Global Drought Tightens

Eric deCarbonnel has done us a favour and assembled in a rough and ready manner, the apparent numbers developing in the global agricultural scene. He is an alarmist here but one gets the inescapable sense that it will be very difficult to cover shortfalls this year and that there will be plenty of pain to spread around.

I would speculate that the globe is readjusting back to normal climatic conditions with the typical disruptive lag biting everyone’s tail. We may well test our reserves this year, but that should be followed by a strong replenishing cycle world wide. This is going to be needed.

I also do not see quite were he is getting some of his more alarming numbers from, and perhaps we should just leave them alone for now. A lot of these droughts are localized within large growing regions and simply do not apply to the region as a whole. Some of these droughts are due to break as has happened in California. In fact, the evidence indicates that weather bands have shifted south and that suggests to me that the southern USA is about to have its drought broken as spring returns.

In spite of that, I think that the press will have a lot to talk about this year on the weather and drought front. However, if the global drought breaks everywhere it will be pleasant news for a change

Why am I so confident? I think that the present drought conditions are lagging results from the drop in global temperatures brought about by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation reversal and that global weather is rebounding back to conditions that stood twenty years ago. The impact of this is weather disruption that should now be ending as the tropical weather system re-expands again.

Monday, February 9, 2009

*****Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production*****

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/02/2009-global-food-catastrophe.html

by Eric deCarbonnel

After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world.

To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjt66T7_I3Jxd2_bmDtoz6O56ODM3CsA7YEQ8v2UKkqiMGmxhYDP9ZP6RzyPTXmkUWnZlR3CnaTBD37dmOh-bQReiZpxjQxjS9q-Y5OU1AAq-KJuclbawuD648RzoJ9vTLp3PsIQ0Qv22X/s1600-h/Countries_by_agricultural_output-753925.png

Now, consider the same graphic with the countries experiencing droughts highlighted.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirXo1-dksOxDOF3c3lBygEs4_1E9n1JrWlZb3g9RAKGhGYhnxuNtyJKcRrJP3Xdm2CttxgtF9p4bH4sPLsTMgW8anzKCCYksINZYrs7p7VOSXqiajTw0HvGTBPm9kfOoXgaNU2kYegg4fa/s1600-h/Countries_by_agricultural_output%5B1%5D-747806.png

The countries that make up two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions. Whether you watch a video of the drought in China, Australia, Africa, South America, or the US, the scene will be the same: misery, ruined crop, and dying cattle.

ChinaThe drought in Northern China, the worst in 50 years, is worsening, and summer harvest is now threatened. The area of affected crops has expanded to 161 million mu (was 141 million last week), and 4.37 million people and 2.1 million livestock are facing drinking water shortage. The scarcity of rain in some parts of the north and central provinces is the worst in recorded history.

The drought which started in November threatens over half the wheat crop in eight provinces - Hebei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu.HenanChina's largest crop producing province, Henan, has issued the highest-level drought warning. Henan has received an average rainfall of 10.5 millimeters since November 2008, almost 80 percent less than in the same period in the previous years. The Henan drought, which began in November, is the most severe since 1951.

AnhuiAnhui Province issued a red drought alert, with more than 60 percent of the crops north of the Huaihe River plagued by a major drought.

ShanxiShanxi Province was put on orange drought alert on Jan. 21, with one million people and 160,000 heads of livestock are facing water shortage.

JiangsuJiangsu province has already lost over one fifth of the wheat crops affected by drought. Local agricultural departments are diverting water from nearby rivers in an emergency effort to save the rest.

HebeiOver 100 million cubic meters of water has been channeled in from outside the province to fight Hebei’s drought.

Shaanxi1.34 million acres of crops across the bone-dry Shanxi province are affected by the worsening drought.

ShandongSince last November, Shandong province has experienced 73 percent less rain than the same period in previous years, with little rainfall forecast for the future.

Relief efforts are under way. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (about $12.69 billion) to drought-hit areas. Authorities have also resorted to cloud-seeding, and some areas received a sprinkling of rain after clouds were hit with 2,392 rockets and 409 cannon shells loaded with chemicals. However, there is a limit to what can be done in the face of such widespread water shortage.

As I have previously written, China is facing hyperinflation, and this record drought will make things worse. China produces 18% of the world's grain each year.

AustraliaAustralia has been experiencing an unrelenting drought since 2004, and 41 percent of Australia's agriculture continues to suffer from the worst drought in 117 years of record-keeping. The drought has been so severe that rivers stopped flowing, lakes turned toxic, and farmers abandoned their land in frustration:

A) The Murray River stopped flowing at its terminal point, and its mouth has closed up.B) Australia’s lower lakes are evaporating, and they are now a meter (3.2 feet) below sea level. If these lakes evaporate any further, the soil and the mud system below the water is going to be exposed to the air. The mud will then acidify, releasing sulfuric acid and a whole range of heavy metals. After this occurs, those lower lake systems will essentially become a toxic swamp which will never be able to be recovered. The Australian government's only options to prevent this are to allow salt water in, creating a dead sea, or to pray for rain.

For some reason, the debate over climate change is essentially over in Australia.The United States

CaliforniaCalifornia is facing its worst drought in recorded history. The drought is predicted to be the most severe in modern times, worse than those in 1977 and 1991. Thousands of acres of row crops already have been fallowed, with more to follow. The snowpack in the Northern Sierra, home to some of the state's most important reservoirs, proved to be just 49 percent of average. Water agencies throughout the state are scrambling to adopt conservation mandates.

TexasThe Texan drought is reaching historic proportion. Dry conditions near Austin and San Antonio have been exceeded only once before—the drought of 1917-18. 88 percent of Texas is experiencing abnormally dry conditions, and 18 percent of the state is in either extreme or exceptional drought conditions. The drought areas have been expanding almost every month. Conditions in Texas are so bad cattle are keeling over in parched pastures and dying. Lack of rainfall has left pastures barren, and cattle producers have resorted to feeding animals hay. Irreversible damage has been done to winter wheat crops in Texas. Both short and long-term forecasts don't call for much rain at all, which means the Texas drought is set to get worse.

Augusta Region (Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina)

The Augusta region has been suffering from a worsening two year drought. Augusta’s rainfall deficit is already approaching 2 inches so far in 2009, with January being the driest since 1989.

Florida

Florida has been hard hit by winter drought, damaging crops, and half of state is in some level of a drought.

La Niña likely to make matters worse

Enough water a couple of degrees cooler than normal has accumulated in the eastern part of the Pacific to create a La Niña, a weather pattern expected to linger until at least the spring. La Niña generally means dry weather for Southern states, which is exactly what the US doesn’t need right now.

South America

Argentina

The worst drought in half a century has turned Argentina's once-fertile soil to dust and pushed the country into a state of emergency. Cow carcasses litter the prairie fields, and sun-scorched soy plants wither under the South American summer sun. Argentina's food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent, maybe more. The country's wheat yield for 2009 will be 8.7 million metric tons, down from 16.3 million in 2008. Concern with domestic shortages (domestic wheat consumption being approximately 6.7 million metric ton), Argentina has granted no new export applications since mid January

.Brazil

Brazil has cut its outlook for the crops and will do so again after assessing damage to plants from desiccation in drought-stricken regions. Brazil is the world's second-biggest exporter of soybeans and third-largest for corn.
Brazil's numbers for corn harvesting:

Harvested in 2008: 58.7 million tons
January 8 forecast: 52.3 million tons
February 6 forecast: 50.3 metric tons (optimistic)
Harvested in 2009: ???

Paraguay

Severe drought affecting Paraguay's economy has pushed the government to declare agricultural emergency. Crops that have direct impact on cattle food are ruined, and the soy plantations have been almost totally lost in some areas.

UruguayUruguay declared an "agriculture emergency" last month, due to the worst drought in decades which is threatening crops, livestock and the provision of fresh produce.The a worsening drought is pushing up food and beverage costs causing Uruguay's consumer prices to rise at the fastest annual pace in more than four years in January.

BoliviaThere hasn’t been a drop of rain in Bolivia in nearly a year. Cattle dying, crops ruined, etc…ChileThe severe drought affecting Chile has caused an agricultural emergency in 50 rural districts, and large sectors of the economy are concerned about possible electricity rationing in March. The countries woes stem from the "La Niña" climate phenomenon which has over half of Chile dangling by a thread: persistently cold water in the Pacific ocean along with high atmospheric pressure are preventing rain-bearing fronts from entering central and southern areas of the country. As a result, the water levels at hydroelectric dams and other reservoirs are at all-time lows.

