat sources would also help. That's two.

Third, coal fire plants. There are coal plants going on line every several weeks in India, every week in China. The Paris accords admitted those two countries would not curb their coal plant expansion--expansion--until 2030. 2030! So, they could stop that.

That would be three terrific steps right there. (I am sure there are other simple steps that could be taken and achieved simply by government fiat--without the reactionary Americans--like outlawing meat-eating, killing methane producing farm animals, curtailing travel and shipping, limiting military maneuvers, planting forests, killing carbon producing wild life; all are simple, achievable, minimally-intrusive objectives.)

On the assumption that Trump is too idiotic to do the first, we'll just have to rely on the good intentions of the other two groups. It would probably be more than we need, but we can achieve these goals without the Americans. All we need is the rest of the world's commitment. So I am sure it will work out just fine.

Love to all,

Jim

​

And a couple of notes on Paris Accords:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/06/accord2.html

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/06/trumping-climate.html

​

Accords steeleydock.blogspot.com The Paris Accords Trump is said to be considering leaving the Paris Climate Accords. I do not know his reasons but reasons are often fore...

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2016/04/carbon-decisions.html
​

​

Accord2 steeleydock.blogspot.com Sandra has noted, critically, that I have not condemned Trump's exit from the Paris Accords. What is interesting about the Accords is why ...

Is it really unreasonable to be suspicious of all this?

Ehrlich

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich is a longtime environmental icon and author of the 1968 book "The Population Bomb."

Ehrlich confidently predicted in a 1970 issue of Mademoiselle: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years."

He assured readers of The Progressive in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off." In a 1969 essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!" Ehrlich said "most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born."

This has passed, like Peak Oil. And the Left forgives, albeit  quite selectively.

And, like a bearish stock market goldbug, Ehrlich persists. His thesis is always that we are doomed, the mechanism just gets updated.

He predicted in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich continued that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

In 1975, Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

He now has a new theory. In a July 2017 issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" he predicts that human civilization stands in peril from an ongoing mass extinction on Earth: "Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages (of vertebrates) amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This 'biological annihilation' underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction event."

Is it any wonder that the public get inured to these alarms?

Goldbugs and Erlich will, like a stopped watch, be probably right some day but shouldn't we have the right to make more demands than that?

Candor

A story off an economic blog:
  
I was invited to a major political dinner in Washington with the former Chairman of Temple University since I advised the University with respect to its portfolio. We were seated at one of those round tables with ten people. Because we were invited from a university, they placed us with the heads of the various environmental groups. They assumed they were in friendly company and began speaking freely.

Dick Fox, my friend and Chairman of Temple, began to lead them on to get the truth behind their movement. Low and behold, they too admitted it was not about the environment, but to reduce population growth.

Dick then asked them, “Whose grandchild are we trying to prevent from being born? Your’s or mine?”

Electric

Electricity from the Electric Tree


Some discussion over the weekend on the G20 Paris Accord talk, which has come up again. Electric is seen as a solution but, of course, electric power comes from somewhere.
Here are some numbers on generation of electric power in the U.S. from the U.S. Energy Information Administration from 2016:

Major energy sources and percent shares of U.S. electricity generation: 

Natural gas = 33.8%

Coal = 30.4%

Nuclear = 19.7%

Renewables (total) = 14.9%

• Hydropower = 6.5%
• Wind = 5.6%
• Biomass = 1.5%
• Solar  = 0.9%
• Geothermal = 0.4%

Petroleum = 0.6%

Other gases = 0.3%

Other nonrenewable sources = 0.3%Pumped storage hydroelectricity = -0.2%

So 64% of electricity now comes from carbon. And will the people of the U.S. embrace nuclear power? So at least 64% and maybe 84% of electrical sources will have to be replaced?
How?

