by Judith Curry
Global warming in the coming years will foster trauma, depression, violence, alienation, substance abuse, suicide, psychotic episodes, post traumatic stress disorder and many other mental health-related conditions.
The National Wildlife Federation has a new report out entitled ‘The Psychological Effect of Global Warming on the United States‘, with subtitle And Why The U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.
The Report was generated from a Workshop convened on this topic. From the Preface:
Having the reality of the destructive forces presented by climate change fully register with people, so they will to act with the needed urgency, is indeed a challenge. And, while the physical and environmental effects of global warming are studied and described, what has rarely been addressed, and is as compelling a topic as any, are the psychological impacts.
This report aims both to fill in the gap in our awareness of the psychological impacts of climate change, and by exposing the emotional side of the issue, to find the place in our hearts that mobilizes us to fly into action, forewarned, determined, relentless. It also is a call for professionals in the mental health fields to focus on this, the social justice issue of all times, with their capacity to work through denial and apathy, to bring insight and commitment before it is too late.
The language of science is, admittedly, not a stirring call to action. Scientists are by nature cautious, and restrained. While this report does not aim to present the forum participants as flame throwers, for this work to accomplish a primary goal, the reader will need to feel something in reading it. The language used here, and some of the questions asked, may feel uncomfortably probing, as they pierce our armor. After all, most of us want to be patriotic, to be optimist about the future. But we need to fully confront certain realities.
If we continue the adolescent-like disregard for the dangers we are being warned of, driving green house gasses up with only casual concern, there will be consequences. As our world begins to unravel and our role is undeniable, all eyes will be on us.
From the Executive Summary:
In November of 2011, the U.N. sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed this in a report entitled: Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. The report finds that changes in weather, due to climate warming, will be felt everywhere in the world. The physical and economic destruction surely boggles the mind but what is not being addressed are the human psychological consequences of all this devastation.
To begin with, the incidences of mental and social disorders will rise steeply. These will include depressive and anxiety disorders, post traumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, suicides, and widespread outbreaks of violence. Children, the poor, the elderly, and those with existing mental health disorders are especially vulnerable and will be hardest hit. At roughly 150 million people, these groups represent about one half of the American public.
The American mental health community, counselors, trauma specialists and first responders are not even close to being prepared to handle scale and intensity of impacts that will arise from the harsher conditions and disasters that global warming will unleash. It is not that we haven’t experienced natural disasters before, but the scientific data show that what lies ahead will be bigger, more frequent, and more extreme than we have ever known.
There are even broader implications, many of them beyond our shores. As climate related disasters and burdens spread across the world, the U.S. military will increasingly be called upon to help keep order. Service members will be faced with stressful, even horrifying conditions. They will see people – the young, the old, the innocent – suffer terribly. Back home their families will experience the ripple effects, suffering vicariously and experiencing their own disruptions in finances, relationships and child-rearing. There will be the disorders from the immediate trauma, and in some cases chronic psychological disorders will follow.
Another major problem for the military is a high rate of active service member suicide. Even though the numbers have recently declined after reaching a high of nearly double the rate of the civilian population, the problem persists. While suicide is the result of many complex factors, the linkage to global warming with respect to military personnel must be acknowledged. Burning fossil fuels for energy means depending on foreign areas where those supplies are most abundant. To the U.S. military this can mean sending young people into battle to protect our energy sources or to calm related unrest. Our service members will recognize that their own lives and limbs were sacrificed even though alternate renewable sources of energy could be more available. Our national need to put these young people in harm’s way would also decline if we were simply more energy efficient. How will we answer these service members’ questions about why we didn’t work harder at fixing this problem?
Moreover, the United States is increasingly disliked, worldwide, as a global warming villain. Though representing less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. emits about 25 percent of the world’s green house gasses. As the link between climate disasters in other countries and the production of green house gases in the U.S. becomes clearer, Americans will be blamed for inflicting harm on other countries. Critics may point to emissions from China (now surpassing the U.S.) and India as reasons why the U.S. can “share the blame” but our per capita emissions are second to none. Alarmingly, our perceived indifference is already the subject of rallying cries against us. It is used by leaders of terrorist groups, for example, as a tool to recruit new members. The President of one African country hit hard by drought linked to climate change addressed countries emitting high levels of green house gases: “We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming.” The President of Bolivia, faced with unprecedented flooding from heavy rains, threatened to sue the U.S. in international court.
JC comment: Well, I have identified one case where there has been adverse psychological impact of global warming: Greg Craven. Although in this particular instance the “peril” comes from alarmism itself.
Utter nonsense.
Manipulation of data and outright deception by government-financed science since 6 Aug 1945 have utterly destroyed confidence in world leaders, leaders of the scientific community, once-reputable research journals and produced the present constitutional crisis!
See http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/12/the-ongoing-debate/ and the comments of former Senator and NASA Astronaut, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt: http://americasuncommonsense.com/
Loss of contact with reality: The basis of mental illness
When faced with the “nuclear fires” that consumed Hiroshima on 6 Aug 1945, world leaders lost contact with Reality – the Creator, Destroyer, and Sustainer of Life (God).
Driven by fear and the instinct of survival,
1. United Nations charter was established, 24 Oct 1945
2. Information on “nuclear fires” is obscured after 1945
3. The Sun’s internal composition was changed in 1946
4. 1969 Apollo lunar sample data started to expose this
5. The Apollo program was officially ended in Jan 1972
6. Continued lunar analysis confirmed Iron Sun in 1983
7. Data from 1995 Galileo probe of Jupiter first hidden
8. Jupiter data released in 1998 confirmed Fe-rich Sun
9. Climategate emails/documents expose fraud in 2009
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/12/the-ongoing-debate/#comment-192125
Solution: Re-establish personal contact with Reality.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
Yep, it has already started in the Keys :)
Drier, sunnier winters here in the Pacific NW? Sign me up!
You and me both.
This weekend was the first I was able to get any yard work in.
Yah, pretty funny, until one remembers that these people aren’t kidding. And let’s not forget their are those who wish to pathologize…and treat…climate change denial. Sorry, but I’m just not laughing.
Indeed, this is a mainstream group and a significant number of people think this way. The political struggle is far from over. It may always be with us. But then, laughter is the best medicine.
Mood dependent with me, David. So many ups and downs. We see the debate opening up at last, and one can almost feel euphoric as with the NASA letter… then the next day see that nothing’s really changed. The realization that we’re still in the beginning stages of winning this thing can be damn depressing at time.
I share your concerns, pokerguy, but know that Big Brother is totally powerless over the Great Reality that surrounds and sustains us:
1. Life is a Natural process on some of the stellar debris that contains liquid water and orbits at proper distance from the remnant pulsar that remains after ejecting stellar debris.
2. Neutron repulsion – in cores of heavy atoms, some planets, ordinary Sun-like stars, and galaxies – is the energy source that powers the Sun, the cosmos, sustains our lives, and exerts primary control over Earth’s climate.
3. The Universe is expanding now because neutrons in the cores of heavy atoms, some planets, ordinary Sun-like stars, and galaxies are becoming interstellar atoms, with a net volume change per particle of ~10^39: V(final)/V(initial) is about
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
4. We were endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights – “incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.”
5. Big Brother cannot control unalienable rights of citizens or neutrons.
A synopsis of our current problems and one viable solution are here: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Synonyms: Great Reality, Universe, Creator
Action verbs: Natural process, Life, Evolution
Being ignored doesn’t discourage you much, does it?
Says WHO?
http://www.naturalnews.com/035585_Michigan_farms_raids.html
Do you think this stuff is funny too?
Indeed, a merry heart doeth good, like a medicine.
Hansen’s multidisciplinary team of scholars,…
http://hongpong.com/archives/2012/04/12/meet-new-boss-town-ice-spawns-hsi-homeland-security-investigations-great-justice
& their police force, need to ‘keep on truckin’. It’s for our kids. Remember.
From Hansen’s multidisciplinary team of scholars, we read in The Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature (2012):
It is true that the children are hearing this scare mongering. The real scientific question is then how much is this hysteria traumatizing them? Are Hansen & Co (hence NASA) creating a future fearing generation?
Yes. Re-read 1984 and see the type of society established by mentally-ill rulers:
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
Human life is flowering today because human life fits Reality! For humans at this stage of evolution, the Great Reality, Universe, Creator, God is benevolent.
Not so for the dinosaurs! Henry Kissinger, Al Gore, and James Hanson should use their talents to save the dinosaurs. Having convinced us mere mortals of their leadership skills, we might then be more willing to give up our unalienable rights as humans and trust ourselves to them. UNtil then, . . . .
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Alternatively, David, it is possible that the discovery that a fabricated, doom-filled, future does not come to pass may itself be a hopeful and freeing enlightenment. People learn from errors, and we’ll learn from this one.
============
Let’s Hope.
We can’t help it, either the hoping or the learning.
============
“We’ll learn from this one”
*We* might, but the modern-day Goebbelses (Hansen and all the alarmists) will just carry on with more of the same propaganda, because they’ll keep getting money from the state to boost the fortunes of the state.
No doubt we will, but science is likely to take a hit in the process. My teacher lied to me is not a good lesson.
This whole thing reminds me of that sage advice:
‘When in trouble, or in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout!’
Maybe a generation’s worth of sense. All we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.
It is a good paper if you wish to read alarmist dribble. It would be equally possible to exchange “AGW” with almost any other issue or concern and get a similar effect.
Hansen like to state that “HE KNOWS” what the future the future conditions will be although in fact he using forecasting methods whith huge margins of error to hind the truth- he doesn’t
You should familiarize yourself with Orwell’s writings and in particular 1984. It is eery to see how both Hansen’s and the NWF’s “reasoning” fit the bill.
So how do we mentally cope with seasonal weather changes? Or a move from Green Bay to Phoenix?
http://pindanpost.com/2012/04/13/moving-to-the-tropics-more-heat-wanted/
It also is a call for professionals in the mental health fields to focus on this, the social justice issue of all times, with their capacity to work through denial and apathy, to bring insight and commitment before it is too late.
Oh come on, social justice issue of all times? You have to laugh. Split seconds of thought come up with worse social justice issues. How about slavery? Let’s see in addition to the enslaved injustices, it caused a civil war in the US that killed just about as many people as in all the other wars combined.
This could only have been written by someone who has led a very sheltered life.
Dr. Curry,
Don’t forget the moral corrosion AGW has caused in so many, not only Craven but Gleick and those who ahve sought to rationalize what he did as no big deal. Then there is the mental confusion of those who rely on conspiracies, support breaking the law (like Hansen), who confuse climate policy with a need to end democracy, etc. So yes, AGW does cause mental illness. In its true believers.
I think we’ve seem some of the psychological effects already – just look at the Sky Dragons. What’s that if it’s not psychological?
And outbreaks of mass (well, biggish) internet hysteria – AGW is a scam to install one-world government!. etc etc.
And climategate, Gleick, the 10:10 video, conspiracy delusions, etc. etc. etc. all reflect great mental health of believers?
Ha, love it, but you’re 13 days late with this post, no?
These folks need to switch their meds, on the other hand, maybe we shoud just let them wander around and blather, as long as they don’t hurt themselves or others :)
Which is the worse: The psychological effects of global warming, the psychological effects of global cooling, or the psychological effects of global cooling when the mass of the population has been propagandized into accepting guilt for global warming and have pawned their grandchildren’s future in a vain and unnecessary attempt to halt it.
============================
kim | April 13, 2012 at 10:15 pm |
Mental health is not the mass of reeds to be wandering into singing hey nonnie nonnie while collecting pretty garlands.
Three headed dogs howl through the reeds on the banks of the Big Muddy.
========
http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/stranger-than-fiction/head-transplant.html
‘It’s impossible to reconnect nerve threads once they’ve been broken’. For now, son. But you can hope.
===========
We should consider any apocalyptic thinking from the green religion as a sign of mental illness. If we put the people responsible for promoting this hysteria in asylums, the mental health of the rest of society would improve.
I see a lot of Flat Earth people around me still. Oh well.
Ok, there is little doubt that major natural events create a lot of problems for people, and a lot of people have trouble dealing with it. The side issues, like banks and insurance companies who still keep sending bills long after your house has washed away/blown away/blown up/burnt down … just adds to the trauma. So yes, people will suffer, in direct proportion the increasingly violent weather patterns as the global system changes.
As for ‘blaming’ people/governments/military for exacerbating the problem, well that’s human nature. Someone must be to blame.
And renewable energy? No one has found anything even remotely viable yet. Keep looking huh.
Robert C,
Please explain where the weather is getting more violent and extreme.
TIA,
hunter
The official numbers for world-wide crude oil production are available for 2011.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=57&aid=1&cid=regions&syid=2007&eyid=2011&unit=TBPD
Once again crude oil is flat as production sits on a plateau, not close to growing for the last 8 years. That essentially explains the stagnant world economy, while the countries of India and China continuing to put the pressure on the price of oil.
You are probably right that we won’t come up with anything close to the energy density of crude using alternative or renewable energy schemes. But that doesn’t mean we won’t continue to try.
WebHubTelescope:Once again crude oil is flat as production sits on a plateau, not close to growing for the last 8 years. That essentially explains the stagnant world economy, while the countries of India and China continuing to put the pressure on the price of oil.
In the US and other parts of the world, the prinicpal limit on the expansion of oil production is government restriction: in some places this is to maintain a high price, in some places (Venezuela, for example) it is governmental incompetence, and in some places (U.S.) it is to protect diverse aspects of the environment. To stick with the US as a single example, output has expanded on non-Federally owned land but contracted on Federally owned land.
Tangentially, the US uses a peculiar definition of “proven” reserves: reserves are not considered “proven” if the government prohibits extraction. Thus, when Obama says that the US should not extract more oil because it only has 2% of Earth’s “proven” reserves, he is saying that US should not pump more oil because of existing restriction on extracting oil. The US has so much oil in all forms that the US could do the rest of the world a favor by extracting more of it and reducing the global cost of oil somewhat, freeing up more investment for solar and hydropower in the places where hydropower and distributed solar right now economic alternatives.
If you change the criteria to included NG liquids, which can directly and cheaply replace crude oil in many industries, US production is up from 7461 to 9000 in 4 years.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=55&aid=1&cid=regions&syid=2007&eyid=2011&unit=TBPD
NG liquids can be used to make plastics and companies are planning to invest 30 billion in plastics production in the US over the next decade.