Horn of Africa

Africa faces food shortages and famine. Food production across the Horn of Africa has suffered because of the lack of rainfall. Also, half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant, and the declining soil fertility across Africa is exacerbating drought related crop losses.

KenyaKenya is the worst hit nation in the region, having been without rainfall for 18 months. Kenya needs to import food to bridge a shortfall and keep 10 million of its people from starvation. Kenya’s drought suffering neighbors will be of little help.

TanzaniaA poor harvest due to drought has prompted Tanzania to stop issuing food export permits. Tanzania has also intensified security at the border posts to monitor and prevent the export of food. There are 240,000 people in need of immediate relief food in Tanzania.BurundiCrops in the north of Burundi have withered, leaving the tiny East African country facing a severe food shortage

Uganda

Severe drought in northeastern Uganda's Karamoja region has the left the country on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The dry conditions and acute food shortages, which have left Karamoja near starvation, are unlikely to improve before October when the next harvest is due.

South Africa

South Africa faces a potential crop shortage after wheat farmers in the eastern part of the Free State grain belt said they were likely to produce their lowest crop in 30 years this year. South Africans are "extremely angry" that food prices continue to rise.Other African nations suffering from drought in 2009 are: Malawi, Zambia, Swaziland, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tunisia, Angola, and Ethiopia.

Middle East and Central Asia

The Middle East and Central Asia are suffering from the worst droughts in recent history, and food grain production has dropped to some of the lowest levels in decades. Total wheat production in the wider drought-affected region is currently estimated to have declined by at least 22 percent in 2009. Owing to the drought's severity and region-wide scope, irrigation supplies from reservoirs, rivers, and groundwater have been critically reduced. Major reservoirs in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all at low levels requiring restrictions on usage. Given the severity of crop losses in the region, a major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

IraqIn Iraq during the winter grain growing period, there was essentially no measurable rainfall in many regions, and large swaths of rain-fed fields across northern Iraq simply went unplanted. These primarily rain-fed regions in northern Iraq are described as an agricultural disaster area this year, with wheat production falling 80-98 percent from normal levels. The USDA estimates total wheat production in Iraq in 2009 at 1.3 million tons, down 45 percent from last year.

SyriaSyria is experienced its worst drought in the past 18 years, and the USDA estimates total wheat production in Syria in 2009 at 2.0 million tons, down 50 percent from last year. Last summer, the taps ran dry in many neighborhoods of Damascus and residents of the capital city were forced to buy water on the black market. The severe lack of rain this winter has exacerbated the problem.

AfghanistanLack of rainfall has led Afghanistan to the worst drought conditions in the past 10 years. The USDA estimates 2008/09 wheat production in Afghanistan at 1.5 million tons, down 2.3 million or 60 percent from last year. Afghanistan normally produces 3.5-4.0 million tons of wheat annually.

JordanJordan's persistent drought has grown worse, with almost no rain falling on the kingdom this year. The Jordanian government has stopped pumping water to farms to preserve the water for drinking purposes.

Other Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations suffering from drought in 2009 are: The Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Israel, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Cyprus, and Iran.

Lack of credit will worsen food shortage

A lack of credit for farmers curbed their ability to buy seeds and fertilizers in 2008/2009 and will limit production around the world. The effects of droughts worldwide will also be amplified by the smaller amount of seeds and fertilizers used to grow crops.

Low commodity prices will worsen food shortage

The low prices at the end of 2008 discouraged the planting of new crops in 2009. In Kansas for example, farmers seeded nine million acres, the smallest planting for half a century. Wheat plantings this year are down about 4 million acres across the US and about 1.1 million acres in Canada. So even discounting drought related losses, the US, Canada, and other food producing nations are facing lower agricultural output in 2009.

Europe will not make up for the food shortfall

Europe, the only big agricultural region relatively unaffected by drought, is set for a big drop in food production. Due to the combination of a late plantings, poorer soil conditions, reduced inputs, and light rainfall, Europe’s agricultural output is likely to fall by 10 to 15 percent.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low

Low stocks of foodstuff make the world’s falling agriculture output particularly worrisome. The combined averaged of the ending stock levels of the major trading countries of Australia, Canada, United States, and the European Union have been declining steadily in the last few years:

2002-2005: 47.4 million tons
2007: 37.6 million tons
2008: 27.4 million tons

These inventory numbers are dangerously low, especially considering the horrifying possibility that China’s 60 million tons of grain reserves doesn't actually exists.

Global food Catastrophe

The world is heading for a drop in agricultural production of 20 to 40 percent, depending on the severity and length of the current global droughts. Food producing nations are imposing food export restrictions. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries with food deficits, millions will starve.

The deflation debate should end now

The droughts plaguing the world’s biggest agricultural regions should end the debate about deflation in 2009. The demand for agricultural commodities is relatively immune to developments in the business cycles (at least compared to that of energy or base metals), and, with a 20 to 40 percent decline in world production, already rising food prices are headed significantly higher.

In fact, agricultural commodities NEED to head higher and soon, to prevent even greater food shortages and famine. The price of wheat, corn, soybeans, etc must rise to a level which encourages the planting of every available acre with the best possible fertilizers. Otherwise, if food prices stay at their current levels, production will continue to fall, sentencing millions more to starvation.

Competitive currency appreciation

Some observers are anticipating “competitive currency devaluations” in addition to deflation for 2009 (nations devalue their currencies to help their export sector). The coming global food shortage makes this highly unlikely. Depreciating their currency in the current environment will produce the unwanted consequence of boosting exports—of food. Even with export restrictions like those in China, currency depreciation would cause the outflow of significant quantities of grain via the black market.

Instead of “competitive currency devaluations”, spiking food prices will likely cause competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for just this type of emergency. Central banks around the world will lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currencies or by using them to purchase grain on the world market.

Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. A more valuable currency allows a nation to monopolize more global resources (ie: the overvalued dollar allows the US to consume 25% of the world's oil despite having only 4% of the world's population). If China were to selloff its US reserves, its enormous population would start sucking up the world's food supply like the US has been doing with oil.

On the flip side, when a nation appreciates its currency and starts consuming more of the world’s resources, it leaves less for everyone else. So when china appreciates the yuan, food shortages worldwide will increase and prices everywhere else will jump upwards. As there is nothing that breeds social unrest like soaring food prices, nations around the world, from Russia, to the EU, to Saudi Arabia, to India, will sell off their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and reduce the cost of food imports. In response to this, China will sell even more of its reserves and so on. That is competitive currency appreciation.When faced with competitive currency appreciation, you do NOT want to be the world’s reserve currency. The dollar is likely to do very poorly as central banks liquidate trillions in US holdings to buy food and appreciate their currencies.

California Drought Breaks

You would think that by now, that our promoters of the sky is falling school of global warming debate would have learned to keep their heads down and to pack their enthusiasm with a surfeit of weasel words.

As my readers know, the twenty year warming system or climate trend that had plateaued for ten years, sharply reversed course last winter after blowing itself out in the Arctic during the summer of 2007. I know of no other way of describing the sequence of events.

Our northern climate is back to normal and possibly going below normal as we speak. What took twenty years of warming to establish disappeared in an eye blink. I am disappointed that I will not get to do a summer cruise through the Northwest Passage in a couple of years.

What bothers me is that the supporting evidence for sustained global warming disappeared eighteen months ago and the community has kept its mouth shut. Three years ago I pointed out that the sea ice decline was ready to accelerate. When it did I stated that the collapse would be largely complete by 2012 provided conditions remained the same. Yet when I saw a real temperature drop reported I retreated. That is how we are supposed to have the evidence interpreted.

Children, it has remained colder than normal and we can be sure that a major rebuild of the sea ice pack has taken place. Again we have silence and at best the rehashing of two year old news.

This all coincides with the retreat of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and that suggests that we have seen the last of global warming for this generation. If I were a climatologist with my reputation hung out to dry, I would be anticipating a return to colder wetter weather in most regions and a complete end of any indication of global warming anywhere while perhaps waiting for additional confirmation. I would not keep silent.

