http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/05/no-mo-pomo.html
No Mo' PoMo?
Whenever the Federal Reserve wants to tweak the dials of the economy -- or pretend that it can -- it turns first to its sock puppet at The Wall Street Journal, John Hilsenrath, and "leaks" a rumor of policy change (here). They like to do this late on Fridays when financial markets are about to close, so that market players will have a whole weekend to ponder the Fed's actions like medieval viziers reading goat entrails.
Last Friday's puddle of steaming guts was a supposed preview of the Fed's "exit strategy" from its reckless policy of "quantitative easing" or "money" creation (or "liquidity," if you like). In other words, they supposedly intend to stop juicing the financial markets with fake wealth, i.e. capital not accumulated from real productive activity, but just fictively created on computer hard drives. For the past year they have been doing this to the tune of $85 billion a month, "buying" US Treasury bonds and bills and an assortment of miscellaneous securities (mostly trash that can't be pawned off on anyone else) through their so-called "primary dealer" bank cohorts, the too-big-to-fail usual suspects, who "earn" hefty transaction fees in the process of conveying all these pixels from Point A to Point B. These interventions are called Permanent Open Market Operations, or PoMo.
The theory all along has been that this $85 billion a month would seep down to Main Street to provoke spending (increasing the "velocity of money) and therefore "jump start" the economy. The theory has proven itself to be complete horseshit, of course. All it has done is suppress interest rates on bonds, depriving old people of income off their savings by so doing. It also artificially jacked up reckless lending on loans for houses, cars, and college degrees, juiced the share price of stocks, and boosted food prices. Meanwhile, an increasingly former middle class languishes in a purgatory of foreclosure, penury, and desperation. The Fed can't really do anything to help them. It can only burden them with more easy-credit debt, especially their college-age children. But ours is a financialized economy and finance is too abstruse for most ordinary people to understand, so they just muddle along in a fog of dashed hopes and repossession.
Lately, though, the financial markets at the heart of the financialized economy -- that is, an economy based on buying and selling increasingly dubious "paper" assets rather than on capital formation through producing things of value -- are sending distress signals. The aforesaid efforts at economic dial-tweaking have only produced distortions and perversions in the basic functioning of the markets they're designed to tweak. They pervert the "price discovery" mechanism by dumping "free money" into equity markets. They distort "risk premiums" by steering money out of savings, where it earns less than nothing, into riskier investments subject to the vagaries of everything from weather (commodity markets) to control fraud (bank stocks) to geopolitics (Toyota stock). They debauch market expectations in general by implying permanent artificial life-support. They promote market gaming such as front-running equity prices via high frequency trading on computers, naked shorting (pretending to borrow shares that, in fact, do not exist) and the abuse of futures markets -- lately illustrated in the ongoing smash of paper gold and silver contracts, with the side effect of driving yet more money into stock markets. Finally, they undermine the meaning and value of money itself, which is the most dangerous game of all because when people lose confidence in their national currency, nations dissolve in political chaos.
Despite the aura of control, Fed officials (and casual observers) may sense things spinning out of control. Of course, hyper-fragility is exactly the effect that all the Fed's own actions would predictably lead to. When you divorce truth from reality, strange things are bound to happen. The Fed ventriloquists who speak through Hilsenrath at The Wall Street Journal suggest they would accomplish their exit from the current $85billion-a-month QE policy in a set of "halting steps" by irregularly dialing down QE issuance month-by-month to fine-tune the results on-the-fly, as markets may require. This is also complete horseshit because they could only accomplish controlled tweakings by somehow signaling their intentions beforehand through some lackey like Hilsenrath. Otherwise, they could not pretend to control the results of their actions. They might as well just throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks. Unfortunately, the "halting steps" idea would only provide even more opportunities for selective, complex front-running, shorting, and gaming -- which is to say setting up more dangerous behavior with more uncertain and possibly destructive outcomes.
Anyway, there's no evidence at this moment that anyone believes what was leaked to Hilsenrath. It could easily be more smoke and mirrors aimed at concealing the fact that the Federal Reserve has no idea what it has been doing and fears the consequences. There is one thing that we know for sure in this strange period when bankers have tried to manage reality in the absence of truth: that advanced industrial-technological economies designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil can't run on $100-a-barrel oil, and that is why the US economy was subject to financialization in the first place -- to offset declining productive activity by an attempt to get something for nothing. Notice that this macro-trend coincided exactly with the rise of legalized gambling all over America. That is how the idea that you could get something for nothing got to be normal. The world is about to find out that you really can't get something for nothing. It will be a harsh lesson.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
SC117-9
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/09-05-13-victory-day-russia-%d0%b4%d0%b5%d0%bd%d1%8c-%d0%bf%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%b5%d0%b4%d1%8b/
Victory Day Russia
The weather is perfect after a miserable two weeks of cold spring wind and rain here in Altai Krai. It is a balmy 26o C (low 80s F) sun high in the sky, with not a serious gust of wind anywhere to be felt. It is Victory Day across Russia. The successful end to the “Great Patriotic War.” Russia overtook the Nazi offensive, walked into Berlin, and Russian freedom from German tyranny was fetched from the hands of defeat with the signing of the peace accord. Big celebration today. Barnaul is alive with pedestrian traffic, sharing in the merrymaking around the main square at the intersection of Socialisticheskii and Dimitrova streets. Children are thanking old grandfathers for their heroic war-labors as they stroll about town dressed in hard won and stale but cherished medals; remnants of an earlier empire. The declination of imperial design. The leftovers of conquistadorial aspirations. The decadence of civilized greatness and hegemonic ambition. We really are living through The End of History!
The interesting thing about the emergent culture that I see on display here in Russia, and specifically in Siberia, is that it is all about the show, the spectacle! Appearance, affect and effect – these are what matter most. But perhaps it is indicative of the end of history through which we are now living. After all, there is not much sense in doing anything substantive at this juncture anyway; just create the appearance of something being done or having been done.
Certainly, the American Congress understands that concept well. Lots of chest-pounding and the appearance of decisiveness; but really nothing of substance done that means anything… just keep the ship on course until we see the size of the iceberg coming at us. It seems the only thing the American political class is good at doing is head-faking the American people. The honorable Premier Obama continues to payback his creditors and cronies with appointments and political favors – like handing out balloons to toddlers, while he himself still remains deeply indebted (or is that indentured) to the biggest of his backers. Meanwhile, our political-military-security-industrial complex continues to squeeze the public under the guise of providing protection from global bogeymen, just like the Chicago mafia extracting payola for “protecting” the local grocer from their own hired thugs. Call that ‘win-win’!
As Chris Hedges points out this week in his column, it is a similar situation with Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Wikileaks generally. They (The Security State) cannot possibly stop their pursuit of these people because their very presence threatens to blow the lid right off the cover stories of all the scams and other bullshit we are being asked to swallow by various officially sanctioned (i.e., paid for) media outlets and wonks. And so a simulacrum of truth does the job, it obviates the public’s need to know; they believe they already have the truth! In fact the search for truth becomes exposed, shown to be precisely what it usually is when dished out by professionals – a scam of the intellectual, expert, and policymaking elite slicing, dicing and selectively manipulating bits of data to create cogent illusions for public consumption. And as the public sits back in their soft armchairs and consumes this tripe, the real stuff is quietly getting cooked behind the scenes, as we continue sleepwalking to the bitter end.
Here in Barnaul things are not much different. People are wandering as if in a fog – the fog of new acquisitiveness, enjoying the myriad spectacles, and playing their bit parts, while ‘the powers that be’ continue casting shadows on the screen, images of a present that make it appear larger than life, and the promise of a future that really can never be. But the pedestrian class (including and especially those who consider themselves the motoring public) goes on spending money it has-not, building-up debt, accumulating the nice new toys of capitalist success. But, no cares, no worries: just buy, buy, buy, and then, show and tell time.
Meanwhile the rock music blares behind me, as the band plays on, the crowds energy and anxiety feverishly growing, anticipating the gargantuan firework display sure to come after dark. But, how can we expect anything less. Indeed, like most of my compatriots either here or across the Atlantic, I too am still entranced at times by the spectacle, by the lure of a flashy new smart-phone or a stylish fur-lined winter coat; engaged by the temptations of consumption, although no longer ‘conspicuously’ so, as it remains for most of those here.
One final, but intriguing note. Oddly enough, you cannot buy any alcohol in Russia today – Victory Day. The biggest day of celebration with the exception of New Year’s eve, and the buying of any mind-numbing spirits is strictly prohibited. It is a holy-day after all, a day evidently dedicated to the sober contemplation of the gifts bestowed upon us by great men of courage and conviction. Courage that is perhaps an automatic response to the convincing psychopathy of everyday life in the civilized regimes and empires we inhabit and helped to build, carried upon our shoulders, one log or one brick at a time.
To quote the folk-masters of old: “When will they learn? When will they ever learn?”
Victory Day Russia
The weather is perfect after a miserable two weeks of cold spring wind and rain here in Altai Krai. It is a balmy 26o C (low 80s F) sun high in the sky, with not a serious gust of wind anywhere to be felt. It is Victory Day across Russia. The successful end to the “Great Patriotic War.” Russia overtook the Nazi offensive, walked into Berlin, and Russian freedom from German tyranny was fetched from the hands of defeat with the signing of the peace accord. Big celebration today. Barnaul is alive with pedestrian traffic, sharing in the merrymaking around the main square at the intersection of Socialisticheskii and Dimitrova streets. Children are thanking old grandfathers for their heroic war-labors as they stroll about town dressed in hard won and stale but cherished medals; remnants of an earlier empire. The declination of imperial design. The leftovers of conquistadorial aspirations. The decadence of civilized greatness and hegemonic ambition. We really are living through The End of History!
