Global Warming Business Lobby

This article spells out the drivers behind the rush to judgment on the global warming front. Business has bought into a government managed revenue stream that they all think they can win at. This is why its proponents are continuing to turn a blind eye to the encroaching facts of global cooling.

We are having a sustained bitter cold winter that is wracking up numbers that when reported will show even greater cooling than last winter. The sea ice will jump to full thickness this winter matching any previous year. In fact we should not expect winter to end until March is over. We may get a late blizzard this year. This is my present prognosis.

We are now going to have at least three more winters just like this one before it lets up.

I am not a seer. The global temperature fell out of bed last year. It will lose at least a full degree and perhaps a little more. Most of it is lost now. It now needs to stabilize for a couple of years at least as the Earth adjusts.

Then it can begin the slow creep back up that will take about twenty years per half a degree.

If I have a concern, it is that the drop is good for two degrees, as occurred during the little ice age. That would hurt. It would not hurt to see the last true believers attempting to explain it all away.

Right now, global warming is over. Mother Nature is having the last laugh.


Climate Confusion

By Steven Milloy
FrontPageMagazine.com

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

As a new president takes office and elevates global warming alarmism to official federal policy, much of America is experiencing record low temperatures. While the deep freeze amounts to little more than irony, Americans should nevertheless take what could well be a last opportunity to reconsider the cliff off which Barack Obama, Al Gore and the rest of the global warming industry want us to jump.

No doubt many experiencing the bitter cold this January have muttered under their breath that we could actually use some global warming about now. But the ongoing cold spell no more debunks global warming alarmism than Hurricane Katrina proved it was real. Weather, a short-term phenomenon, is simply not evidence of climate change, a long-term phenomenon. Weather is not the only natural phenomenon that is often misused as evidence of manmade climate change.

We’ve all read and heard about shrinking polar ice, receding mountain glaciers, endangered polar bears and a variety of other environmental phenomena that supposedly reflect the allegedly harmful effects of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Alarmists have tried to induce the public to think that simply because the Arctic ice cap has shrunk on our watch, for example, then industrialized man must have caused it. The reason they do this is because they have been unable to prove their fundamental contention in the global warming debate - that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases drive global climate - despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on climate research over the last 25 years.

Here are three indisputable scientific facts about climate that are sufficient on their own to throttle any claims of manmade global warming. First, we know from studies of Antarctic ice that, over the last 650,000 years or so, warmer temperatures have preceded increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by hundreds, if not thousands of years. The ice studies indicate that the carbon-dioxide-causes-global warming theory is precisely backwards.

Second, during the 20th century, there is simply no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature. Not only did most of the century’s temperature rise occur before most of the century’s manmade greenhouse gas emissions, but during 1940-1975 global temperatures actually declined while atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emission levels steadily increased.

Finally, the ultimate test of a scientific theory is whether it has predictive value. We used Newton’s laws of physics, for example, to land men on the moon. Unfortunately, there are no climate models that predict trends and changes in global climate with any degree of accuracy. Think about the recent failures with hurricane season predictions or even the risk of relying on what your local weatherman predicts for tomorrow’s weather - and you’ll start to get an idea of how far away science is from predicting global climate 10, 50 and 100 years from now.

Although none of this is rocket science or a state secret, our government is nevertheless on the verge of saddling our society with draconian energy-use and rationing laws that will harm our economy and reduce our standard of living. How did we find ourselves in this position?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not only or even mostly due to the persuasiveness and persistence of environmental activists. After all, how many people really believe Al Gore and Greenpeace? Ironically, we’re in crushing jaws of global warming regulation thanks to big business and other rent-seekers, including Gore, who hope to profit from new laws.

Leading the lobbying charge on Capitol Hill is the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a big business-environmental activist group coalition that is urging Congress to enact a so-called cap-and-trade bill. Under such legislation, Congress would issue permits to emit greenhouse gases (also called “carbon credits”) to electric utility companies and other major emitters. The permits represent more than mere regulation since they have monetary value and are tradable among emitters. An electric utility, say, that emits more greenhouse gases than it has permits for, would be forced to purchase additional permits from another utility that had excess permits. Under cap-and-trade, Congress would issue more than one trillion dollars worth of permits over the programs first ten years - so there’s a lot of money at stake. Who’s set to profit from all this?

Manufacturing companies and USCAP members like Alcoa, Dow Chemical and Dupont want Congress to award them free carbon credits for actions they’ve taken since 1992 to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. - like moving manufacturing operations to other countries. They’ve not reduced their emissions so much as they’ve displaced them.

Other USCAP members include electric utilities like Exelon, Florida Power & Light, and NRG Energy. They use emission-free nuclear power to generate much of their electricity and anticipate having extra carbon credits that they can sell at high prices to major greenhouse gas emitters like coal burning utilities. Wall Street is also a big proponent of cap-and-trade in anticipation of investing in and facilitating the trading of carbon credits. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns part of the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange where carbon credits would be traded.

Many would-be climate profiteers don’t care so much about cap-and-trade per se as they do any legislation that would mandate America’s switch to new and more expensive forms of energy production and energy efficiency. USCAP member General Electric, for example, wants to sell wind turbines, pricey equipment for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired utilities and high-priced but more energy-efficient industrial and consumer products. Al Gore is a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins which, as described in a New York Times Magazine cover story hopes to make billions of dollars of profits off global warming legislation.

Regular Americans who are not part of some global warming special interest group will be paying the price for all this. Expect the price of electricity and gasoline to skyrocket, as well as the prices of goods and services that are produced with energy. Remember the 2007-2008 spike in food prices caused by higher gasoline prices as well as the ethanol mandate? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Much more than mere money is at stake. The global warming mob wants to tell you where to live, what to drive, how many children you can have, what you can eat - all in the name of reducing your carbon footprint. Energy efficiency can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing when it’s forced down your throat, costs you more money than it saves and robs you of your freedoms and dignity.

Action to reduce the dreaded “global” warming, of course, needs to be coordinated on a global basis, hence the need, climate alarmists intimate, for global government. “We are one” was a theme of Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities - disturbingly similar to the Communist Chinese theme for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “One World, One Dream.” While such rhetoric may sound inspiring, the reality is that it is little more than a euphemism for central planning and, ultimately, “the road to serfdom” as economist Friedrich Hayek might say.

America’s strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.

Stevia FDA Approval

This business item is something that I stumbled into and thought that I should share it with you. This is the beginning of the stevia market in the USA. When I first investigated stevia, it was argued that the FDA was protecting the sugar trade. That was likely true.

I found it outrageous that a completely proven natural sweetener, clearly superior to all synthetics was been held off the market.

It was grown in England during the second war, and amazingly it holds a 5% market share in Japan. That is not small potatoes.

A really good application that I would like to see is a glucose beverage sweetened with it. Glucose is a sugar that goes directly into the bloodstream with minimal impact on other digestive processes. Its weakness is a modest sweetness compared to sugar. This would be a superior way to ingest your coke if stevia becomes the sweetness source.

In any case, it has long been understood that we are dangerously addicted to far too much sugar in our diets. Get rid of it and our sensitivity will reset at a much lower level.

If you want to ruin your day, count the number of cups of sweetened drinks that you have every day. Then estimate the spoons of sugar used. Then spoon a like amount into a cup and look at it. Would you eat it?

I did that to my coffee habit fifteen years ago and that was the end of that.



New drinks review: stevia gaining ground as the new sweetener of choice
Tue. January 20, 2009; Posted: 06:15 AM

Jan 20, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) The natural sweetener stevia has gained much attention in recent weeks after the US Food and Drug Administration approved the sweetener for use in foodstuffs. Following the approval, a number of manufacturers have introduced new stevia products, including Coca Cola and PepsiCo. As a result, the product can be expected to gain further exposure in 2009.

PepsiCo has launched the SoBe Lifewater Vitamin Enhanced Water beverage, a new line of soft drinks which contains an extract of the stevia leaf called PureVia, in the US. The extract is said to provide a sweet taste but without the calories of sugar, and is promoted on the fact that it is a natural product, unlike other available sugar substitutes. Now that stevia has official approval, PepsiCo is likely to include it in a rising number of new products.

PepsiCo rival Coca Cola has also released a new drink that contains an extract of stevia leaf in the US. Sprite Green Naturally Sweetened Soda contains a stevia leaf extract called Truvia. However, while the new SoBe line is said to contain no calories, Sprite Green is said to contain 50 calories per 8.5-ounce serving which, according to the company, is 50% fewer calories than regular soda.