Pruitt

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was interviewed about Trump's decision on the Paris Accords. These are some excerpts:


Re: legal vulnerability (the Americans being vulnerable to domestic climate activists was a question I had not considered):
You know, that this idea that somehow that it was just simply not enforceable, or not something that really could be enforced domestically, and that’s just simply not the case. I mean, when you look at our Clean Air Act, China and India don’t face what we do domestically. What we face domestically was you know, with the Paris Agreement in place, are 26-28% targets with all of the previous actions by the previous administration, the climate action agenda, the Clean Power Plan and the rest, still fell 40% short of those 26-28% targets. And so we were vulnerable to an action by an environmental group here domestically to sue under the Clean Air Act, specifically Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, to compel regulatory response. I mean, this was a legal evaluation as much as anything to make sure that our agenda wouldn’t be hijacked or dominated by some sort of litigation post-staying in Paris. So this was a very important decision across the board. But part of the decision, in fact, a major part of the decision was the legal vulnerabilities.


Re: the process of ratification (I do not think the Europeans understand this):
We know that the individuals of Paris negotiating for the United States and also those in attendance on behalf of other countries, walked up to the very line. They did all that they could to create what would be constituted a treaty, but then called it something else. And they did that, because they knew they couldn’t get it ratified in the U.S. Senate. And that’s just a bad way to do business. I mean, when you have decisions being made in Paris that impact the cost of electricity in this country, or a contraction of the power grid, or you’re taking fossil fuels, natural gas or coal off the power grid, those types of things, voters ought to have a voice in that process, and that’s what the U.S. Senate and Constitutional protections are intended to address.


On the income shifts:
....if every nation that signed up for Paris met all of the commitments that they put as part of that agreement, by the year 2100, the temperature would be reduced all of two-tenths of one degree Celsius. And for what cost,....? I mean, in this country, it was a $2.5 trillion dollar cost for gross domestic product. I mean, this was a bad business deal both on advancing environmental objectives, but also the cost that it took domestically while the rest of the world skated. China and India took no steps to meet their obligations until 2030. In fact, India qualified any steps on receiving $2.5 trillion dollars of aid through the Green Climate Fund.......why wouldn’t you want the United States in this deal if you’re the rest of the world? I mean, one, you’re extracting billions of dollars in aid. India is taking no steps. I mean, we’re subsidizing their manufacturing base. And they’re taking no steps to reduce their CO2 emissions. I mean, under the deal, China is continuing to build coal generation facilities, and 365 or so, I can’t remember the exact number, but and I think 800 plants. You know, under the deal, Russia came in and said yes, we’ll agree to target reductions, but we’re going to use a baseline of 1990. And so they had like 20-plus percent reductions, but they baseline it in 1990. Our baseline was 2006, which is, I think, after all some of the progress we had made with respect to reducing CO2 emissions. So it was a much greater hit on our economy versus Russia, and obviously China and India. And this was a bad deal for this country.


On his own position:
The climate is changing. The climate has warmed. Human activity contributes to it. How much human activity has contributed to it is difficult to measure with precision. But we have processes that have to be followed. We have innovation technology that can achieve good outcomes in CO2 reduction. You know, there’s a term that I’ve been using here of late. You know, they like to throw out climate denier and those types of things, which I don’t even understand what that means, honestly. But there are climate exaggerators in the marketplace. And there are people that take data that we know, and they stretch it so far that it becomes incredible, and people don’t believe it....[in]....   the New York Times paper, about a month ago... [t]here was an op-ed called Climate of Complete Certainty where the person writing the op-ed said exactly that, that the politicians have taken scientific data and stretched it so far that the American people don’t have confidence or trust that they can rely upon the information. So what we need is truth.

Accords

The Paris Accords

Trump is said to be considering leaving the Paris Climate Accords. I do not know his reasons but reasons are often foreign to him. The main American objection to the Treaty has been that it was negotiated and signed outside of established Constitutional Law: The Congress, not the Administrative Branch, confirms treaties. The Constitution provides that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur" (Article II, section 2).
The international reaction to the recent Trump rumor has been quite negative, as if a great and noble thing will be lost if the U.S. indeed leaves.
Here is a summary of several points of the Treaty:

In 2009, in Copenhagen, the world’s nations agreed: The global temperature average should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. This is a difficult demand because the very nature of the mechanism and degree of global warming is in dispute. The data has been criticized and the models based upon that data have not been accurate. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Paris climate deal agreed to limit the rise of global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius in this century. To bell the cat, the agreement also directed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the climate-science arm of the UN—to draw up a report by 2018 on how to reach that 1.5 degrees Celsius target.