I will go further than that. The silence of the specialists has actually done the profession damage in terms of their credibility. You must move your interpretation to follow the data, unless your method is clearly proven to be faulty. Their silence now suggests that they are tongue tied.

I have been relying on simple principles of physics to come to grips with the data and it has not let me down by keeping me stuck holding a failed position. Perhaps our scientists have vacated their senses in favor of the magic black box of computer simulation. Perhaps they should take up computer science to clarify the limitations of their models.

The point that I am making today, is that like this article, more and more commentators are calling the bluff.

California Weather Exposes Fiction of Global Warming

Saturday, February 14, 2009 6:04 PM
By: Lowell Ponte

The Golden State could become a desert wasteland, with no more winter salad greens from its parched Central Valley or wines from its withered Napa-Sonoma vineyards, before this century ends unless America takes drastic steps to slow global warming, warned U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

“We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,” Chu told The Los Angeles Times, adding, “I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego could become sandstorm-blasted ghost towns, Chu seemed to be saying.

January had been unusually dry, the start of a third dry year in a row for California. But soon after Chu's interview, rain began falling. Rainstorm after rainstorm – an average of one every two days – rolled across and drenched much of the state. By Feb. 10, water-short San Diego had surged to 2 inches above its normal-to-date rainfall, and southland mountain ski lodges opened quickly.

This rain pattern continues, with huge storms expected to thicken the Northern Sierra snowpack that supplies much of California's water when it melts. The snowpack was only 61 percent of its usual thickness when Chu voiced concern about a drought.

The Chu Effect

“It's the Gore Effect,” says a laughing James Taylor, editor of the Heartland Institute think tank journal Environment & Climate News. “Almost every time global warming doomsayer Al Gore speaks or his movie is shown, unusual cold or blizzards happen. And now we have the Chu Effect. He warns of global warming-caused drought in California, and the heavens reply with almost nonstop rains. Maybe somebody up there is trying to tell us something.”

With little or no planetary warming since 1998, alarmists and climate opportunists point increasingly to brief regional droughts as second-hand evidence of global warming.

“It's amazing how many big-mouth global warming alarmists get media attention who were never trained as climatologists,” Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, tells Newsmax.

Chu is the latest example. He is a brilliant physicist who shared a 1997 Nobel Prize for his research into how to manipulate atoms with lasers. He has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley. But like most global warming doomsayers, Chu has no degree in atmospheric sciences, meteorology, or climatology.

Politicizing Science

Like many scientists eager to influence national policy, Chu became an outspoken activist in fields far from his expertise. He joined the Copenhagen Climate Council, a private collaboration between science and business to promote a 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital — and, it acknowledges, to use “emotional storytelling” about global warming.

Giving emotion more credence than concrete evidence worries other officials.

“I am hopeful Secretary Chu will take note of the real-world data, new studies, and the growing chorus of international scientists that question his climate claims,” says Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. “Computer model predictions of the year 2100 are simply not evidence of a looming climate catastrophe.”

Among Chu's fellow council members preaching politicized science are Thomas Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and Environment; doomsaying eccentric scientist and founder of Gaia theory James Lovelock; idealistic airline magnate and spaceflight privatizer Sir Richard Branson; and Copenhagen Climate Council President radical climate activist, author of “The Weather Changers;” and paleontologist Tim Flannery.

A few years ago, Chu was one of six Nobel laureate scientists (none climatologists) who posed sitting against a huge tree on the UC-Berkeley campus for a Vanity Fair photograph to show their concern about global warming.

To the consternation of some extreme leftists, Chu played a role in establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) at UC-Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the University of Illinois — a far-ranging $500 million project researching alternative fuels funded by BP, formerly British Petroleum, a multinational corporation.

EBI investigates ways to use grasses instead of corn to make biofuel ethanol more efficiently with less environmental and economic impact.
Chu Dislikes Nuclear Power, Coal

Chu has been reluctant to embrace nuclear power, even though it emits no greenhouse gases, out of concerns with its waste and proliferation safety. He also finds problems with clean coal technologies, even though America's huge reserves make it “the Saudi Arabia of coal” and offer a clear path to energy independence.

“Coal is my worst nightmare,” says Chu, who describes the typical coal plant's radioactive fly-ash pollution as giving off 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant.

As an adviser, Chu may have influenced candidate Barack Obama's Jan. 17, 2008, statement to the San Francisco Chronicle that he planned pollution taxes that would “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a coal-powered plant.

And Chu is an early signatory to Project Steve, which advocates the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Its name may have been chosen to mock Bible-believing proponents of Intelligent Design and traditional marriage by evoking their slogan “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

Will the West Run Dry?

“Is there more drought in America? Yes, but it has nothing to do with climate change,” University of Delaware and Delaware State Climatologist David Legates tells Newsmax.

“Averaged over wet and dry years, most places are getting roughly the same amount of precipitation they did in past decades,” Legates says. “Some recent regional dry spells appear to be caused by a Pacific Ocean cyclic phenomenon called La Niña. But because more people want and need water, we have demand-side 'drought.' ”

And Cato Institute environmental fellow Patrick Michaels tells Newsmax: “If anything, the 20th century was a bit wetter than average, and the Pacific Southwest continues to get slightly wetter.

“The latest research predicts that more global warming would make California drier in summer, when little or no rain falls anyway, but wetter in winter,” says Michaels, co-author of the 2009 book “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.”

“Surely humans could adapt to that, store increased winter precipitation, develop drought-resistant crops, import water from H2O-rich Canada, or desalinate sea water along California's 800 mile coastline on the Pacific Ocean,” he says.

“This doomsayer idea that Californians would be helpless and do nothing innovative to protect their cities and crops from drought is ridiculous and an insult to the human mind and spirit,” Michaels says.

“The Obama administration is top-loaded with global warming extremists,” Michaels tells Newsmax, “and we're all going to pay a price for that.”

Man-Made Water Shortage

California once supported only a few thousand Native Americans but today sustains more than

36 million people because people built dams to store and aqueducts to redistribute water.

San Diego, for example, gets 60 percent of its water from the Rocky Mountains, where this season's snowpack is heavier than average, via the Colorado River.

Los Angeles gets most of its water from Northern California. L.A.'s biggest threat of water shortage comes not from drought but from Federal District Court Judge Oliver Wanger.

On Sept. 1, 2007, this judge put strict limits on the pumping of water each December to June from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to protect a 3-inch-long endangered fish, the Delta Smelt. This ruling costs Southern California up to 30 percent of what used to be its California Aqueduct water each year. (President George H.W. Bush appointed Wanger a federal judge in 1991.)

Therefore, the global warming alarmists are strangely correct. Man causes much of the water shortage in large areas of California — and that man is a federal judge.

Climate Changing NOx

I am showing this item as a reminder of the not well known fact that huge amounts of methane and other gases are locked up in the permafrost and as usual much is made of the green house gas potential.

I have seen the methane factor beaten on before in regard to this same issue and again it is largely irrelevant.

Firstly CO2 is an end product of the carbon oxidation process and it is heavy enough to hang around looking for a plant to absorb it. It is a real possible factor to consider for greenhouse gas fame.

Methane however, puts on its rocket pack and heads straight for the troposphere, unless it happens to be oxidized into CO2 first. If there is ever an accumulation please do not light a match. Actual maps of land based methane show it disappearing downwind and offshore as it escapes to the troposphere.

And now someone wants to get excited over NO2. Firstly, there isn’t much of it and likely the frozen conditions helped in preserving it. If it does get free, it will immediately combine with any available water molecule and produce nitric acid and reduce something tougher. Recall that lightning produces millions of tons of this stuff to fertilize our fields. Perhaps we need to launch an initiative to stop lightning to prevent global warming.

I think they are finally running out of ideas.

And by the way, how do we know exactly how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean and how do we measure variability? This article suggests a degree of precision that seems to me to be plainly impossible.

Climate change: 'Feedback' triggers could amplify peril

by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) Feb 15, 2009

New studies have warned of triggers in the natural environment, including a greenhouse-gas timebomb in Siberia and Canada, that could viciously amplify global warming.

Thawing subarctic tundra could unleash billions of tonnes of gases that have been safely stored in frosty soil, while oceans and forests are becoming less able to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, according to papers presented this weekend.

Together, these phenomena mean that more heat-trapping gases will enter the atmosphere, which in turn will stoke global warming, thrusting the machinery of climate change into higher gear.