The interesting thing about the emergent culture that I see on display here in Russia, and specifically in Siberia, is that it is all about the show, the spectacle! Appearance, affect and effect – these are what matter most. But perhaps it is indicative of the end of history through which we are now living. After all, there is not much sense in doing anything substantive at this juncture anyway; just create the appearance of something being done or having been done.
Certainly, the American Congress understands that concept well. Lots of chest-pounding and the appearance of decisiveness; but really nothing of substance done that means anything… just keep the ship on course until we see the size of the iceberg coming at us. It seems the only thing the American political class is good at doing is head-faking the American people. The honorable Premier Obama continues to payback his creditors and cronies with appointments and political favors – like handing out balloons to toddlers, while he himself still remains deeply indebted (or is that indentured) to the biggest of his backers. Meanwhile, our political-military-security-industrial complex continues to squeeze the public under the guise of providing protection from global bogeymen, just like the Chicago mafia extracting payola for “protecting” the local grocer from their own hired thugs. Call that ‘win-win’!
As Chris Hedges points out this week in his column, it is a similar situation with Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Wikileaks generally. They (The Security State) cannot possibly stop their pursuit of these people because their very presence threatens to blow the lid right off the cover stories of all the scams and other bullshit we are being asked to swallow by various officially sanctioned (i.e., paid for) media outlets and wonks. And so a simulacrum of truth does the job, it obviates the public’s need to know; they believe they already have the truth! In fact the search for truth becomes exposed, shown to be precisely what it usually is when dished out by professionals – a scam of the intellectual, expert, and policymaking elite slicing, dicing and selectively manipulating bits of data to create cogent illusions for public consumption. And as the public sits back in their soft armchairs and consumes this tripe, the real stuff is quietly getting cooked behind the scenes, as we continue sleepwalking to the bitter end.
Here in Barnaul things are not much different. People are wandering as if in a fog – the fog of new acquisitiveness, enjoying the myriad spectacles, and playing their bit parts, while ‘the powers that be’ continue casting shadows on the screen, images of a present that make it appear larger than life, and the promise of a future that really can never be. But the pedestrian class (including and especially those who consider themselves the motoring public) goes on spending money it has-not, building-up debt, accumulating the nice new toys of capitalist success. But, no cares, no worries: just buy, buy, buy, and then, show and tell time.
Meanwhile the rock music blares behind me, as the band plays on, the crowds energy and anxiety feverishly growing, anticipating the gargantuan firework display sure to come after dark. But, how can we expect anything less. Indeed, like most of my compatriots either here or across the Atlantic, I too am still entranced at times by the spectacle, by the lure of a flashy new smart-phone or a stylish fur-lined winter coat; engaged by the temptations of consumption, although no longer ‘conspicuously’ so, as it remains for most of those here.
One final, but intriguing note. Oddly enough, you cannot buy any alcohol in Russia today – Victory Day. The biggest day of celebration with the exception of New Year’s eve, and the buying of any mind-numbing spirits is strictly prohibited. It is a holy-day after all, a day evidently dedicated to the sober contemplation of the gifts bestowed upon us by great men of courage and conviction. Courage that is perhaps an automatic response to the convincing psychopathy of everyday life in the civilized regimes and empires we inhabit and helped to build, carried upon our shoulders, one log or one brick at a time.
To quote the folk-masters of old: “When will they learn? When will they ever learn?”
Saturday, May 4, 2013
SC117-8
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-social-crisis-in-america-the-myth-of-an-accelerated-economic-recovery/5333896
The Social Crisis in America. The Myth of an Accelerated Economic Recovery
US stock markets surged Friday to new record highs as Wall Street traders seized on a tepid jobs report to engage in a fresh orgy of speculation.
The official line promoted by the Obama administration is that the United States is in the midst of an accelerating economic recovery. For the corporate and financial elite that runs America, and the section of the upper-middle class that hangs on its coattails, a soaring stock market is indeed what defines economic health. For the vast majority of the population, however, life five years after the Wall Street crash of 2008 is dominated by the daily struggle to make ends meet.
Official statistics—of poverty, unemployment, indebtedness, declining wages—give a glimpse of this social reality, which the mass media does its best to obscure.
One sobering statistic that emerged on Thursday points to the social reality that underlies the euphoria on Wall Street. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the past decade has seen a sharp increase in the US suicide rate.
Among those aged 35 to 64, suicides soared nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010. More people in the US now kill themselves than die in car accidents. The fundamental cause is no mystery. It is the economic crisis, which has brought with it a rise in unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, illness and homelessness, and all of the personal and family problems that go along with these scourges.
The social crisis affects all sections of the working population—young and old, working and unemployed—of all races, genders and ethnicities.
For millions of older workers, the prospect of economic security and a decent retirement is growing ever more distant as the elderly are forced to dip into their savings and take on ever greater debt just to survive. The debt of Americans aged 65 to 74 is rising faster than that of any other age group, according to Federal Reserve figures. For a typical household led by someone 65 or older, household debt grew by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2011.
The already insufficient benefits provided by Social Security and Medicare, the federal retirement and health care programs, are being scaled back. Fewer and fewer retirees have a guaranteed pension. Among those that do, many have resorted to borrowing against their pensions and paying usurious interest rates to unscrupulous lenders.
Last week, the New York Times reported that companies that offer pension advances often charge interest rates, after factoring in fees, of between 27 and 106 percent. Older households spent 7.1 percent of their incomes to pay off debt in 2010, up from 4.5 percent three years earlier, according to figures from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Earlier this month, Wells Fargo reported that the number of older workers borrowing from their 401(k) retirement accounts—and paying penalties to do so—surged 28 percent at the end of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011.
Conditions are no better at the other end of the age spectrum. Almost 16 million children in the US, or 22 percent, live in families whose income is below the federal poverty line, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. Last month, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund released a report showing that, among developed countries, the United States ranks 26 out of 29, behind Greece and just above Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, in terms of the percentage of children living in poverty.
Every year, 1.3 million students drop out of high school in the United States, and, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, low-income students fail to graduate at six times the rate of higher-income youth.
Those students who get to college are increasingly saddled with student loans they will never be able to pay off. Between 2003 and 2012, the portion of 25-year-olds with student debt rose from 25 percent to 43 percent.
In the face of unemployment and falling wages, marriage and home ownership are becoming too expensive for many. Home ownership rates are at the lowest level in eighteen years, while the portion of children born out of wedlock has grown from 31 percent in 2005 to 36 percent in 2011, according to Census Bureau figures released this week.
The Census report noted, “Children who are born to unmarried parents are more likely to live in poverty and to have poor developmental outcomes.” In 2010, 42.3 percent of families headed by single females with children were in poverty, according to the Demos Project.
Overall, the current US poverty rate, estimated at 16.1 percent, is the highest since 1965. According to the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure, there are a staggering 49.7 million people in the United States who are in poverty. More than 48 percent of the population is poor or “near poor,” meaning they make less than double the official poverty rate.
Nor is poverty confined to the unemployed. According to a report issued last month by the US Census Bureau, the percentage of the population who are “working poor” rose dramatically, from 5.1 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2011. One quarter all those in poverty—about 10.4 million people—are working.
The bulk of new jobs are in low-paid service industries, and even manufacturing workers increasingly make as little as $10 an hour—a poverty wage for a family of four.
The effects of poverty are myriad. According to one recent study, 80 million adults in the US, about 43 percent of the total population, did not get medical care sometime in 2012 because they could not afford it. This is up a shocking 17 million since 2003.
Growing poverty and social distress are treated essentially as non-issues by the mass media. According to a recent study by the Pew Research center, the US media focused just one fifth of one percent of its news coverage on the topic of poverty. “In no year did poverty coverage even come close to accounting for as little as one percent of the news hole,” Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, told Harvard’s Nieman Foundation.
In an earlier period, such indices of social distress would have been treated as a national disgrace. Today, far from proposing any measures to address the social crisis, the Republicans and Democrats, with the Obama administration in the lead, vie with each other over how best to slash Social Security, Medicare and other vital social programs.
There is a deep and growing anger directed against the entire social system and a ruling elite that grows rich from the impoverishment of the broad masses of the people. This sentiment can find no expression within the framework of the existing political system.
The Social Crisis in America. The Myth of an Accelerated Economic Recovery
US stock markets surged Friday to new record highs as Wall Street traders seized on a tepid jobs report to engage in a fresh orgy of speculation.
The official line promoted by the Obama administration is that the United States is in the midst of an accelerating economic recovery. For the corporate and financial elite that runs America, and the section of the upper-middle class that hangs on its coattails, a soaring stock market is indeed what defines economic health. For the vast majority of the population, however, life five years after the Wall Street crash of 2008 is dominated by the daily struggle to make ends meet.
Official statistics—of poverty, unemployment, indebtedness, declining wages—give a glimpse of this social reality, which the mass media does its best to obscure.
One sobering statistic that emerged on Thursday points to the social reality that underlies the euphoria on Wall Street. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the past decade has seen a sharp increase in the US suicide rate.
Among those aged 35 to 64, suicides soared nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010. More people in the US now kill themselves than die in car accidents. The fundamental cause is no mystery. It is the economic crisis, which has brought with it a rise in unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, illness and homelessness, and all of the personal and family problems that go along with these scourges.
The social crisis affects all sections of the working population—young and old, working and unemployed—of all races, genders and ethnicities.