Shale Gas is the replacement for oil. Thats why envirowhackos hate it.
“Global warming in the coming years will foster trauma, depression, violence, alienation, substance abuse, suicide, psychotic episodes, post traumatic stress disorder and many other mental health-related conditions.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExjDzDsgbww
“Peace Little Girl (Daisy),” Johnson, 1964
CHILD: One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine, nine.
MALE VOICE: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.
(Sound of exploding bomb)
JOHNSON (voice-over): These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other, or we must die.
MALE NARRATOR: Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
The actual psychological issues will arise when the conversion of the US to socialism/communism is complete.
I’ll really be depressed when green energy finally makes all the Unicorns extinct.
“Global warming in the coming years will foster trauma, depression, violence, alienation, substance abuse, suicide, psychotic episodes, post traumatic stress disorder and many other mental health-related conditions”.
The Earth has been cooling for the past ten years up to and includingn the March 2012. Before global warming in the coming years has any psychological effects on the human population the global temperature trend will have to reverse its direction and all indications are that this won’t happen until the end of solar cycle 25 in 2032!
The National Wildlife Federation should get with the program and stop using the term “global warming” and stick to the party line of using the term climate change because such slips could be very devastating to those who have invested so much of themselves in perpetuating the AGW fraud!
“Extremism in the defense of Planet Earth is not a crime.”
Entitlement, virtuous purpose, ruthless means accompanied by self loathing, besieged mentality are symptoms of a mind gone mad.
Diseases of the mind are terrifying for those within ear shot as these notions spill from the mouths of the afflicted. Greg Crazen and Peter Gleick’s utterances reveal an intolerance of contrary opinions, paranoid ideation of the perceived enemy, an empowerment to exaggerate. These diseased minds have no internal brakes, no holding back. Just a vitriolic, unbridled full volume rant.
Organizations have the same susceptibility to have group mind maladies as individuals. Movements are infected similarly as they plunge headlong to extremism. Robespierre and the Jacobins have their parallel today. Furtively look over your shoulder and see those making calls for silencing descent by any means possible. They ascribing to skeptics as being unknowing and unworthy; bourgeoisie in the pockets of a ruling and uncaring elite. All to be eliminated.
Freud may have observed this phenomenon as mass hysteria.
The National Wildlife Federation seems to be behaving…hysterically.
In the following video, the kids in a classroom are all brainwashed to believe they will all die as a result of global warming.
http://bit.ly/YrBo6
Gobbles would not have done a better job!
Comparison of IPCC’s climate model for the last 100 years against an empirical model => http://bit.ly/HECYrn
Compared to last year’s model, same arguments, but now with even less data and more incorrect methodology:
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-9-girma/
You used to use 130 years. Now it’s 100 years. Based on your logic, one must conclude in 14 months more, you will be using 70 years for the same argument, and in 3.5 years from now, you’ll fit your 20 year projection on only 10 years.
One is curious what happens 14 months after that.
Le Pétomane,
‘Our interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Anastasios Tsonis
Then again if Girma’s claims are limited to the next decade or three he is on quite ground. Infuriating isn’t it?
Best reagards
Captain Kangaroo
Infuriating? Not so much. Misleading, irrational, obfuscatory? Sure.
But I’m glad it amuses you to encourage it; I worry you have far too few sources of fun in your life.
Le Pétomane,
‘In this study, low-frequency variations in temperature anomaly are investigated by mapping temperature anomaly records onto random walks. We show evidence that global overturns in trends of temperature anomalies occur on decadal time-scales as part of the natural variability of the climate system. Paleoclimatic summer records in Europe and New-Zealand provide further support for these findings as they indicate that anti-persistence of temperature anomalies on decadal time-scale have occurred in the last 226 yrs. Atmospheric processes in the subtropics and mid-latitudes of the SH and interactions with the Southern Oceans seem to play an important role to moderate global variations of temperature on decadal time-scales.’ Carvalho et al 2007
Not sure what pleasure you can get from hopelessly turning away from settled science. Girma may not have much of a theory – but plenty of other people do. It makes you part of the problem and not part of the solution. It can only end in Kool-aid.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Bart
I learn from my mistake and take peoples genuine criticism.
Girma | April 15, 2012 at 4:30 am |
Wouldn’t that be for the people to say?
I’m looking at a list of two dozen people who have yet to say you’ve taken their criticism and learned from mistakes, and none who have stood up after spotting errors to say how you’re doing everything right.
Robert Ellison laughs up his sleeve at the 20 year joke. Many try to be kinder in their words, but the methods presented retain serious flaws seen in every version of this same precept so far.
I get that sometimes brilliant leaders ahead of their time have trouble convincing others of the genius of their methods. This isn’t one of those times.
In Bart’s case it is a list of imaginary friends – Webby, Mosh, Numbnut, no that’s it – who are in denial. The world is not warming for a decade or three at least.
‘Although long considered implausible, there is growing promise for probabilistic climatic forecasts one or two decades into the future based on quasiperiodic variations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs), salinities, and dynamic ocean topographies.’ McCabe et al 2007 You guys are up for some serious rainfall deficit.
‘Prediction of internal decadal variability in the climate system represents one of the newest and toughest challenges. It is only recently that near-term climate projection experiments have been carried out focusing on internal decadal variations (10–12). Keenlyside et al. (11) have suggested that, in the coming decade, decadal-scale weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) can work to suppress the globally averaged SAT rise due to anthropogenic forcing. Here, we have considered that the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) (13) can also have large impacts on decadal-scale projections of the pan-Pacific climate and decadal-scale modulations of the global warming trend. The PDO is a dominant internal oscillation in the climate system with phase shifts developing on decadal timescales. After the end of the 1970s, for example, corresponding to the positive phase of the PDO, the upper-ocean temperatures were higher than those in the preceding decades along the west coasts of North and South America and over the equatorial Pacific, while they were lower over the western and central North Pacific (14, 15). The PDO has recently attracted much attention not only in climate studies but also in impact assessments in the areas of agriculture, water resources, and fisheries (13, 16, 17). Successful prediction of the state of the PDO over timescales of years to one decade has considerable societal benefits (18).’
Ensemble hindcasts for the 20th century demonstrate a predictive skill in the upper-ocean temperature over almost a decade, particularly around the Kuroshio-Oyashio extension (KOE) and subtropical oceanic frontal regions where the PDO signals are observed strongest. A negative tendency of the predicted PDO phase in the coming decade will enhance the rising trend in surface air-temperature (SAT) over east Asia and over the KOE region, and suppress it along the west coasts of North and South America and over the equatorial Pacific. This suppression will contribute to a slowing down of the global-mean SAT rise.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1833.full
Suck eggs guys – Girma is right.
Bart
I am still writing and ironing out things. Don’t criticize me before you see the final product.
Your comment that I should include the data before 1910 is justified. But I cannot because there was a change in the climate pattern before 1910. My empirical model works only as long as there is no change in the climate pattern. I will make this clear.
Jim 2 @11.07pm
History shows it’s not much funliving in the totalitarian state.
Short on commodities
short on opportunities
short on freedom of communication
short on human rights…
the midnight knock at the door.
Tell them to worry about that! :-)
Beth, you may remember the old song, “Plastic Jesus” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JxnK4GKhA
– try this, to the tune:
Weeell…,
I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
Cause I’m damn sure I know the reason’s
You, your wife, your kids,
And your damn car.
Me and my kind can’t be to blame,
‘Cause we all agree and we think the same,
It’s you, your wife, your kids
And your damn car.
refrain;
Global Warming, Global Warming,
It’s the best fun we’ve all had since Y2K,
It makes us feel important,
To listen to Al Gore, and chant,
And hope to hell it never goes away!
Now add sanctimonious, self-congratulatory verses, ad infinitum…. Just to make it fun – all verses should end with “and your damn car”
Neon windmills whine out GAIA cros’t the sky.
===================
if you want government money for your science, a good strategy is to speak of impending disaster and the consequent need for more funds to study it.
It worked a treat for climatologists, so why not for pschologists too?
Psychologists and mental scientists will march forward to help…
http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx
to make sure their ‘Grief’, pays well too.
So they will still be able to make their car payments.
Once, AGW is over.
Craven? Add Plait, Mooney, Cook, Nuccitelli, Monbiot …and that funny middle-aged lady journalist who blogs about me…
“Though representing less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. emits about 25 percent of the world’s green house gasses.”
Really. In 2008 it was 18%. Less now.
AGW … always lying.
We have nothing to be alarmed about but alarm itself?
Spitting image of the 2K scare.
“We are doomed! DOOMED!!!”
A strong case of “trauma, depression, violence, alienation, substance abuse, suicide, psychotic episodes, post traumatic stress disorder and many other mental health-related conditions” indeed.
It is scary – scary to know grown people take this bull***t seriousely.
retired autralian greens leader Bob Brown getting in touch with his alien side.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=336110673104476&set=a.190699277645617.44364.187552421293636&type=1
There are relatively few of these people – some 10% in their own survey. What is more worrying with these is the increasing desperation being – especially as the planet refuses to warm and will not do so for a decade or so hence. I am expecting terrorist cells to emerge from this small population of the self declared elite. That’s where the mental illness is coming from – the cognitively dissonant cognoscenti.
Anyone over 35 grew up with the threat of the mushrooms. Conclusion: “When we do not have an immediate existential threat to contend with, we must invent one”. The psychologists should really investigate that.
Yes indeed. Poor people worry about where their next meal is coming from. Rich people worry just as much if not more about which smartphone to buy.
The National Wildlife conference occurs annually in Cushman Arkansas, where the deep caverns which have no natural light are absolutely perfect for members to lie down and escape completely from reality.
Scientists have that.
It is called laboratories where they can ignore all parameters outside of observations.
Judith,
Shows scientists are so desperate to keeping the AGW alive that they cannot tell the difference of economic collapse to climate.
Rather than protecting theories no matter what, they should be embracing new science and technology to move our science and knowledge forward. Instead, they are just protecting their positions and funding.
We are such a fragile species — I don’t know how we’ve managed to survive this long. The threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war should have wiped us out.
Speed
Have you heard of ANY nuclear testing in space?
No.
They need pressure around them to work which space does not have.
Joe’s world writes “Have you heard of ANY nuclear testing in space?”
I dont know if this is a serious question. Because, yes, there was a nuclear test in space.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
I think it was designed to test the theories of Kristopholous (?sp).
Jim,
High Altitude is still in our atmosphere. There was no white flash at that height, just the radiation spread which crippled many low level satellites.
Our scientists REALLY stink at pressure measurements or we would be able to measure the displacement of the atmosphere by the moon on the oceans. Or the “Popping” of our ears when traveling up or down a hill.
So but for the radiation, you could ‘stand’ next to a nuclear bomb as it is detonated in space, and suffer no effects at all ?
You might not like the shrapnel, including photonic, atomic and molecular.
In the vacuum of space, there is no pressure around to exert force on. This is why if you had a rocket stopped in space, it would take an incredible amount of fuel just to move. There is nothing to exert energy off of.
A NASA probe found itself in trouble of not being able to complete it’s flight until the engineers had the probe circle a planet and get the rotational energy to slingshot it to it’s destination.
The action of the rocket engine’s combustion chambers and expansion nozzles on a high pressure fluid is able to accelerate the fluid to extremely high speed, and conversely this exerts a large reactive thrust on the rocket (an equal and opposite reaction according to Newton’s third law) which propels the rocket forwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Rockets_Work
Newton’s Third Law …
To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.
Speed,
Equal and opposite are not a natural occurrence.http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/lalonde-joe/world-calculations.pdf
You always have parameters that change from friction, torque, speed, density, etc.
A hand held rocket takes a second or two to forward thrust as it needs the density of pressure to push off of. If it was underwater, the friction and pressure around would hinder the speed due to the density difference compared with atmospheric pressure.
In circular motion the parameters are totally different due to shape and circular motion energy and speeds are very different.
Joe
There was this old guy called Newton….. read up on his stuff..
Also the jet engine. You might ponder why jet planes go up really high where there is less stuff to ‘push against’.
Newton was an idiot.
Never incorporating motion and parameter changes to an expanding and slowing planet. This is why they never could understand what the planet was like 4.5 billion years ago.
Mind you, it is simple calculations that show the different speed the planet was at and all the parameters from relativity, etc. has to be changed as well.
Joe said:
The prototypical contrarian argument, common to many AGW skeptics that comment here.
I’m not saying this is the case for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me, given warmist antics and shock ads of the past, that “Joe’s World” is a warmist. He posts his nonsense, then Web comes along and smears skeptics by associating them with Joe.
…”it wouldn’t surprise me, given warmist antics and shock ads of the past, that “Joe’s World” is a warmist.”
Jim2, Nope…. Joe is true to his word… FWIW.
WHT has a thing about Kooky Klimate (theory) Klown Kars and the people who ride in them.
Ask WHT what he thinks about the clowns who wrote this psycho-babble report… he’s been pretty quiet about who rides in his own car.
Joe,
Please repost your comment at Daily Onion.
Sent you a subscription.
You never believed their was velocity differences of this planet a year ago either, until I actually mapped this out.
That’s pretty lame stuff Joe. NASA never unexpectedly used a slingshot. This is a common maneuver used to gain more delta-v with less fuel. The tradeoff is travel time.
There have certainly been nuclear tests in space. The only thing missin is the compressive shock wave. The CSW does considerable damage but in space the energy it takes to make the shockwave instead goes into radiation and particle speeds. Conservation of energy, ya know. The fission chain reaction generates the same amount of energy regardless of where the blast takes place.
David,
I have learned NOT to believe a single word another scientist says unless I am able to check it out as well.
In almost every case parameters were ignored or not thought of that makes the experiments null and void.
But that was still dumped into the publishing of making educated idiots of all of us.
The gases push against/transfer energy to the inner wall of the rocket. That’s what they push against. The lack of air in space makes it easier to move the vessel, not harder.
Jim,
That is a little lame.
It is all still connected together as one unit.
Science fiction and science facts intermix to give use vastly confusing mindsets.
In space, their is a few particles but it takes a vast amount of fuel to exert forward momentum. Put a block in behind a jet engine and it will forward thrust faster than exerting of pressurized air of our atmosphere.
It is called “Back Pressure”.
Sorry, Joe. I’m not buying what you are selling. Plus, this isn’t even remotely related to the topic. I don’t believe there will be many people here who buy it, either.
Climate alarmism drives me crazy.