 

The mechanisms of this rise is assumed to be carbon fuel. If humanity hopes to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, it must essentially stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2060, according to a recent study from Nature Climate Change. Their estimates come from the same unfulfilled models mentioned above. The Paris meeting could not agree on this crucial concept because the world runs on carbon and replacing it implies relying on technology we do not yet use.

If nations eliminate carbon fuel which is cheap and efficient for another energy source we do not have or use, changes will be necessary. Alternative power sources must be made available. Growing nations will be especially stressed it is said, but it is difficult to imagine how established economic powers like the U.S., China, Russia and India will manage such a conversion. This energy gap is not filled by the Paris Accords but it seems that money will solve the question. As usual, as it is assumed that someone will have to pay and, unsurprisingly, it seems that the Americans are most likely to be the ones. Mrs. Clinton, in Copenhagen, volunteered $100 billion that the rich world would “mobilize." But "mobilize" is different from "pay."  And the Paris agreement includes no new specific commitments to finance the change. But item 115 of the Paris decision says that more than that $100 billion will be needed.

How will the progress of this vision be assessed? The Paris agreement deals with both "stocktaking" and "ratcheting." It announced that the first  taking stock will occur in 2023, then every five years, and that countries should “update and enhance” individual plans at that and future meetings, those innovations presumably the ideas the aforementioned  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will bring forth in 2018.

No outside agency will approve and oversee whether nations are keeping their words—this was a red line for China and India. But under Article 13, nations will be subject to a common framework of transparency, though it will recognize that developing countries may need more help reaching their goal.

According to the U.N.’s website on climate change, the agreement has a “hybrid of legally binding and nonbinding provisions.”

But there’s no clear cut consequence or penalty for countries that fall short of their pledged goals.

 

So we have a presumed climate problem, for which we apparently have no definitive solution. If we assume carbon fuel is the problem and we eliminate it, that elimination will cause untold economic problems for which we have no solution as we do not have a substitute energy source. We agree to start the process but defer the means to do so. There is no money for the project and there is no process for the enforcement of any of the Agreement's notions.

Do I have that right? Is that the great international achievement we should defend?

Earth Day Memories

Earth Day Memories: Looking Back and Forward


The prediction business is tough; even the Long Island Medium doesn't do it.


Here is a collection of pronouncements from the beginning of Earth Day celebrations 47 years ago collected by Mark Perry. The problem with this kind of outrageous fear mongering is that it undercuts any logical, reasonable discussion on the topic and makes any legitimate concern the part of a loony gaggle.

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Climate/Measurements

Measurement Error

The climate debate has faded in the bright light of the election. There are many elements of the discussion that are worthwhile. This is a bit about temperature measurement. Recognize that most people believe there is good evidence there is a warming trend. How accurate the measurements and the implications of the trend are the two important points of debate.

We have been measuring the temperature at a few select locations for hundreds of years, but it really is only in the last century that we have fairly good coverage of the land surface.  And even then our coverage of places like the Antarctic, central Africa, parts of South America, and all of the oceans (which cover 75% of the Earth) is even today still spotty. And what should be done with the information?  How do we reconcile the temperature of Oregon with the temperature of Arizona. Do we add them and average them? Is that meaningful? A theory has emerged that one can more easily average what are known as temperature anomalies than one can average the temperature itself. So researchers will establish an average for one specific thermometer for a particular day of the year.  The exact time period or even the accuracy of this average is not that important, as long as the same time period is used consistently.  Then, the anomaly for any given measurement is the deviation of the measured temperature from its average.   So if the average historical temperature for this day of the year is 25C and the actual measured for the day is 26C, the anomaly for today at this temperature station is +1.0C. Sounds sensible...but it is a theory that it is representative.