Staying with the health theme, Javalution Coffee has launched the JavaFit Ready to Drink Latte, a line of functional, ready-to-drink coffee beverages, in the US. The line includes Diet Plus, Extreme, Focus and Immune varieties, which each claim to have a functional benefit. The Diet Plus variety, for example, is described as a lower calorie, lower fat, high powered blend that can help to suppress the appetite and support weight loss programs. Such products could help to reposition coffee, reversing its somewhat negative image to present it as a healthier beverage.

Meanwhile, Rubyy has launched an energy drink in the US under its company name. This is a premium style of energy drink that is presented in a distinctive black aluminum bottle. The drink is available in an orange flavor which contains the juice of various orange varieties including blood oranges, tangerines and Valencia oranges. The company claims that this provides the beverage with a superior taste. The energy drinks market is currently saturated with products, but this high-end launch could stand out from the crowd.

Over in Europe, more specifically Spain, Finland, Portugal, France, Italy, and Norway, PepsiCo is capitalizing on the popularity of mojito beverages with the launch of Pepsi Mojito. The mojito is a blend of mint and lime which has traditionally been used in alcoholic drinks. This version pairs lime and mint in a cola, in both diet and non-diet varieties, showing that the mojito flavor is moving into the soft drinks market.

Finally, a recent Japanese launch claims to feature a new type of super carrot. Ito En has introduced Ito En Kokusan 100 Yasai, a vegetable juice drink that is made with 12 types of selected vegetables. However, helping it to stand out from the crowd is the fact that the "connoisseur" carrots used in the drink are said to contain 1.5 times as much beta-carotene as normal carrots. The carrots are processed through the Natural Sweet Method, which is said to enhance the sweetness of carrots without using sugar or salt. This new drink appears to be a first in the juice market.

http://www.datamonitor.com

Focus Fusion Slide Show

This string of slides comes from the focus fusion web site and I am posting them here so that you can easily work your way through them. They are a must view description of the whole working process. They are really neat stuff.

You can also just stay on the site and wing your way through the slides.

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/6/

They are using eight copper rods to deliver current. The ends of the rods are cylindrical and I wonder what effect if any that different geometries have. I also wonder about the level of erosion. Can graphite and ultimately graphene make a difference in performance? Has anyone experimented with either seven or nine poles? The use of eight is an obvious bow to mathematical convenience. However, such symmetry may be a mistake. Nine poles give some mathematical convenience and seven gives you none. And while we are at it we may as well also know what happens when one pole fails.

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/7/

Does the initial spacing of the filament matter and can this be affected by the geometry of the cathode bars?

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/8/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/9/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/10/

At this point it would be nice to know if the center core means anything.

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/11/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/12/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/13/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/14/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/15/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/16/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/17/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/18/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/19/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/20/


http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/21/

How is the energy in the electron bead handled?

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/22/


It sure beats building a bigger and bigger torus in the hope that speed can overcome the lack of strong containment. This system delivers containment and energy for the money shot.

Once this is shown to work and be understood, and this is certainly a large step in that direction, I want to see what can be achieved by replacing copper with graphene. I am anticipating a progressive improvement in performance that cannot happen with copper.

What has made me keen about this particular protocol is that it starts small and can be obviously be improved while staying small or even getting smaller. This is a real spacecraft engine.

Global Dimming Again

The observation that particulates lower surface light is hardly news and we have discussed it in the past. This is a refresher.

What is forgotten though is that the incoming energy is simply absorbed by the particulate and it is unlikely that the total global energy budget is affected at all. So this frantic article is a little misplaced.

More importantly, as has happened in the developed world and is about to happen elsewhere, this is the type of problem that has engineering solutions that can and will be implemented.

It may take another fifty years, but this issue is going to disappear as fast as it arose.

Global Dimming - A trend dangerous than Global Warming

"The twin effects of Global Warming and Global Dimming due to human pollution can be extremely disastrous. While global warming increases temperature due to the greenhouse gases, global dimming reduces sun’s intensity due to solid suspended pollutants. They can cause massive climatic change and catastrophic natural disasters like cyclones, droughts, floods, hurricanes etc."

Pritish Pradhan : January 20, 2009

In 1955, a young British immigrant Gerry Stanhill was working on Israel’s irrigation scheme. His job was to find out, with the help of light-meters, how strongly the sun shone over Israel.

He repeated his experiment in the year 1980. Gerry was stunned over his findings. The observations suggested that the sun shone 22% less brightly over Israel than it did in 1955! He published his results but the scientific community dismissed it as nonsense.

At around the same time Beate Leipert - a graduate climatologist reported the same behaviour over the Bavarian Alps of Germany. What was strange was that two completely different sets of observations in two different parts of the world had come to the same conclusion!

Slowly in the 1990’s interest grew on this phenomenon and it was given a suitable name- ‘Global Dimming’.

The phenomenon was strongly challenged since the temperature of the world is rather increasing due to Global Warming and when the temperature is increasing due to rapid pollution how come the sun is gradually dimming? Temperature in the last 100 years has risen by 0.60° C and may rise by 3.75° C globally this century. This makes the twin effects of global warming and global dimming very contradicting.

In 1995 a $25 million multinational project INDOEX was launched to solve the puzzles of global dimming. Scientists saw that the northern islands of Maldives sit on the path of a stream of dirty air descending from India while the southern islands get fresh air from Antarctica. A major difference in light intensity is also observed between the two. The north islands over which the pollutant layer is 3 km thick received 10% less sunlight than the south. Climatologists understood that there was nothing wrong with the sun but with the earth itself.

A major reason for this effect was found in the change in behaviour of clouds that solid pollutants induce. These solid pollutants are emitted in high quantities by vehicular movement, air traffic, industrial activity etc. In a cloud small droplets of water condense over microscopic solid particles, which then become heavy and fall as rain. But in polluted areas, the number of suspended solid particles in the air like dust, soot etc is very large and over kilometres thick in the atmosphere, which could block the sunlight.

But a more drastic effect is produced when they interact with water droplets. Tiny particles of water form around them like layers. They may stay on in the atmosphere without falling down and turn the clouds into acting like giant mirrors, which reflect much more sunlight into space than ordinary clouds. These solid pollutants, which increase the volume and intensity of these hybrid clouds, prevent the sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface.

Since increase in pollution is global, this effect is also global. Over a course of thirty years, intensity of sunlight has fallen by 9% in Antarctica, 10% in the U.S., 11% in India, 16% in England, 20% in Singapore and 30% in Russia!!

In one of the longest conducted experiments on climate change, weather stations around the world have been measuring the rate of evaporation of water everyday since more than a century. Their data has revealed that rate of evaporation is declining with time. The reason is that sunlight plays a more dominant role in evaporation than increase in world temperature. This may cause less rain and its effects on India, a monsoon dependent country, is very harmful.

The twin effects of Global Warming and Global Dimming due to human pollution can be extremely disastrous. While global warming increases temperature due to the greenhouse gases, global dimming reduces sun’s intensity due to solid suspended pollutants. They can cause massive climatic change and catastrophic natural disasters like cyclones, droughts, floods, hurricanes etc.

Today, the desertification of a lush green North African region Sahel, Tunisia has been attributed to global dimming. Droughts in that region killed a million people and affected several million more. Thus the ill effects of this phenomenon are already in the course of causing devastation to the life and economy of the world.

After 9/11 attacks, all flights in the U.S.A. were grounded for three days. Dr. David. Gerard, University of Wisconsin studied its effects. He found that in just 3 days temperatures rose 1° C. It happened because no contrails (jet engine pollutants) were released and more sunlight reached the earth’s surface.

Global dimming reduces some increase in temperature on earth due to global warming but it is minimal. To go lax on either of the phenomena, thinking that they would cancel each other out, is suicidal. Rise in temperature by 2.5° C is enough to raise sea levels by 6-7 metres by melting polar ice caps, which may flood densely populated areas and destroy the sources of fresh water. Reduction in the intensity of sunlight will disrupt the process of evaporation and precipitation, which might change rainfall patterns. If immediate measures are not taken to stop these manmade effects, then man may himself fall victim to this through climate change.

Biofuel Buzz

There has been a persistent increase in the number of stories on the development of so called bio fuel derived as a byproduct of the pyrolysis of bio waste. I posted extensively on this subject in the early days of this blog. Regrettably, it is tracking the same way as the enthusiasm for corn based ethanol. Lots of folks are piling onto the apparent governmental gravy train rolling up to the station and this is a technology that everyone can jump onto. It is easy to present and the real thing that makes it all appear creditable is the simple fact that a fluid is produced that appears to look like crude oil. Except that it is not.