This passes for education. It is not funny.
http://www.globalwarmingforyoungminds.com/page18_19_largeimage.htm
Food shortages to follow.
From http://globalwarmingkids.net/books/index.html with many more.
K-12 science education is now enforced by extensive state testing. How many states require CAGW as the correct answer?
And it’s typical of the genre.
The utterly unconnected from AGW of any sort http://www.kidzone.ws/water/index.html gets so many facts wrong it makes one wince. Still teaching kids that brontosaurs were real things? Sad.
That it’s aimed at grade one, like your link, hardly makes it any less bad.
Except your link, poor though it is, at least isn’t demonstrably wrong on facts. Merely oversimplified.
And at least neither is full of product placement (http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/education/commercialism/placement.html) nor political interference (http://gapolitico.com/en/2012/02/10/ga-republicans-rewrite-history-to-inject-politics-religion-into-classroom/).
Oh. Wait. That’s not what you meant to object to at all, is it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjPo0ewuCw
How’s your curriculum plan going?
Clearly you do not know what a fact is, but we knew that.
My Heartland climate education project is under way, thanks for asking.
David Wojick | April 14, 2012 at 9:52 am |
Product placement, political interference, fact. I’ll settle for being able to spot two out of three, in this case.
That’s still a passing grade, in K-12, isn’t it?
Because we protect our children from some things until they’re old enough, if we have a conscience.
Yes, two out of three is a D, just about right for you. But you are correct that I am trying to protect the children. Deliberately scaring children, for political ends, is despicable.
David Wojick | April 14, 2012 at 1:25 pm |
For our Australian readers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(education) will help explain David’s regionally-limited joke.
The USA really does have tougher educational standards than most of the rest of the world. Which leads Americans to wonder how we get so many graduates who can’t find the USA on a map.
Deliberately scaring children, for political ends, is despicable. We’re agreed there, David. So why do you accept money to do it?
I am teaching them not to be scared Bart. There is a difference, even if you cannot see it.
Teacher: Billy! Why ever did you steal Sallys cookie!
Billy: Aww… cause global warming made me do it.
Teacher: That’s silly! Where ever did you hear such nonsense!
Billy: Gee teacher… didn’t we learn how global warming is causing food shortages?
Teaching (thinking): (Well, he has a point there)
Billy (thinking): (Sucker !)
Dang… Teacher (thinking)
John Carpenter | April 14, 2012 at 11:21 am |
Is this the same teacher who still thinks brontosaurs were real?
Apatosaurlutly
This is like a dream, or a funny Dr. Strangelovian movie. Is this real?
Has polluted “climate change” science infected all the other sciences now, like a wildfire fungas or bacteria, resistant to antibiotics — and truth, commonsense?
Like lemmings, they follow the federal funding money over the cliff, selling their integrity and souls for a stupid research grant. I suppose that, wherever they start, over time, they must come to believe in the rectitude of their beliefs, the good in their research, however absurd.
One looks at the Lysenko mess. What a mini-fraud compared to this!
…Lady in Red
LiR,
The social mania of AGW infects all science, politics and art it comes in contact with.
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.” ― Abraham Lincoln http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/229.Abraham_Lincoln
‘Global warming in the coming years will foster trauma, depression, violence, alienation, substance abuse, suicide, psychotic episodes, post traumatic stress disorder and many other mental health-related conditions.’
Is this just a psuedo-scientific way of saying that the Militant Wing of the Alarmist Tendency are all certifiably bonkers?
Because we suspected that already. Good to have a professional disgnosis..
I wonder who coined the expression ‘climate of fear’?
Joseph Goebbles perhaps?
One of the WUWTisms I miss the least since shaking the dust of that den of the casual Godwin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Way to elevate the level of discourse, beesaman and Orssengo.
How dismissive of you Bart. Maybe you think the proles shouldn’t be
allowed to question the likes of you. The arrogance drips off your reply. How disappointing for you it must be for us to dare question the AGW propoganda machine and its tactics of fear and dread. You don’t want a discourse or even a monologue, just a subservient audience, sorry not happening!
Anyone who cites Godwin to support their case, automatically loses the argument, as it is generally done when the person is unable to show how his position differs in *type* from that of the Nazis.
beesaman | April 14, 2012 at 12:10 pm |
How dismissive of you beesaman. Maybe you think the proles shouldn’t be allowed to question the likes of you. The arrogance drips off your reply. How disappointing for you it must be for us to dare question the
WUWT propoganda machine and its tactics of fear and dread. You don’t want a discourse or even a monologue, just a subservient audience, sorry not happening!
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 14, 2012 at 12:17 pm | Reply
Anyone who cites illogic to support their case, automatically loses the argument, as it is generally done when the person is unable to show how his position differs in *type* from that of the WUWTs.
And so the downward spiral goes. It’s recurrent, and unproductive; mere name-calling and ranting ad hom with neither point nor merit, largely accompanied by ignorance and irrationality. No thanks.
Again Bart, dismissive and condescending, true to form. Then you run away when challenged. That seems to be the norm for alarmists and warmist, at least the skeptics stand and debate when given the chance.
This Bart R is arguably the biggest proponent of ad homs etc around here (generally employed to advance alarmism), yet he complains if others do the same ???
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 15, 2012 at 1:06 am |
Only if they do it badly.
But you’d be numerically off by an order of magnitude if you were arguing my my ad hom score were particularly big here, and incorrect if you thought I was promoting the practice.
I’m here about the ideas. The climate science-related ideas, if possible. What does WUWTism have to do with that?
Silly as psychology invariably is, it’d be hard to expect the topic to inspire enlightening or sparkling discourse. While I’m quite certain the US mental health system isn’t prepared for the future, it’s also not prepared for the present, and handled the past terribly; whatever happens with climate isn’t likely to change that in any meaningful way on its own.
There’s nothing to see in this topic; so I’m inclined to move along to better ones. Perhaps someone will talk about how Climate Change is going to ruin birthday parties, or be hard on sparkling vampires, or beneficial to unicorns next. Sadly, any of those would be a step up.
The big three causes of mental illness are loss of job, divorce and death of a loved one. Money problems are the biggest cause of deviorce. Thus, economic expansion reduces unemployment, helps stabilize marriage and funds medical services which keep people alive. If you want to tackle mental health, make everyone richer.
Taxing carbon is going to screw the economy, increase unemployment, increase crime, increase the prison population, etch away at medical programs for the poor and tip people into mental health problems.
DocMartyn | April 14, 2012 at 9:55 am |
While I’d think blows to the head, toxic exposure and physiology might be three bigger causes of mental illness, given the topic is psychology not psychiatry, who am I to argue with a doctor about medical opinions?
Which leaves me to tackle your errors of Economics.
Misery, the Economic collective term for unemployment, family break-up, ill health and premature death, etc. does indeed have something to do with money problems. However, more money for individuals making more than double the median income of a population will have minimal positive impact on measures related to misery; often, more money past this point in the upper few percent of income-earners rather appears to cause more misery.
Also, those who make less income generally stimulate Economic growth disproportionately to their wealth by orders of magnitude, due their greater likelihood to spend their money soonest.. neither of which is so much an argument for keeping the poorest poor as for keeping the gap between low and high income moderate. The third pillar of this conventional argument is fittingly that more income disparity leads to more unrest and instability.
Dr. Ross McKitrick, in his Economics PhD paper, explains luminously why it is less distortionate to tax carbon than to not. Which is to say, failing to tax carbon is, in Dr. McKitrick’s published opinion going to screw the economy and also increase unemployment, crime, the prison population, as well as etch away at medical services, with what in your medical opinion will be the result of increased mental illness.
To go Dr. McKitrick’s statist command and control tax-and-spend plan one better, privatizing the carbon cycle, returning all revenues raised from fees on the service the carbon cycle provides, achieves all Dr. McKitrick’s objectives without any of the issues you raise.
Oh, and would tend to increase innovation, too, such as: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=24883.php
Yep, Bart knows best how to run our lives and the world. He should be King.
“Also, those who make less income generally stimulate Economic growth disproportionately to their wealth by orders of magnitude, due their greater likelihood to spend their money soonest.”
A regurgitation of Keynes’s basic blunder, that savings somehow disappear from the economy, and hence government should step in and spend.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 15, 2012 at 1:32 am |
*snrx*
Savings ‘disappear’?
Rates vary, and lag slows. It’s amply apparent that sitting on savings does happen; it’s one of the chief factors in the constriction of 2008-present. Can the corporations sit on their cash forever? It seems their taste for cash is a firm preference now, so in effect yes.
Who always doesn’t prefer to sit on cash? People with little income.
You can reliably model this with some of the better simulation software.
Even Keynes wouldn’t quote something as outdated as Keynes today, where he alive and working as an Economist with access to computers and the Internet. Heck, he wouldn’t likely cite stale old Hayek, either.
Funny you should say “sit on cash” because that’s literally the only way to keep savings apart from investment. The proverbial guy who’s scared by banks and keeps his savings stuffed in his mattress. You’re not so naive as to think that banks actually put your savings in a vault do you? LOL
You merely repeat your earlier blunder, ie the idea that savings disappear somehow, rather than being borrowed by someone else (there is also the danger here of wrongly ignoring spending on investment rather than consumption). And using computers to ‘model’ foolishness changes nothing (as climatology well illustrates).
And even if savings did disappear (into mattrasses or whatever), it would simply increase the buying power of the money that remained outside of mattrasses.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 15, 2012 at 3:03 am |
This increased buying power.. how does it help those who don’t have it or those who won’t spend it?
Your presenting an innumerate pronoia that flies in the face of recent and exceptional evidence of the impact of constriction.. and doing it to nibble at one of three pillars upholding an argument; certainly not an indispensible one.
Indeed, the entirety of the argument I make for reducing human misery could be swept away, and your (apparently) pro-misery case could stand, as if misery weren’t reason in and of itself to reduce misery.
The most deft way to deal with mental health issues, if caused by those three Economic effects the good Dr. premised his case on still remains privatization of the carbon cycle. There’d certainly be more, not less employment, and more, not less money in the hands of those the good Dr. expresses so much concern about, than either BAU or the McKitrick big government carbon tax and spend approach.
So, are we still nitpicking over long-dead Economists?
‘Fraid not. It’s not like there’s a gold standard or anything. Put all the legal tender you want in your mattress. Our government will just print more to make up for it.
No one takes money out of circulation anymore. That ended with the gold standard. Rich or poor it’s gonna stay in circulation. It just goes to different places. If you want a boom in Marlboro, manufactured housing, and Keystone Lite then by all means give more to the poor. Generally those aren’t the industries we might wish to encourage so…
David, even Friedrich August von Hayek advocated welfare. By his lights, it is a tool for social stability – a necessity for civilized society. But the means by which it is administered is what is important. It should be in the form of a fair tax, a negative income tax, or other similar means that is administered by a simple formula and maintains incentives to work. There should not be a large administrative apparatus other than what is needed to prevent fraud.
David Springer | April 15, 2012 at 6:51 am |
Shifts in tastes are shifts in tastes are shifts in tastes.
Those who develop shift from investment and spending to holding currency don’t take the currency out of circulation. They take the circulation out of circulation. This constriction was amply evidenced over the past four years, and pretending it can’t happen is simply denial of direct evidence.
The difference between those who can shift this taste and those who cannot being, while it’s easy for large corporations in an economic climate of increasing Risk to justify a shift from taste for the adventure of innovation and discovering new markets to a taste for ample reserves to weather increasing extreme economic weather, low-income families are going to spend their income or starve.
The taste for spending is not so elastic when the alternative is death.
Which is why it makes good economic sense to use measures to bring the taste for spending back into equilibrium by countering the shift. Proponents of trading systems and carbon taxes to general revenues all propose plans that worsen this shift instead by increasing taste for cash reserves in large institutional investors.
Fee and dividend systems both grow the spending power of those with more taste for spending and also unfetter the pent up drive to innovate in the private sector.
Do I have to spell out every little obvious detail?
Bart
And still you persist with your blunder, in an apparently unwitting following of the long-dead Keynesian mode of thinking – this idea that savings somehow represent a reduction in the economy, requiring government to ‘unsave’, ie spend. All that actually happens is that government spending displaces other spending – it cannot increase the total.
“This increased buying power.. how does it help those who don’t have it or those who won’t spend it?”
And yet again your baseline blunder. Savings do not reduce spending, they simply transfer it from lenders to borrowers.
“So, are we still nitpicking over long-dead Economists?”
You are blindly relying on one, and I am pointing it out. Call that nitpicking if you must.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 15, 2012 at 5:59 pm |
As soon as the data match your pro-bank misreading of my statements better than they match my statements, it would be valid to start doubting that manufacturers who produce actual goods, and services that add actual value, ought take their money and give it to banks to circulate around to other banks to circulate around to other banks, until each have taken their piece of the original capital and they’ve ‘grown’ the cash from the real producers to nothing, instead of investing in themselves (who they are already matched to, one would think) and their own business (which they have one hopes better knowledge of than banks).
As it is, observations from the debacle leading to the recent Great Recession side with my views.
Yet more self-congratulatory and incoherent marxist-style drivel from Bart. If anyone can see anything at all there that makes even vague sense (never mind agreeing with it or not) I would be fascinated to hear of it.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 16, 2012 at 11:25 am |
..self-congratulatory and incoherent..
Well, why didn’t you _say_ you were a Megan McArdle fan.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/solar-and-oil-2-great-tastes-that-taste-great-together/255860/#
But since you like dead guys, here’s someone a bit more coherent, who might move you a bit forward from guys who died even earlier:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjTCS1-Ykvw
I didn’t want to subject you to the shock of dealing with anything after the Beatles broke up (hope that isn’t news to you too).
As tastes in saving shift from investment in real factors of growth to accounts with investment managers who themselves prefer to invest in accounts with investment managers, and so on, the supply of money for real factors of growth — innovators and producers of goods and of value (which, sorry, banks cannot do by definition) — constricts.
“As tastes in saving shift from investment in real factors of growth to accounts with investment managers who themselves prefer to invest in accounts with investment managers, and so on, the supply of money for real factors of growth — innovators and producers of goods and of value (which, sorry, banks cannot do by definition) — constricts.”
It is true that banks don’t produce goods of value. They provide services of value. (If they didn’t, noone would lend them any money).
Other than that, the above just more marxist/keynesian drivel, money disappearing into to a fantasy black hole created by banks, never to be applied to creating good and services anywhere.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 17, 2012 at 3:05 am |
Again, you’re mistaking short term and long term rationality.