Researchers in Finland and Russia discovered that nitrous oxide is leaking into the air from so-called "peat circle" ecosystems found throughout the tundra, a vast expanse of territory in higher latitudes.

CO2 and methane account for the lion's share of the gases that have driven global temperatures inexorably higher over the last century.

Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is far less plentiful in volume, but 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. It accounts for about six percent of total global warming, mainly due to a shift toward chemical-intensive agriculture.

In experiments near the Russian city of Vorkuta, Pertti Martikainen of the University of Kuopio in Finland and colleagues found that N2O leaked as a result of cryoturbation, a process that occurs when frozen soil is thawed and then refreezes.

"There is evidence that warming of the Arctic will accelerate cryoturbation, which would lead to an increased abundance of peat circles in the future," said their paper, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"This would increase N20 emissions from tundra, and therefore a positive feedback to climate change."

Research presented Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago suggested that the frozen soil of the tundra stored far more greenhouse gas that previously thought.
"Melting permafrost is poised to be a strong foot on the accelerator pedal of atmospheric CO2," said Chris Field, a professor at Stanford and a top scientist on the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

"The new estimate of the total amount of carbon that's frozen in permafrost soils in on the order of 1,000 billion (one trillion) tonnes," he said.

By comparison, the amount of CO2 that has been released through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is around 350 billion tonnes.

The greenhouse gases in the tundra, which also includes methane, come from the decayed remains of vegetation that died long ago.

Meanwhile, new research on the Southern Ocean surrounded Antarctica suggest that the sea, a vital "carbon sink," is sucking up less CO2 than before.

Nicolas Metzl, a researcher at the French National Research Institute, said fierce winds -- aggravated by climate change and gaps in the ozone layer -- were churning the sea, which brought CO2 to the surface and released it into the air.

This adds to previous research that points to the sea's drooping effectiveness as a carbon sponge, he said.

"Today, human activity injects about 10 billion tonnes of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, compared to around six billion in the early 1990s," said Metzl.

"Before we had an ocean that captured some two billion tonnes -- about a third. Today we are below two billion tonnes," less than a fifth of the total, he added.

earlier related report

Climate change could be even worse than feared

It seems the dire warnings about future devastation sparked by global warming have not been dire enough, top climate scientists warned Saturday.
It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 percent of plant and animal species.

But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," said Chris Field, who was a coordinating lead author of the report.

"Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought."

Fresh data has shown that greenhouse gas emissions have grown by an average of 3.5 percent a year from 2000 to 2007, Field told reporters at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's "far more rapid than we expected" and more than three times the 0.9 growth rate in the 1990's, he said.

While increased economic activity could have contributed to the growth in emissions, Field said it appears as though the bulk of the growth is "because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal."

Further complicating the problem is that higher temperatures could thaw the Arctic tundra and ignite tropical forests, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.

That could raise temperatures even more and create "a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century."

"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.

The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution an estimated 350 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) have been released through the burning of fossil fuels.

The new estimate of the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic's permafrost soils is around 1,000 billion tonnes. And the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the globe.

Several recent climate models have estimated that the loss of tropical rainforests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 10 to 100 parts per million by the end of the century.

The current level is about 380 parts per million.

"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable," Field said. "You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires."

Recent studies have also shown that global warming is reducing the ocean's ability to absorb carbon by altering wind patterns in the Southern Ocean. Faster winds blow surface out of the way, causing water with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide to rise to the surface.

Sea levels are also rising faster than previously estimated as ocean temperatures warm and melting ice in mountain glaciers and at the poles flows into the ocean, warned Anny Cazenave, of France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales.

Fresh analysis using satellite imaging has shown that in the past 16 years, average sea levels have risen at a rate that is twice as fast as the last century: more than three millimeters a year.

Some regions have seen levels rise as much as one centimeter a year, Cazenave told reporters.

The expanding use of biofuels could also contribute to global warming because farmers are cutting down and burning down tropical forests to plant crops, said Holly Gibbs of Stanford University.

"If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks," she warned.

Global Seed Bank Rising

This is a welcome bit of news, not so much the establishment of the seed bank itself, but the expressed intent to establish a broad network of individual growers who can apply well established breeding protocols and act as conservators. The fact is that there are six guys working on yams. Would twenty or thirty be better? Of course. How about the multiple varieties of heirloom fruits and vegetables that needs to be actively worked with and conserved?

Today record keeping protocols are easily established and maintained. This should be taught and implemented in the high schools so as to prepare all future growers and develop the proper habits.

Every grower is interested in specialty test beds that can also lead to limited premium sales to a local informed food trade.

I will give you a simple example. There are dozens of potato varieties and we are now seeing some of them emerge out in the marketplace. They attract premium prices. This is an easily harnessed phenomenon. The tools all exist and the fields are all prepared and in place.

A grower can readily run dozens of separate beds of two rows each containing a specific variety in each bed. Any given bed can be long enough to contain a ton of end product that can be sold at several times the wholesale price for ordinary table potatoes. It merely takes a little extra attention and effort. This has obviously begun to happen and can be applied to everything else.

What is so helpful here is that the seed bank is the natural record keeper and central conservator that can support this huge largely volunteer effort.
Hoard of a Different Color

Doomsday seed vault's stores are growing

http://www.grist.org/news/2009/02/16/Norwegianseedbank/index.html?source=daily

Posted at 3:37 PM on 16 Feb 2009

CHICAGO -- The stores of seeds in a "doomsday" vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

"These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation," Fowler said. "You can't imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity."

That's because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said.

One recent study found that corn yields in Africa will fall by 30 percent by 2030 unless heat-resistant varieties are developed, Fowler noted.

"Evolution is in our control," he said in an interview. "It's in our seed bank. You take traits form different varieties and make new ones."

That process currently takes about 10 years. But Fowler said his organization is hoping to speed up the development of new varieties by cataloguing the genetic traits of the seeds that it stores.

Their gene bank -- dug into a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the Svalbard islands in the far north of Norway -- will be made public to help spur research, which Fowler says is woefully inadequate.

"Six people in the world are breeding bananas. Ditto for yams, a major crop in Africa," Fowler said ahead of a presentation Sunday to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fowler said the Global Crop Diversity Trust has agreements with 49 institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000 crop samples identified as endangered.Agreements for preserving the remaining varieties are expected to be completed soon.They include rare varieties of barley, wheat, rice, banana, plantain, potato, cassava, chickpea, maize, lentil, bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea, and yam.

The varieties most at risk are being stored in poorly funded seed banks in Africa and Asia where varieties are being lost due to inadequate refrigeration and the destruction of the facilities as a result of civil strife and natural disasters.

Researchers do not know how many varieties of crops have already been lost. But the industrialization of farming has had a major impact on crop diversity.

In 1903, U.S. farmers planted 578 varieties of beans. By 1983 just 32 varieties remained in seedbanks.

"When you lose one of these samples you're losing something you can't find in a farmer's field," Fowler said.

"We can't afford to lose this diversity when it's so easy and cheap to conserve it."

Two Impossible Phenomena

This month, I have been confronted with two impossible phenomena. The first impossible phenomenon was a theropod living in a swamp in Northern Australia with an existence probability greater than zero. It is a smaller version of tyrannosaurus rex but that possibly reflects only the fact that we are seeing juveniles and that given the chance and the years, a bigger version becomes possible because it likely keeps growing if the habitat allows it. Recall that its contemporaries do not obviously age out the way we do.

The second impossible phenomenon was that a skilled entomologist had picked up on the fact that biology is sensitive to gravity and biota can sense and manipulate material structures to beneficiate the effect. This led him to a real device that also manipulated gravity.

This last is rather good news. If it is possible to sense gravity, it is possible to manipulate gravity. There may be many years between the two events, as was very true for electricity whose discovery exited Benjamin Franklin and whose exploitation excited Tesla and Edison one century later. Today we think we understand it.

These impossibilities are straight out of bad science fiction, yet they must be considered. When you invoke biology, I am always receptive. The reason is that biology has discovered and exploited every law of nature and any we do not understand.

In fact, if a new phenomenon is ever presented, I want to see it show up biologically before I support it.

Both these phenomena will shake science up. And science is very much due for a firm kick in the pants. It has become far too easy to hide behind your specialty and maintain the pretense of having an important opinion on anything outside that specialty without bothering to do any of the basic homework.