Although they are different, both the satellite and surface temperature records show warming since 1980.  For all that some skeptics may want to criticize the authors of the surface temperature databases, and there indeed some grounds for criticism, these issues should not distract us from the basic fact that in every temperature record we have (including other technologies like radiosonde balloons), we see recent warming.
In terms of magnitude, the two indices do not show the same amount of warming -- since 1980 the satellite temperature record shows about 30% less warming than does  the surface temperature record for the same period.

While "the pause" does not in and of itself disprove the theory of catastrophic manmade global warming, it does easily falsify the myriad statements you see that global warming is accelerating.  At least for the last 20 years, it has been decelerating.

The surface temperature record shows only about half the warming, and the satellite record shows only about a third the warming, that Hansen predicted. 
This is a picture of a temperature station, a center where temperature is measured regularly to determine level and direction.

The temperature station is the fenced-in white box (the uproar over this picture eventually caused this location to be closed).  It was in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a major university in the middle of a growing city.  100 years ago this temperature station was in the countryside, in essentially the open desert - no paving, no buildings, no cars.  So we are getting the highest warming rates in the country by comparing a temperature today in an asphalt parking lot in the middle of a city to a temperature a hundred years ago in the open desert.

This actually has a name: The urban heat island effect.  Buildings and concrete absorb heat from the sun during the day, more than would typically be absorbed by raw land in its natural state.  This heat is reradiated at night, causing nights to be warmer in cities than in the areas surrounding them.

There is no conclusion obvious here. But measurement is hard and generalizations from difficult measurements are harder. 

(much of this is from coyote blog)

Is There Anyone Less Like the Average Person Than a Fashon Model?

For some reason we are enamored with "models" as a new "conceptual framework." The prominent model is the Climate Change Model where numbers are collected and put into a software program which extrapolates temperatures into the future. Brave stuff, picking a few decades of arbitrary measurements in a history of billions of years and concluding that we must deconstruct all the successful economies and stunt the growing ones to Lord-knows-what deprivation.
It must be the software; the software must give people confidence. After all we have had a zillion models in the past: Heliocentric Universe Models, Ptolemaic Models, Divine Right of Rule Models, Imitative Magic Models, Newtonian Gravitational Model, Alchemy Models, Recapitulation (Biogenetic Law) Model, Lamarckian Model, Phlogiston Model, the Miasma Model, Dalton's Atomic Model, Preformation Models, the Classical Elements Model, Geocentric Universe Model, Steady State Model, the Freudian Model, Phrenology Models, Flat Earth Model, Dialectic Materialism Models, QE/Inflation model, Expanding Earth Model......
It must be the software.

Models and Global Cooling

The Maunder Minimum is the title given to periods of time when sunspots are rare. It last occurred between 1645 and 1715, when roughly 50 sunspots were recorded, as opposed to the standard 40,000. That time was marked by brutal, river-freezing temperatures in Europe and North America. A mini-ice age.
Solar activity was thought to be caused by a turbine-system of moving fluid within the sun. In search of a more accurate system of prediction, Professor Zharkova of Northumbira University and her team discovered fluctuating magnetic waves in two layers of the sun. By studying the data of the dual waves, she says, predictions are far more precise.
“Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97 percent,” said Zharkova, whose findings were published by the Royal Astronomic Society.
Using this method, she and her team discovered that there will be far less solar activity in sun cycles 25 and 26, leading to a prolonged period of solar dormancy
“In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other -- peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’,” said Zharkova.

Zharkova’s model predicts that solar activity will drop by more than half between 2030 and 2040.

Women and Climate Change

Current politics demands that every single disparate thread be woven into the creed's braid.




California Democrat Barbara Lee proposed a resolution in the House of Representatives that claims women will eventually be forced into prostitution since they face "disproportionately harmful impacts from climate change," this despite the fact that women are somehow "uniquely" capable of adapting to climate change.
Some representative insights include:
"Women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change."
"'Food insecure' women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health."

"....despite a unique capacity and knowledge to promote and provide for adaptation to climate change, women often have insufficient resources to undertake such adaptation."

"...women are often underrepresented in the development and formulation of policy regarding adaptation to climate change, even though they are often in the best position to provide and consult on adaptive strategies."