For millions of older workers, the prospect of economic security and a decent retirement is growing ever more distant as the elderly are forced to dip into their savings and take on ever greater debt just to survive. The debt of Americans aged 65 to 74 is rising faster than that of any other age group, according to Federal Reserve figures. For a typical household led by someone 65 or older, household debt grew by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2011.
The already insufficient benefits provided by Social Security and Medicare, the federal retirement and health care programs, are being scaled back. Fewer and fewer retirees have a guaranteed pension. Among those that do, many have resorted to borrowing against their pensions and paying usurious interest rates to unscrupulous lenders.
Last week, the New York Times reported that companies that offer pension advances often charge interest rates, after factoring in fees, of between 27 and 106 percent. Older households spent 7.1 percent of their incomes to pay off debt in 2010, up from 4.5 percent three years earlier, according to figures from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Earlier this month, Wells Fargo reported that the number of older workers borrowing from their 401(k) retirement accounts—and paying penalties to do so—surged 28 percent at the end of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011.
Conditions are no better at the other end of the age spectrum. Almost 16 million children in the US, or 22 percent, live in families whose income is below the federal poverty line, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. Last month, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund released a report showing that, among developed countries, the United States ranks 26 out of 29, behind Greece and just above Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, in terms of the percentage of children living in poverty.
Every year, 1.3 million students drop out of high school in the United States, and, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, low-income students fail to graduate at six times the rate of higher-income youth.
Those students who get to college are increasingly saddled with student loans they will never be able to pay off. Between 2003 and 2012, the portion of 25-year-olds with student debt rose from 25 percent to 43 percent.
In the face of unemployment and falling wages, marriage and home ownership are becoming too expensive for many. Home ownership rates are at the lowest level in eighteen years, while the portion of children born out of wedlock has grown from 31 percent in 2005 to 36 percent in 2011, according to Census Bureau figures released this week.
The Census report noted, “Children who are born to unmarried parents are more likely to live in poverty and to have poor developmental outcomes.” In 2010, 42.3 percent of families headed by single females with children were in poverty, according to the Demos Project.
Overall, the current US poverty rate, estimated at 16.1 percent, is the highest since 1965. According to the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure, there are a staggering 49.7 million people in the United States who are in poverty. More than 48 percent of the population is poor or “near poor,” meaning they make less than double the official poverty rate.
Nor is poverty confined to the unemployed. According to a report issued last month by the US Census Bureau, the percentage of the population who are “working poor” rose dramatically, from 5.1 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2011. One quarter all those in poverty—about 10.4 million people—are working.
The bulk of new jobs are in low-paid service industries, and even manufacturing workers increasingly make as little as $10 an hour—a poverty wage for a family of four.
The effects of poverty are myriad. According to one recent study, 80 million adults in the US, about 43 percent of the total population, did not get medical care sometime in 2012 because they could not afford it. This is up a shocking 17 million since 2003.
Growing poverty and social distress are treated essentially as non-issues by the mass media. According to a recent study by the Pew Research center, the US media focused just one fifth of one percent of its news coverage on the topic of poverty. “In no year did poverty coverage even come close to accounting for as little as one percent of the news hole,” Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, told Harvard’s Nieman Foundation.
In an earlier period, such indices of social distress would have been treated as a national disgrace. Today, far from proposing any measures to address the social crisis, the Republicans and Democrats, with the Obama administration in the lead, vie with each other over how best to slash Social Security, Medicare and other vital social programs.
There is a deep and growing anger directed against the entire social system and a ruling elite that grows rich from the impoverishment of the broad masses of the people. This sentiment can find no expression within the framework of the existing political system.
SC117-7
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/02/white-house-arctic-ice-death-spiral
White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral
National security officials worried by rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice overlook threat of permanent global food shortages
The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has caught the eye of the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP
Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years.
The meeting is bringing together Nasa's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
This is the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.
Senior scientists advising the US government at the meeting include 10 Arctic specialists, including marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.
In early April, Duarte warned that the Arctic summer sea ice was melting at a rate faster than predicted by conventional climate models, and could be ice free as early as 2015 - rather than toward the end of the century, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007. He said:
"The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train."
Duarte is lead author of a paper published last year in Nature Climate Change documenting how "tipping elements" in the Arctic ecosystems leading to "abrupt changes" that would dramatically impact "the global earth system" had "already started up". Duarte and his team concluded: "We are facing the first clear evidence of dangerous climate change."
New NASA satellite imagery from March 2013 reveals massive cracks in ice connecting Beaufort Gyre region to Alaska New research suggests that the Arctic summer sea ice loss is linked to extreme weather. Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis points to the phenomenon of "Arctic amplification", where:
"The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather."
Extreme weather events over the last few years apparently driven by the accelerating Arctic melt process - including unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the US and Russia, along with snowstorms and cold weather in northern Europe – have undermined harvests, dramatically impacting global food production and contributing to civil unrest.
US national security officials have taken an increasing interest in the destabilising impact of climate change. In February this year, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which noted that global warming will have:
"... significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water."
The effects of climate change may:
"Act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world... [and] may also lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response, both within the United States and overseas … DoD will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on its facilities, infrastructure, training and testing activities, and military capabilities."
The primary goal of adaptation is to ensure that the US armed forces are "better prepared to effectively respond to climate change" as it happens, and "to ensure continued mission success" in military operations - rather than to prevent or mitigate climate change.
While the DoD is also concerned about the Arctic, the focus is less on risks than on opportunities:
"The Department is developing cooperative partnerships with interagency and international Arctic stakeholders to collaboratively address future opportunities and potential challenges inherent in the projected opening of the Arctic."
Arctic "stakeholders" include US, Russian, Canadian, Norwegian and Danish energy firms, which are scrambling to exploit the northern polar region's untapped natural wealth. The region is estimated to hold a quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves, sparking concerted efforts by these countries to expand their Arctic military presence.
The US Homeland Security Department's Climate Change Roadmap released last year raised similar issues, warning that climate change "could directly affect the Nation's critical infrastructure", as well as aggravating "conditions that could enable terrorist activity, violence, and mass migration".
On the Arctic, the report highlights the imperative to protect US resource interests by increasing regional military penetration:
"Melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to new opportunities for shipping, tourism, and resource exploration, but the increase in human activity may require a significant increase in operational capabilities in the region in order to safeguard lawful trade and travel and to prevent exploitation of new routes for smuggling and trafficking."
A public statement in response to news of the White House's Arctic briefing released on Tuesday by the UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) - a group of international climate scientists – called on governments to recognise that the dramatic loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic would amplify the types of extreme weather events that have already affected the world's major food basket regions, undermining global food production for the foreseeable future with serious consequences for international security.
The group, which includes among its founding members leading Arctic specialists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, stated that:
"The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue."
White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral
National security officials worried by rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice overlook threat of permanent global food shortages
The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has caught the eye of the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP
Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years.
The meeting is bringing together Nasa's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
This is the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.
Senior scientists advising the US government at the meeting include 10 Arctic specialists, including marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.
In early April, Duarte warned that the Arctic summer sea ice was melting at a rate faster than predicted by conventional climate models, and could be ice free as early as 2015 - rather than toward the end of the century, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007. He said:
"The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train."
Duarte is lead author of a paper published last year in Nature Climate Change documenting how "tipping elements" in the Arctic ecosystems leading to "abrupt changes" that would dramatically impact "the global earth system" had "already started up". Duarte and his team concluded: "We are facing the first clear evidence of dangerous climate change."
New NASA satellite imagery from March 2013 reveals massive cracks in ice connecting Beaufort Gyre region to Alaska New research suggests that the Arctic summer sea ice loss is linked to extreme weather. Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis points to the phenomenon of "Arctic amplification", where:
"The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather."
Extreme weather events over the last few years apparently driven by the accelerating Arctic melt process - including unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the US and Russia, along with snowstorms and cold weather in northern Europe – have undermined harvests, dramatically impacting global food production and contributing to civil unrest.
US national security officials have taken an increasing interest in the destabilising impact of climate change. In February this year, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which noted that global warming will have:
"... significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water."
The effects of climate change may:
"Act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world... [and] may also lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response, both within the United States and overseas … DoD will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on its facilities, infrastructure, training and testing activities, and military capabilities."
The primary goal of adaptation is to ensure that the US armed forces are "better prepared to effectively respond to climate change" as it happens, and "to ensure continued mission success" in military operations - rather than to prevent or mitigate climate change.
While the DoD is also concerned about the Arctic, the focus is less on risks than on opportunities:
"The Department is developing cooperative partnerships with interagency and international Arctic stakeholders to collaboratively address future opportunities and potential challenges inherent in the projected opening of the Arctic."
Arctic "stakeholders" include US, Russian, Canadian, Norwegian and Danish energy firms, which are scrambling to exploit the northern polar region's untapped natural wealth. The region is estimated to hold a quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves, sparking concerted efforts by these countries to expand their Arctic military presence.
The US Homeland Security Department's Climate Change Roadmap released last year raised similar issues, warning that climate change "could directly affect the Nation's critical infrastructure", as well as aggravating "conditions that could enable terrorist activity, violence, and mass migration".
On the Arctic, the report highlights the imperative to protect US resource interests by increasing regional military penetration:
"Melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to new opportunities for shipping, tourism, and resource exploration, but the increase in human activity may require a significant increase in operational capabilities in the region in order to safeguard lawful trade and travel and to prevent exploitation of new routes for smuggling and trafficking."
A public statement in response to news of the White House's Arctic briefing released on Tuesday by the UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) - a group of international climate scientists – called on governments to recognise that the dramatic loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic would amplify the types of extreme weather events that have already affected the world's major food basket regions, undermining global food production for the foreseeable future with serious consequences for international security.