I admit that it took my establishing a proper protocol and language for handling phenomena properly to loosen my own blinders. That makes it easy for me to perceive when researchers are out of line. That methodology is central to my book Paradigms shift which I will make available in eBook format shortly now that an effective system is up and running.

Snowball Earth Musings

A lot of this theoretical thinking is premature at best, but we have seen snowball earth and other models enthusiastically picked up on over the years.

A look at the various moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus promises no simple answer. Any early model of earth’s atmosphere must add in methane at least and a lot of it, all of which with carbon dioxide would have established a gaseous atmosphere with maximum greenhouse heat retention while sponging up the oxygen been produced by emerging life.

Yet I have seen little mention of methane in the literature. Since I am unaware of any Precambrian oil deposition, or coal deposition, this seems a bit curious because it begs the question of where might it be hiding besides the atmosphere?

The oceans produced oxygen and grabbed carbon from somewhere to sequester in the sediments. It is a pretty good bet that methane was a big atmospheric factor up to the point that life was able to leave the ocean and its final decline may in fact been the initiating event.

My point is simply that there is an incredible amount of carbon tied up in the sediments that has made it there solely as a result of biological processes. It was tied up in the form of CO2 and Methane at the beginning just like every other planet we are able to look at.

Unless I am missing something, most of it was accumulated post Precambrian when life was already established on land.

It may have been snowball earth, but the liquid ocean certainly existed and was slowly growing and brewing up the necessary changes that set the stage for life to transition onto land. It may have been associated with Deep Ocean and volcanism to begin with, because the early snowball earth must have comprised both ice and frozen methane as in the arctic permafrost. And as in Antarctica, regions would even have had frozen CO2.

In the end, life had to strip carbon and produce water from the mostly frozen gas mix from the very beginning and this process dominated until the methane and CO2 was almost fully reduced. This makes exploring similar planets very interesting.



Modern day scourge helped ancient Earth escape a deathly deep freeze

http://www.astrobiology.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=27242

The planet's present day greenhouse scourge, carbon dioxide, may have played a vital role in helping ancient Earth to escape from complete glaciation, say scientists in a paper published online today.

In their review for Nature Geoscience, UK scientists claim that the Earth never froze over completely during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago.

This is contrary to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, which envisages a fully frozen Earth that was locked in ice for many millions of years as a result of a runaway chain reaction that caused the planet to cool.

What enabled the Earth to escape from a complete freeze is not certain, but the UK scientists in their review point to recent research carried out at the University of Toronto. This speculates that the advancing ice was stalled by the interaction of the physical climate system and the carbon cycle of the ocean, with carbon dioxide playing a key role in insulating the planet.

The Toronto scientists say that as Earth's temperatures cooled, oxygen was drawn into the ocean, where it oxidized organic matter, releasing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The review's lead author, Professor Phillip Allen, from Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, says that something must have kept the planet's equatorial oceans from freezing over. He adds:

"In the climate change game, carbon dioxide can be both saint and sinner. These days we are so concerned about global warming and the harm that carbon dioxide is doing to our planet. However, approximately 600 million years ago, this greenhouse gas probably saved ancient Earth and its basic life forms from an icy extinction."

Professor Allen, whose previous research has found evidence demonstrating hot and cold cycles in the Cryogenian period, says a plethora of papers has been published and much debate has been devoted to the Snowball Earth theory since it was originally proposed. He says:

"Sedimentary rocks deposited during these cold intervals indicate that dynamic glaciers and ice streams continued to deliver large amounts of sediment to open oceans. This evidence contradicts the Snowball Earth theory, which suggests the oceans were frozen over. Yet, many scientists still believe Snowball Earth to be correct."

Professor Allen hopes his review in Nature will prompt climate modellers to realign their thinking about the Cryogenian period and review their models to reflect a warmer Earth during this time. He adds:

"There is so much about Earth's ancient past that we don't know enough about. So it is really important that climate modellers get their targets right. They need to build into their calculations a warmer planet, with open oceans, despite lower levels of solar radiation at this time. Otherwise, climate models about the Earth's distant past are aiming for a target that never existed."

Furan for Gasoline?

This first item led me to the related item regarding the work on furan as a fuel. It competes directly with gasoline and relies on cellulose as a feedstock without a painful side trip through a biological intermediary.

It is easy to understand what drives cellulose based biofuel research. There is plenty of it and by its very nature, only termites and odd single cell animals thrive on its food value. Converting waste cellulose to a fuel precursor is a very desirable outcome. That furan is a deliverable fuel with the comparable energy density of gasoline is a welcome option.

No one mentions that the process also produces other important chemicals besides HMF that also must be dealt with. However, been able to throw everything into the chipper and then into a batch brewing process delivering a sizable percentage of HMT is a rather good start. It is something that a farm can master. Even if the resultant fluid is not separated, it is shippable.

So we have a chemical processing protocol that delivers a working fuel and additional chemical feed stocks of significance by a different route than imagined by other efforts with cellulose.

As I have posted many times, we must vacate the oil patch for our transportation fuels. A number of sugar and starch sources can give us a lot of ethanol, but likely not enough to ever avoid rationing. The major byproduct of all these methods happens to be cellulose. Converting cellulose directly into HMF and then to furan is a major break in the right direction. We still will have other byproducts but these are marginal compared to sponging up the sugars and the cellulose.

Process turns raw biomass into biofuel

http://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/Process_turns_raw_biomass_into_biofuel_999.html

by Staff Writers
Madison, Wis. (UPI) Feb 12, 2009

U.S. biochemists say they have developed a two-step chemical process that can convert cellulose in raw biomass into promising biofuels.

University of Wisconsin researchers said the new process is unprecedented in its use of untreated, inedible biomass as the starting material. They said the key to the new process is the first step, in which cellulose is converted into the "platform" chemical 5-hydroxymethylfurfural from which a variety of valuable commodity chemicals can be made.

"Other groups have demonstrated some of the individual steps involved in converting biomass to HMF (5-hydroxymethylfurfural), starting with glucose or fructose," said Professor Ronald Raines, who led the study. "What we did was show how to do the whole process in one step, starting with biomass itself."

Raines and graduate student Joseph Binder said they developed a unique mix of solvents and additives -- for which a patent is pending -- that has an extraordinary capacity to dissolve cellulose. And since cellulose is one of the most abundant organic substances on the planet, it is widely seen as a promising alternative to fossil fuels.

The research is detailed in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
A search led to this article, not noted at the time because of the use of the feedstocks of glucose and fructose. Switching to cellulose changes all that.

Avantium Engine-Tests Furan-Based Biofuel

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/10/avantium-engine.html
26 October 2007

Avantium, which spun-off from Shell in 2000, successfully completed an engine test to demonstrate the potential of its furan-based biofuels, or “furanics.” Furanics are heteroaromatic compounds derived from the chemical intermediate HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural, C6H6O3).

The cost-effective development of HMF and its fuel and chemical derivatives from biomass is of increasing research interest (earlier post, earlier post), given that the resulting fuels have significant advantages over first-generation biofuels.

For example, 2,5-dimethylfuran, one of the HMF-derived fuels being researched by Professor James Dumesic at the University of Wisconsin, has around a 40% higher energy density than ethanol, a higher boiling point (by 20 K), and is not soluble in water. Ethoxymethylfurfural (EMF, one of Avantium’s furanics examples) has an energy density of 8.7 kWh/L—very close to that of regular gasoline (8.8 kWh/L), nearly as good diesel (9.7 kWh/L) and significantly higher than ethanol (6.1 kWh/L).

Avantium is focused on the development of second generation biofuels and catalytic processes for the efficient production of novel bio fuels and bio-based chemicals. (The company also has a major focus in the pharmaceutical industry.)

By using its catalytic process development platform, Avantium has been able to find new and improved catalytic routes to specific furanics. Specifically, Avantium developed a one-step method for obtaining HMF derivatives in high yields from very hexose or hexose-containing starting materials such as sucrose and glucose.

The engine test. The engine test was performed by Intertek, in Geleen, The Netherlands, an independent test center. Using a Citroën Berlingo with a regular diesel engine, Avantium tested a wide range of blends of Furanics with regular diesel. The test yielded what the company termed positive results for all blends tested. The engine ran smoothly for several hours. Exhaust analysis uncovered a significant reduction of soot (fine particulates). Furanics do not contain any sulfur.