It is a brew of complex organics, principally acids with poor energy output characteristics.

The production process gives us two product streams. One is char, whether charcoal or biochar and the so called biofuel. The most energetic components, the volatiles are typically burned in the actual production process. Advanced processes can apply pressure and additional heat to improve the output by reforming the complex organics into better grade fuels like hopefully methane. All this consumes a lot of the available energy.
It all likely ends up as slightly superior to coal gasification but that is faint praise. It remains an option that is used because you have no choice and someone is prepared to subsidize it.

What it has going for it is that there is little patent protection possible, so you and I can waltz into a funding source and ask for gobs of money to build a plant. There will be a lot of such folks, just as in the ethanol boom, who will round up the necessary funds on this tale of joy and build away. They will all lose money, just as ethanol is doing today.

The point that I need to make is that even if it can be made to operate profitably, which is not totally unreasonable, the capital is unlikely to ever be recovered. Otherwise, there would already be thousands around the country long since paid of.

My real regret is that this is a diversion of capital from projects that deserve every penny of support.

I would far rather see a drive on creating cattail paddies that produce massive amounts of starch as ethanol feedstock. It would also employ thousands and not interfere with food production.

More importantly, the electric car is now imminent. We need a massive increase in base grid power on top of the rapidly expanding solar and wind sources.

We need to hugely expand geothermal energy production in the state of Nevada. Power plants can be built there readily and as often as necessary. What is most important, there is nothing to invent. Of course, we can expect some meathead to redo Icelandic history by using cheap steel inappropriately. The rest will not.

Very shortly someone will be asking why nothing was done for the past several years to prepare for the looming energy crunch.

Graphene Sheets and Arthur C. Clark Space Elevators

This is more of the graphene revolution rushing toward us. Complaints aside, we are not far at all from been able to produce large sheets. A comment has also been made that this material is approaching the electrical behavior of a room temperature super conductor.

Now imagine a printed circuit of this stuff layered with insulation and metglas materials and you are on the way to utterly unbelievable capability. I do not think we have ever seen a technology emerge so fast.

With any luck we can take a continuously produced sheet and slice it into thin strips to produce the world’s strongest rope ala Arthur C. Clark. The produced thin strip will form a slowly twisting tube that is then wound around its sisters to form the strongest rope possible. How many are needed to make a space elevator has to still be answered, but this is certain to meet the strength requirements. And we will have fiber continuity from ground to geostationary position.

I considered the possibility of a space elevator as completely unlikely, when I read Clark’s novel. I have to hand him another kudo for prescience. By the way, he wrote a book predicting future technology about forty years ago that I will still recommend. He got a lot right and we are now filling in his last blanks in the battery business.

It sounds as though this may be produced from vapor form onto a chilled wheel some way or the other. For our space rope, it can be several layers thick.

The key point that I am making is that the continuous production of a uniformly thick sheet of graphene with multiple splits is the topological equivalent of a rope. It is also a manufacturing process that can be incrementally improved until we have our space cable.

Shares anyone? This will really work and the initial capability is maybe a year away.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21964/?a=f

Bigger, Stretchier Graphene

High-quality, clear graphene films are a leap toward bendable OLED displays.
By Prachi Patel-Predd

http://www.technologyreview.com/files/23143/flex_graph_x220.jpg


Big and bendy: A transparent graphene film, two centimeters on each side, stretches and flexes when transferred to a rubber stamp. The stamp can be used to deposit the film on any substrate. Credit: Ji Hye Hong

Korean researchers have found a way to make large graphene films that are both strong and stretchy and have the best electrical properties yet. These atom-thick sheets of carbon are a promising material for making flexible, see-through electrodes and transistors for flat-panel displays. Graphene could also lead to foldable organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays and organic solar cells. However, it has not been easy finding a way make large, high-quality sheets of graphene.

Researchers from the Sungkyunkwan University and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, in Suwon, Korea, have made centimeters-wide graphene films that are 80 percent transparent and can be bent and stretched without breaking or losing their electrical properties. Others have made large graphene films using simpler techniques, but the new films are 30 times more conductive. In addition, it is easy to transfer the new films onto different substrates. "We have demonstrated that graphene is one of the best materials for stretchable transparent electronics," says Byung Hee Hong, who led the work, which is published in Nature.

Graphene is an excellent conductor, and it transports electrons tens of times faster than silicon does. It could replace the brittle indium tin oxide (ITO) electrodes that are currently used in displays, organic solar cells, and touch screens. Graphene transistors could also replace silicon thin-film transistors, which are not transparent and are hard to fabricate on plastic.

The easiest way to make tiny flakes of high-quality graphene is to peel off graphene layers from graphite (which is, essentially, just a stack of graphene sheets). Last year, a group led by Rutgers University materials-science and engineering professor Manish Chhowalla devised a method for making centimeters-scale pieces for practical applications. The researchers dissolved graphite oxide in water, creating a suspension of individual graphene-oxide sheets, which they deposited on top of a flexible substrate.

The Korean researchers use a method called chemical vapor deposition. First, they deposit a 300-nanometer-thick layer of nickel on top of a silicon substrate. Next, they heat this substrate to 1,000 Cº in the presence of methane, and then cool it quickly down to room temperature. This leaves behind graphene films containing six to ten graphene layers on top of the nickel. By patterning the nickel layer, the researchers can create patterned graphene films.

Others, such as MIT electrical-engineering professor Jing Kong, are working on similar approaches to making large graphene pieces. But the Korean researchers have taken the work a step further, transferring the films to flexible substrates while maintaining high quality. The transfer is done in one of two ways. One is to etch away the nickel in a solution so that the graphene film floats on its surface, ready to be deposited on any substrate. A simpler trick is to use a rubber stamp to transfer the film.

Fish Modify Calcium Carbonate

One of the great pleasures in reading science literature is the occasional bite at the unexpected. Here we learn that calcium carbonate is actively processed through the gut of a fish in copious amounts and in the process we conclude, is an active agent in converting calcium carbonate sources into immediately soluble forms.

Of course we get a little noise on the idea that human fishing is possibly depleting this resource. This is hardly true or ever likely to be true. Human fishing is selective and at worst removes competition from larger fish. Imagine what will happen to the population of ruminants if we hunted out all the big cats. Somewhere there is a population of little fish that is very happy we are knocking of their predators. And as this article makes very clear, the smaller fish are better at the conversion process.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Fishdunnit_Mystery_Solved_999.html

Fishdunnit! Mystery Solved

by Staff Writers
Virginia Key FL (SPX) Jan 20, 2009

An international team of scientists has solved a mystery that has puzzled marine chemists for decades. They have discovered that fish contribute a significant fraction of the oceans' calcium carbonate production, which affects the delicate pH balance of seawater.

The study gives a conservative estimate of three to 15 percent of marine calcium carbonate being produced by fish, but the researchers believe it could be up to three times higher.

Published January 16th in Science, their findings highlight how little is known about some aspects of the marine carbon cycle, which is undergoing rapid change as a result of global CO2 emissions.

Until now, scientists believed that the oceans' calcium carbonate, which dissolves in deep waters making seawater more alkaline, came from marine plankton. The recent findings published in Science explain how up to 15 percent of these carbonates are, in fact, excreted by fish that continuously drink calcium-rich seawater.

The ocean becomes more alkaline at much shallower depths than prior knowledge of carbonate chemistry would suggest which has puzzled oceanographers for decades. The new findings of fish-produced calcium carbonate provides an explanation: fish produce more soluble forms of calcium carbonate, which probably dissolve more rapidly, before they sink into the deep ocean.

Corresponding authors Drs. Frank Millero and Martin Grosell at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Dr. Rod Wilson of the University of Exeter note that given current concerns about the acidification of our seas through global CO2 emissions, it is more important than ever that we understand how the pH balance of the sea is maintained.

Although we know that fish carbonates differ considerably in their chemical make-up, the team has really only just scratched the surface regarding their chemical nature and ultimate fate in the ocean. Scientists clearly need to investigate this further to understand what this means for the future health of the world's oceans.

Millero, Grosell and Wilson, who was the recipient of the University of Miami's prestigious 2005 Rosenstiel Award, along with Rosenstiel School Marine Biology and Fisheries graduate student Josi Taylor collaborated with other British and Canadian scientists to reach the conclusion published in the current issue of Science.