This is right up there with too many military personnel tipping Guam over.

I think my favorite part is "food insecure."

Oil, Batteries and Weighty Subjects‏

"We can break our dependence on oil…and become the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” President Obama said this in his January 2011 State of the Union address. But right now there are  less than 180,000 plug-ins on U.S. roads today. ( Worldwide, there are only 400,000.) Less than 70,000 Leafs, 71,00 Volts. And Fisker is bankrupt.

Treason? Gridlock?

All the hope and subsidies in the world cannot overcome the physics of energy density: Hydrocarbons--oil--store 40X the energy pound for pound than does the electrochemistry of batteries. The engine-battery system of a Leaf is 1000 pounds more than the engine+gas tank of a Mustang. And the Mustang can run all day.

Excess of XL

The President has vetoed the authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline. The project would build a pipe system from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refiners on the Gulf coast. It would create 40,000 jobs in construction and pipe-fitting over the two years it would take to finish it. Unions strongly backed the Keystone XL project, while environmentalists strongly opposed it. It had bipartisan support in the Congress and in the nation. A CNN poll in January showed that 57 percent of Americans wanted it approved, while only 28 percent opposed it. The bill had majority or double-digit plurality support in almost every demographic – age, region, gender, income, education. Only among Democrats and self-described liberals did opposition exceed support, and in those cases only by single digits. For some reason the State Department saw fit to evaluate the environmental impact of the pipeline--twice--and found that the pipeline project would be neutral on climate change and would not have a serious impact on the environment.
The truth of the matter is that this is a pretty innocuous thing but nothing is small to the ideologue.

Google and Global Warming

Two Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked on an ambitious renewable energy project at Google. The idea was to solve the petroleum/global warming problem but, at the end of the project, they felt the plan had failed.

They write about their results in IEEE Spectrum. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
They now say that existing technologies like wind and solar are too costly to stave off climate change.

"....we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope,” the engineers said. “Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn.”   

As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states: “Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
 
Koningstein and Fork further state that, while the cost of replacing fossil fuel is overwhelming, there is another crushing concept in their research. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for one hundred years. James Hanson, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote a paper in 2008 saying that exceeding 350 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already past that limit. Right now, concentrations of CO2 is around 400 ppm. If Hanson is right, we will be stuck with current CO2 levels for one hundred years. While stopping CO2 production is worthwhile, some option to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is more important.

Fossile Fuel (Energy Week)

Cheap energy is the current whipping boy. But some understanding of it must be conceded as well. 

Thomas Newcomen in 1712 produced the most important single technological advance of the industrial age. He invented a crude steam engine that ran on coal. It was by most subsequent standards terribly inefficient but it was efficient enough to allow British miners to work in coal mines; it was able to pump the mines dry so the miners could work safely. Thus began the incredible modern industrial age, a machine that enabled men to produce more energy than the machine needed.

By every means this improved the lives of men. The famous wealth chart is the most dramatic. The wealth of the Western man was virtually flat through history; wealth was transferred, not developed, by theft or, worse, war. Except for those rare episodes--like the Spanish stumbling on South American gold, the wealth of the West was stagnant through history. Until Newcomen. Then the wealth curve became a hockey stick.

And everything changed. We no longer froze in the dark, died of heat prostration or starved. Machines cut lumber for good houses. Irrigation and fertilizer nourished increasing crops. Relief efforts arrived in hours or days, not months or years. 

Climate-related deaths are down 98 percent over the last 80 years. Affordable and abundant energy is the cornerstone of human progress. And fossil fuels are the most affordable and abundant — alternative energy sources are either too expensive, too difficult to access or simply inefficient. There may be trouble now with fossil fuels. It may hide some significant downsides. But they can not be replaced at their availability or cost. That gap must be considered. And it is the third World, those trying to take advantage of the available and cheap energy sources that the West has enjoyed for the last two centuries, that will suffer most from its decline.