The excellent results of the engine test support the proof of principle of our next generation biofuel, and is an essential milestone for our biofuels development program. The significant reduction of soot in the car exhaust is encouraging, as soot emissions are considered a major disadvantage of using diesel today, because of its adverse environmental and health effects. We are developing a next generation biofuel that has superior fuel properties and process economics compared to existing biofuels. The production process of Furanics has an excellent fit with existing chemical process technology and infrastructure. Ultimately our ambition is to develop biofuels that are competitive with fossil based fuels.

—Tom van Aken, Chief Executive Officer of Avantium

The company plans to undertake an additional, comprehensive engine tests in 2008 to study engine performance and long terms effects of Furanics. Commercialization will also require studies of toxicologic and environmental effects, such as emissions.

Avantium also announced the filing of over a dozen patent applications on the production and use of Furanics as part of the company’s strategy to build an extensive patent portfolio for its biofuels program. In September 2007, the first two key patents were published, that claim amongst others the use of furanics as a biofuel and its production routes from sugars.

US Bank Weakness

This is a creditable assessment of the total exposure of the financial system to the deflation that is taking place. The scope of the problem is working out to be well over one trillion dollars. If the problem is not tackled, the USA will have Zombie banks until it is resolved by the methods proposed here at the least. It may turn out to be twice that and the banks are not helping matters by keeping the grief to themselves.

If the problem is solved as suggested, then the banks will commence lending again and slowly they will start to come out of the present disaster.

My contention is that we can do a lot better than that. Setting a mark to market say today and implementing the half and half program that I have previously described will likely cost less than that proposed , while putting the property owners back in the game as good customers. This will have the effect of taking all the bad assets off the market and allow a nice bounce in the market if not a land rush to clean up all the impaired properties.

In the meantime you will find this to be a sober and clear report on the present situation. If it is not fixed, we will have a building downward pressure on asset prices that will continue until it becomes unbearable on asset prices and a reset takes place that puts all debt underwater.

Right now we have a balance in place between remaining credit and outstanding good debt. This is remaining stable for now.

I read recently that Japan tolerated 15 years of declining real estate prices before they cleaned up the zombie banks. We are entering perhaps year three or so. And the problem created here is every big as the Japanese disaster.

Remember folks, none of this is possible if financial disclosure became mandatory world wide. The system can be gamed only in secret, not with the other six billion stakeholders looking over your shoulder. This is a radical remedy, but I know no other way to circumvent human greed

Large U.S. banks on brink of insolvency, experts say

By Steve Lohr Published: February 13, 2009

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/13/business/insolvent.php

Some of the large banks in the United States, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.

A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today's marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks' assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent.

None of the experts' research focuses on individual banks, and there are certainly exceptions among the 50 largest banks in the country. Nor do consumers and businesses need to fret about their deposits, which are insured by the U.S. government. And even banks that might technically be insolvent can continue operating for a long time, and could recover their financial health when the economy improves.

But without a cure for the problem of bad assets, the credit crisis that is dragging down the economy will linger, as banks cannot resume the ample lending needed to restart the wheels of commerce. The answer, say the economists and experts, is a larger, more direct government role than in the Treasury Department's plan outlined this week.

The Treasury program leans heavily on a sketchy public-private investment fund to buy up the troubled mortgage-backed securities held by the banks. Instead, the experts say, the government needs to plunge in, weed out the weakest banks, pour capital into the surviving banks and sell off the bad assets.

It is the basic blueprint that has proved successful, they say, in resolving major financial crises in recent years. Such forceful action was belatedly adopted by the Japanese government from 2001 to 2003, by the Swedish government in 1992 and by Washington in 1987 to 1989 to overcome the savings and loan crisis.

"The historical record shows that you have to do it eventually," said Adam Posen, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Putting it off only brings more troubles and higher costs in the long run."

Of course, the Obama administration's stimulus plan could help to spur economic recovery in a timely manner and the value of the banks' assets could begin to rise.

Absent that, the prescription would not be easy or cheap. Estimates of the capital injection needed in the United States range to $1 trillion and beyond. By contrast, the commitment of taxpayer money is the $350 billion remaining in the financial bailout approved by Congress last fall.
Meanwhile, the loss estimates keep mounting.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, has been both pessimistic and prescient about the gathering credit problems. In a new report, Roubini estimates that total losses on loans by American financial firms and the fall in the market value of the assets they hold will reach $3.6 trillion, up from his previous estimate of $2 trillion.

Of the total, he calculates that American banks face half that risk, or $1.8 trillion, with the rest borne by other financial institutions in the United States and abroad.

"The United States banking system is effectively insolvent," Roubini said.
For its part, the banking industry bridles at such broad-brush analysis. The industry defines solvency bank by bank, and uses the value of a bank's assets as they are carried on its books rather than the market prices calculated by economists.

"Our analysis shows that the banks have varying degrees of solvency and does not reveal that any institution is insolvent," said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group whose members include the largest banks.

Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association, called claims of technical insolvency "speculation by people who have no specific knowledge of bank assets."

Roubini's numbers may be the highest, but many others share his rising sense of alarm. Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, estimates that the United States banks have a capital shortage of $500 billion. "In a more severe recession, it will take $1 trillion or so to properly capitalize the banks," said Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At the end of January, the IMF raised its estimate of the potential losses from loans and other credit securities originated in the United States to $2.2 trillion, up from $1.4 trillion last October. Over the next two years, the IMF estimated, United States and European banks would need at least $500 billion in new capital, a figure more conservative than those of many economists.

Still, these numbers are all based on estimates of the value of complex mortgage-backed securities in a very uncertain economy. "At this moment, the liabilities they have far exceed their assets," said Posen of the Peterson institute. "They are insolvent."

Yet, as Posen and other economists note, there are crucial issues of timing and market psychology that surround the discussion of bank solvency. If one assumes that current conditions reflect a temporary panic, then the value of the banks' distressed assets could well recover over time. If not, many banks may be permanently impaired.

"We won't know what the losses are on these mortgage-backed securities, and we won't until the housing market stabilizes," said Richard Portes, an economist at the London Business School.

Raghuram Rajan, a professor of finance and an economist at the University of Chicago graduate business school, draws the distinction between "liquidation values" and those of calmer times, or "going concern values." In a troubled time for banks, Rajan said, analysts are constantly scrutinizing current and potential losses at the banks, but that is not the norm.

"If they had to sell these securities today, the losses would be far beyond their capital at this point," he said. "But if the prices of these assets will recover over the next year or so, if they don't have to sell at distress prices, the banks could have a new lease on life by giving them some time."

That sort of breathing room is known as regulatory forbearance, essentially a bet by regulators that time will help heal banking troubles. It has worked before.

In the 1980s, during the height of the Latin American debt crisis, the total risk to the nine money-center banks in New York was estimated at more than three times the capital of those banks. The regulators, analysts say, did not force the banks to value those loans at the fire-sale prices of the moment, helping to avert a disaster in the banking system.

In the current crisis, experts warn, banks need to get rid of bad assets quickly. The Treasury's public-private investment fund is an effort to do that.

But many economists and other finance experts say that the government may soon have to move in and take on troubled assets itself to resolve the credit crisis. Then, they say, the government could have the patience to wait for the economy to improve.

Initially, that would put more taxpayer money on the line, but in the end it might reduce overall losses. That is what happened during the savings and loan crisis, when the troubled assets, mostly real estate, were seized by the Resolution Trust Corporation, a government-owned asset management company, and sold over a few years.

The eventual losses, an estimated $130 billion, were far less than if the hotels, office buildings and residential developments had been sold immediately.

"The taxpayer money would be used to acquire assets, and behind most of those securities are mortgages, houses, and we know they are not worthless," Portes said.

Eric Dash contributed reporting.

GM Considering Chapter 11

I consider this to be unfortunately, inevitable. The union cannot back off decades of worker entitlement, and they cannot protect their workers from direct competition in the same state. GM has tolerated this conflict because we have had a health product market for twenty five years and this allowed them to pass on the costs. It also allowed their competitors to build up massive new capacity in their North American markets.

It is time to pay. GM is down sizing right where they are no longer competitive. Chapter 11 will break all those contracts and refinance the industry. GM will emerge intact with the same cost structure as Toyota down the street. And if no one likes it, it is too bad. Remember the bad old days at British Leyland. The cleanup was ugly, but it saved the industry in the end.