The researchers suggest that fish carbonates dissolve much faster than those produced by plankton, and at depths of less than 1,000 m. Less soluble carbonates, produced by plankton, are more likely to sink further and become locked up in sediments and rocks for tens or hundreds of millions of years before being released. Fish carbonates, on the other hand, are likely to form part of the 'fast' carbonate system by more rapidly dissolving into seawater.

"As a marine chemist who has been studying the global carbon cycle and its impacts on the pH of the water and marine ecosystems for 40+ years, these results offer an important piece of the equation," said Millero, professor of Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry at the Rosenstiel School.

"By working with scientists in several disciplines we were able to come at this from different perspectives and combine data sets that hadn't been previously used together, to solve this problem. We can now employ the knowledge gained from this study to examine how ocean acidification due to the adsorption of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels affects the ocean carbon system."

The combination of future increases in sea temperature and rising CO2 will cause fish to produce even more calcium carbonate, which is in sharp contrast to the response by most other calcium carbonate producing organisms.

Fish's metabolic rates are known to increase in warmer waters, and this study explains how this will also accelerate the rate of carbonate excretion. In addition, our existing knowledge of fish biology shows that blood CO2 levels rise as CO2 increases in seawater and that this in turn will further stimulate fish calcium carbonate production.

"Depletion of fish stocks due to overfishing will obviously influence global calcium carbonate production attributable to fish, but the prediction of the impact of overexploitation is complex. Smaller fish which often result from exploitation produce more calcium carbonate for the same unit of biomass than bigger fish, a simple consequence of higher mass-specific metabolic rates in the smaller animals.

In addition, the chemical nature of the calcium carbonate produced by fish, which determines solubility, almost certainly will depend on temperature, fish species, ambient pH and CO2 levels among other factors.

The influence of such factors on this newly recognized and significant contribution to oceanic carbon cycling offers an exciting challenge for further study" said Grosell, associate professor of Marine Biology and Fisheries at the Rosenstiel School.

Note:

Freshwater fish drink very little, while most marine fish ingest copious amounts of seawater to maintain salt and water balance. The European flounder is euryhaline and illustrates that no intestinal calcium carbonate is formed in freshwater (Figure A) and only a brief period in seawater results in the formation of x-ray opaque calcium carbonate precipitates in the intestinal lumen (Figure B). The calcium carbonate precipitates are formed regardless of feeding and are excreted to the surrounding seawater, where it impacts the pH balance

Diatom Diversity

Diatom diversity maximized during a period of hothouse conditions on earth. This suggests a maximizing of its habitat rather than anything else. Again warm conditions would have released more CO2 into the atmosphere during this period, much of that because of a warmer ocean. The warmer ocean encourages a rapid expansion of the diatom population as they took advantage of the higher energy environment.

It sounds very much like the polar ice caps disappeared 30 million years ago for a while. This also sounds like it is happening on the time scales associated with plate movement. If Antarctica moved thirty degree north we would swiftly add a couple of hundred feet of sea level and the earth would be a hothouse about ten degrees warmer.

This also a reminder that the short term climate variations we have uncovered as part of the history of the past one million years would be submerged into the background noise after that. Earth’s climate could as volatile as could be and we would never know it from the data available.

Now if there were some way to improve the resolution of the diatom record, the climate record could be modestly refined and perhaps mapped for many millions of years.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Jan09/diatom.evolution.hp.html

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Jan09/diatoms_noaa.jpg

Jan. 7, 2009

Decline of carbon dioxide-gobbling plankton coincided with ancient global cooling

By Hugh Powell

The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

The study is published in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Nature.

The research casts doubt on the long-held theory that diatoms' success was tied to an influx of nutrients into the oceans from the rise of grasslands about 18 million years ago. New evidence from a study led by graduate student Dan Rabosky of Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology takes into account a widespread problem in paleontology: that younger fossils are easier to find than older ones.

"We just tried to address the simple fact that the number of available fossils is colossally greater from recent time periods than from earlier time periods," Rabosky said. "It's a pretty standard correction in some fields, but it hasn't been applied to planktonic paleontology up till now."

More than 90 percent of known diatom fossils are younger than 18 million years. So an unadjusted survey of diatom fossils suggests that more diatom species were alive in the recent past than 18 million years ago.

The dearth of early fossils is understandable. Sampling for diatom fossils requires immense drill ships to bore into seafloor sediment. To find an ancient fossil, scientists first have to find ancient sediment -- and that's no easy task because plate tectonics constantly shift the ocean floor, fossils and all. Much of the seafloor is simply too young to sample.

So Rabosky and co-author Ulf Sorhannus of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania controlled for how many samples had been taken from each million-year period of the Earth's history, going back 40 million years. After reanalysis, the long-accepted boom in diatoms over the last 18 million years disappeared. In its place was a slow recent rise, with a much more dramatic increase and decline at the end of the Eocene epoch, about 33 million years ago.

With the new timeline, diatoms achieved their peak diversity at least 10 million years before grasslands became commonplace.

"If there was a truly significant change in diatom diversity at all, it happened 30 million years ago," Rabosky said. "The shallow, gradual increase we see is totally different from the kind of exponential increase you would expect if grasslands were the cause."

As an example of that kind of increase, Rabosky turned to another fossil record: horse teeth. Before grasslands, horses had small teeth suited for chewing soft leaves. But as grasslands appeared, much hardier teeth appeared adapted to a lifetime of chewing tough, silica-studded grass leaves. Diatoms ought to show a similar evolutionary response to the sudden availability of silica, Rabosky said, but they don't.

Although the new results don't explain the current prevalence of diatoms in the ocean, Rabosky said that whatever led to diatoms' rise at the end of the Eocene, the tiny organisms may have contributed to the global cooling that followed.

"Why diatom diversity peaked for 4 to 5 million years and then dropped is a big mystery," Rabosky said. "But it corresponds with a period when the global climate swung from hothouse to icehouse. It's tempting to speculate that these tiny plankton, by taking carbon dioxide out of the air, might have helped trigger the most severe global cooling event in the past 100 million years."

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Chronology Incognito

The one issue that keeps cropping up in our ongoing perusal of the literature is that dating the past is fickle. A consensus slides into the literature and when overturned, taints all the prior work. I find myself constantly rechecking sources to get some comfort, and yes, making mistakes. We need to think about this.

For the past several thousands of years we are dependent on carbon dating. This method must be corrected by tree ring matching and that has been improving since its first discovery. That is why we know Hekla blew up in 1159 BC. Thank god we know something! On the other hand, the acknowledged error factor is significant in its own right and the wood itself can easily be decades old. This means that one sample can throw you all over the map.

Imagine dating Hekla on the basis of an ash collapsed roof. This sounds very straight forward. The assay will come back based on the apparent age of the wood which must be younger than the event. The house stood for a hundred years and the assay accounts for an error factor of one percent for ninety five percent of the time. That suggests that the date lies between 1300 BC and 1200 BC. You see how easy this is.

Now imagine trying to convince your peers that on the basis of other weaker evidence that the date is a hundred years too old.

The problem is that data does get written up and made to look convincing. This is hard to overcome. We have just reviewed the Vostok Ice Core. A marvelous chart lays out the apparent sequence of the data in clear chronological order. We have no way of confirming the reliability of the corrective factors used, if any, and thus are susceptible to been misled.

It is clear that hotspots occurred that were clearly significant and briefly countered the effects of the general ice age. The spacing is such that we can say that this is a periodic event that has yet to reoccur because the curve shape of the Holocene is radically different. The Holocene is the first stable climate regime in the past one million years because the Northern Ice Cap has been eliminated.

So what are these hotspots? They appear periodic. If they are periodic, then the probability exists that the cause is both cosmological and strongly periodic within a narrow predictable time range. If it is a solar event then it will be say 100,000 years plus or minus 10,000 years. If it is orbital then it will be say 100,000 years plus or minus 1000 years.

The data is showing three precisely similar events with a high degree of probability and clear apparent periodicity. So within the confines of our data we have clear unique and similar events that are separable from the ice age data. The probability of real periodicity is also very high and certainly approaching ninety percent plus.

If for example, the orbit were most of 150,000 years, then simple stretching of the data will preserve the near term data chronology and fit in the remainder handily giving us a 600,000 year chart. I would suspect that our weak present knowledge puts such an orbit well within the probability range. Right now we merely know that we are traveling in the right general direction and at a relative velocity that certainly supports an orbit hypothesis. We do not really know were we are on the curve of the orbit let alone a refined knowledge of the path of perigee.