Behavior in the long term against the investor’s interest, but in the short term providing some utility, is the problem here.
It’s great when small individual investors without the means to find and evaluate and hedge an investment use the services of a bank to do this for them, through interest-earning vehicles (good luck with that, these days, small investor). The banks, in turn, can lend large sums in well-organized ways to viable borrowers. However, the banks tastes have changed to favor other banks as borrowers, marginally.
And it’s a tragedy when a huge company like Apple, for example, chooses to give a bank large cash reserves. Apple sitting on cash in a bank where it’s doing less good than the work Apple does through its innovation and manufacture and many services is constricting the economy by a small marginal factor. If everyone makes that choice, then a small marginal factor multiplies and recycles through what ought be the money multiplier effect to a money eroding effect. The vigor leaves the economy.
Sure, long dead economists spoke of people putting their cash in mattresses; the difference between that then and a bank now is you can sleep soundly on a mattress.
It’s not that the money goes away. It’s that it goes more slowly than it would have otherwise to where it does most good. And along the way, it gets diminished a bit more than it once did.
“Again, you’re mistaking short term and long term rationality.”
That is purely a figment of your deepening confusion.
—
“Behavior in the long term against the investor’s interest, but in the short term providing some utility, is the problem here.”
Sucked straight out of your thumb, part of your marxist anti-banking rant.
—
“banks tastes have changed to favor other banks as borrowers, marginally.”
That banks deal with each other does not mean that investment somehow disappears (the myth you keep trying to float). The ultimate investment must still be to industry (a part of which is indeed banking), or investments will be not yield dividends.
—
“And it’s a tragedy when a huge company like Apple, for example, chooses to give a bank large cash reserves”
How could you possibly know that what Apple would do with the money, would be better than what whoever the bank lends to money to, will do ? You seem to think you know better than Apple’s management do, what Apple can do with the money. Ludicrous, of course.
David Springer | April 15, 2012 at 6:40 am |
Banks are in the business of manufacturing what, exactly?
Adding how much value to whatever they touch, again?
The shift in investment tastes from those engines of growth that actually do something to those self-consuming spirals of padding their CEO’s pocketbooks in ways that are only different from Bernie Madoff by the slimmest of shadings is well modeled by the image of people sitting on their cash, until they flush.
“Banks are in the business of manufacturing what, exactly?”
Banking services. Matching up borowers and lenders.
“Adding how much value to whatever they touch, again?”
They save you the hassle of finding people to borrow from or lend to. But if you feel you can arrange your own borrowing and lending more effectively, by all means go ahead.
But cheer up, if there are any other loony-left dimwits lurking here – professors of sociology and suchlike – I’m sure they’ll have enjoyed your anti-profit rant, and implication that banking (and money too?) are capitalist evils we could all do without.
Too many research dollars chasing too many bogus/worthless studies. This results in such groundbreaking statements such as:
“If we continue the adolescent-like disregard for the dangers we are being warned of…” “Moreover, the United States is increasingly disliked, worldwide, as a global warming villain” “Americans will be blamed for inflicting harm on other countries.”
This is basically a trip through wonderland exploring the mass psychosis of The National Wildlife Federation’s leadership. What a crock.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of guilt ridden thinking is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy for many within the alarmist community. This document is simply the precursor for their explanation. The new escape clause for any of their personal failures will be ‘Global warming did it’.
http://sppiblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Global-Warming-Murder.jpg
I love that cartoon
In the media, with opinions. We’ve a problem, though; there is no body to autopsy.
==========
Where I live, we have shifted one hardiness zone in the warmer direction, and there are several invasive species in the area.
Are the plants depressed?
The amount of psychological projection that goes on this comments section is astounding.
The fact is that a changing climate is important but is almost a strawman when compared to the diminishing fossil fuel supplies that the world is faced with.
Consider just the number of Australians that are on the comments here. They seem to be so infatuated with marginalizing climate science, and all the mitigation efforts that go along with the possibility of AGW, that they blithely ignore the fact that their country is going through a significant drop in crude oil production. The latest numbers are out from EIA and Australia crude oil production looks to be falling off the plateau they have been on:
http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/1869/australia.gif
They are down from half of their peak in oil production from several years ago. This has nothing to do with climate science and everything to do with finite reserves of fossil fuels.
The psychological projection is essentially placing the blame of your own problems onto the Hansen and the NASA folks at Goddard.
So Australians think they can make up for the loss of crude oil with coal and natural gas. Hope it turns out well.
And I am not singling out the Australians here (even though I just did), but for the fact that they seem to be very tenacious in criticizing everything. In fact, we all share this as a problem,and until we treat issues in a systems context, it all amounts to a witch hunt.
The fact is that the same mitigation approaches used against the possibility of AGW, such as more reliance on alternative and renewable energy supplies, are the same mitigation approaches that we would use when faced with finite reserves of fossil fuels and hydrocarbons. This all goes into the category of “sustainability” that the meta discussion (outside of the incestuous AGW-skeptic community) is trending toward.
Clearly the climate scientists will do research on climate and rely on their conscience when it comes to spreading the word on potential climate change.
And oil company analysts will do research on future reserves, and rely on their concience when it comes to spreading the word on depleting supplies … um … oops, scratch the latter.
Much of psychology involves the use of a mirror.
What consumers demand, the marketplace will provide. WHT, we don’t want your social engineering, just get out of the way and let productive people profit from their service. Keep your five year plans, carbon taxes and hand-wringing about the evil destructiveness of mankind. If you have not figured this out: the cornucopia of profligate government was a bubble. Sorry, but you might have to find something useful to do.
Ken Coffman, The data is right there. You just don’t want to see it.
My psychological projector is broken. Bulb burned out.
Coal man. You could care less.
Diminishing?
Growing.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=55&aid=1&cid=regions&syid=2007&eyid=2011&unit=TBPD
Freaking out over residue. Scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Actually, its like recycling old fields and finding out they increase US production by a huge amount.
AGW cult members are so dishonest.
What is the average lifetime of a Bakken shale well? About 2 years.
And the USA is fortunate to have that. Canada is fotunate to have the tar sands.
Considering they’ve doubled production to 500,000 bpd in 2 years I doubt it it 2 years.
The US is very fortunate to have the technology to double production in 2 years in ND.
Decline rates of Bakken oil wells are just like the shale gas wells, with 50% decline per year being common, with some having 90% decline in one year.
This is a chart of the average of 2000 Bakken wells
http://www.visageinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Avg-Prod-Rates-by-Year.png
What is striking is that this is not the conventional stripper well that people are familiar with — a well that can continue supplying oil for decades after it was first tapped. You see those all over the place in Texas and even around Los Angeles.
These fracked shale wells will last for a short while and the remnants of this activity will turn these places into ghost towns. It all makes intuitive sense, as the oil coming out of the fractures is very transient, and it is a one time deal. The hydraulic fracturing provides an impulse and whatever oil is there will come out of the seams without having a large reservoir to draw from.
We have seen this same fever mentality play out during gold rush times.
People have known about Williston Basin and the Bakken for years. It is just now that it is becoming cost effective to exploit. Oil hands will extract it until it is gone in a few years and that will be that.
Take a look at the activity around the Bakken in this satellite photo:
http://sayanythingblog.com/files/2011/11/article-0-0ECF298000000578-278_634x324.jpg
All those lights won’t be there when it starts to decline in a few years.
Awful … 142 bbls per day. For ALL wells in production.
5 million dollars a year.
And the’ve doubled production from Feb 2010 with only 400 more wells.
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats.pdf
I think your sourceis lying.
Most everything can be found on the ND.gov Department of Mineral Resources web site.
The presentation I linked to above is typical of the findings, see pages 18 and 19.
Is the North Dakota DMR lying?
It has been long known that these are transient wells. What the heck would you suspect? That they would last forever?
Typical Cornucopian Cult member, dishonest to the core.
Everything is supposed to last forever, until it doesn’t. Then theyrationalize by making up some junk about Methane Hydrates, or whatever the current fantasy is.
webhub – You seem to be eaten alive with hubris, as are many of the warmists. You can’t predict what secondary recovery techniques will be developed for shale. You simple aren’t that smart.
Ahh, but you are talking shale. The minute you put your hopes on shale, you admit that conventional crude oil is on a massive decline.
That is what this is all about — to admit that finite resources exist. And you have admitted it. How does that amount to hubris, to state objective facts, and not bury your head in the sand?
Shale is shale, and it is not the conventional crude reservoir material. Point me to an extensive study on shale resources that doesn’t involve marketing.
I also think that it is important to talk about this issue in general, as it brings out the people that are hiding what they do or do not know. This guy, jim2, obviously knows enough about the situation to not act so naive. The fact that he mentions “secondary recovery techniques” means that he is at least well-read or has been fed the talking points by the cornucopian contingent.
If the climate problem does fade away, we will still be left with the fossil fuel replacement problem.
Well, Web, it is well known that I am supported by Big Tobacco and the Koch brothers; so it is no surprise that I know what secondary recovery means. But you miss my point. I’m not arguing that petroleum supplies are infinite. I am arguing that it takes a (HUGE) village to properly run an economy and world. A roomful of smart people aren’t up to the task. One reason is information. Joe Sixpack has boots on the ground in his community. He knows more about wants and needs there than the government ever will, no matter how huge the information-gathering burden imposed upon businesses and citizens. He will make better economic decisions than that roomful of smart people as concerns his community. You and I don’t know what the next big thing will be WRT energy. But what I do know is that we need every last person engaged in the operation of the economy. That will make the next big thing a lot more likely to come to fruition.
Jim2 said:
Not a bad attitude after all, that of being open to and embracing many different aproaches to solving problems.
This applies to many of the “green” entrepeneurs out there, and those looking at renewable resources such as wind and solar..
This applies to many of the academics and scientists who scrap and scrape for research dollars.
It also applies to those of us that like to process information that no one else
wants to look at, i.e. the troves of data relating to energy resources.
Web, the powerpoint presentation on the DMR site is from May 2007.
The DMR production data I linked to is from March of this year.
Things change.
Web – I welcome all efforts towards green energy so long as no tax dollars are spent on them. I can allow that some tax money should be applied to research, but not supporting “green” businesses directly. I feel the same about other businesses also – let them get along without tax money. The only exception I would make is for nuclear.
And Web, even your 5 year old reference shows wells continuing to produce for a long time with wells levelling off at 75bpd for decades.
No wonder ND can double produce with only a small increase in wells.
How about other countries spending their own tax dollars on green energy?
I assume you are USA and you recognize the sovereign rights of each nation to spend their money as they see fit. You have the right to an opinion as a taxpayer in ONE country, but I don’t see how that extends elsewhere.
90% of the whine I see in the comments are based on this kind of provincialism. Yet no one ever wants to call these people on it. It’s like they want a one-world government, where everyone is ruled by the same tax system.
That was one of the charts that prompted other people to look at it in more depth. Which is why this chart has data up to 2011:
http://www.visageinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Avg-Prod-Rates-by-Year.png
If you want to understand decline rates and how to mathematically distinguish between exponential and hyperbolic decline, I suggest that you read up on a good reference, such as my online book http://TheOilConundrum.com , where I have descriptions of the various decline envelopes.
The distinction between an exponential decline and a hyperbolic decline is huge. A hyperbolic decline can have a fat tail, which can sustain for years. On the other hand, an exponential decline will result in the well getting shutdown within a few multiples of the half-life. The hyperbolic decline has much to do with a slow diffusion and drift of surrounding oil replenishing the local concentration that gets pumped out. It is not clear that this happens to any great extent with oil from hydraulically fractured shale. It certainly does not happen with natural gas from shale, as that is always a fast depletion once it sets in (even for conventional deposits in
fact).
Then there is the issue of production rates. Wells supplying 74 barrels a day can supply 20 million barrels a day, the USA’s current daily consumption rate, if there are 250,000 of these scattered around the Williston Basin. But take a look at some of those rates on the chart, which are down to 15 barrels a day (a bbl is a barrel not a billion barrels, BTW). This would require a million of these wells to sustain. That is hard to imagine.
Consider the conventional-oil stripper wells, which are quite common in the USA and are classified as producing no more than 15 barrels a day. The average stripper generates about 2.2 barrels per day and comprise 84 percent of U.S. oil wells but only 20 percent of the domestic oil production volume. The strippers are basically the residue of all of the large reserves in Texas, Oklahoma, California, etc which contribute to our historical lower-48 supply. Many of those started with decline rates of around 2% to 10% per year, the historical average decline is around 5%, which is a far cry from the 50% that many of the Bakken wells are showing. It then really depends on whether Bakken wells show a fat hyperbolic tail to make it more than a flash-in-the-plan, err, I mean flash-in-the-pan.
The question is whether the Bakken will turn into an equivalent stripper resource for years to come, or whether the flows are so weak that they close down after a few years. Remember that this is shale, not the optimal reservoir material that we are used to. It takes a deep analysis, not some marketing blurb to get to the bottom of that.
Typical of you skeptics to opine with nothing to back up your assertions with.
As usual, the language lawyers make an appearance. I could actually quote every response with one of my own passages, which I will do here, see p. 4.
Web – yes, I am a US citizen was targeting US tax money. I don’t care what other countries might do. It is, as you rightly point out, their business.
Web, production has doubled in 2 years with only a few hundred more wells.
Your sources are lying.
@WHB April 14, 2012 at 9:40 pm
Quote: “People have known about Williston Basin and the Bakken for years. It is just now that it is becoming cost effective to exploit.”
And there is the achilles heel of the ‘peak oil’ argument.
It is now cost effective:
“If resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically.
For the technological means involved in the use of resources determines their creation and therefore the extent of their scarcity.
The nature of the scarcity is not outside the process (that is natural), but a condition of it.”
– Tom DeGregori (1987). “Resources Are Not; They Become: An Institutional Theory.” Journal of Economic Issues, p. 1258.
The total supply of any mineral is unknown and unknowable because the future knowledge that would create mineral resources cannot be known before its time.
The confounding of physics with economics has plagued a real-world understanding of mineral resource development.
The phenomenon of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics rule in their domain.
But there is no economic law analogous to the physical conservation of matter.
There is no law of conservation of value; value is continually, routinely created by the market process.
And this value creation does not deplete–just the opposite.
Those in the mineral-resource world think in terms of proved, probable, and speculative quantities. Should another category be added–resourceship–that would make such supply open-ended? Unless peak-oil proponents can demonstrate peak-resourceship, open-endedness should be elevated in the debate.