There is a global price to pay for a service, just like there is a global price to pay for a commodity. Juicing it up sooner or later opens the door for your competition to wreck your margins. Union leaders cannot afford to admit this, so they always run out the clock.

GM considering Chapter 11 filing, new company: report

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?EdNo=001&At=045691

Sat Feb 14, 2009 4:03pm EST

CHICAGO (Reuters) - General Motors Corp, nearing a Tuesday deadline to present a viability plan to the U.S. government, is considering as one option a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that would create a new company, the Wall Street Journal said in its Saturday edition.

"One plan includes a Chapter 11 filing that would assemble all of GM's viable assets, including some U.S. brands and international operations, into a new company," the newspaper said. "The undesirable assets would be liquidated or sold under protection of a bankruptcy court. Contracts with bondholders, unions, dealers and suppliers would also be reworked."
Citing "people familiar with the matter," the story said that GM could also ask for additional government funds to stave off a bankruptcy filing.

GM declined to comment, the story said.

General Motors and Chrysler LLC face a Tuesday deadline to file restructuring plans to the government in exchange for receiving $17.4 billion in federal loans.

Automakers have struggled as U.S. auto sales have tumbled amid a recessionary economy. U.S. auto sales in January tumbled to a 27-year low.

GM has been in talks with bondholders and the United Auto Workers union to get an agreement on a restructuring that would wipe out about $28 billion in debt for the auto maker, sources have told Reuters. However, it appears unlikely a deal could be reached by the Tuesday deadline, they said.

GM has already announced plans to cut 10,000 salaried workers worldwide, or 14 percent of its staff, impose pay cuts for most remaining white-collar U.S. workers and has offered buyouts to its 62,000 U.S. workers represented by the UAW.

In addition, it is trying to sell its Hummer SUV and Swedish Saab brands and is reviewing the status of its Saturn brand.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Searching for Tyrannosaurus Rex

The possibility of a living theropod in Arnhem land in northern Australia is almost too good to be true, but the more I check out the little that is known the more certain that we need to take this report very seriously.

First of I sourced Google maps to take a satellite look at Arnhem Land. Reports suggest that the animal ranges throughout the region and even much farther afield. However, our conjecture regarding its primary prey tells us to look for a large riverine wetland that could be suitable for primary refugia.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=-12.634978,134.3573&spn=3.933608,6.855469&t=h&z=8

The absolute last thing I expected to find was an Everglades like swamp, but it is there. I also found plenty of river valleys holding crocodile habitats. Take a look at it. This is straight out of Conan Doyle’s Lost world. It is big enough and it is wet enough and it has obviously been able to stay that way for millions of years. Until the sea level overran the coastal plains about 10,000 years ago, it was part of a large tropical ecosystem that clearly is connected in time to the cretaceous. This is one of its last surviving remnants.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=-12.476805,135.09407&spn=0.492094,0.856934&t=h&z=11

This is the item out of wikipedia

Arafura Swamp

The Arafura Swamp is a large inland freshwater wetland in Arnhem Land, in the Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is a near pristine floodplain with an area of 700 km2 that may expand to 1300 km2 by the end of the wet season, making it the largest wooded swamp in the Northern Territory and, possibly, in Australia. It has a strong seasonal variation in depth of water. The area is of great cultural significance to the Yolngu people, in particular the Ramingining community. It was the filming location for the film Ten Canoes

Geography and climate

The Arafura Swamp is a large and irregular floodplain surrounded by a low plateau 60–100 m in height, with prominent scarps to the east and west. The eastern scarp contains the Arafura Jungles site. It is laced with drainage channels and billabongs and forms a major flood-control and sedimentation basin for the Goyder-Glyde river system, with the main inflow coming from the Goyder and Gulbuwangay Rivers in the south, and with discharge northwards through the Glyde River into the Arafura Sea. It has a monsoonal tropical savanna climate with a mean annual rainfall of over 1000 mm, falling mostly from December to April. In dry years much of the swamp lacks free standing water during the dry season. The average annual increase in water depth over the wet season is nearly two metres, with refilling starting in January and reaching its greatest depth in April.

Flora and fauna

The Arafura Swamp contains 25 distinct plant communities, with over 100 species of grasses, herbs, aquatics, sedges and trees recorded. Most of the swamp is covered by low forest and woodland over grassland, with the dominant tree species being the paperbarks Melaleuca cajuputi and Melaleuca leucadendra.

The swamp is a major breeding area for Magpie Geese. Other abundant waterbirds include Wandering Whistling Ducks, Pacific Black Ducks and Green Pygmy Geese. There are breeding colonies of Royal Spoonbills, Little Pied and Little Black Cormorants, and Darters. Land adjacent to the swamp supports one of the largest breeding populations of the Hooded Parrot outside the Katherine area.

Large numbers of fruit bats feed and roost in the extensive paperbark forests. The Threadfin Rainbowfish, once known only from New Guinea and the Cape York Peninsula, has been discovered in the swamp. It is also an important breeding site for Freshwater and Saltwater Crocodiles.

Cultural use

Aboriginal people from the Ramingining community use the swamp for fishing, hunting and gathering, including harvesting the eggs of geese and crocodiles. The margins of the swamp are used for grazing livestock. The swamp is one of very few tropical wetlands in Australia continuing to be managed by Aboriginal people using traditional land management practices, including formal burning regimes. Traditional use of the swamp was studied by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s.

Much of the 2006 film Ten Canoes was filmed on location in the swamp with many of the actors deriving from the local community and speaking in Yolŋu Matha.

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Here we are. We have a perfectly good swamp with an excellent supply of crocodiles for food. The range is ample enough to maintain a healthy breeding population. This story actually has an embarrassment of riches. I never expected to have a bona fide target area that was a gimme.

The animal is also clearly nocturnal, or he would have been encountered many times before now. This is surely a response to high daytime temperatures which makes the animal sluggish. It has a lot of meat in its lower body which surely assists it in moving around the swamp. However it is hardly fast moving and likely chooses to surprise prey. That means that it takes advantage of cover.

Reported kills of cattle and kangaroos would be opportunity kills. Its preferred target is still any of the thousands of crocodiles available who can be taken by the simple expedient of jumping on the croc’s back and tearing of its head.

It would be amusing it these animals are available to reintroduce to the croc infested waters of Africa, the Everglades and the Amazon. We would have to be very comfortable in their husbandry before we pursued that, but why not? These are important wetlands that are amenable to agricultural development and the infestation of crocs and alligators are a serious liability. The question of course is whether a theropod is even more of a liability.

I also wonder if what we view as a smaller version of Tyrannosaurus Rex is only the juvenile form of same. The reason that I ask that is that these dawn reptile families have shown amazing stability against speciation over millions of years. The croc is an excellent example of just that. Of course, I may be wrong, but these creatures have occupied a very specific tropical niche from the very beginning and they would be indistinguishable from their early members.

What this all means is that a proper effort needs to be mounted to this particular swamp and its environs. A careful biological inventory needs to be conducted and capture techniques need to be employed. I can think of several viable capture options to pursue and would expect success. The effort would need to be supported over a full year and include the filming of a documentary. This is fully justified because this is likely as close to a snapshot of the Cretaceous as we can clearly define on Earth. And yes, I would love to take on this project.

That is another reason to think about establishing additional refuges for the biome.

Narwhal Migration

This is a neat item from England and gives us more insight into the life cycle of the Narwhal. This is one of those iconic creatures of the far north like the polar bear that by and large has been fairly unaffected by human encroachment. More likely they have been helped by human hunting of their competition.

What is interesting is their ability to migrate through the ice in the face of the obvious and apparent dangers. They pull it off year after year.

The Arctic is a harsh environment but is a lot less fragile than some let on.

In fact, the waters are teeming with sea life on a scale with the crest of the oceans. The barrenness of the land is that of the desert that it is. I do not have to go to the Arctic to locate such deserts.

Until the globe warms up to the top end of the Holocene temperature range and stabilizes there with only modest variation, the arctic will hang on to its summer ice pack. This does not need to be and will change once we reforest the Sahara back to conditions prevalent during the Bronze Age.
Narwhals filmed for first time on migration

Narwhals, known as ice unicorns for their long tusks, have been filmed for the first time as they make their treacherous migrating along the cracks in the Arctic sea ice.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4547325/Narwhals-filmed-for-first-time-on-migration.html

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 9:13PM GMT 07 Feb 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01291/narwhales_1291644c.jpg

The treacherous journeys made by narwhals have been witnessed for the first time Photo: PAUL NICKLEN/BBC

These unusual whales are rarely glimpsed in the fleeting moments they break through the ice that covers their underwater world.