Returning to the issue of carbon dating, we have illustrated just how controversial any single carbon dated data point must be. It also reaffirms the need for careful methodology and multiple samples to pin down chronologies. It also tells us that the documentary record needs to be disciplined by facts on the ground. This is slowly happening in the Mediterranean and other selected regions around the globe.

On the other hand there is still far too much ‘terra incognito’. Had the Maya built only in wood, what would we know? Millions lived in the Amazon and we have only just discovered them. And that is all within the past several thousands of years. Deeper and older, we have barely turned a spade.

When we dig down though a couple hundred feet of mud and discover man made stonework from seventy thousands of years ago, how will we explain it? Certainly our endeavors have raised the possibility.

Blizzard of 1888

This is a timely reminder of the extremes that Mother Nature can throw at us in the winter time. I think that folks caught a whiff of this out on the plains this winter.

The abrupt temperature inversion is a long way from beginning to recover, and the record shows that it will take many years. In fact, the sun is perhaps slightly cooler and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is long gone. This is a new development that is a clean break from the preceding north hemispheric warming that lasted twenty years.

As I posted last winter, it began with the heat blow out into the Arctic of 2007 that likely discharged the driving energy of the PDO.

We can now expect a further measured drop in global temperature and also more this coming winter or two before this has run its course. I do not want to say that this will continue for at least a decade, because we do not know, but it certainly is setting up for it. The historical record slants the probability strongly in that direcrtion.

We will soon be talking at how much cooler 2008 was when the numbers are released and this winter will be dragging into the spring, just like the good old days.

http://www.mccookgazette.com/story/1494559.html

The Blizzard of 1888

Walt Sehnert
Monday, January 19, 2009

Note: The January meeting of the Buffalo Commons Storytellers produced many good stories about the great Nebraska Blizzard of 1948-'49. Since the blizzard stories proved so popular, it seemed appropriate to bring back some stories about another great Nebraska Blizzard -- in 1888.

The Blizzard of Jan. 12-13, 1888, one of the greatest tragedies that ever hit the State of Nebraska, has been referred to as the "School Children's Blizzard," as it trapped so many children in country schools across the state. The storm was widespread, reaching from the Rockies, across the Midwest, and as far south as Mississippi. A later storm, in March of 1888, hit the Northeastern part of the country, and New York State. That storm was not as severe, but affected more people. It is more often reported, and cited as a great tragedy, which it certainly was, even though loss of life was not as great a factor as the Midwest storm.

Strong winds made conditions especially trying in the Midwest. In that day women's and girls' skirts were full and reached nearly to the ground. In those strong winds the skirts wrapped tightly around the legs, making progress difficult. The temperature fell in 24 hours from an unseasonable 70 above zero, to almost 40 below zero. The Colorado River, in Texas, was frozen one foot in depth, the first time in memory that that phenomenon had happened. The winds were so strong that voices were not audible, barely six feet away.

Snow, as fine as powder (which people caught in the storm referred to as "ice dust") was propelled by the wind into minute cracks in buildings. Snow drifted into barns where horses in stalls continually stomped it down, till they were three or four feet above the ground. Stock, in the open, drifted with the wind, straying over drift covered roads and fences -- drifts packed so tightly that cattle could easily cross, as if the obstruction never existed. But cattle also exhibited a homing instinct, and cattle bearing into the storm toward home suffocated from the powdery snow packing into their nostrils.

Across the Midwest some 235 lives were lost in the Blizzard of 1888. In Nebraska there are conflicting reports of deaths, but apparently somewhere between 40 and 100 deaths were attributed to the great storm. For a great number of years the "Blizzard of '88 Club" was very active. Survivors met annually, usually in Lincoln, to swap stories about their experiences. Babies born during those two days seemed to have special status, even into old age, and obituaries often carry a reference to that person as "The Blizzard Baby."

As is the case in any widespread disaster -- tornadoes, floods, fires, and blizzards, stories of tragedy, heroism, and ingenuity are repeated again and again, in various locations, involving different names.

In the Plainview, Neb., cemetery there is a monument erected by a teacher, Loie Royce to the memory of three of her pupils. Miss Royce was a teacher in a rural school north and east of Plainview in 1888. The morning of the blizzard she had nine pupils in school. As the blizzard worsened, Miss Royce sent six of the older students home. Some reports say that she ran out of fuel at the school, some say that there was still fuel for the stove. At any rate, sometime in the afternoon Miss Royce started out, with her three youngest pupils, Peter Poggensee, 9, Otto Rosburg, 9, and Hattie Rosburg, 7, for the nearby farm home where she boarded.

Mrs. Ella Rosburg Martin, a younger sister of two of the victims, was not yet of school age at the time of the blizzard. In a story in the Plainview Diamond Jubilee, 1886-1961, Mrs. Martin offered this account of the events of that day, regarding Miss Royce and three of her pupils. "Unable to face into the storm, the four drifted to the southeast and became lost. Peter Poggensee died first, about 6 in the evening. About midnight Otto Rosburg became still. The little girl, being plump survived until daylight. Wrapped in her teacher's arms, she kept repeating, over and over,

'I am so cold, Mama. Please cover me up.'"

Conrad Rosburg, father of the children, and H. Lorenz found them in the morning. Loie Royce was alive, but her feet were frozen so badly that they had to be amputated above the ankles. It is thought that she became panicky and so left the schoolhouse.

Said Mrs. Rosburg Martin, "My folks were restless after that and moved around a lot. I don't believe they ever got over the deaths of my brother and sister."

At a farm south of Wisner, in Northeast Nebraska (the family farm of my wife, Jean) young Harry Leisy managed to string a rope from the barn 60 yards to the house, which he used to keep from getting lost in the swirling snow, as he traveled that short distance back and forth to the barn. Using this rope he was able to keep a regular milking and feeding schedule for the animals in the barn, during the two days of the blizzard.

Some years ago, the late Harry Culbertson, a railroader from McCook, related his story about the Blizzard of '88. Harry was attending a country school near Culbertson in 1888. For a mid-January day it was extremely mild and sunny, though there was a lot of snow on the ground from previous storms. That morning Harry decided to take his shot gun, as he walked to school, to get in a bit of hunting on the way.

He had managed to bag a couple of quail (or some small bird), and as he neared the schoolhouse, he buried the birds and his shotgun in the snow beside a certain fencepost, not wanting to take either the birds or the shotgun with him into the school building.

Though all morning there was an unusual amount of electricity in the air, the snow did not start until near 1 p.m. The snow began as large silky flakes, but soon turned into a fine powder, which was propelled by strong winds into a full-blown blizzard. The teacher of the school was young, but capable.

She dismissed the school and sent the older children home, but kept the younger children with her. She managed to keep them close and together they made it to a nearby farm place where they spent the night.

Harry had a mile or so to go to reach home. Even though the storm was raging, and the temperature had dropped dramatically, he was not worried, as he knew he could follow the fence all the way home. He said that conditions were worse than he at first believed, and he should have been more concerned, but with the confidence of youth slogged on. The worst part was that he could not see the buildings of his farm and would have gone past had there not been some sort of farm machine near the fence, which he recognized and that enabled him to get his bearings. When the winds abated slightly he caught sight of the lantern in the kitchen window of his home, which allowed him to make it to the house and safety.

School did not resume for a week, and some of the youngsters were gone for longer than that. The subsequent drifts completely covered the fence that Harry had followed on his trip home that day. It was late in March before he made his way back to the spot where he had left his shotgun and the two birds he had bagged the morning of the storm. He was much relieved to find that a little oil and cleaning was all the gun required to be restored to prime condition, and the two birds were still frozen solid. He laughed as he told how he had taken them home, thawed them out, cleaned them, and the family had eaten them for supper that night -- only two and a half months late.

Source: Plainview News Diamond Jubilee, 1886-1961

Jim Kunsler writes on Hope and Fear

This article by Jim Kunsler is a very good summary of all the bad news that we face on the economic front. It is indescribably ugly, but there is nothing here that I have not already said. Jim’s error, if it may be called that, is that he lacks faith in our capability to replace oil as our energy source at a reasonable price. This blog has been an investigation of our options and strategies for side stepping this massive oil industry contraction.

We have been treated to the first sharp oil shock and that popped the sagging credit balloon. The second shock is inevitable although it can be postponed possibly until the first major field fails. We are past the peak and are waiting for the rapid decline that is inevitable.