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/12/open-ended-resourceship-2012/
If Australia extracted oil from its coal, as was done during 2nd WW years, it would have enough to last 500 years.
“I don’t think this will be an industrial process tomorrow. But conceptually, it is important.”
Robert Bergman, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0418_060418_coal_energy.html
As for your dig at Australians ‘here’, we face an economy destroying carbon & oxygen tax which WILL NOT stop one flood, drought, cyclone in Oz, nor will it stop tornadoes, snow storms or one hot day in Chicago or Florida.
We know. We have a tax & it doesn’t work.
And some might say it starts on July 1, but do you have proof that Gaia
has a calendar?
Compensation (?) starts 2 months early. Gaia is not amused.
Just ask Tim Flannery, Australia’s leading climate scientist.
Fossil fuels are not inorganic minerals in any sense. They are not renewable in any way, they form under strict conditions of temperature and pressure, and they are found in specific geospatial locations, for example, conventional oil reservoirs usually involve salt domes. Everything about fossil fuel reserves is largely known by now. By a combination of data collection (including seismic) and statistical analysis we know everything there is to know about crude oil reserves. The fact that this information hides mainly in corporate backrooms, makes it not very apparent to the laymen. Of course, corporations don’t care if this is made public or not — they will make money in abundance or scarcity, the latter by higher prices.
I think that quote of “unknown and unknowable” appeals to an anti-science mindset.
How about a category called “non-renewable”? It doesn’t matter how open-ended something is if we all know for a fact that it is a finitely constrained resource that can’t be renewed like aluminum can be recycled.
WHT
Why don’t geologic timescales qualify as “renewable in any way”?
And what if supply is a function of demand? Then, isn’t supply inexhaustible (at variable rate) provided we can avoid government price forcing?
Non-renewable is not a dumb category if there is also subcategories for alternative/no-alternative. Otherwise it is dumberer.
WEB,
I know that diminishing oil is your area and I’ve never tried to argue you are wrong on the topic. What I don’t understand is your support of the AGW based actions that get called for.
The support of “renewable energy sources”? Ok, that makes sense, but only up to a rather limited point. Wind generation is never going to be more than 20% and that’s being optimistic. Solar soneday might, but it sure isn’t now.
That pretty much leaves coal and nuclear. The two sources all of the green AGW folks insist can’t be used.
I too think we would be wise to wean ourselves off of oil based transportation – at least so far as personal transportation goes. But the folks saying we need to reduce our carbon footprint only want everyone to have less of everything. They are not interested in finding alternative methods for proving more.
Web, you’re EIA link hides NG and liquids, which are a direct replacement for oil, and they are growing.
You are a typical dishonest AGW cultist.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=55&aid=1&cid=regions&syid=2007&eyid=2011&unit=TBPD
That is North America. You are hiding the decline. Typical for a cornucopian.
Globally up a smaller amount from 82,200 to 84,700.
When shale gets going globally it will take a big jump.
Typical liar. I was talking about crude oil. That has been at 73 and never over 74 million barrels per day since 2005. That number is not going up anytime soon even though the world economy depends on crude oil for providing economic growth. Only through price increases has that rate stayed on a plateau. Isn’t it very strange that a product that goes through such price increases and demand can’t match a supply increase via the profit motive? The system is in fact straining and adjusting to a new state which has nothing to do with AGW..
So where does your 84.7 million barrels number come from?
When you start adding natural gas plant liquids that adds another 8.5 million barrels per day and “other liquids” is anothe 2 million barrels per day. Those two are making up the difference. That makes it 73.9+8.5+2 > 84
Your shale oil comment is very telling. It means that you are concerned about the situation with crude oil. Again, the psychology is obvious as people will go to heroic measures to rationalize just about anything before they admit to an objective truth. The truth is that the world is going through a transition off of crude oil.
Shale gas is the big story. The oil is just frosting on the cake.
Liquids are way up. They are actually better than oil money-wise.
And methane hydrates are coming.
OH NOES! Not more fossil fuels!!! The HORROR!!!! Say it ain’t so!!!
Please forgive me. I’m suffering the severe psychological effects from fossil fuels. The HORROR!!!
I’m of the opinion that crude oil is the most concentrated and wondrous fuel that mankind has ever worked with. It is so extraordinary in its energy density, able to power jumbo jets with ease, that it is sad that we have squandered it without really taking advantage of it in developing a worthy successor.
Perhaps we will at some point.
As it is, nothing comes close to conventional crude oil’s Energy Return on Energy Investment.
I think BartR has forced Jim2 close to the edge. I may have pushed him beyond :) All with facts, who would have thunk it?
WebHubTelescope: The fact is that a changing climate is important but is almost a strawman when compared to the diminishing fossil fuel supplies that the world is faced with.
You are going to have to learn a new tune. At current rates of diminishment the fossil fuels are going to last a long time. Nobody born soon will live long enough to see the supplies exhausted. The big penalty is that demand has raised price: that slows overall economic development compared to a regime of infinite easily accessible fossil fuels, but it also spurs the ongoing development of cheaper alternatives.
In the US the main impediment to increased oil supply is federal prohibition on development of many supplies. The restrictive policies are less and less popular (and Obama’s energy policies make Bush’s energy policies positively brilliant, as Budsh really did support “all of the above”.) Reducing that prohibition could reduce domestic prices meaningfully and bring in revenue for companies and the federal and state governments. But overall global demand will still keep prices sufficiently high to spur investment in alternatives.
The bit about small, gradual increases in mean temperature (if in fact that happens) producing mental illness is absurd. The annual variations will continue to be great enough to cause loss and distress, as they have always done.
It would make more sense to keep the fossil fuels back and sell them when they cost more in the future.
Of course by then we might discover rising CO2 is definitely negative so perhaps the best business decision IS to burn them all off now ;)
CO2 has such a long adjustment time that it really doesn’t matter how fast or slow we burn fossil fuels. All that matters is the cumulative. I suppose one could devise a profit strategy based on that and the potential scarcity.
But then again, how weird would that be if the recent stabilization in temperatures was eventually found to be linked to a plateauing in crude oil production? I really doubt that is the case, but time wil tell on all this stuff.
“how weird would that be if the recent stabilization in temperatures was eventually found to be linked to a plateauing in crude oil production?”
Doesn’t make sense really. A plateau in crude oil usage still means CO2 going up. And as you say, CO2, once added, hangs around for a long time.
Yes, and that is why I said that “I really doubt that is the case” for precisely your reasons.
The statisticians are the worst. Fior example, the Freakonomics guys are the greatest cornucopians I have seen when it comes to analyzing fossil fuel reserves.
The statisticians are the worst
Indeed,the China problem is well identified undereporting of GHG
emmissions.The Revisions by the PRC NBS is still substantive, ie around 18% in coal production alone eg Tu 2011
* Up to 100 to 200 Mt of coal output may be underreported in Shanxi in recent years,
which needs to be corrected by the Shanxi Bureau of Statistics.
* Up to 300 to 600 Mt of coal output may be underreported at the national level in recent
years, which needs to be corrected by the National Bureau of Statistics.
*The coal supply statistical revisions by the NBS in 2006 and 2010 have not fully corrected the aforementioned statistical distortion.
Currently, the size of grey markets in the Chinese coal value chain seems to have grown to dangerous levels that are too significant to be ignored; it is recommended that the Chinese government should consider assessing the current situation and fixing any inconsistency within its statistical reporting system. Otherwise, ongoing coal statistical distortion is likely to not only severely undermine China’s policy initiatives on energy conservation and carbon intensity abatement in the years to come, but also to make it difficult for the international community to
verify policy achievements claimed by the Chinese government.
WebHubTelescope: The statisticians are the worst. Fior example, the Freakonomics guys are the greatest cornucopians I have seen when it comes to analyzing fossil fuel reserves.
That is a “non-disputatious dispute”, to paraphrase a famous quote. It does not dispute either that (a) [at present prices,] there is a lot of oil and natural gas to be extracted or (b) that the principal impediment to extracting it is government prohibition and incompetence. You don’t even dispute a more gentle claim, namely that there is enough recoverable oil and gas to power the manufacture of a fossil-fuel-free energy industry while leaving enough in place for future generations, should they find a need for it.
Aha, see how a statistician quantifies numbers? They say “a lot of” and that apparently means something.
This is a perfect place to introduce the psychology of greed. You seem to think that society will, on its own accord, prioritize the use of valuable fossil fuels to first develop alternatives. This makes sense to me. However, the sustainability expert Thomas Fischbacher said this recently:
“There is at present a very powerful mental block that shows up in many discussions of sustainability: looking at our past conduct, it is easy to get the idea that Homo sapiens‘ modus operandi is to seek out the most valuable/powerful/convenient resource first, use this up, and then, driven by need, find ways to make do with the next most valuable resource, calling this “progress”—actually a downward spiral.
Now, there are two dominant attitudes toward this observation that we despoil one resource after another.
One is some form of “denial”. This is quite widespread amongst professional economists. Ultimately, the absurdity of their argument becomes clear when it is condensed to “sustainability is just one problem among many, and we are the better at solving problems the stronger our economy—so we need to use up resources fast to get rich fast so that we can afford to address the problems caused by us using up resources fast.” Reminds me of a painter who lived in the village I grew up in. He was known to work very swiftly, and when asked why he always was in such a hurry, wittily replied: ‘but I have to get the job done before I run out of paint!’
The other attitude is some sort of self-hate that regards the key problem not as an issue of very poor management, but inherently linked to human existence. According to that line of thinking, collapse is inevitable and we should just make sure we do not gobble up resources so fast that we leave nothing for our children to despoil so that they can have a chance to live.”
from http://azimuthproject.com blog
Actually, Web, a high level of economic activity, which implies the largest number of people possible working on solving problems, will maximize the odds of finding new energy sources and maximizing the ones we have. As history shows, that is how it works. The problem you have is that you don’t see the solution. The solution lies in the future, and neither you nor I are smart enough to figure out what it will be. For now in the US, the solution is natural gas. In the future, it will be something else.
You have to give Jim2 credit for at least responding just like the typical Peak Oil believer, however roundabout his reasoning is, that crude oil is not the future. That’s at least a start.
Web – Nat gas price is around 2 bucks. That is all I need to know. You, on the other hand, don’t seem to let data get in the way of a good story.
Here is a good analysis of the nat gas situation:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/486111-natural-gas-might-produce-a-fracking-miracle-in-2013
WebHubTelescope: Aha, see how a statistician quantifies numbers? They say “a lot of” and that apparently means something.
Again you do not dispute the assertion that there is a lot of recoverable oil and natural gas, enough to manufacture the fossil-fuel-free future energy technology, based on recent trends, and have oil and natural gas left over.
WebHubTelescope: You have to give Jim2 credit for at least responding just like the typical Peak Oil believer, however roundabout his reasoning is, that crude oil is not the future.
Now you are changing your ground by returning to focus on “crude” oil, after the rest of us have been talking about shale, natural gas, tar sands, the Venezuelan tar that can be (at present prices) economically converted to transportable fuel feedstock, and everything else that is economically recoverable at present prices. At present prices, the only thing preventing an oil glut is the system of government restrictions (with diverse motivations) that prevent extraction.
You refuse to define what “a lot” means. Some statistician you are.
I already responded by describing the human impulse, when faced with abundance, of “the need to use up resources fast to get rich fast so that we can afford to address the problems caused by us using up resources fast.” Give me proof that this will change in the near future.
That’s funny because the first comment that I made on this thread I specifically restricted to crude oil
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/13/psychological-effects-of-global-warming/#comment-192162
Conventional crude oil resides in only certain locations within a finite volume. The mathematics of describing the stochastic search through this volume is surprisingly simple. Mathematically describing the extraction of the oil from this volume is also simple if one uses a compartmental model of flow. Amusing that no one ever though to try this before.
That is my point, but what exactly is your point? You are evidently a statistician based on your name. Do you have problems with the meaning of the word finite?
You are a liar. I was the one that brought up the tar sands of Canada. And as far as I can see, you are the first to now mention Venezuelan tar. And what is up with that phrase “the rest of us”. Are you involved in some pact, colluding to make this information on finite amounts of conventional crude oil a secret?
Again, what makes you think that humans will change their psychological makeup to suddenly be conscientious about using the current stash of oil to come up with alternatives? That is the psychological dilemma tha we are faced with.
Go count your natural gas and coal and get back to me.
web hub telescope:That’s funny because the first comment that I made on this thread I specifically restricted to crude oil
You are correct. my mistake. I missed that — how appropriate in a thread about “psychology”.
There is a lot of energy if we consider “oil equivalents” and do not restrict attention to crude oil: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9106.
Production growth has not kept up with population growth, mostly due to governmental restrictions, political unrest, and governmental incompetence, as “Gail the Actuary” at that post shows further down. The cost per barrel of oil equivalent, and the source I cited has occasionally written much about how “expensive” oil is equivalent to unavailable oil if it can’t be paid for.
With that I concede your main point: as long as “solution to the problem” is confined to mean “the last solution to the last problem” instead of “the next solutions to the next problems”, then peak oil is a severe problem without a solution. If you can persuade Americans that there are no solutions, then Americans will not find the next solutions to the next problems. Someone else will find them. In recent years, oil production in the US has grown except on federal land, where federal restrictions have prevented increased extraction. If federal restrictions remain in place, or expand further, then peak oil is an insoluble problem.
There is a lot of recoverable energy in barrel of oil equivalents. Enough to power the construction of a fossil-free energy economy, though it will take perhaps a century.
WebHubTelescope: You are a liar. I was the one that brought up the tar sands of Canada. And as far as I can see, you are the first to now mention Venezuelan tar.
I for sure made a mistake. You did bring up the tar sands first. I did bring up the Venezuelan tar as an example of an “oil equivalent” resource that will last a long time. It’s mentioned by Gail the Actuary in the post I linked to above. It’s a resource that will not be available as long as Venezuela has Chavez-like governance.
WEbHubTelescope: Again, what makes you think that humans will change their psychological makeup to suddenly be conscientious about using the current stash of oil to come up with alternatives?
I did not say “suddenly”, but humans are now using the available hydrocarbons to power manufacture of alternatives. For example, electrical power from coal and natural gas powers the manufacture of PV panels and wind turbines, and research into biofuels. Each time (almost every time) I write about replacing the current energy economy with the future energy economy I refer to the time, labor, and inventiveness that must be persistently invested.