The group, which includes among its founding members leading Arctic specialists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, stated that:
"The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue."
Friday, May 3, 2013
SC117-6
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/
Climate-change summary and update
American actress Lily Tomlin is credited with the expression, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” With respect to climate science, my own efforts to stay abreast are blown away every week by new data, models, and assessments. It seems no matter how dire the situation becomes, it only gets worse when I check the latest reports.
The response of politicians, heads of non-governmental organizations, and corporate leaders remains the same. They’re mired in the dank Swamp of Nothingness. These are the people who know about, and presumably could do something about, our ongoing race to disaster (if only to sound the alarm). Tomlin’s line is never more germane than when thinking about their pursuit of a buck at the expense of life on Earth.
Worse than the aforementioned trolls are the media. Fully captured by corporations and the corporate states, the media continue to dance around the issue of climate change. Occasionally a forthright piece is published, but it generally points in the wrong direction, such as suggesting climate scientists and activists be killed (e.g., James Delingpole’s 7 April 2013 hate-filled article in the Telegraph).
Even mainstream scientists minimize the message at every turn. As we’ve known for years, scientists almost invariably underplay climate impacts. I’m not implying conspiracy. Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism. These folks are loathe to risk drawing undue attention to themselves by pointing out there might be a threat to civilization. Never mind the near-term threat to our entire species (they couldn’t care less about other species). If the truth is dire, they can find another, not-so-dire version.
If you’re too busy to read the evidence presented below, here’s the bottom line: On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction (from Oliver Tickell’s 2008 synthesis in the Guardian). According to an informed assessment of BP’s Energy Outlook 2030, published in January 2013, global average temperature of Earth will hit the 4 C mark in 2030. In the face of near-term human extinction, Americans view the threat as distant and irrelevant, as illustrated by a 22 April 2013 article in the Washington Post based on poll results that echo the long-held sentiment that elected officials should be focused on the industrial economy, not far-away minor nuisances such as climate change.
This essay brings attention to recent projections and positive feedbacks. I presented much of this information at the Bluegrass Bioneers conference (Alex Smith at Radio Ecoshock evaluates my presentation here). More recently, I presented an updated version on the campus of the University of Massachusetts. All information and sources are readily confirmed with an online search, and links to information about feedbacks can be found here.
Large-scale assessments
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (late 2007): 1 C by 2100
Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (late 2008): 2 C by 2100
United Nations Environment Programme (mid 2009): 3.5 C by 2100
Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (October 2009): 4 C by 2060
Global Carbon Project, Copenhagen Diagnosis (November 2009): 6 C, 7 C by 2100
International Energy Agency (November 2010): 3.5 C by 2035
United Nations Environment Programme (December 2010): up to 5 C by 2050
These assessments fail to account for significant self-reinforcing feedback loops (i.e., positive feedbacks, the term that implies the opposite of its meaning). The IPCC’s vaunted Fifth Assessment will continue the trend as it, too, ignores important feedbacks. On a positive note, major assessments fail to account for economic collapse. However, due to the feedback loops presented below, I strongly suspect it’s too late for economic collapse to extend the run of our species.
Taking a broad view
Astrophysicists have long believed Earth was near the center of the habitable zone for humans. Recent research published in the 10 March 2013 issue of Astrophysical Journal indicates Earth is on the inner edge of the habitable zone, and lies within 1% of inhabitability (1.5 million km, or 5 times the distance from Earth to Earth’s moon). A minor change in Earth’s atmosphere removes human habitat. Unfortunately, we’ve invoked major changes.
The northern hemisphere is particularly susceptible to acclerated warming, as explained in the 8 April 2013 issue of Journal of Climate. Two days later, a paper in Nature confirmed that summers in the northern hemisphere are hotter than they’ve been for 600 years. As pointed out by Sherwood and Huber in the 25 May 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and then by James Hansen points out in his 15 April 2013 paper, humans cannot survive a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C (95 F).
As pointed out by the United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases in 1990, “Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage” (link mirrored here). Planetary instruments indicate Earth has warmed about 1 C since the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, plants in the vicinity of Concord, Massachusetts — where the instrumental record indicates warming of about 1 C — indicate warming of 2.4 C since the 1840s.
Whether you believe the plants or the instruments is irrelevant at the point. We’ve clearly triggered the types of positive feedbacks the United Nations warned about in 1990. Yet my colleagues and acquaintances think we can and will work our way out of this horrific mess with permaculture (which is not to denigrate permaculture, the principles of which are implemented at the mud hut). Adding egregious insult to spurting wound, the latest public-education initiative in the United States — the Next Generation Science Standards — buries the relationship between combustion of fossil fuels and planetary warming. The misadventures of the corporate government continue.
Let’s ignore the models for a moment and consider only the results of a single briefing to the United Nations Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen (COP15). Regulars in this space will recall COP15 as the climate-change meetings thrown under the bus by the Obama administration. A footnote on that long-forgotten briefing contains this statement: “THE LONG-TERM SEA LEVEL THAT CORRESPONDS TO CURRENT CO2 CONCENTRATION IS ABOUT 23 METERS ABOVE TODAY’S LEVELS, AND THE TEMPERATURES WILL BE 6 DEGREES C OR MORE HIGHER. THESE ESTIMATES ARE BASED ON REAL LONG TERM CLIMATE RECORDS, NOT ON MODELS.”
In other words, Obama and others in his administration knew near-term extinction of humans was already guaranteed. Even before the dire feedbacks were reported by the scientific community, the Obama administration abandoned climate change as a significant issue because it knew we were done as early as 2009. Rather than shoulder the unenviable task of truth-teller, Obama did as his imperial higher-ups demanded: He lied about collapse, and he lied about climate change. And he still does.
Ah, those were the good ol’ days, back when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were below 400 parts per million (ppm). We’ll blow through the 400 ppm mark soon, probably for the first time in 3.2 to 5 million years.
Positive feedbacks
Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011). This breakdown of the thermohaline conveyor belt is happening in the Antarctic as well.
Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too (Nature, August 2012)
Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
The Beauford Gyre apparently has reversed course (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 2012)
Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)
Summer ice melt in Antarctica is at its highest level in a thousand years: Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting 10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago, with the most rapid melt occurring in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)
Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
As nearly as I can distinguish, only the latter feedback process is reversible. Once you pull the tab on the can of beer, there’s no keeping the carbon dioxide from bubbling up and out. Because we’ve entered the era of expensive oil, I can’t imagine we’ll voluntarily terminate the process of drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic (or anywhere else).
See how far we’ve come
Never mind that American naturalist George Perkins Marsh predicted anthropogenic climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels in 1847. Never mind that climate risks have been underestimated for the last 20 Years, or that the IPCC’s efforts have failed miserably. After all, climate scientist Kevin Anderson tells us what I’ve known for years: politicians and the scientists writing official reports on climate change are lying, and we have less time than most people can imagine. Never mind David Wasdell pointed out in 2008 that we must have a period of negative radiative forcing merely to end up with a stable, non-catastrophic climate system. Never mind that even the Atlantic is displaying “five charts about climate change that should have you very, very worried.” Never mind that atmospheric carbon dioxide is affecting satellites. Never mind that even the occasional economic analyst is telling climate scientists to be persuasive, be brave, and be arrested. Never mind that Peruvian ice requiring 1,600 years to accumulate has melted in the last 25 years, according to a paper in the 4 April 2013 issue of Science.
Never mind all that: Future temperatures likely will be at the higher end of the projected range because the forecasts are all too conservative and also because climate negotiations won’t avert catastrophe.
Through late March 2013, global oceans have risen approximately ten millimeters per year during the last two years. This rate of rise is over three times the rate of sea level rise during the time of satellite-based observations from 1993 to the present.
Actually, catastrophe is already here, although it’s not widely distributed in the United States. Well, not yet, even though the continental U.S. experienced its highest temperature ever in 2012, shattering the 1998 record by a full degree Fahrenheit. But the east coast of North America experienced its hottest water temperatures all the way to the bottom of the ocean. The epic dust bowl of 2012 grew and grew and grew all summer long. Even James Hansen and Makiko Sato are asking whether the loss of ice on Greenland has gone exponential (while ridiculously calling for a carbon tax to “fix” the “problem”), and the tentative answer is not promising, based on very recent data. And climate change causes early death of 400,000 people each year.
Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This warming has resulted about 90% of overall global warming going into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically, according to a paper published in the March 2013 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. About 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which is unprecedented over at least the past half century. The death spiral of Arctic sea ice is well under way, as shown in the video below.
Global loss of sea ice matches the trend in the Arctic. It’s down, down, and down some more, with the five lowest values on record all happening in the last seven years (through 2012).
Then see where we’re going
The climate situation is much worse than I’ve led you to believe, and is accelerating far more rapidly than accounted for by models. Ice sheet loss continues to increase at both poles, and warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is twice the earlier scientific estimate. Arctic ice at all-time low, half that of 1980, and the Arctic lost enough sea ice to cover Canada and Alaska in 2012 alone. In short, summer ice in the Arctic is nearly gone. Furthermore, the Arctic could well be free of ice by summer 2015, an event that last occurred some three million years ago, before the genus Homo walked the planet. Indeed, Arctic ice could be gone in 2013, as predicted by climate scientist Paul Beckwith. Among the consequences of declining Arctic ice is extremes in cold weather in northern continents (thus illustrating why “climate change” is a better term than “global warming”). In a turn surprising only to mainstream climate scientists, Greenland ice is melting rapidly.
Even the conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) has thrown in the towel, concluding that “renewable” energy is not keeping up with the old, dirty standard sources. As a result, the IEA report dated 17 April 2013 indicates the development of low-carbon energy is progressing too slowly to limit global warming.
The Arctic isn’t Vegas — what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic — it’s the planet’s air conditioner. Whereas nearly 80 calories are required to melt a gram of ice at 0 C, adding 80 calories to the same gram of water at 0 C increases its temperature to 80 C. Anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions add more than 2.5 trillion calories to Earth’s surface every hour (ca. 3 watts per square meter, continuously).
Ocean acidification associated with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is proceeding at an unprecedented rate and could trigger mass extinction by itself. Already, half the Great Barrier Reef has died during the last three decades. And ocean acidification is hardly the only threat on the climate-change front. As one little-discussed example, atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping to levels considered dangerous for humans.
An increasing number of scientists agree that warming of 4 to 6 C causes a dead planet. And, they go on to say, we’ll be there by 2060. The ultra-conservative International Energy Agency, on the other hand, concludes that, “coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017 … without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.” At the 11:20 mark of this video, climate scientist Paul Beckwith indicates Earth could warm by 6 C within a decade. If you think his view is extreme, consider the reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years published in Science in March 2013 ( see this graph at the link listed above ).....
Climate-change summary and update
American actress Lily Tomlin is credited with the expression, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” With respect to climate science, my own efforts to stay abreast are blown away every week by new data, models, and assessments. It seems no matter how dire the situation becomes, it only gets worse when I check the latest reports.
The response of politicians, heads of non-governmental organizations, and corporate leaders remains the same. They’re mired in the dank Swamp of Nothingness. These are the people who know about, and presumably could do something about, our ongoing race to disaster (if only to sound the alarm). Tomlin’s line is never more germane than when thinking about their pursuit of a buck at the expense of life on Earth.
Worse than the aforementioned trolls are the media. Fully captured by corporations and the corporate states, the media continue to dance around the issue of climate change. Occasionally a forthright piece is published, but it generally points in the wrong direction, such as suggesting climate scientists and activists be killed (e.g., James Delingpole’s 7 April 2013 hate-filled article in the Telegraph).
Even mainstream scientists minimize the message at every turn. As we’ve known for years, scientists almost invariably underplay climate impacts. I’m not implying conspiracy. Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism. These folks are loathe to risk drawing undue attention to themselves by pointing out there might be a threat to civilization. Never mind the near-term threat to our entire species (they couldn’t care less about other species). If the truth is dire, they can find another, not-so-dire version.
If you’re too busy to read the evidence presented below, here’s the bottom line: On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction (from Oliver Tickell’s 2008 synthesis in the Guardian). According to an informed assessment of BP’s Energy Outlook 2030, published in January 2013, global average temperature of Earth will hit the 4 C mark in 2030. In the face of near-term human extinction, Americans view the threat as distant and irrelevant, as illustrated by a 22 April 2013 article in the Washington Post based on poll results that echo the long-held sentiment that elected officials should be focused on the industrial economy, not far-away minor nuisances such as climate change.
This essay brings attention to recent projections and positive feedbacks. I presented much of this information at the Bluegrass Bioneers conference (Alex Smith at Radio Ecoshock evaluates my presentation here). More recently, I presented an updated version on the campus of the University of Massachusetts. All information and sources are readily confirmed with an online search, and links to information about feedbacks can be found here.
Large-scale assessments
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (late 2007): 1 C by 2100
Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (late 2008): 2 C by 2100
United Nations Environment Programme (mid 2009): 3.5 C by 2100
Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research (October 2009): 4 C by 2060
Global Carbon Project, Copenhagen Diagnosis (November 2009): 6 C, 7 C by 2100
International Energy Agency (November 2010): 3.5 C by 2035
United Nations Environment Programme (December 2010): up to 5 C by 2050
These assessments fail to account for significant self-reinforcing feedback loops (i.e., positive feedbacks, the term that implies the opposite of its meaning). The IPCC’s vaunted Fifth Assessment will continue the trend as it, too, ignores important feedbacks. On a positive note, major assessments fail to account for economic collapse. However, due to the feedback loops presented below, I strongly suspect it’s too late for economic collapse to extend the run of our species.
Taking a broad view
Astrophysicists have long believed Earth was near the center of the habitable zone for humans. Recent research published in the 10 March 2013 issue of Astrophysical Journal indicates Earth is on the inner edge of the habitable zone, and lies within 1% of inhabitability (1.5 million km, or 5 times the distance from Earth to Earth’s moon). A minor change in Earth’s atmosphere removes human habitat. Unfortunately, we’ve invoked major changes.
The northern hemisphere is particularly susceptible to acclerated warming, as explained in the 8 April 2013 issue of Journal of Climate. Two days later, a paper in Nature confirmed that summers in the northern hemisphere are hotter than they’ve been for 600 years. As pointed out by Sherwood and Huber in the 25 May 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and then by James Hansen points out in his 15 April 2013 paper, humans cannot survive a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C (95 F).
As pointed out by the United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases in 1990, “Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage” (link mirrored here). Planetary instruments indicate Earth has warmed about 1 C since the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, plants in the vicinity of Concord, Massachusetts — where the instrumental record indicates warming of about 1 C — indicate warming of 2.4 C since the 1840s.
Whether you believe the plants or the instruments is irrelevant at the point. We’ve clearly triggered the types of positive feedbacks the United Nations warned about in 1990. Yet my colleagues and acquaintances think we can and will work our way out of this horrific mess with permaculture (which is not to denigrate permaculture, the principles of which are implemented at the mud hut). Adding egregious insult to spurting wound, the latest public-education initiative in the United States — the Next Generation Science Standards — buries the relationship between combustion of fossil fuels and planetary warming. The misadventures of the corporate government continue.
Let’s ignore the models for a moment and consider only the results of a single briefing to the United Nations Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen (COP15). Regulars in this space will recall COP15 as the climate-change meetings thrown under the bus by the Obama administration. A footnote on that long-forgotten briefing contains this statement: “THE LONG-TERM SEA LEVEL THAT CORRESPONDS TO CURRENT CO2 CONCENTRATION IS ABOUT 23 METERS ABOVE TODAY’S LEVELS, AND THE TEMPERATURES WILL BE 6 DEGREES C OR MORE HIGHER. THESE ESTIMATES ARE BASED ON REAL LONG TERM CLIMATE RECORDS, NOT ON MODELS.”
In other words, Obama and others in his administration knew near-term extinction of humans was already guaranteed. Even before the dire feedbacks were reported by the scientific community, the Obama administration abandoned climate change as a significant issue because it knew we were done as early as 2009. Rather than shoulder the unenviable task of truth-teller, Obama did as his imperial higher-ups demanded: He lied about collapse, and he lied about climate change. And he still does.
Ah, those were the good ol’ days, back when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were below 400 parts per million (ppm). We’ll blow through the 400 ppm mark soon, probably for the first time in 3.2 to 5 million years.
Positive feedbacks
Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011). This breakdown of the thermohaline conveyor belt is happening in the Antarctic as well.
Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too (Nature, August 2012)
Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
The Beauford Gyre apparently has reversed course (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 2012)
Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)
Summer ice melt in Antarctica is at its highest level in a thousand years: Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting 10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago, with the most rapid melt occurring in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)
Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
As nearly as I can distinguish, only the latter feedback process is reversible. Once you pull the tab on the can of beer, there’s no keeping the carbon dioxide from bubbling up and out. Because we’ve entered the era of expensive oil, I can’t imagine we’ll voluntarily terminate the process of drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic (or anywhere else).
See how far we’ve come
Never mind that American naturalist George Perkins Marsh predicted anthropogenic climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels in 1847. Never mind that climate risks have been underestimated for the last 20 Years, or that the IPCC’s efforts have failed miserably. After all, climate scientist Kevin Anderson tells us what I’ve known for years: politicians and the scientists writing official reports on climate change are lying, and we have less time than most people can imagine. Never mind David Wasdell pointed out in 2008 that we must have a period of negative radiative forcing merely to end up with a stable, non-catastrophic climate system. Never mind that even the Atlantic is displaying “five charts about climate change that should have you very, very worried.” Never mind that atmospheric carbon dioxide is affecting satellites. Never mind that even the occasional economic analyst is telling climate scientists to be persuasive, be brave, and be arrested. Never mind that Peruvian ice requiring 1,600 years to accumulate has melted in the last 25 years, according to a paper in the 4 April 2013 issue of Science.
Never mind all that: Future temperatures likely will be at the higher end of the projected range because the forecasts are all too conservative and also because climate negotiations won’t avert catastrophe.
Through late March 2013, global oceans have risen approximately ten millimeters per year during the last two years. This rate of rise is over three times the rate of sea level rise during the time of satellite-based observations from 1993 to the present.
Actually, catastrophe is already here, although it’s not widely distributed in the United States. Well, not yet, even though the continental U.S. experienced its highest temperature ever in 2012, shattering the 1998 record by a full degree Fahrenheit. But the east coast of North America experienced its hottest water temperatures all the way to the bottom of the ocean. The epic dust bowl of 2012 grew and grew and grew all summer long. Even James Hansen and Makiko Sato are asking whether the loss of ice on Greenland has gone exponential (while ridiculously calling for a carbon tax to “fix” the “problem”), and the tentative answer is not promising, based on very recent data. And climate change causes early death of 400,000 people each year.
Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This warming has resulted about 90% of overall global warming going into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically, according to a paper published in the March 2013 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. About 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which is unprecedented over at least the past half century. The death spiral of Arctic sea ice is well under way, as shown in the video below.