Until we are able to begin to build out oil’s replacement, credit expansion must be hesitant. The reason is simple. When you evaluate a loan, you will now factor in the impact of $145 oil.

When you lend a million dollars to the local pig farm, you ask how the loan is going to fare if oil is $145. We already know the answer. Everyone is trying to recapture loses while oil is presently around $40.

Read my lips. The party has been halted for a time out to allow us to get our energy act together.

If the solution is EEStor based electric cars, then Kunsler’s concerns about suburbia are misplaced. If the solution is truly solar, then there is a massive job creation program cutting loose that must surely employ several millions directly in the build out. The energy crisis is so large that every technology able to meet a price point equivalent of $100 per barrel will be riding on government guarantees until the problem is fully solved.

Oil as a solution is contracting now and we must run full out just to stay even. July of 2008 was the first shot in that war for modern economic survival and it rang as loud as the shot at fort Sumter.

Obama must organize a response to this threat as soon as possible. The answers are there in my blog. But we must lead the charge because we are on the oil horse and it is beginning to buck. We have only two choices and the worst by far is to let nature run its course. You did not like round one. The next round will be a lock on $100 oil and ferocious rationing been screamed for. All the cars will be forcibly parked. It is coming anyway because we cannot add fresh supply fast enough. Then the real declines will hit.

Freeing up all the alternatives with price guarantees is a good start. Providing guarantees for a national power corridor is necessary. The moment electric cars are really feasible the demand for power on demand will sky rocket. That could be as early as next year if EEStor is right.

The big megawatts are just a matter of building plants already ready to be built. Wind, solar and geothermal are surely the most stable solutions with no fuel pricing vulnerabilities whatsoever. All these can be financed with debt instruments that will get paid of.


This article by jim kunsler
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/01/hope-and-fear.html
Hope and Fear
Tomorrow at noon, Barack Obama steps into the shoes of Lincoln, FDR, Millard Fillmore and forty other predecessors -- this time as the wished-for Mr. Fix-it of a nation run into a ditch. Surely over the months of transition, someone with a clear head and a fact-laden portfolio has clued-in the new President about the reality-based state-of-the-Union -- as opposed, say, to the Las Vegas version, where Santa Clause presides over a whoredom of something-for-nothing economics, and all behaviors are equally okay, and consequence has been sliced-and-diced out of the game. . . where, in the immortal words of Milan Kundera, anything goes and nothing matters.

Mr. Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout. There's a lot of raw material from sea to shining sea, admittedly, but how do you re-shape it into a population guided by a sense of earnest purpose, with reality-based expectations, with habits of delayed gratification and impulse control, and a sense of their own history? That will be quite a trick. Many of us -- myself included -- will be pulling for Barack. Maybe the power of his rhetoric and his sheer buff physical presence can whip this republic of overfed clowns into shape.

He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.

Mr. Obama's first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be to get right with his own credo of "change," meaning he'll have to persuade the broad American public that the "change" required to salvage this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they'd imagine in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go.

Say goodbye to the "consumer society." We're done with that. No more fast money and no more credit. The next stop is "yard-sale nation," in which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to Hello Kitty charm bracelets.

It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves as "consumers." This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101 section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a republic of broken communities shattered by WalMarts.

The government will not have to do a thing to bring down the chain-stores. History and inertia is already on that case, with the easy credit racket terminated and new frictions arising over global trade, and even Peak Oil waiting to work its hoodoo behind the scrim of deceptively temporarily low pump prices. The larger question for President Obama is: how can we collectively promote the reconstruction of Main Street, including all the fine-grained layers of retail and wholesale trade. High tech "solutions" are not likely to avail in this.

In fact, techno-grandiosity and techno-triumphalism must be be sedulously monitored and guarded-against. They jointly amount to the great mass psychosis of our time and culture. This array of traps -- from proposed flying cars to "renewable" motor fuels -- is the ultimate Faustian "bargain." It will be at the heart of any campaign to sustain the unsustainable, sucking us ever more deeply into the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity. Hence, the last thing this nation needs now is a stimulus plan aimed at the development of non-gasoline-powered automobiles -- married with extensive rehabilitation of the highway system. What I incessantly refer to as the Happy Motoring fiesta is drawing to a close as we have known it, whether we like it or not. Cars will be around for a while, of course, but as an increasingly elite activity. The owners of cars will be increasingly beset by grievance and resentment on the part of those foreclosed from the Happy Motoring life -- and it could easily degenerate to vandalism and violence, since the "right" to endless motoring was surreptitiously made an entitlement somewhere around 1957.

The "change" we face in agriculture dwarfs even the death throes of Happy Motoring (and is not unrelated to it either). A lot of people are likely to starve in America if we don't get our act together pronto in terms of how we produce the food we eat. Petro-agribusiness faces a set of disturbances that are certain to induce food shortages. Again, the Peak Oil specter looms in the background, for soil "inputs" and diesel power to run that system. But all of a sudden even that problem appears a lesser danger than the gross failure of capital finance now underway -- and petro-agriculture's chief external input is credit. Credit may be in extremely short supply this year, and hence crops may be in short supply as we turn the corner into spring and summer. Just as in the case of WalMart versus Main Street, the reform of farming in America is one of those "changes" much larger than most of us imagine. I'd go so far to say that a large proportion of young people now in college will find themselves not working in office cubicles, but in some way or other in farming or the "value-added" activities connected to it.

I don't see how America can confront the "change" represented by the stark fact that suburbia-is-toast. It is the sorest spot of all in the corpus of a culture beset by disease and debility. The salient manifestation of suburbia's demise is the remorseless drop of housing values in the places most representative of that development pattern. The worst thing the Obama team could do about this would be to attempt to prevent the fall of inflated house prices. Their real value needs to be clearly established before a picture emerges of which places have a plausible future, and which places are destined to be mere ruins or salvage yards.

Americans will have to live somewhere, of course, but the terrain of North America faces a very comprehensive reformation. The biggest cities will contract; the small cities and small towns will be reactivated, the agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, and the suburbs will undergo an agonizing decades-long work-out of bad debt and true asset re-valuation. Since the loss of so much vested "wealth" is implied by the crash of suburbia, this may be a source of revolutionary political violence moving deeper into the Obama administration.

There's been plenty of buzz in the blogosphere about the imminent failure of the US "social safety net," including especially the social security program. Retirees are the biggest block of voters. They're not liable to foment riots -- that is best left to the youthful high-testosterone cohort -- but the older folks -- with Baby Boomers now coming aboard -- could be so distressed by the loss of their presumed entitlements that they will elect any maniac promising to bring back something that looked like the 1980s. We haven't begun to hear their war cries, and I hope they do not beat a path straight into some sort of crypto corporate fascism -- as, finally, every last failing scrap of American life is nationalized.

Some natural processes hide in the thickets ahead. A hyper-inflation could take this country in any weird and unappetizing direction, from scapegoating and persecution to a new kind of corporate fascism. But I'm inclined to see our tribulations governed more by weakness in high places than by real power. In a world of declining capital and depleting energy resources, the key to any successful venture will be smaller scale. I'm not convinced that any emergency could make the US government more effective at getting anything done. Our hopes really ought to be vested locally, since that is where the most effective action is likely to be in the years just ahead.

It will be stirring to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and all the hoopla and balls, and the radiant children, and the exemplary First Lady dancing with the First Partner. Euphoria is a legitimate part of the human condition, though we know it soon passes into the heavy lifting of real life. There are many Americans of good will who would like to see the meaning of real "change" clearly articulated in a way that comports with reality, not just "dreams" and wishes. We'll hear a lot about dreams this week, anyway, of course, but then reality will set in and the heavy lifting will commence. Many Americans of good will also stand ready to face reality, to roll up our sleeves, ditch the video games and the Nascar and the microwaved cheese treats, and the internet porn and all the other noxious, narcolepsy-inducing distractions of our time, and put our shoulders to the wheel to haul this nation into a plausible future. For the moment: a rousing cry of "Good Luck!" To President Obama from this little outpost of Clusterfuck Nation

Ice Age Climate Interpretation

The Vostok Ice Core (last friday's post) opens the door to additional hypothesis that we will now entertain. I have already dealt extensively on this blog with the idea that the Holocene was initiated by a thirty degree shift in the Earth’s crust along a line from the North Pole to the Center of Hudson’s Bay. We go further and surmise that the evidence also supports a directed asteroid impact as the trigger. The evidence for both is extensive and strongly conforming. I still do not expect you to accept these ideas as with the exception of Einstein and a few others over the past sixty years, I am perhaps the only real champion.