Irony, thy name is Web Hub Telescope.
Thanks for pointing out how well I can detect irony.
“So Australians think they can make up for the loss of crude oil with coal and natural gas. Hope it turns out well.”
Well, if “environmentalists” quit trying to shut down shale and coal they could easily do so.
NG Consumption: 26.41 billion m3
NG Reserves: 3,115 billion m3
Australia will either have to trade their NG to other countries for crude, or they will have to transition their transportation fleet to use natural gas. Isn’t it interesting to see how things work once you look at the data.
In this case it really has nothing to do with AGW. You go through your supply of crude oil, then it is on to the next thing.
Imagine the who country run on clean, plentiful NG.
What a great day that would be. Lucky for Australia they have lots of NG and coal.
Too bad for Australia they have morons running the country. Until the next election. When Labor will cease to exist.
Australia’s Bass Straight oil resource has been in production since the 1960’s. The field is definitely in decline and there is very little in terms of alternative sources. On the other hand we are the world number 1 producer of LNG – fourth largest exporter – and are on track to more than quadruple production to 104 million tonnes by 2020. We are hoping that production in the US is mostly used to drive US power generation with cheap gas – so that export prices hold up.
We have as well 11% of the world’s uranium resource, 25% of the thorium resource and 1000 years supply of coal.
People keep telling Webby that oil depletion is an economic problem – and not one that is all that difficult to solve through the market. The unwillingness to evolve past simple concepts is telling. Webby decides something is the case without any depth or breadth – no background reading at all it seems – and insists with insults and calumny that it is that way ever after it seems. He seems to believe that if he just insults us enough he will convince some people. Other than Bart – I haven’t seen any evidence of Webby convincing anyone.
Sorry, wasn’t following.
Of what am I convinced?
Of Webby’s brilliance of course – it is an especially insane delusion.
Captain Kangaroo said:
“I haven’t seen any evidence of Webby convincing anyone.”
Listen, I don’t go to places where all I will get are pats on the back and head-nodding. Perhaps the best places for critical analysis are where people hate your guts in a knee-jerk fashion and despise everything you say. You get the feeback here because then you know how to deal with it in when you inevitably have to deal with it in the real world.
One of these days someone will knock me for a loop, but this round everyone seems to be implictly saying that supplies of crude oil are something they are concerned about. It is implicit because the topics of natural gas, coal, shale, and even methane hydrates are mentioned as alternatives, without anyone debating the fact that crude oil supply is in fact on the decline.
Forget the Hockey Stick, the biggest “hide the decline” controversy is in our refusal to explictly admit to declining world-wide crude oil reserves. All would rather hide this fact than to publicly admit to it.
Robert I Ellison | April 15, 2012 at 6:04 am |
Of Webby’s brilliance of course – it is an especially insane delusion.
Dude, you’re both brilliant.
That’s pretty obvious; it’s also clear that both of you are convinced of this, else you wouldn’t hammer and tongs the way the pair of you do. One can measure this in level of invective and proportion of effort made to undercut. See how little time either of you spend pincushioning lesser lights.
You’re certainly also both more brilliant than you are insane, for some value of ‘more’.
I don’t know Webby – I start with the inevitable decline of Bass Strait oil and then quantify gas production and other resources. Oil is an economic problem in substitution. This is not the end of the world as we know – there are lots if alternatives with similar or higher energy density. This is part and parcel of your particular obsession which you return to like a dog to a bone in the mistaken belief that anyone cares that oil is a limited resource. As opposed to deliberately ignoring something utterly obvious. We have taken this on board and moved onto another level of analysis. You should do the same.
I am not an expert on crude oil reserves. It does seem however that the US in particular has huge fossil fuel reserves including a lot of natural gas. Muller is excellent on this. The US reserves dwarf everyone else’s. The issue at least in the US is regulatory risk which has been higher for at least a decade than in most of the rest of the world. This explains why our production has been dropping at least so I am told by my friends in the fossil fuel industry. In any case, I’m not too concerned. If fossil fuel prices go up, other forms of energy become more competitive.
Yes, Richard Muller has a book out called “Physics for Future Presidents”. And the importance of this topic suggests why he has a chapter called “The End of Oil” where he describes Hubbert’s work on predicting what we now know as peak oil.
Most academics seem to be very well-versed on the subject and aren’t afraid to talk about the issues, unlike the so-called skeptics on this comment site, who will bend over backwards to talk around the problem of resource constraints.
The argument for free markets and capitalism and against centralized controls in no way is an argument that there are resource constraints. I’m not sure where you come up with these ideas, web.
Sorry, that should have been “an argument there are NO resource constraints.”
Thnis is the National WILDLIFE Federation? Really? Reporting on human psychology? If I was a donor I’d be asking where my money’s going. And there’s a polar bear on their front page.
I live in a mild climate that still fluctuates from -15C to 25C and sometimes more.
I admit the constant rain in the winter gets to me, but I rarely notice if the thermometer is .8C more in March of this year compared to previous years since normal fluctuation can be 5C or more.
For a fuller list of the destructive nature of global warming see:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
It will cheer you up no end. ;-)
That’s a list of things that could be caused by global warming. Not to be confused with a list of things that will for sure be caused. No-one knows for sure what will happen.
I use that list often to demonstrate to people the full scale of consequences ongoing CO2 emissions could have. I note to them that the list is not exhaustive either. I suspect it’s the mere tip of the iceberg of elements of our world that could be impacted.
Then I suggest, lets say only 5% of the list comes to pass. That’s still dozens of bad things. Although there are no numbers for this, the sheer scale of things that could be impacted makes me doubt we’ll be lucky to avoid every single one of them.
This isn’t a typical climate change after-all. The ongoing CO2 rise is the fastest known in Earth’s history. The primary impacts will be on global temperature, ocean pH and plant fertilization (even arch climate deniers agree on the last). In terms of global temperature, after 10,000 years of relatively stable climate we could be witnessing a change equivalent to the scale of the warming out of the last glacial maximum, but much faster and of course without past-precedent (after all the past interglacials the planet has cooled, never has the world warmed several degrees further).
In terms of ocean pH we could witness a drop unprecedented in Earth’s history. As for plant fertilization I am unsure how significant the change will be relative to the past. I haven’t seen any numbers. But if it is very significant then that alone could alter entire ecosystems.
In turn these three impacts will impact others – and so on, not just as a long cascade of causality either: many things will feedback too. It really is a very complex system and we are throwing a wrench into it. I don’t see on what basis we can know the planet as is comfortable for us will survive. We don’t have past precedent and unless you believe in Gaia or a particular form of God there’s no reason to expect Earth’s climate and life on it to consider us in it’s changings.
Speculation knows no bounds when we are pouring billions of dollars a year into it. It is worse than idle; it is destructive.
We could easily play this billion dollar what-if impacts game with asteroid strikes. It would not increase their negligible liklihood.
This is not science. Science is about what is. In Popper language, science is conjectures and refutations. Conjectures alone, like this impacts game, is not science. Yet the climate journals are full of it.
well asteroid strikes we have past precedent. Last major strike was millions of years ago. Statistically we should be fine for the next 200 years.
For the CO2 rise we have no such reassuring statistics.
lolwot,
You do realize (or do you?) that you are just repeating a list of AGW crap talking points and treating them as if they are meaningful.
A Maserati
A chalet in Switzerland
A Rolex for both wrists and both ankles
A 1958 gold top Les Paul guitar
A round-the-world high-end cruise
A winery
A Clydesdale horse
A contract to print an upcoming book by Stephen King
These are a list of things I could buy if I won a $1B lottery prize. Clearly it’s important that I buy a ticket. Even better, the taxpayers should buy me one. No, make that two.
lolwot
Your response was purely speculative. Read it yourself. Nature is not as fragile as you would like me to believe. Bikini Attol – read about it. :)
Bikini Attol is a poor test of the required robustness to rising CO2. It’s also not a great example. The radiation there is above what is deemed acceptable for a population.
“Application of U.S. standard computer analysis provided that a concentration of cesium in the soil between .32 and .35 picocuries/cubic gram (including background) would result in an annual effective dose equivalent of 15 millirem assuming a local only diet.” http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com/bikinifin.htm
That 15 millirem standard is the EPA’s standard for Yucca mountain that has been applied to Marshall Islands. Most would consider your great example, a great example of what is wrong with science, at least, the EPA’s interpretation of science :)
Obviously you are not familiar with the PETM.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/petm-weirdness/
@lolwot
‘In terms of ocean pH we could witness a drop unprecedented in Earth’s history’
You mean that the sea could go from mildly alkaline to even milderly alkaline?
Wow! Scary stuff!
I’m really, really frightened of dipping in my toe in water that would be even closer to pure distilled water (pH7 = neutral) than it is today. That
Dihydrogen Monoxide is a truly dangerous chemical.
read up on ocean pH a bit more. It doesn’t have to cross some magical 7 line to have an effect.
Of course, the ocean organisms, many of them, might surprise us and utilize the extra CO2 building material. I say might in the same sense used in climate science predictions.
Our US government is wasting billions of dollars annually with website information and reports designed to alarm the general public about catastophic global warming in attempt to scare it into supporting unsound political agendas without first performing an independent, objective scientific review of the issue. Can our government really afford to borrow more than 40 cents out of every dollar it spends on this ill-defined “problem”? Why doesn’t our government tone down its alarmism with more accurate discussions about what is happening with the global warming “problem” over the last 15 years. Why does GISS’s Dr. James Hansen publicly announce that 2011 was the 9th warmest year in the historical record, when he could as truthfully said it was the 3rd coldest of the last 15? Or why doesn’t he just give it straight to the public and tell them that global average temperatures have held steady or perhaps declined slightly in the last 15 years?
I finally found the book I read ~30 years ago that talks about apocalytpic doomsday movements. It is out of print, and not even in the Amazon book list. It is called, “Waiting for the Apocalypse: Doomsday Deferred”. I have ordered a copy and am looking forward to seeing how its insights fromthe 1980’s bear up when focused on the AGW movement.
ON the subject of psychopathology, I’d say anyone laying wake nights worrying that a couple of degrees warmer world is going to cause some sort of apocalypse while ignoring the increasing likelihood of another LIA and the very real harm that will do, is mentally unbalanced.
Warm is good. Cold is bad. Why is that so difficult for these people?
I agree with you, pokerguy. I don’t think 5/6s of the world population will die if the global temp goes up 5C. However, if the global temp goes down 5C and the icecaps grow to where they were 11,000 years ago? That would be very tough on us.
The thing you can bank on, if temps start moving in the minus direction, the left will be be there…. one hand trying to pick your pocket, the other wagging the finger of blame in your face.
“a couple of degrees warmer world”
contrast that with the LIA which was about 1 degree cooler than present.
I agree. Warmer is better. The LIA certainly had many years more than one degree Celcius colder than present and averaged more than a degree colder. Returning to LIA temperatures might make Malthus look like an optimist. A couple degrees warmer doubles the size of the bread basket- Canada and Russia especially. Lolwot lives in the best of all possible worlds, climate wise. Lolwot, more Dr. Pangloss, please, and less Miniver Cheevy. Expand your optimism beyond climate. This is the best of all possible worlds, isn’t it?
“A couple degrees warmer doubles the size of the bread basket- Canada and Russia especially.”
Sure that seems very likely looking at that factor in isolation simplistically.
What I question is how the overall interleaved system will be impacted by going into a climate that nature as we know it has never had to cope with before.
Climate has had to cope with bigger and faster changes than this. There have been mass extinctions in the past. The Earth has always recovered.
Nature has shown it is very good at coping.
One of the psychological effects of true belief in AGW is that need to repeat one’s favorite type of doom over and over, hoping that repetition will make it a more accurate prophecy.
Fred, for instance, is convinced of the need to repeat endless litanies of doom about the death of the oceans due to what beleivers oddly call “Acidification”. They are convinced, without any field data at all, that CO2 is infusing the oceans and making them acidic and that shell fish and corals are already suffering from Man’s sinful emissions.
And then a study comes along like this:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/4/14/the-ok-coral.html
and shows that even the wise and educated have lsot their cognitive abilites due to exposure to AGW obsession.
Hunter that study states that CO2 is infusing the oceans and making them more acidic. But you dispute that?
The ocean wasn’t acidic before and isn’t now. Are you aware of the PH then and now?
The ocean is a buffered system and we are possibly looking at undersaturation of aragonite by the end of the century.
Doug,
More significantly, lolwot has to ignore that the coral is viable living a wide range of pH regimes.
lolwot,
making something less alkaline is not making it acidic, but you did manage to miss the point: The coral is fine.
Keep with your relentless bs. It is now entertaining.
Speaking of litanies of doom, whatever happened to the ozone hole?
I have a couple of good friends who are true believers. These are smart (in one case very smart), Liberal (of course) well intended people who are just so convinced that the right cannot possibly be right about something they refuse to even consider it.
That’s the problem right there. The politicization of AGW. That’s been a brilliant tact for the warmists. Even better than the ad hoc renaming of g.w. to climate change.
“Speaking of litanies of doom, whatever happened to the ozone hole”
Montreal protocol banning CFC emissions, you know that thing that was going to destroy the aerosol industry. It didn’t. But it did stop the ozone hole growing even larger.
With several serious unintended consequences, since the CFC ban was essentially total. Asthma inhalers being one, since CFCs were the well understood delivery agent. Replacements have not been as effective. Another is the engine fire suppression systems on jet aircraft. Not sure about you, but at 38,000 feet, I want the best stuff on the planet to fight an engine fire. It is not like we actually use such systems on a regular basis. Last, the blowing agents for the external foam insulation on the shuttle. After the Montreal ban, the first shuttle launch with new blowing agents was almost a total disaster, with insulation “popcorning” off the external fuel tank and shotgunning the underside of the shuttle.
We need to come to middle ground on these things (including CO2), instead of slamming to the exteme position. Lead being another example of mindless “pursuits to zero” of the green lobby.
lolwot,
They never did figure out what “caused” the ozone hole. They were surprised when it showed up over Antartica rather than in the NH where it was predicted to be. They really don’t know how long the hole existed prior to be “discovered”.
And, as with CAGW, the threat it c was claimed to represent was all out of proportion to what it really was. Were you aware that if the ozone hole were over the US, the increase in uv exporsure would be equivlent to that one would get moving from Minnesota to New Orleans?