Books on Climate Change: Little Ice Age

The second book on Climate Change is "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change; Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century," by Geoffrey Parker, which tries to show a "fatal synergy" between climatological and political factors that produced turmoil from Europe to China in the period called "the Little Ice Age" (LIA) between the 1640s and 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough to qualify as a change in climate, correlated strongly with political upheavals as to constitute causation for the author.




Whatever caused the LIA — decreased sunspot activity and increased seismic activity were important factors — it caused, among other horrific things, "stunting" that, Parker says, "reduced the average height of those born in 1675, the 'year without a summer,' or  during the years of cold and famine in the early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded." Such temperature declines "decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10%, doubles the risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure six fold." For those farming at least 1,000 feet above sea level this temperature decline "increases the chance of two consecutive failures a hundredfold."
His conclusion: It is not surprising that more wars took place during the 17th-century crisis "than in any other era before the Second World War."




Correlation and causation are difficult concepts for most and probably should be avoided. But the fragility of the period--and the suddenness of the change--is provocative.

Books on Climate Change: The Third Horseman

Two new books have arrived with different slants on climate change. This is a thumbnail sketch of the first,

"The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century,"  by William Rosen. A second one will follow.

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four torments of mankind as seen and described by John the Evangelist in The Book of Revelations. The four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine and Death respectively who precede the Final Judgment.
The third rider is Famine.
The third rider is the only rider with whom there is sound, actually speech. "When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”--Revelation 6:5-6
 "....and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine". This suggests to some that the black horse's famine drives up the price of grain but leave oil and wine supplies unaffected (though out of reach of the ordinary worker). The various political and economic views may make of these pronouncements what they will.

Rosen's book is a story like a dream of Pharaoh: Feast matures to famine.

From the end of the 9th century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the last 8,000 years. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England
The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The warming period allowed populations to grow. A population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing and new wealthy classes. Huge economic, demographic and social evolution rode the wave of production. Warriors got greedy.

Then, near the end of the warming period, came the sudden and severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. Early in that century, 10% of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died. The cold conspired with rain to decrease the food supply. In 1315 there was rain for 155 consecutive days and topsoil was washed away. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; hunger resulted in early death, the death of babies. Even cannibalism. The Brothers Grimm began to write stories of terrible deprivation. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe’s livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed much of the remaining farmland. One eighth of the European population died.
The Third Horseman, Famine, rides a black horse, and carries a set of scales; Famine is the result of imbalance.

If you survived, the Bubonic plague--the “Black Death”--followed in the mid-fourteenth century. The Black Plague was so terrible--it killed one third of the population of Europe, towns disappeared--that we forget the terrors of the Great Famine.

Another Undeclared War

I spoke to a farmer recently who told me this story.

A few years ago he was called by a local government official who asked him about his watering tubs for his cattle. He explained he had several large tubs he had placed strategically over his farmland to assure his cattle could water in all weather. The official said the government was concerned that a mouse might fall into the tubs and drown so they wanted the farmer to put a board in the tub from the water surface to the tub edge so, should a mouse fall into the water, he could escape safely. The farmer said he was willing to do that. The official said they would pay him $1000 a month.

The next year the official called him again. He explained the government was concerned that the farmer's tractor might accidentally trap and morcellate a rabbit in the field. He wanted the farmer to place a pipe with pieces of chain that fell like a necklace on the front of the tractor that would frighten rabbits away and save them from injury. The government would pay him $3000 a month. The farmer said he could do that.

This year the official called again. He explained that some forms had to be completed now that the farmer was receiving federal money. He could fill them out on line. The farmer said he did not use a computer although his wife did. We can send the forms to you, the official replied. A packet soon arrived. There were 77 pages. The farmer called the official and said he was too busy to fill the forms out. The official said he would send a woman to help him.

Several days later a young woman arrived to help him with the forms. They started as simple identification questions--name, address, phone number. They gradually became more complicated and strange. "Where did your parents first meet?" "Who was the first girl you ever kissed?" The farmer asked if these were security questions; the woman said they were not, they were information only. He said the questions bothered him and asked her to leave.

The following day the official called and said he had to fill out the forms or he would have to return the money from the last few years.

The farmer said he would send the money back.