But spectacular aerial footage captured by the BBC shows how the gruops of narwhal, with tusks up to eight feet long, crowd their way through narrow gaps between the ice sheets as they attempt a dangerous spring migration in the search for food.

It comes as new research is also revealing how these rare and strange-looking mammals are under threat from changing conditions in the Arctic.

Scientists studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic have concluded that narwhals are even more vulnerable than polar bears, which rely upon the ice to hunt. They claim that without the ice to shelter them, narwhals will become more vulnerable to predators and competition from other whales.

"Narwhal need predictable conditions so they can time their migration right and get to their food sources at the right time," added Dr Kristen Laidre, a polar biologist who is carrying out the research on narwhal at University of Washington. "They are really very specialised animals that have adapted to live amid the ice, so if the ecology of the Arctic changes then it can impact on the whole food chain.

"The areas they are found are extremely remote, so they are difficult to study. We still don't know how they manage to find open water within the ice. Each year the ice breaks up in different ways, but they time their migration at the right moment."

The narwhals, which feature in the first programme of the BBC's latest natural history series Nature's Great Events, were filmed during their annual migration north from the west coast of Greenland to their summer feeding grounds in the fjords and bays beyond Lancaster Sound.

They form the vanguard of animals to migrate north as rising spring temperatures and winds start to break up the vast stretches of sea ice that form in the Arctic Circle during the freezing winter months.

The film captures the thousands of narwhals as they make the annual trip along thin channels in the ice in the ice in groups of 20 or 30, all swimming in perfect unison as they surface for air.

Occasionally channels close up and the narwhals have to swim to find openings in the ice further along their route or they will drown. The animals can also become trapped if the ice sheets close up above them and the narwhals have to break through thin sections of the ice in order to breathe.

To get the footage film crews had to travel 30 miles out on the sea ice while it was starting to break up.

Justin Anderson, producer of the programme that follows the springtime melting of the Arctic ice sheets, said it took three weeks before they found the elusive whales.

He said: "The location is very remote and the ice was breaking up all the time around the film crew.

"When you see them, it is hard to believe they are real – they seem almost mystical as if they have come straight from some kind of fantasy world."

Narwhal tusks are thought to be the inspiration for the legend of unicorns and they can fetch thousands of pounds. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have paid a fortune for a narwhal tusk which she used as a sceptre.

Only male narwhals have tusks and they were originally thought to be used in "fencing" as males competed for mates. Recent research, however, has suggested the tusks could also act as some sort of super-sensory organ that allows them to detect changes in water temperature and salinity.

Nature's Great Events follows six periods of dramatic seasonal change in different parts of the world, including the salmon run in north America, flooding on the Kalahari and shoals of sardines up to 15 miles long migrating off the coast of South Africa.

In one heart-rending scene, a pride of hungry lions in Africa's Kalahari attack and kill a baby elephant in broad daylight. Such behaviour is considered to be extremely rare and it is the first time such an attack has been filmed.

Although lions are known to attack elephants, they usually do it under cover of darkness when the elephants are unable to see. It is thought that some prides are adapting to increasingly difficult conditions in their habitats to hunt bigger and more difficult prey.

Chris Carbone, a carnivore ecologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: "Lions do occasionally hunt really big prey that weigh up to one tonne, but that is pretty unsusual. They usually stick to zebra and wilderbeast that can weigh up to 200kg. With a social species like elephant, the adults will try to protect the young so it is a big risk. But lions are very adaptable and there are lions that specialise in hunting giraffe."

Nature's Great Events will begin on Wednesday 11 February on BBC One at 9pm.

Narwhal Facts

Weight: up to 3,500lbs

Length: up to 15.5 feet

Ivory tusk: Actually a left front tooth that grows to 8ft

Population: up to 80,000

Dive more than 3,000 feet

Feed on arctic cod and squid

Related to other toothed whales such as orca and sperm whales

Economy Turning

For the past several months, all eyes have been focused on the money printing machine put in motion to salvage the financial credit system. Lots of drama and a lively debate over solutions, but they will grind themselves out the hard way unless congress et al are able to accelerate the healing process. Right now all assets are repriced. The prices are at a level that an intelligent buyer will buy.

More importantly, the lenders are frozen in terms of their liquidation options. They have discovered that when there are no bidders, you are not going to sell at all. Just as the advent of oil at $150 brought the economy to a screeching halt this past summer, present real estate prices have made it impossible for the lenders to liquidate.

So perhaps doing nothing right now is an excellent option. We sure know that they will all be a lot more realistic next year at this time.

In the meantime, what else has happened? The real global economy slammed on the brakes and shook off excess use of credit and inventory. All commodity prices have collapsed back to painful levels, including that of oil. Surplus inventories and capacity has now built up so we have ample reserves to supply the global recovery.

Global trade has dropped over 15% since September and dropped another 5%, this month, but then reorders must begin to kick in about now and the numbers will be trending upward in the spring. Expect a broad recovery to be fully underway this fall and winter and a recovery to prior levels as early as late 2010.

Capital spending will be led by energy investment as the world now understands that $150 oil is not an option.

Also the American automotive industry needs a trip through chapter 11 to shake off contracts that have made it non competitive even in the USA.

Personally, I have no clue what the stimulus boys think that they are going to accomplish with their money. If they actually can fix the financial system, that will be wonderful. I have already said what needs to be done to bounce out of this rat hole. So far they are on the road to attempt to restore the original bubble. It simply cannot be done because no one is going to buy stupid paper from America anymore. You only get one bite at that particular apple.

The key point that we can make is that the global economy is getting over its funk and finding that they are still in business, and there is still so much real liquidity around that business at least will get financed. I expect all surplus inventories except housing to be cleaned up by the end of the year and everything to be functioning normally if a little less flambouyantly.

Ancient Manioc Husbandry

Finding this item from 2007 gives us an important snapshot of a key crop in the American tropics and informs us that key crops easily moved between the Amazon and Central America as one would reasonably expect but was disputed because of a lack of evidence. The existence of a properly laid out Manioc planting bed whose human component is utterly beyond any reasonable dispute assures us that Manioc culture was a certain staple throughout Central America as well as South America.

It also helps to explain the economic viability of the ditch and bank agriculture that supported the Maya. Manioc is a huge producer of starch on a per foot basis and rotated with the three sisters and the use of ditch mud as fertilizer we have an extremely productive and secure food system fully justifying the implied labour.

The lack of draft animals forced the Indians to become hyper efficient in the use of their backs and these growing methods including the planting beds found by the archeologists tell us this.

I am actually surprised that the use of manioc was not uncovered with routine pollen analysis long since, but that may well be shrouded in the archeological record with conflicting evidence.

First Ancient Manioc Fields In Americas Discovered

ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2007) — A University of Colorado at Boulder team excavating an ancient Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has discovered an ancient field of manioc, the first evidence for cultivation of the calorie-rich tuber in the New World.

The manioc field was discovered under roughly 10 feet of ash, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets, who has been directing the excavation of the ancient village of Ceren since its discovery in 1978. Considered the best-preserved ancient village in Latin America, Ceren's buildings, artifacts and landscape were frozen in time by the sudden eruption of the nearby Loma Caldera volcano about 600 A.D., providing a unique window on the everyday lives of prehistoric Mayan farmers.

The discovery marks the first time manioc cultivation has been discovered at an archaeological site anywhere in the Americas, said Sheets. The National Geographic Society funded the 2007 CU-Boulder research effort at Ceren, the most recent of five research grants made by NGS to the ongoing excavations by Sheets and his students.

"We have long wondered what else the prehistoric Mayan people were growing and eating besides corn and beans, so finding this field was a jackpot of sorts for us," he said. "Manioc's extraordinary productivity may help explain how the Classic Maya at huge sites like Tikal in Guatemala and Copan in Honduras supported such dense populations."
In June, the researchers used ground-penetrating radar, drill cores and test pits to pinpoint and uncover several large, parallel planting beds separated by walkways, said Sheets. Ash