There is a reason we don’t hear about it any longer. It was a non-issue all along and now they have global warming, which allows them to make up ever scarier predictions.
Timg56
Do you have some references on this Ozone Hole stuff?
What sort of references are you looking for? Some of this was from stuff I read while in grad school. I’d have to hunt for my class files.
The part about the hole showing up in an unexpected location was well documented back in the early 90’s. The part about scientists not knowing how long the hole has been in existence has also been talked about. I imagine an internet search would turn up material.
One simple test is to ggo back and read the claims in the media about what would happen due to the ozone hole. Then check to see if any of them have.
Well, this explains a lot:
Lise Van Susteren, MD
“She also worked as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency, conducting psychological assessments of world leaders.”
“In September 2006, Van Susteren was chosen as one of the first
50 persons to be trained by Former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Project to give her version of his global warming slide show, An Inconvenient Truth.”
Don’t they mean “side show”, not “slide show”?
“Kevin J. Coyle, JD is Vice President for Education and Training at the
National Wildlife Federation (NWF) where he oversees its citizen science and education programs. In 2006, he adapted Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth, into a training course curriculum that has been used by the Climate Project to prepare nearly 2,000 advocates to make educational presentations to civic and business leaders in the U.S. and abroad. Prior”
Do you think they sniff glue? Or drop LSD? Because that would explain a lot.
Oh! Fossil fuels! The HORROR!!
Leftist bureaucracy’s use of global warming scare tactics as a means for social change has been a fire bomb in the hands of the liberal mob. Scientists are beginning to better understand the psycho-cybernetics underlying this mass mania of the radical supporters of liberal fascism.
The correlation between belief in AGW and a host of self-defeating personality disorders has become all too obvious: people in the grip of Hot World Syndrome who who engage in fearmongering and pushing doomsday-catastrophist beliefs.
We are treated to the AGW True Believers of the Left who fear CO2, over-population, second-hand smoke, hamburgers, nuclear power, melting glaciers, dying polar bears, food shortages, sinking islands, storms… even cold weather. The defamation of conservatism by aging hold hippies who miss wearing flags on their arses has resulted in an undermining of honor and ethics in science.
Wag,
In many ways I’m an aging hippie myself. Then again, even back in the late 60’s I thought the so-called “counter-culture” was rife with self seeking and hypocrisy. Of course, what human endeavor is not? Do you really think the right is any better?
But you’re right on many points. I’ve been hanging around these climate blogs for a while now. It’s more than obvious that the true believers are generally of a type…trollish, unquestioning, and almost unbelievably annoying. Given a choice between hanging out with a bunch of enviro-hippies and a bunch of right wing skeptics, at this moment in history I’d choose the latter, despite my profound political disagreements..
Pokerguy,
I am of a similar vintage, early 70s, and of a similar general disposition to what you set out. With hindsight my take on that period is that our generation threw open the doors and curtains and let a lot of intellectual and cultural light flood into our society – unfortunately we also let in a lot of insects and they have colonised all sorts of niches in our society. Insects are a wonderment of survivability part of the wonder being how they manage it for so long without much of a brain.
And then George becaue anti-nuke, again.
We’ve got it every which way now. The Leftist-libs’ blindness to the evils of communism is so ’70s that environmentalists like Patrick Moore refuse to stand with the malignant enviro-whackpot neurotics any longer. Then, we’ve got George Monbiot in the wake of Fukushima has become pro-nuclear.
Web HuB Telescope @14/4 12.41pm:
Re energy, Australia has uranium and is not too worried about millennium claims about oil. We Australians remain optimistic that things will improve after the next Federal Election when we can rid ourselves of a go it alone carbon tax that will bleed our economy. For a small population, Australia has a history of innovation, my own father and a nephew have taken out world patents, and Australians will, as in the past, rise to the challenges ahead. Do not worry about us, Web Hub Telescope… if that is your name.
Beth, before you guys dump your carbon tax, please bear with me and let me to share the burden I bear due to fossil fuels. I can get in my car and drive to work, get groceries and other goods, and even go to fairly far away places I have never seen before. If I save some money, I can even utilize a fossil-fueled airplane to visit places even further away – all the way around the world, if I choose. My house is cool in the Summer and warm in the Winter. I enjoy a wide variety of goods and services made possible by copious and cheap energy. I think you can see, the burden I bear due to fossil fuels is well nigh unbearable. It has to be the worst thing to happen to me and to the world at large. Please reconsider that carbon tax. Right.
I’m telling you, Beth. I have merely scratched the surface of the misery fossil fuels have brought to the step of my door. So terrible!
Well, then shouldn’t worry about climate science and climate scientists either.
Unless you happen to be afraid of them?
The HORROR!!!
I think they’ve learned which ones to pay attention to and which ones to ignore.
KIM @ 14/4 11.04 AM:
Three headed dogs howling through the reeds…’ LOL. Here’s what I hear.
The shining river mingles with the land
Where murmuring bees and trilling birds sound
The old harmonies. Echoing their song
In lifting appegios the river reeds respond.
Hey Prof. JC,
Not just Craven. How about Glieck?
As you say, Jim2,
‘Quelle horreur!’
Yep, I am getting depressed. Our tax dollars support this kind of absolute junk. But there is a bright side. This kind of completely unsubstantiated garbage simply makes people more skeptical.
If you want to help, please help us, help them. And if you’re in the SF area and would like to lend a helping hand, just contact me through Judith.
http://www.veteransfreedomfarm.org
The US has gone to war for many reasons and is in the Middle East for more than one reason. However, Steve’s implication that we are in the Middle East partly to ensure stability of the oil supply there is correct. That fact drives home just how crucial fossil fuels are to our technological way of life. If we want to partly reduce that reason to be in the Middle East, the best thing we can do is produce all the natural gas and oil possible in the US and in other stable parts of the world. Also, build all the nuclear plants we can and start a Moon-shot-like research program on thorium power. Finally, stop wasting money on wind and solar. Those resources are better used elsewhere. Stop subsidizing production of electric cars, but subsidize battery research – batteries are not yet ready for prime time. Support our troops and veterans. They deserve all the help and support they get.
I am willing to pledge support for the charity, but, I am confused as to JC’s role as contact liaison. Is she your personal secretary?
Web Hub Telescope @ 10.48pm:
Why would I fear science, the process of formulating a hypothesis, testing empiric data, of critical argument and refutation, followed on by publication of tests and conclusions, sans gate keeping? What is there to fear in this?
Say, WHT, why do you conceal your identity behind a nom de plume? What is there to fear in speaking out under your real name?
This report quotes approvingly quotes an anti-American quip by Hugo Chavez. I almost stopped reading then but persisted a bit longer. If your team includes Chavez you have just lost the plot entirely already.
And the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales. “Morales threatens to sue US for blah blah blah.” Stop the presses.
Well, if the topic is things the US mental health system is unprepared to cope with..
‘Our interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Anastasios Tsonis
Many of us accept that greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases. Much of the purported impacts are simply over the top. Ocean acidification is simply a non event. Plant fertilisation? It can’t really be a factor unless plants are carbon limited. Not the case. The daisys are the same, the vagetables are the same, the trees are the same as they have ever been. Much is made in this report of the Australian drought. Rainfalls haven’t changed. – http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rain&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=0 – Extreme rainfall hasn’t increased – http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/extremes/timeseries.cgi?graph=RX1d&ave_yr=0
No one is afraid of science but much of what is said is too absurd to be contemplated. Case in point – the planet is in a cool decadal mode and isn’t warming for a decade or three more. Australia indeed has decades of flooding and cyclones to deal with – quite natural and creating unwarranted fear for the future doesn’t help at all.
Having said that – very few people are advocating radically increased CO2 emissions. All parties in Australia have the same CO2 target – 5% reduction by 2020. So ‘Australia now has three positions on tackling climate change: Labor’s hybrid 50/50 capitalist-socialist scheme, the rationalist-socialist policy offered by the Coalition, and the romantic-socialist position of the Greens.’
Any way it’s going to cost us a motza. Frankly – I’d not worry about it, put a lot more money into health, education, agriculture and conservation in our neighbohood and become even more of a regional powerhouse. The lack of vision and understanding is astonishing. Hell – I would have a billion dollar prize for the best ideas in energy.
Best regards
Robert I Ellison
Plants do not have to be carbon limited in order for more CO2 to improve growth and hardiness. That is far too simple.
The idea of limiting factors – light, water, nutrients is a fundamental organising principle in biogeochemistry.
– http://fresc.usgs.gov/staff/perakis/publications/perakis%20hp%202002.pdf –
‘A limiting nutrient is defined as that element in shortest supply relative to demands for plant growth. The addition of a limiting nutrient will stimulate plant growth (i.e. net primary productivity) more than will additions of any other elements, and co-limitation by two or more nutrients is also possible. Nitrogen (N) is the most common limiting nutrient in the temperate zone, as indicated by its widespread use in agricultural fertilizers, and by experimental additions of nutrients to a range of natural terrestrial ecosystems (Vitousek and Howarth, 1991). Limitation by N is common in so many regions because it is not supplied by rock weathering (with few exceptions), and must accumulate from atmospheric deposition and biological fixation as ecosystems develop.’
Water or light limitation is common as well.
True, but that does not contradict my point. Your quote notes that changing the limiting factor has the biggest beneficial impact, not the only impact.
It does indeed contradict your point as there are limits on the ability of plants to use carbon. There are cellular limits – a ratio of carbon to nitrogen and phosphorus in cells for instance. There are overall limits on water light or light. Plants respond to growth in CO2 by reducing stomata size and density – which conserves water. They just don’t need more carbon – carbon isn’t limiting.
Yer missin a big limiting factor – temperature. It is very often low enough to exclude practicallyt all plant growth but seldom high enough to do the same. Ice and agriculture just don’t go together very well.
David – yer a dickhe@d. Plants of some sort grow almost anywhere ecept for the poles.
It is not a matter of deliberately increasing CO2 emissions, just leaving them alone. The only energy (other than getting more) problem today is mental. We are spending many billions on a nonproblem. Fire is good. Live with it.
Emissions respond to economic growth.
% annual increase in CO2 emissions
China 3.4
India 2.6
Japan 0.1
OECD Europe 0.3
USA 1.1
World 1.8
So there is doubling and doubling again this century. Is there a point where this becomes problematical? The answer is perhaps and dogmatic assertions otherwise are simply an exercise argumentum ad ignorantum. An argument without any substance or depth moreover.
It’s a shotgun wedding. A forced marriage. The counter-examples to the case are well-documented and well-known, and dismantle the correlation that some pretend has any causatio.
Economic growth needs carbon emissions like a fish needs a bicycle.
Oh, wait. That’s someone else’s slogan.
“Carbon emissions lead to increased welfare” is a difficult case to make, looking at historic pattern of killer smogs. Just ask tonyb.
Economic growth requires energy – and adding a few disjointed comments doesn’t bring any clarity at all.
Economic growth good. Not economic growth bad. Taxing carbon based energy out of the market bad man.
Captain Kangaroo | April 15, 2012 at 4:20 pm |
Just think of all the energy we could obtain by fueling furnaces with people. Carblent Green is people. It’s people.
Unconscionable measures ought not be excused for Economic expediency.
If you want the benefits of the services of the carbon cycle, pay for them.
One day someone will have to; your transfer of your borrowed obligations to those others in that far off day is simple theft from the future.
Low cost energy good for people and for the future. I don’t think burning people is likely to be either economically or morally viable.
How about if the choice was between CAGW and burning the bodies of those who have died (in unsuspicious circumstances) ?
The notion Bart is stumbling around here, is Land Tax (or Natural Resources tax, more generally). Which, to have any justification, would require that the increasing CO2 levels are indeed a serious issue. Which is of course precisely what we do NOT know.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 16, 2012 at 11:17 am |
Uh, no. The notion Bart R is stumbling around is privatization, as in the opposite of tax.
Tax delivers decision power from the individual to the state, or transfers that power unearned and inefficiently to some favored sector. Privatization simply gives owners the means to collect revenues from those who benefit by use of the owners’ property.
No one ever has to prove that peeing in the village well is objectionable by evidence of harm.
The notion VCD appears to be stumbling around is the Tort of Trespass, which is the only time one need prove the level of harm of a trespass to private property: when determining the damages due to the injured party.
Are we calculating how much the fossil fuel and biofuel industry owe the rest of the people on the planet in damages, akin to a Tobacco class action suit?
“Are we calculating how much the fossil fuel and biofuel industry owe the rest of the people on the planet in damages, akin to a Tobacco class action suit?”
Short answer : Yes
CAGW, if true, amounts to a tragedy of the commons. So unless you can privatize the atmosphere (which is now what you say/imply you stumbling towards), then putting a price on pollution is the only sensible option.
Of course if CAGW is not true, nothing at all needs to be done. Indeed we need to ensure we do nothing. The air would remain in the commons, and not be an issue. Just like when nobody pees in the village well.
Vera, Chuck and Dave | April 17, 2012 at 2:53 am |
Short answer : Yes
The problem with your reasoning is that you’re still confusing the Tort of Trespass with the Tragedy of the Commons.
CAGW does not need to be true in any sense for the capacity of the carbon cycle to perform the service of recycling carbon to be diminished.
CAGW could be net beneficial — if you want the benefit, pay for it — and there’d still be the Tragedy of the Commons.
All that is needed for the privatization case to be made is that lucrative CO2E emission is excludable and rivalrous.
Well, it’s administratively possible to exclude lucrative uses, as the various F&D, carbon tax, and ETS devices testify. It’s even administratively _cheap_ or net positive (through churn reduction) to exclude lucrative CO2E uses, and net less distortionate to the economy.
And CO2E is definitely rivalrous. Once anyone else has used up that portion of the carbon cycle with their emission, or changing land use, or whatnot, it’s in effect gone. That also addresses scarcity, the traditional measure of what determines if a good ought be priced under Capitalism.
“The problem with your reasoning is that you’re still confusing the Tort of Trespass with the Tragedy of the Commons.”
No, the problem is you wrongly try to see the former (which has no bearing on CAGW as far as I can tell) in a discussion on the latter (which does have a bearing).
—
“CAGW does not need to be true in any sense for the capacity of the carbon cycle to perform the service of recycling carbon to be diminished.”
What has this got to do with anything ? Does it even mean anything ?
—
“CAGW could be net beneficial — if you want the benefit, pay for it — and there’d still be the Tragedy of the Commons.”