Global loss of sea ice matches the trend in the Arctic. It’s down, down, and down some more, with the five lowest values on record all happening in the last seven years (through 2012).
Then see where we’re going
The climate situation is much worse than I’ve led you to believe, and is accelerating far more rapidly than accounted for by models. Ice sheet loss continues to increase at both poles, and warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is twice the earlier scientific estimate. Arctic ice at all-time low, half that of 1980, and the Arctic lost enough sea ice to cover Canada and Alaska in 2012 alone. In short, summer ice in the Arctic is nearly gone. Furthermore, the Arctic could well be free of ice by summer 2015, an event that last occurred some three million years ago, before the genus Homo walked the planet. Indeed, Arctic ice could be gone in 2013, as predicted by climate scientist Paul Beckwith. Among the consequences of declining Arctic ice is extremes in cold weather in northern continents (thus illustrating why “climate change” is a better term than “global warming”). In a turn surprising only to mainstream climate scientists, Greenland ice is melting rapidly.
Even the conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) has thrown in the towel, concluding that “renewable” energy is not keeping up with the old, dirty standard sources. As a result, the IEA report dated 17 April 2013 indicates the development of low-carbon energy is progressing too slowly to limit global warming.
The Arctic isn’t Vegas — what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic — it’s the planet’s air conditioner. Whereas nearly 80 calories are required to melt a gram of ice at 0 C, adding 80 calories to the same gram of water at 0 C increases its temperature to 80 C. Anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions add more than 2.5 trillion calories to Earth’s surface every hour (ca. 3 watts per square meter, continuously).
Ocean acidification associated with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is proceeding at an unprecedented rate and could trigger mass extinction by itself. Already, half the Great Barrier Reef has died during the last three decades. And ocean acidification is hardly the only threat on the climate-change front. As one little-discussed example, atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping to levels considered dangerous for humans.
An increasing number of scientists agree that warming of 4 to 6 C causes a dead planet. And, they go on to say, we’ll be there by 2060. The ultra-conservative International Energy Agency, on the other hand, concludes that, “coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017 … without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.” At the 11:20 mark of this video, climate scientist Paul Beckwith indicates Earth could warm by 6 C within a decade. If you think his view is extreme, consider the reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years published in Science in March 2013 ( see this graph at the link listed above ).....
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
SC117-5
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/04/the-irreconcilable-acceptance-of-near-term-extinction/
The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction
....My long definition of NTE is both descriptive yet hopelessly indistinct: It will eventually arise from a sequence of catastrophic global civic failure stemming from permanent food scarcity, as a consequence of ever-increasing extreme weather events, due to both the collapse and predictability of the Northern Hemispheric jet stream, as the temperature and pressure gradients continue to weaken in the Arctic. And lest we forget, NTE will be greatly aided and preceded by humanity’s murderous forte. It can also effectively be summed up in two words: Permanent drought! And again, I’m intentionally avoiding the subject of containment pools, which easily merits its own essay.
At least for me, the meaning of life is completely determined by the quality of life, which is why I’ve always considered life imprisonment to be far worse than a death sentence. I have always known that if the quality of my life was degraded to a point that it lost all meaning, then life would no longer be worth living.
Enter NTE. Ergo, enter the almost impenetrable awareness that it’s only a question of time, before each of us consider life to no longer be worth living. Aside from that being nearly an impossible acceptance to attempt to live with, it has become sine qua non from which every thought I now have must pass through. Therefore, all the remaining meaning in my life only has a limited amount of time between now, and some indeterminate point in the very near future for me to consider life worth living. This novel reality is the actual crux of this entire essay.
As cognitive filters go, NTE doesn’t let too much through. In fact, only one idea as how best to spend my remaining time has made it pass this mind-boggling juggernaut: Peacefully and quietly leave this world as a completely carefree drug-addled impoverished vagabond, who eventually takes a lovely one-way walk into the woods.
I have already accepted that today is as good as life on earth will ever be, it’s all downhill from here, the extinction event that is already terribly advanced can’t be stalled, so the clock as to my remaining time is already ticking along with all the rest of life.
And yes, that mortal coil started unraveling at my conception, and this is why age, will most likely be the greatest factor in determining the choices we make from here on out. If we feel we’ve plenty of life still in us, we’ll most likely feel inclined to stuff as many new experiences in the time we have left, compared to those who are well pass their prime, and naturally see ease and comfort as their best available option.
I am someone who would much rather die from a rattlesnake bite, after days of hallucinating on mushrooms in the desert, than sit behind my computer and continue to alphabetize the apocalypse until the power goes out, as I’ve done for far, far too long already.
All that is left is for me to discover the courage to truly live with this morbid conviction, but to be completely honestly, I haven’t mustered the nerve yet. My behavior is still one of passive deference, for reasons still unknown to me, but most likely it’s just a jumble of distraction, guilt, fear, melancholy and a little laziness thrown in for safe measure.
I’m still telling myself that I need two more years of trending data sets to feel confident NTE will transpire much sooner than any of us ever imagined. Logically, I have accepted it, but I have yet to emotionally resolve my manifold hypocrisy.
Finding the courage to willingly embrace our inevitable destitution unto death is the only purpose of accepting NTE in my opinion. If this is not our objective, then I can see very little reason for even taking it into consideration. Why initiate such a ruinous acceptance into our existing lives, if we’re not going to allow our past lives to actually be ruined?
I am not old enough to die of natural causes before global famine descends across the globe, given it is probably only a few years away at this point anyhow. Whether or not most of us die as a direct result of famine or genocide is a question that simply no longer interests me. At this stage of the game, it’s all equally horrific. So what’s the point in continuing to waste our precious time even thinking about the millennial pernicious power plays of hairless apes?
For not unlike our current gross inequality, as long as capitalism rues the day, and I fear it wretchedly will until the very end, food stuff will flow in only one direction, towards those who can afford it. Those who can’t, will either quietly starve, riot or be killed.
Governments will have only two options in addressing this, either disintegrate and schism into temporary competing factions, or become brutal oppressive genocidal police states of in-groups and out-groups, thus postponing complete civic collapse by a number of years, through vicious demand destruction.
Governments with large securities apparatuses will most likely become police states, while governments without advanced security forces will most likely collapse. Endless war between competing police states will be the only perceived surrogate for hope in a world of permanent famine. The global citizenry will willfully welcome tyranny, much in the same way we always have. And as many of us have already accredited, “what’s past is prologue” … it’s just going to be unbelievably atrocious for the world’s poor in the beginning, again, much as it is already.
We live in a hyper-interdependent global market place, completely irrespective of its sustainability. State currency valuation and exchange through central banking is the sum total of what our speculative civilization now reflexively strives to protect. Whatever means keeps liquidity in the markets and power in the State, will be kept in play for as long as humanly possible.
Entire nations will be sacrificed upon the altar of maintaining capital flow and investment, it’s just a question of trickling economies of scale on the way down. We inhabit an utterly amoral economic system that will sacrifice all of life to sustain itself. Capitalism will double down until it, or we, cease to be. As long as there is enough energy to allow capitalists to cannibalize all perceived assets in an indebted world, then even famine on a global scale will just be a game of attrition controlled by the world’s ruling elite, in a continuous charade of paying a well-armed Peter to murder an ever-starving Paul.
It dawned on me a few years back that after over a decade of intensely attempting to collectively network with others through a myriad of preparedness schemes that I had just lost the will to survive in the collapsing world I was proselytizing. This is quite different from no longer wanting to live, for I very much love life, and have no desire to needlessly cut it short. I have just always seen living and surviving as to two separate entities. I am also at an age where I feel I’ve already taken more than my share.
I have decided after decades of feral study, without any sense of certainty, and based only on my opinion as to what is and isn’t probable, that when the Arctic sea ice is completely gone during the summer, when the earth’s Holocene epoch completely loses one of its primary thermal regulators, we are probably only a few years at best, before the ruling classes of the world realize global agriculture is untenable, and at that point, the lack of alternatives will be rather self-evident. And I simply have no desire to live through that deleterious fallout, nor do I even feel I have a right to.
What an endless perverse decay of ideas we now embark, where NTE can be seen as a bizarre new lease on life for those who are in a position to access it.
I can’t yet claim I’ve achieved this, for I’m still terribly conflicted and immersed in a lifetime of despondent culpability, but I can see an entirely new transgressive identity rising out of the ashes of this phenomenal and ominous acceptance.
Only a few years ago, I would be the first to lead the charge in attacking the very perspective I now possess. But necessity dictates my moral imperative, and it requires at least some belief of a viable future for the remaining life on earth. But I am now without this belief, and it seems my long personal sense of insignificance, has finally caught up to my actions. I was weary long before there was no point.
So, I am not one for skulking through what remains of this life, only to carefully arrive at extinction. I am going out on my terms, no one else’s. But until that day comes, I’m going to embrace this endless redefining of life for as long as I desire, as I hysterically fall out of this world.
If NTE is a tsunami, I’m sure in the hell not going to wait for it to arrive, I’m going to swim out to it across the desert night sky.
The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction
....My long definition of NTE is both descriptive yet hopelessly indistinct: It will eventually arise from a sequence of catastrophic global civic failure stemming from permanent food scarcity, as a consequence of ever-increasing extreme weather events, due to both the collapse and predictability of the Northern Hemispheric jet stream, as the temperature and pressure gradients continue to weaken in the Arctic. And lest we forget, NTE will be greatly aided and preceded by humanity’s murderous forte. It can also effectively be summed up in two words: Permanent drought! And again, I’m intentionally avoiding the subject of containment pools, which easily merits its own essay.