You will discover that if you start mapping the known extent of ice flows, that all the conflicts disappear that bedeviled the original acceptance of ice ages in the first place. We no longer need to pretend that ice flows will survive at sea level in temperate environments when we cannot make it happen in the far north today. It is amazing how serious reservations are often forgotten in science because their champions die out. I personally have found that a fruitful source of new ideas.

Since we can comfortably separate out the Holocene as a special case, we can now look at the balance of the data as a very different regime. The Antarctic remained a polar continent surrounded by a continuous circumpolar current and wind system that separated its climate niche largely from the rest of the Earth. This too can be comfortably isolated from our considerations. At best, a small part of it had a climate like Norway’s as Atlantic warm waters partially penetrated the current providing excellent fishing grounds.

The Northern Hemisphere was a very different tale. The polar cap was intact for a million years as a direct result of the emergence of the Panama Isthmus that blocked the interchange of waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific and thus dumping heat into the Arctic. I would go even further. Prior to this closure the heat flow was possibly large enough to keep the North ice free and possibly strong enough to reduce the Southern Ice Cap. Applying our climate modeling programs would be very interesting and the geological changes are well enough known to get a pretty good first estimate that can then be confirmed by direct investigation of sediments.

During the ice Age, the Atlantic heat flows were insufficient to much affect either cap even when the climate warmed up as happened several times as shown by the Vostok record. The ice retreated, but briefly. Sea levels rose, but only a few feet. Present day Greenland is a good example.

Even had the climate warmed and sustained itself as has in fact happened during the Holocene, the retreat would still have had minor impact as is the case today in Antarctica. What conceivable difference would a ten degree drop in global temperatures make to Antarctica? The same was true for the Northern Ice Cap.

This all means that with two polar ice caps, that the global temperature is ten degrees colder. From this we know that the presence of two polar ice caps will lower the sea level by three hundred feet. Also outside the vastly expanded coastal plains, we will have a far less stable climate regime that will rumble back and forth with as it impacts with shifting glaciation and ocean changes brought on by the rise and fall of sea ice supply.
The chart shows that there was never a stability zone even at the lower ranges. It likely hit its lows because ice flooded the oceans for a few years until it melted away and the ocean had a chance to recover.

Today, the only threat is the Antarctic and the currents and winds are set up to contain the events. Imagine the Ross Ice Shelf breaking up and flooding into the Atlantic over a few years. Such ice shelves existed and certainly flooded into the Atlantic during the ice age. Thus we have a convincing causation for the long climate shifts shown by the Vostok chart. Huge amounts of cold ice could get shifted all the way into equatorial regions chilling the surface waters and needing years to recover.

In fact looking at the chart it is easy to believe that I am looking at the trace of ice removal and this includes everything except as explanation for the sudden rapid warming that took place at least four times before the Holocene. In fact, I find it easy to create a narrative of explainable differences between the four apparent cycles. I will not bore you with it, but another question is immediately apparent. I need someone to figure out how to measure the area under the chart from low to low. If the result is very similar, it would be an excellent indicator that the periodicity of the peak event is excellent and may in fact be cosmological.

I recall grinding the raw ice core data from Greenland back in 1996 to confirm a Greenland climate shift 12900 years ago. We need to do something like that here. Actually summing the temperatures between the two points should be sufficient.

So what about the brief hot spots? There we have two possible explanations, one that I have already discussed at length. We may be on an orbit that brings us close to Sirius and its star group. The weakness with such an idea is that is demands a very precise periodicity in the orbit. The apparent periodicity is very close to been good enough to give credence to the idea which is why it has champions.

An investigation of comparable ice cores could refine the periodicity to a convincing level of precision. At least we know it should be done.

Then there is the excellent possibility that the sun simply gets hotter. There the periodicity is much rougher and we are likely still overdue. Such periodicity has been observed in the short term but not on the time scales we are looking for. Or it could also have been that the crust was deliberately shifted when the sun became warmer. Except that I simply do not think that the sun is warmer at all.

The bottom line is that we have a very consistent ice age climate chart with a periodic hot spot that is external to the ice age narrative and that is quickly subdued by the ice age. One way or the other, the hot spot is cosmological and it will not kill us, but may inconvenience us. The solar causation allows us to accept the dating regime as is and to wonder how soon. The orbital causation puts us thousands of years away but going in the right direction inward while strongly indicating that the time axis needs to be stretched for far time and shrunken for near time.

China Revises to #3

The Chinese economic expansion is entering a much needed consolidation as occurred among the early adopters such as Japan and others twenty years ago. This phase should be characterized by strong domestic and government investment in both new infrastructure and reconstruction. This time, build the schools properly and show that the lives and health of the people is respected.

China can now implement necessary labor market reforms and proper health and educational services. The economy is rich enough to accommodate what is after all an investment in future government revenues.

China has shown that it can mobilize its resources to achieve it goals in a very proficient manner, although there is the usual nit picking and cheap shots. When there are government resources and lolly to distribute, you can count on a corruption loss. I am still waiting for an apology to the American people for the unseemly free for all that we saw in Iraq under US management.

At least the Chinese shoot a few from time to time to encourage honesty among the rest. Otherwise they would need to sharply increase their police force.

We all can see things in China that needs to be improved. Fortunately, so do the Chinese and they know the solutions as well as we do. I suspect we only need to come back in five tears to see the problems abate.

China revises figures, 'becomes world's number three economy'

by Staff Writers

Beijing (AFP) Jan 14, 2009

China revised upwards its 2007 growth figures Wednesday, indicating the Asian giant overtook Germany as the world's third largest economy, analysts said.

China's economy expanded by 13.0 percent in 2007, up from a previous calculation of 11.9 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

"At market exchange rates, China in 2007 was the third largest behind the US and Japan," Vivek Arora, senior resident representative with the IMF in Beijing, told Dow Jones Newswires.

The economy was worth 25.7 trillion yuan in 2007, the statistics bureau said, or about 3.5 trillion dollars based on the exchange rate at the end of that year.

"It indicates the speed of economic growth in the year was beyond what people previously imagined. The economy was overheated beyond what people estimated," said Ren Xianfang, a Beijing-based analyst with Global Insight.

"The figures here mean China has surpassed Germany," she said, citing World Bank estimates. "Germany's economy was 3.3 trillion dollars in 2007 while China's economy was much bigger than that."

China is now only behind the United States, whose economy was worth 13.8 trillion in 2007, and Japan, at 4.4 trillion, according to World Bank figures.

"It reflects the remarkable success of a strategy that links China up with the world," said David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"But it also means a lot of the growth in China is based on that global linkage and that makes China more vulnerable to global fluctuations in the economy," he said.

China became the fourth largest economy in 2005, when it grew 10.4 percent, speeding past France, Britain and Italy.

The revision put the 2007 economic growth second only to the 13.1 percent growth seen in 1994, Ren said.

But the revised figures could serve only to make the slowdown between 2007 and 2008 appear sharper, economists said.

"The change in GDP estimates for two years ago will not alter the economy's near-term outlook," said Sherman Chan, an economist with Moody's Economy.com.

"The only effect is perhaps negative, as a stronger 2007 would make the 2008 slowdown more upsetting," she wrote in a research note.

China is expected to release its full-year economic figures for 2008 next week.

The Chinese economy grew by nine percent in the third quarter, the lowest rate in more than five years, and the World Bank has forecast 2008 growth of 7.5 percent, a level not seen since 1990.

"For 2009, a further slowdown is projected, as the global economy remains in a dismal state, hurting China's export-related businesses, which have been the bread winner for the country," Chan said.

The bureau said this was the final revision for 2007 economic numbers, after reporting in January last year that growth was 11.4 percent, then upgrading it to 11.9 percent in April.

Gaza Cease Fire

Today Gaza went into cease fire mode. Of course we are regaled with immediate claims from whatever passes for Hamas leadership that this represents a ‘heavenly victory’. I cannot imagine someone so dense as to accept such nonsense. The international press is saying that neither side achieved their long term aims. A fair assessment if long term aims include the immediate destruction of Israel or the conversion of Hamas to common sense.

Israel entered Gaza, inflicted thousands of casualties and destroyed billions in property and public infrastructure. It has brought Egypt to the table as a possible guarantor of Hama’s good behavior. The leadership and direct supporters of Hamas have been hard hit.