There’s be a positive spillover. What of it ?
—
“All that is needed for the privatization case to be made is that lucrative CO2E emission is excludable and rivalrous.”
This essentially amounts to state-issued tradeable CO2 permits. Which are also pointless if CAGW is not actually a problem.
So what, if anything, is your point here ?
Burning good. Books bad. => Burning books is best.
Bart -> Fantastic Dram. Fantastic Drama >>> drama.
Another point you missed about limiting factors in plant growth is that drought tolerance is increased as CO2 level rises for the very simple reason that gas exchange goes faster when there is a higher concentration of CO2. Plants lose water to evaporation when stomata iris open to exchange O2 for CO2. They are open less of the time as CO2 concentration rises.
Thus raising CO2 level is beneficial in cases where CO2 is the limiting factor AND when water is the limiting factor AND when low temperature is a limiting factor. Of course these aren’t limiting factors in all places at all times but one or the other is a limiting factor in many places at many times.
“You can limit some of the factors in all places, and all the factors in some places, but you can never limit all the factors in all the places.”
I think I’ve heard that somewhere before….?
Just so. People take the concept of limiting factor far too narrowly. In most cases there is no limiting factor. Plants just grow naturally.
Stomata decrease in size and intensity with increases of CO2 – limiting water loss. Evapotranspiration is a major component of the global, local and regional hydrological cycles. Is this a good thing? Don’t know – ipso facto doesn’t particularly sound like good idea if humans are the cause. Unforseen consequences.
Organisms tend to grow and proliferate until they reach some resource limit. ‘They just grow naturally.’ What an idiotic statement.
‘Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans may be in part responsible. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the US National Academy of Sciences concur. Computer models are being used to predict climate change under different scenarios of greenhouse forcing and the Kyoto Protocol advocates active measures to reduce CO² emissions which contribute to warming.
Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. The issue centers around the paradox that global warming could instigate a new Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.’
http://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/abrupt-climate-change
Predictability on the basis of some some simple minded rationale made in pseudo scientific language should receive the contempt it deserves.
Always alert to a new disorder, those folks from the APA. Stand by for a DSM V chapter on Climate Related Anxiety Problem Disorder. (Hint: Be on acronym alert.)
Webb Hub Microscope No Australian is ever frightened by Scientists, we respect those that earn our respect, we just want the stinking lot that you and Barty are trying to protect exposed, just for what they did to scientists and the science we respect. Meanwhile your wolf tail is slipping out from under that sheep’s coat………………
Considerate thinker says:
Good, then perhaps you can join me in continuing a comprehensive analysis of the world’s energy economy. I have a couple of volumes in the can, to be found at http://TheOilConundrum.com (click on the Google Docs link to download). I would say that this work is partly an expose of the lack of an expose on fossil fuel resources.
You see, I am nothing if not considerate in my thinking.
Tomfod @ 14/4 11.19pm:
Don’t know the song but I’ll have a go …
‘And nobody cares if the seas aren’t risin’,
And nobody’s bothered if the media’s lyin’.
And nobody’s worried if polar bears ain’t dyin’,
Me and my kind can’t be to blame’
Cause we all agree and we think the same,
It’s you, yer wife, yer kids
And yer damned car.’
A rather pacier version, from the Hippycene era
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6wXNmMyAPk&feature=related
And a couple more stanzas:
When times were hard in bygone days
Our forefathers would kneel and pray,
And ask the Lord’s forgiveness for their sins,
But we’re too cool for genuflection,
We don’t believe in resurrection,
In a game of blame, the rules are: ‘Who Scares, Wins’!
refrain, Global warming…
So we cast around for a magic spell
To save our souls from a painless Hell,
And make our peace with a God that’s gone away,
No, we don’t believe in Jesus,
So let’s bite the hand that feeds us,
And say sorry in the mirror every day.
I’m afraid that psychology as a science ranks with climatology as mostly junk IMO and for this reason I tend to ignore anything that is put out under their guise.
Waffle with words is no substitute for hard science backed up with adequate peer review and with observed datum supporting any conclusions being made, all, of course, suitably qualified for the effects of uncertainty.
Those two joining Economics as the dismal sciences. And as a bit of a student of all three, with good reason.
‘Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ IPCC AR4 section 3.4.4.1 Duh
ROFLMAO
The only psychological danger from global warming is the growing cognitive dissonance as the CAGW forecasts are proven wrong.
Do our children still know that snow is?
HAHAHAAHAAHAHAHHAAHAAHAHAAHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111
This is the truth as I understand it. CAGW has made me an obsessive student of weather and climate and reader of climate blogs for 4 years now. At times, I have neglected responsibilities of work, friends, and family to read just one more post and all the comments. CAGW has occasionally made me less civil toward fellow bloggers than I would like them to be, and has occasionally caused me to doubt the good intentions of others, a cynicism I do not appreciate in others. CAGW has sometimes made me exasperated with friends who parrot a conservative or liberal ideological narrative and won’t bother to strudy obsesively like me. CAGW and its green activists, many of whom don’t share my love and knowlwdge of nature and its critters, has made me depressed about the conservation movement which I have been a part of for almost 50 years. CAGW has made me angry with those green activists whose monomania has dumb-downed liberalism, hijacked the conservation movement, corrupted science, and alienated conservatives from aspects of liberalism and conservation that we all, in less ideological times, would share. CAGW has contributed to post normal science, rejection of conservation and aspects of liberalism, policies with horrific unintended consequences such as creating hunger, starvation, and clear cutting of tropical forests due to biofuel programs. Thus, CAGW alarmism has made me depressed, upset, angry, and, at times, less charitable and less civil than I would wish for others and myself. It indeed has had psychological effects on a 70 year old, scientifically literate, center left, conservationist and environmental educator (among other things) who has watched this tragi-comedy, absudist drama play out.
I’m sorry my friend.
“Don’t take life so seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.” ~Van Wilder
“No matter how I trouble and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive.” ~Hank Williams Sr.
to be continued…
Doug, I understand very well.
This is a genuine statement through current NASA employee …
“My son is a nuclear physicist with NASA and knows GHG theory is bogus and NASA distorts AGW data. BHO won’t allow Civil Servants to express skepticism. James Hanson is actual spokesman for NASA on GHG theory, picked by Al Gore and BHO”
This was said by a father to a contact I have who spoke personally with that father on April 13th.
“This was said by a father to a contact I have who spoke personally with that father on April 13th.”
OK, good…. I was getting a little nervous this quote might not be genuine. My friend has a cousin who knows someone that heard the same thing, except it was on April 12th… but always good to get verification!
I believe the main problem is the new destructive virus “delirium carbonum”, which effects are terrific for the brains of those who believes in the AGW…
“This report aims both to fill in the gap in our awareness of the psychological impacts of climate change, and by exposing the emotional side of the issue, to find the place in our hearts that mobilizes us to fly into action”
Intended propaganda effect, in the framework of Jacques Ellul.
OMG. Fact-checking, anyone?
US Land Temperature Anomalies from NASA
County Level Prevalence of Frequent Mental Distress among U.S. Adults from CDC
If anything can be concluded, it is that the faster the warming the more relaxed people get. Especially note the patches in upper Midwest on both maps. Do these people have no shame?
I know you’re not claiming the Dakotas are the sanest place in the USA.
One suspects some observer bias influencing the CDC data.
Aldous Huxley 1962 U.C. Berkeley Speech on “The Ultimate Revolution”
http://publicintelligence.net/aldous-huxley-1962-u-c-berkeley-speech-on-the-ultimate-revolution/
Evolutionary Psychology and Our Mythical Dark Nature
James V. McConnell describes the ultimate goal of behaviorism: “I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory depriva-tion with drugs, hypnosis, and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual’s behavior.”
My fear, precisely.
http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/issues/8-4.pdf
Crispin Tickell
Huxley family tree (partial)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family
Now you come from an Anglo-Irish family. Your great, great grandfather was T H Huxley – Aldous Huxley was in your background too. Now this is a legacy of seriously thoughtful, intellectual address, isn’t it?
Well T H Huxley was in many respects one of my heroes. Aldous was as well. In fact I think if anybody had any influence on me during my adolescence, it was Aldous Huxley. And I remember going to lunch with him and he asked me what essay I was writing that day for my history teacher. And I replied it was about the relations between the Pope and the Emperor. And he sort of took a deep breath, and for about 15 minutes he spoke about the secular versus the spiritual power. And I really sat back, staggered by what I heard, because he illuminated every aspect of this immensely complicated and still continuing problem, and I found it fascinating. When I sat down afterwards to try and write my essay, I was hardly able to write a word.
snip
Well while you were leading this high profile life, you were also already concerned with the planet, and your book ‘Climatic Change and World Affairs’ was published in 1977, and really was seminal in both I think perhaps shaping up everything you’ve done since, and also in shaping up the political responses to climate change both in Britain, Europe, America and the United Nations. So where did this book come from?
http://www.crispintickell.com/page65.html
Richard Lindzen: The Perversion Of Science
Andrew Montford provides a straightforward and unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of The Royal Society but of science itself, wherein the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority
http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/4936-richard-lindzen-the-perversion-of-science.html
Nigel Lawson: Global warming has turned into religion
Lawson was Chancellor when Crispin Tickell, then British Ambassador to the UN, convinced Prime Minister Thatcher that man-made global warming was a problem. Despite Tickell lacking any scientific background (he read history at university) Mrs Thatcher took the population campaigner’s views seriously enough to make a landmark speech on global warming. This led to the foundation of a branch of the Met Office, the Hadley Centre at Exeter, to study the issue. It remains one of the three leading climate institutes.
http://thegwpf.org/uk-news/151-nigel-lawson-climate-science-has-turned-into-religion.html
brent | April 15, 2012 at 9:28 pm |
Margaret Thatcher, aka ‘The Iron Lady’: B.Sc. in Chemistry, Oxford.
Lord Lawson, aka Baron of Blaby: Philosophy, Oxford.
Crispin Tickell, aka UN Ambassador: History
Some upper class twit pulled the wool over the gullible Lady Thatcher. That’s the theory you’re going with?
One rather regards that hypothesis with skepticism.
@Bart R
Don’t forget the other great architect of the CAGW scam
Maurice Strong.. High School Graduate.. FRS, FRSC etc
http://www.mauricestrong.net/index.php/honours-mainmenu-20
It’s a great embarrassment to me as a Canuck, that Strong is a Canadian.
BTW.. as background, I’ve known that the GCMs would not be validated since about the 97/98 timeframe when I figured it out for myself. Therefore I’ve known since that time that the IPCC was blowing smoke. Lots of time since then to delve into the history of what Lindzen correctly calls the corruption of science itself.
It was a great shock to me at the time. I didn’t want to believe that people albeit in another discipline, but nevertheless doing an activity paralleling what I used to do for a living, were deliberately misleading the public.
I’m an old/former petroleum downstreamer who spent most of my career heavily involved in optimization and scheduling.
all the best
brent
Shell Chief: Energy Prices Too Cheap to Change Consumption
We are clearly in favour of cap and trade systems,” he said. “We would like to have them globally for a global level playing field. That’s most probably not going to be possible, so we can live for a while with regional or country-specific cap and trade systems.
“Shell has taken the decision not to wait. So all of our projects take into account a charge for C02 of $40 ton to reflect a future price of CO2 in our economics today.
http://tinyurl.com/82rc7fj
Bart
I certainly hope you’re not advocating on behalf of BIG OIL!! : )
Save me from Canadian logic.
Save yourself Bart !
You’re responsible for your own inanities :)
cheers
brent
A message for Web the Oil Drum Shill”
Every old, declining oil field can potentially be rejuvenated by fracking.
“Oil companies have breathed new life into the Cardium in recent years, using newer horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing technologies to recover previously uneconomic oil in the geological structure that cuts through much of the province and has long been key to conventional oil production. Cardium oil output has totalled some 1.5 billion barrels since the 1950s, when the huge Pembina field was discovered.
ExxonMobil has a “significant acreage position” in the Cardium, according to the joint statement, which noted RN Cardium Oil’s project may promote technology development that could be applied on unconventional reservoirs in Russia.
As of the end of last year, Exxon had “encouraging early results in the Cardium,” said Exxon vice-president of investor relations David Rosenthal on a Jan. 31 conference call with analysts, according to a transcript.
Exxon had two wells on production at the end of 2011 and had planned for additional drilling in 2012, Rosenthal said, noting that of the company’s tight oil and liquids-rich gas prospects, it is particularly optimistic about the Cardium, in addition to the Bakken in North Dakota and the Woodford Ardmore in Oklahoma.
“I will say that if you look, for example, up in the Cardium, where some of the tight oil well rates that you’ve heard from others, ours are certainly doing well and at the upper end of that range,” Rosenthal said.”
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Update+Rosneft+gains+Alberta+Cardium+play+stake+ExxonMobil+trades+part+interest+strategic/6467144/story.html
@Sunshine
If you want to do a little more research about Alberta Crude Production and reserves here’s the site for you :
http://www.ercb.ca
check these out:
http://tinyurl.com/2fj5pp4
http://tinyurl.com/6qtva3h
cheers
brent
Yes, its called reserve growth. I wrote about it and provided mathematical models to extrapolate potential. So what’s with your anecdotes?
btw, I am not a theoildrum.com shill. I am way beyond them in my analysis, and they are not fans of mine.
OMG. Will the scaremongering never cease?
The psychological trauma due to poverty caused by bad economic policies is a definite. But due to climate change is just invention.
Psychological effect? What I have observed, among citizens (a.k.a. “little people”), is despondency.
RE Psychology as a useful degree – when learning it was my stepson’s major, I suggested he consider the service, as that would improve his chances at getting a decent job. I didn’t want to tell him a degree in Psychology was unlikely to.
Now that he’s out of the Marine Corp, he’s going back to get a degree in Computer Science.
As for worrying about the psychological effects of global warming (or anything else, for that matter), I keep in mind this simple fact. Life is hard and then you die. I’m betting for most people here, they don’t have to deal with the hard part, meaning they really don’t have a reason to worry and instead show be celebrating. And since it is guarenteed we all gonna die anyway, why worry about something as trivial as global warming?
NWF workshop: “Having the reality of the destructive forces presented by climate change fully register with people, so they will to act with the needed urgency, is indeed a challenge.” They are quite open here about wishing to brainwash everybody into believing in a non-existent danger. I don’t doubt that those who become cultists as a result will have all those psychological problems they describe.