At least for me, the meaning of life is completely determined by the quality of life, which is why I’ve always considered life imprisonment to be far worse than a death sentence. I have always known that if the quality of my life was degraded to a point that it lost all meaning, then life would no longer be worth living.
Enter NTE. Ergo, enter the almost impenetrable awareness that it’s only a question of time, before each of us consider life to no longer be worth living. Aside from that being nearly an impossible acceptance to attempt to live with, it has become sine qua non from which every thought I now have must pass through. Therefore, all the remaining meaning in my life only has a limited amount of time between now, and some indeterminate point in the very near future for me to consider life worth living. This novel reality is the actual crux of this entire essay.
As cognitive filters go, NTE doesn’t let too much through. In fact, only one idea as how best to spend my remaining time has made it pass this mind-boggling juggernaut: Peacefully and quietly leave this world as a completely carefree drug-addled impoverished vagabond, who eventually takes a lovely one-way walk into the woods.
I have already accepted that today is as good as life on earth will ever be, it’s all downhill from here, the extinction event that is already terribly advanced can’t be stalled, so the clock as to my remaining time is already ticking along with all the rest of life.
And yes, that mortal coil started unraveling at my conception, and this is why age, will most likely be the greatest factor in determining the choices we make from here on out. If we feel we’ve plenty of life still in us, we’ll most likely feel inclined to stuff as many new experiences in the time we have left, compared to those who are well pass their prime, and naturally see ease and comfort as their best available option.
I am someone who would much rather die from a rattlesnake bite, after days of hallucinating on mushrooms in the desert, than sit behind my computer and continue to alphabetize the apocalypse until the power goes out, as I’ve done for far, far too long already.
All that is left is for me to discover the courage to truly live with this morbid conviction, but to be completely honestly, I haven’t mustered the nerve yet. My behavior is still one of passive deference, for reasons still unknown to me, but most likely it’s just a jumble of distraction, guilt, fear, melancholy and a little laziness thrown in for safe measure.
I’m still telling myself that I need two more years of trending data sets to feel confident NTE will transpire much sooner than any of us ever imagined. Logically, I have accepted it, but I have yet to emotionally resolve my manifold hypocrisy.
Finding the courage to willingly embrace our inevitable destitution unto death is the only purpose of accepting NTE in my opinion. If this is not our objective, then I can see very little reason for even taking it into consideration. Why initiate such a ruinous acceptance into our existing lives, if we’re not going to allow our past lives to actually be ruined?
I am not old enough to die of natural causes before global famine descends across the globe, given it is probably only a few years away at this point anyhow. Whether or not most of us die as a direct result of famine or genocide is a question that simply no longer interests me. At this stage of the game, it’s all equally horrific. So what’s the point in continuing to waste our precious time even thinking about the millennial pernicious power plays of hairless apes?
For not unlike our current gross inequality, as long as capitalism rues the day, and I fear it wretchedly will until the very end, food stuff will flow in only one direction, towards those who can afford it. Those who can’t, will either quietly starve, riot or be killed.
Governments will have only two options in addressing this, either disintegrate and schism into temporary competing factions, or become brutal oppressive genocidal police states of in-groups and out-groups, thus postponing complete civic collapse by a number of years, through vicious demand destruction.
Governments with large securities apparatuses will most likely become police states, while governments without advanced security forces will most likely collapse. Endless war between competing police states will be the only perceived surrogate for hope in a world of permanent famine. The global citizenry will willfully welcome tyranny, much in the same way we always have. And as many of us have already accredited, “what’s past is prologue” … it’s just going to be unbelievably atrocious for the world’s poor in the beginning, again, much as it is already.
We live in a hyper-interdependent global market place, completely irrespective of its sustainability. State currency valuation and exchange through central banking is the sum total of what our speculative civilization now reflexively strives to protect. Whatever means keeps liquidity in the markets and power in the State, will be kept in play for as long as humanly possible.
Entire nations will be sacrificed upon the altar of maintaining capital flow and investment, it’s just a question of trickling economies of scale on the way down. We inhabit an utterly amoral economic system that will sacrifice all of life to sustain itself. Capitalism will double down until it, or we, cease to be. As long as there is enough energy to allow capitalists to cannibalize all perceived assets in an indebted world, then even famine on a global scale will just be a game of attrition controlled by the world’s ruling elite, in a continuous charade of paying a well-armed Peter to murder an ever-starving Paul.
It dawned on me a few years back that after over a decade of intensely attempting to collectively network with others through a myriad of preparedness schemes that I had just lost the will to survive in the collapsing world I was proselytizing. This is quite different from no longer wanting to live, for I very much love life, and have no desire to needlessly cut it short. I have just always seen living and surviving as to two separate entities. I am also at an age where I feel I’ve already taken more than my share.
I have decided after decades of feral study, without any sense of certainty, and based only on my opinion as to what is and isn’t probable, that when the Arctic sea ice is completely gone during the summer, when the earth’s Holocene epoch completely loses one of its primary thermal regulators, we are probably only a few years at best, before the ruling classes of the world realize global agriculture is untenable, and at that point, the lack of alternatives will be rather self-evident. And I simply have no desire to live through that deleterious fallout, nor do I even feel I have a right to.
What an endless perverse decay of ideas we now embark, where NTE can be seen as a bizarre new lease on life for those who are in a position to access it.
I can’t yet claim I’ve achieved this, for I’m still terribly conflicted and immersed in a lifetime of despondent culpability, but I can see an entirely new transgressive identity rising out of the ashes of this phenomenal and ominous acceptance.
Only a few years ago, I would be the first to lead the charge in attacking the very perspective I now possess. But necessity dictates my moral imperative, and it requires at least some belief of a viable future for the remaining life on earth. But I am now without this belief, and it seems my long personal sense of insignificance, has finally caught up to my actions. I was weary long before there was no point.
So, I am not one for skulking through what remains of this life, only to carefully arrive at extinction. I am going out on my terms, no one else’s. But until that day comes, I’m going to embrace this endless redefining of life for as long as I desire, as I hysterically fall out of this world.
If NTE is a tsunami, I’m sure in the hell not going to wait for it to arrive, I’m going to swim out to it across the desert night sky.
Monday, April 29, 2013
SC117-4
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html
We Wish
Wishful thinking now runs so thick and deep across the USA that our hopes for a credible future are being drowned in a tidal wave of yellow smiley-face stories recklessly issued by institutions that ought to know better. A case in point is the Charles C. Mann's tragically dumb cover story in the current Atlantic magazine -- "We Will Never Run Out of Oil" * -- setting out in great detail the entire panoply of techno-narcissistic "solutions" to our energy predicament. Another case in point was senior financial writer Joe Nocera's moronic op-ed in last week's New York Times beating the drum for American "energy independence."
You could call these two examples mendacious if it weren't so predictable that a desperate society would do everything possible to defend its sunk costs, including the making up of fairy tales to justify its wishes. Instead, they're merely tragic because the zeitgeist now requires once-honorable forums of a free press to indulge in self-esteem building rather than truth-telling. It also represents a culmination of the political correctness disease that has terminally disabled the professional thinking class for the last three decades, since this feel-good propaganda comes from the supposedly progressive organs of the media -- and, of course, the cornucopian view has been a staple of the idiot right wing media forever. We have become a nation incapable of thinking, or at least of constructing a consensus that jibes with reality. In not a very few years, the American public will be so disappointed and demoralized by broken promises like these that they will turn the nation upside down and inside out, probably with violence and bloodshed.
Charles Mann's Atlantic article begins by cheerleading for the mining of methane hydrates from the ocean floor. These are natural gas molecules trapped in ice formations in the muck around the continental shelves. Mann spotlights the efforts of a Japanese research ship conducting tests. Guess what: the Japanese are engaging in this because they have absolutely no fossil fuels of their own, and a failing consensus about nuclear power, and they are on a course to become the first advanced industrial nation to be forced to return to a medieval economy. That is, they are the most desperate among the desperate. You could say they've got nothing to lose (but a few billion of their rapidly depreciating Yen).
Methane hydrates are stable only at extreme pressures or very low temperatures. They also exist in the arctic permafrost, for instance, Siberia, where conventional natural gas drilling operations have been carried out for decades, with no contributions from methane hydrates. Undersea methane hydrate exploration projects have gone on for decades in the US, Canada, India, Russia, China, and Japan. The hope is that this so-called "hot ice" would turn out to be the gas equivalent of tar sands, which would mean at best a very expensive way to get more fossil fuels as the conventional sources dry up. That hope has dimmed in nations other than extremely desperate Japan. Like a lot of techno-wonders, the recovery of methane hydrates can be demonstrated on the "science project" scale. For now, no viable technique exists for getting commercially-scaled streams of natural gas out of methane hydrates. The Japanese themselves state that it would take at least ten years, if ever, to commercially mine methane hydrates. Japan doesn't have ten years. It's banking system is imploding, and without capital even the science projects will come to an end.
Charles Mann is equally rapturous about shale oil and gas. He writes:
"Today, though, fracking is unleashing torrents of oil in North Dakota and Texas--it may create a second boom in the San Joaquin Valley--and floods of natural gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. So bright are the fracking prospects that the U.S. may become, if only briefly, the world's top petroleum producer. ("Saudi America," crowed The Wall Street Journal. But the parallel is inexact, because the U.S. is likely to consume most of its bonanza at home, rather than exporting it.)"
This is very misleading. The US consumes roughly 19 million barrels a day. The Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations produce about a million barrels a day combined now, and guaranteed to get a whole lot lower within the next five years. Today's near-peak production is based on furious drilling and fracking of extremely expensive wells -- known as "the Red Queen syndrome" because they are running as fast as they can to keep production up. Meanwhile, the depletion curve on shale oil is a reverse "hockey stick."
The situation is similar for shale gas, the difference being that the temporary glut of 2005 - 2012 happened because we didn't have the means to export surplus gas from the initial burst of development and it briefly flooded the domestic market. The price of shale gas is still below the level that makes it economic to produce and when it eventually rises to that level, and beyond, it will be too expensive for its customers to buy. Shale gas is also subject to the Red Queen Syndrome.
These arguments have been well-rehearsed many times in this blog and elsewhere. But the key to understanding our energy predicament is ignored in cornucopian cases like Charles Mann's Atlantic piece, which is the role of capital. Non-cheap oil has already worked its hoodoo on advanced industrial economies: it has already destroyed the process of capital formation. These economies were not designed to run on non-cheap oil and they can't, and the capital is no longer there for even the research-and-development to change out the infrastructure, let alone carry out any as-yet-undesigned changes. Furthermore, there is no prospect that we can rescue the process of capital formation at the scale required to continue financing things like shale oil. The absence of real growth in the USA, Europe, and Japan has already destroyed the operations of interest and repayment of debt, and any new debt issued will never be repaid, meaning it is functionally worthless (we just don't know it yet). These impairments of capital formation have left the major commercial banks insolvent and central banks have worked tirelessly to rescue them by issuing more "money" in the form of credit that can never be paid back.
What all this means is that the capital does not exist to run non-cheap oil economies, or to continue indefinitely the production of non-cheap oil and gas, not to mention methane hydrates and other fantasy fuels.
Joe Nocera's op-ed in last week's New York Times was shorter and even dumber (and lazier) than Charles Mann's foolish Atlantic article. It was based on remarks made by Canada's Energy Minister, Joe Oliver, who said (among other patently false and idiotic things) that Canada "has the resources to meet all of America's future needs for oil." Oliver was pimping for the Keystone pipeline project to transport tar sands byproducts from Alberta down to the US. Nocera swallowed everything Oliver said whole, such as "oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim." Is that so, Joe? And what's your source for that assertion? Canada's Energy Minister? The slug at the bottom of Nocera's column said he was invited onto the op-ed page because regular columnists Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristoff were off (or on book leave). Nocera's column was disgracefully ignorant. The editors should send him back to the Times business section where unreality is the order-of-the-day.
Now, many people may draw the conclusion that some conspiracy is underway when the major mainstream media report the news so disingenuously, but that is just not so. The reason we, in effect, lie to ourselves incessantly is because of the master wish behind all the subsidiary wishes: we want to keep driving to WalMart forever and we can't imagine any other way of life, let alone the way of life that the contraction of industrial economies is tending toward -- which is to say a way, way downscaled and re-localized economic life centered on farming and artisanal manufacture. Yes, we are going medieval too, eventually, just like the Japanese, who will get there a little sooner than we will. It's hard to swallow, I'm sure. That's why we prefer the more digestible propaganda gummi bear treats like Charles Mann's Atlantic article and Joe Nocera's stupid op ed.
We Wish
Wishful thinking now runs so thick and deep across the USA that our hopes for a credible future are being drowned in a tidal wave of yellow smiley-face stories recklessly issued by institutions that ought to know better. A case in point is the Charles C. Mann's tragically dumb cover story in the current Atlantic magazine -- "We Will Never Run Out of Oil" * -- setting out in great detail the entire panoply of techno-narcissistic "solutions" to our energy predicament. Another case in point was senior financial writer Joe Nocera's moronic op-ed in last week's New York Times beating the drum for American "energy independence."
You could call these two examples mendacious if it weren't so predictable that a desperate society would do everything possible to defend its sunk costs, including the making up of fairy tales to justify its wishes. Instead, they're merely tragic because the zeitgeist now requires once-honorable forums of a free press to indulge in self-esteem building rather than truth-telling. It also represents a culmination of the political correctness disease that has terminally disabled the professional thinking class for the last three decades, since this feel-good propaganda comes from the supposedly progressive organs of the media -- and, of course, the cornucopian view has been a staple of the idiot right wing media forever. We have become a nation incapable of thinking, or at least of constructing a consensus that jibes with reality. In not a very few years, the American public will be so disappointed and demoralized by broken promises like these that they will turn the nation upside down and inside out, probably with violence and bloodshed.
Charles Mann's Atlantic article begins by cheerleading for the mining of methane hydrates from the ocean floor. These are natural gas molecules trapped in ice formations in the muck around the continental shelves. Mann spotlights the efforts of a Japanese research ship conducting tests. Guess what: the Japanese are engaging in this because they have absolutely no fossil fuels of their own, and a failing consensus about nuclear power, and they are on a course to become the first advanced industrial nation to be forced to return to a medieval economy. That is, they are the most desperate among the desperate. You could say they've got nothing to lose (but a few billion of their rapidly depreciating Yen).
Methane hydrates are stable only at extreme pressures or very low temperatures. They also exist in the arctic permafrost, for instance, Siberia, where conventional natural gas drilling operations have been carried out for decades, with no contributions from methane hydrates. Undersea methane hydrate exploration projects have gone on for decades in the US, Canada, India, Russia, China, and Japan. The hope is that this so-called "hot ice" would turn out to be the gas equivalent of tar sands, which would mean at best a very expensive way to get more fossil fuels as the conventional sources dry up. That hope has dimmed in nations other than extremely desperate Japan. Like a lot of techno-wonders, the recovery of methane hydrates can be demonstrated on the "science project" scale. For now, no viable technique exists for getting commercially-scaled streams of natural gas out of methane hydrates. The Japanese themselves state that it would take at least ten years, if ever, to commercially mine methane hydrates. Japan doesn't have ten years. It's banking system is imploding, and without capital even the science projects will come to an end.
Charles Mann is equally rapturous about shale oil and gas. He writes:
"Today, though, fracking is unleashing torrents of oil in North Dakota and Texas--it may create a second boom in the San Joaquin Valley--and floods of natural gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. So bright are the fracking prospects that the U.S. may become, if only briefly, the world's top petroleum producer. ("Saudi America," crowed The Wall Street Journal. But the parallel is inexact, because the U.S. is likely to consume most of its bonanza at home, rather than exporting it.)"
This is very misleading. The US consumes roughly 19 million barrels a day. The Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations produce about a million barrels a day combined now, and guaranteed to get a whole lot lower within the next five years. Today's near-peak production is based on furious drilling and fracking of extremely expensive wells -- known as "the Red Queen syndrome" because they are running as fast as they can to keep production up. Meanwhile, the depletion curve on shale oil is a reverse "hockey stick."
The situation is similar for shale gas, the difference being that the temporary glut of 2005 - 2012 happened because we didn't have the means to export surplus gas from the initial burst of development and it briefly flooded the domestic market. The price of shale gas is still below the level that makes it economic to produce and when it eventually rises to that level, and beyond, it will be too expensive for its customers to buy. Shale gas is also subject to the Red Queen Syndrome.
These arguments have been well-rehearsed many times in this blog and elsewhere. But the key to understanding our energy predicament is ignored in cornucopian cases like Charles Mann's Atlantic piece, which is the role of capital. Non-cheap oil has already worked its hoodoo on advanced industrial economies: it has already destroyed the process of capital formation. These economies were not designed to run on non-cheap oil and they can't, and the capital is no longer there for even the research-and-development to change out the infrastructure, let alone carry out any as-yet-undesigned changes. Furthermore, there is no prospect that we can rescue the process of capital formation at the scale required to continue financing things like shale oil. The absence of real growth in the USA, Europe, and Japan has already destroyed the operations of interest and repayment of debt, and any new debt issued will never be repaid, meaning it is functionally worthless (we just don't know it yet). These impairments of capital formation have left the major commercial banks insolvent and central banks have worked tirelessly to rescue them by issuing more "money" in the form of credit that can never be paid back.
What all this means is that the capital does not exist to run non-cheap oil economies, or to continue indefinitely the production of non-cheap oil and gas, not to mention methane hydrates and other fantasy fuels.
Joe Nocera's op-ed in last week's New York Times was shorter and even dumber (and lazier) than Charles Mann's foolish Atlantic article. It was based on remarks made by Canada's Energy Minister, Joe Oliver, who said (among other patently false and idiotic things) that Canada "has the resources to meet all of America's future needs for oil." Oliver was pimping for the Keystone pipeline project to transport tar sands byproducts from Alberta down to the US. Nocera swallowed everything Oliver said whole, such as "oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim." Is that so, Joe? And what's your source for that assertion? Canada's Energy Minister? The slug at the bottom of Nocera's column said he was invited onto the op-ed page because regular columnists Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristoff were off (or on book leave). Nocera's column was disgracefully ignorant. The editors should send him back to the Times business section where unreality is the order-of-the-day.
Now, many people may draw the conclusion that some conspiracy is underway when the major mainstream media report the news so disingenuously, but that is just not so. The reason we, in effect, lie to ourselves incessantly is because of the master wish behind all the subsidiary wishes: we want to keep driving to WalMart forever and we can't imagine any other way of life, let alone the way of life that the contraction of industrial economies is tending toward -- which is to say a way, way downscaled and re-localized economic life centered on farming and artisanal manufacture. Yes, we are going medieval too, eventually, just like the Japanese, who will get there a little sooner than we will. It's hard to swallow, I'm sure. That's why we prefer the more digestible propaganda gummi bear treats like Charles Mann's Atlantic article and Joe Nocera's stupid op ed.
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