While the cease fire discussions are been held, Israel can reposition for the next phase of combat while isolating a fresh inventory of targets. You usually do not have the luxury of a time out in most wars, because no opponent will be dumb enough to give it to you. We even have pretty stories of smiling Israelis leaving the Gaza.

In the meantime, Hamas will attempt to create defensible positions in civilian homes.

That leaves the remaining option for Hamas. Actually entering into a real cease fire and sticking to it. Because right now, Israel can answer every single rocket launch, with a 500 round artillery barrage. Hamas is discovering that no one is blaming anyone else for the Palestinian dead and the past three weeks have completely inured world opinion to sight of all those gratuitous injured children photo ops.

If this cease fire holds, it will because Hamas accepts virtually all of Israel military demands and Egypt possibly steps in to act as the peace keeper. Or perhaps we can get an all African peace keeping force to go in and inspect the magazines.

Hamas strategic thinking will forever mystify me. You acquire and fire rockets that are certain to miss, but as certain to upset the neighbors until they unleash their full military power on your community. When that happens, your highly trained combat specialists put up a spirited defense inflicting almost no casualties while absorbing prodigious losses. This was totally predictable.

The only rational explanation is that the Iranian paymasters love to give stupid orders to their dupes to stir things up a bit. A few hundred dead Palestinians here and there serve only to advance Iranian interests. Especially if your name is Prime Minister Whack Bar.

Vostok Ice Core Interpretation

We have learned enough to ask a few pointed questions regarding the interpretation of the extremely important Vostok Core. This core was pulled from very deep Antarctic ice at the Vostok station and has been given treatment by the global warming enthusiasts who tried very hard to make this support their pet ideas. In fact this is the key data that argues against the linkage of CO2 and temperature. It is backwards with CO2 arriving centuries after the warming has started.

This also reconfirms the unique nature of the Holocene. Of several temperature run ups, this is the only one that suddenly became stable at the peak no less. It made sense for it to perhaps stabilize part way up this curve but it takes something extraordinary for this to occur the way it did. Its two degree variability is confirmed across the entirety of the data, so the two degree variability of the Holocene represents a continuance.

As I have previously posted this is caused by the elimination of the Northern Ice Cap by the thirty degree shift of the crust. If you have not, please read my posts.

Two other factors need to be now considered. These peaks and their shapes are conforming even to the pair of secondary peaks. This powerfully suggests a cosmological explanation, certainly for the peaks. They demonstrate our expectations for a fairly fast pass through a star system that we are orbiting. The secondary highs do not, but may show high ultra violet radiation sources been passed through or even incoming material that heats up the sun.

The take home message is that this is not random. And since we are not now in close orbit of our parent star, when that happens, our climate will get ten degrees warmer. It will be well forested in the Arctic and a lot of that Antarctic ice will melt. It will last for ten to twenty thousands of years while the effects wear off. The actual transit and build up will be fairly quick. There is a good chance that all the polar ice will actually be melted before the cold begins to settle back in.

It is still a good plan. We have swapped ten thousand years of good weather and one hundred thousand years of very bad for one hundred thousand years of very good weather and ten thousand years of very hot weather.

The second factor is that the scale is flawed as expected. It tends to shrink as you go back in time and variation progressively wrecks accuracy. The current scale is the best estimate. If the peaks are associated with stellar events the actual scale could be as much as one million years long with a solar orbit approaching 180,000 years. We could also be over estimating the more recent layering of the ice.

Using the peaks as fixed points, it should be possible to make a tentative match to a putative orbit and take it from there.

Ice Core Evidence for Global Warming - a sceptical/skeptical view

alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/index.html

One of the main planks in the global warming theory is the extraordinary Vostok ice core, dragged 2.5 km out of the Antarctic ice by the Russians in the '80s and '90s. (Other ice cores and analysis methods tell much the same story, but we will concentrate here on Vostok) The data from the ice, published in 1999 gives snapshots of temperature and CO2 concentrations going back 400,000 years. Since the two data sets have different time scales, it is a little tricky to graph them together.

http://www.noe21.org/dvd2/Global%20Warming%20FAQ%20-%A0%20temperature.htm

But, here they are:

http://alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/CO2_temp.gif

An Excel spreadsheet and graph of the data can be downloaded from here.If one sits down to look at the curves, a few things are apparent:

1. Four times in the period, (ie, roughly every 100,000 years) the temperature has quickly shot up to 2°C - 3°C above today's and then slowly slipped back to about 8°C below today's temperature. It looks as though the Earth's complex, non-linear climate system has two stable states and flops rhythmically from one to the other.

2. We are currently hovering near the top of a cycle and an ice-age seems to be due. However, comparing today's position with the 4 previous peaks suggests that the temperature should have reached 2°C or more some 10,000 years ago, but it hasn't. If anything, the world is now somewhat colder than we might expect.

3. CO2 and temperature track each other well. When one goes up, so does the other and conversely. They show such a strong correlation that one might suspect they are causally connected.

4. But which is the cause? We normally think that causes come first and consequences come after. Over long periods in this data, it is temperature that comes first and and by several thousand years (except for a short period about 340,000 years ago). Al Gore, in his film, seems not to have noticed this detail.

5. One explanation might be: when the world gets warmer, the oceans expel CO2 and, some hundreds to thousands of years later, the gas concentration rises. When the world get colder the oceans absorb CO2 and, some time later, the concentration falls. For some reason, when the temperature is rising, CO2 tracks quicker than when the temperature is falling.

6. The fashionable theory of gobal warming says that a rise in atmospheric CO2 causes more of the sun's heat to be retained in the atmosphere. This raises the world's temperature and warms the oceans. As the oceans get warmer they expel more dissolved CO2 and the effect accelerates. This would seem to be a recipe for runaway positive feedback which will raise the world's temperature to an uncomfortable level. We would like to do an experiment to see whether this happens or not.

7. In an area of science where experiments are hard to do, nature has given us 4 repetitions. The Vostock core clearly shows that when the temperature reaches 2°C a mechanism kicks in which sets the temperature falling again and initiates an ice-age. Since this mechanism has repeatedly worked well after 100,000 years of disuse, it seems to be robust.

8. Since the Industrial Revolution, man has contributed increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. It is said that these extra greenhouse gasses will change the climate cycle and that this time the temperature will climb far above the historical maximum, plunging the world into disaster.

9. There is about 800 B tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere and human activities release another 27 B tonnes per year, or 3% of the total . CO2 in the air dissolves in the oceans and there is a lot more in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere. CO2 in the oceans slowly forms limestones, chalk and other rocks. More than 100 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is locked up in these stones (The White Cliffs of Dover are largely CO2). But how much goes where and how long it stays there is not well understood. (See 'non-linear' in para 1). Even if one accepts that man is contributing large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, it will dissolve in the sea and then turn to limestone without any help from us.

10. If we consider all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2, the most important by far is water vapour, which contributes 36% of the total effect. Short of wrapping all the oceans in plastic sheet, we can't do much about that.

11. CO2 contributes 9% of the greenhouse effect. Industry currently pumps 3% more CO2 into the atmosphere each year, which is responsible for .27% of the total greenhouse effect. If we shut down all transport and industry tomorrow, it is hard to believe it would have much immediate impact on global warming.

12. A fact that is often overlooked is that the amount of heat radiated by the earth into space varies as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. That is, if the average temperature of the atmosphere rises from 20C to 21C (293K to 294K or .3%), the radiated energy increases by 1.4%. This fourth power law has a strongly stabilising effect on global temperature.

13. It may be true that this small amount of extra greenhouse gas will trigger run-away global warming, but it is hard to find solid evidence for it in the historical record. What evidence there is must come from models of the way the climate works. But models of such complicated mechanisms as the climate are notoriously unreliable until they have been refined and rigorously checked against the historical evidence. Which has not yet happened.13. I am not a climatologist, but there is a solid looking review paper here. There is a scientific review of Al Gore's film here.

Natural global warming seems to be expected about now in the cycle, but I'm sceptical/skeptical about man-made warming.

Politics

If the science is hard to understand, the politics is easy. The 'man-made CO2 calamity' gives the developed nations a wonderful stick with which to beat the emerging superpowers of India and China. 


If the west can persuade them that they have a moral duty to clean up their industries, substantial extra costs are imposed on them which will do something to offset the west's higher wages.

On the campaign level in the west, things work as usual in practical politics. Here is one of several accounts by scientists who changed their views about global warming, from

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming051607.htm "I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed. The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role," he added. "Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics."