samadhisoft.com

There’s a lot happening. Each day, I gather several articles I want to comment on in relationship to the Perfect Storm Hypothesis. Let’s take a ramble through some of them, shall we? This doesn’t need to be a complete sampling – we’re just looking for the broad patterns here.

I’ve had my doubts about some of the new energy technologies like biofuels and hydrogen. I don’t think the people pushing these are doing rigorous full-cycle accounting analyses. They, and the people they preach to, are hoping for magic bullets which will allow us all to go on breeding, driving cars and consuming as we always have. A U.N. expert has called thinking like this a ‘crime against humanity‘. Here are some other stories that relate to this as well: ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡.

As the world’s resources get thinner and the pressures build, governments will need to keep tighter and tighter controls on their populations. We’ve all heard of The Great Firewall the Chinese government has erected to try to keep external news critical of the regime from the Chinese people. This very blog appears to be blocked by that firewall. Now it appears that Putin and the Russian government are heading down that same path towards control of beliefs and perceptions through the control of information. And here are some other stories that bear on this theme: ➡, ➡, and ➡.

And for an absolutely rip-you-up analysis of what’s going wrong with news reporting here in the USA, read Bill Moyer’s speech to the National Conference for Media Reform from January 12, 2007. It’s a killer.

The father of the concept of Gaia, James Lovelock, has come out with a piece in The Rolling Stone on his thoughts about humanity’s future. It’s best you don’t read this if you haven’t had your morning tranquilizers. It’s also best that you skip it if you haven’t thought about the future and how it may affect you and those you love. James is such a sweetie-pie. I wish he’d tell us what he really thinks and not sweeten it up so much.

Another fellow who can always be depended upon to cheer you up with a good dose of hard-edged thinking is James Kunstler. Here’s his most recent piece called Assumptions. (more tranquilizers, please!)

There’s a new publication out by the United Nations Environmental Programme called, GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK. it is described as:

The fourth Global Environment Outlook: environment for development (GEO-4) assessment is a comprehensive and authoritative UN report on environment, development and human well-being, providing incisive analysis and information for decision making.

It’s a massive compendium somewhat like the State of the World Report put out each year by The WorldWatch Institute. It tries to pull an entire world of information together so that the reader can see the big patterns. More to the point, it tries to pull these patterns together so that our leaders can make wise and informed decisions. Somehow I think most of our leaders are missing the points made in documents like these.

One of the big problems with leadership type personalities is that they tend to be on ‘transmit’ instead of ‘receive’ most of the time and thus lose a lot of the opportunities they might otherwise have to learn.

And that leads naturally into thinking about what’s wrong with our thinking. We human beings like to think we are logical and reasonable but our own scientific studies reveal just how flawed our thinking processes really are. I’ve written about this before here: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡

Here’s a piece about how decision-makers make decisions. Granted, this piece is largely about how decision making processes go wrong in psychologically impaired individuals but the underlying mechanisms that drive decisions, as described in this paper, affect us all.

All of this makes me think we are our own worst enemies and the best thing we could do for ourselves is to require that our leaders be well versed on all of these thinking flaws before they take up their positions of responsibility. Otherwise, we truly are the blind leading the blind.

Environmental problems are building up. Of course, the denialists will say these are just statistical aberrations. And, I assume they will continue to say this until the statistical evidence for significance is overwhelming. And that, I suspect will be a good long ways past the time when we could have hoped to do anything about these problems. There’s that impressive human thinking again, eh?

Here are some more stories that came up immediately when I Googled for ‘Water Shortages’: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡.

Well, if everyone’s cheered up sufficiently, then I think I’ll go off and enjoy the rest of my day off.

Cheers!

The speed at which mankind has used Earth’s resources over the past 20 years has put “humanity’s very survival at risk”, a study involving 1400 scientists says.

The environmental audit, for the United Nations, found that each person in the world now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the planet can supply.

Thirty per cent of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are under threat of extinction, while one in 10 of the world’s major rivers runs dry every year before it reaches the sea.

The bleak verdict on the environment was issued yesterday as an “urgent call for action” by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which said the “point of no return” was fast approaching.

The report was drafted and researched by nearly 400 scientists, all experts in their fields. Their findings were subjected to review by 1000 of their peers.

Canterbury University Professor of Antarctic studies Bryan Storey, whose research team contributed to the Antarctic section of the report, said “a real sense of urgency” was needed over global warming and the Government needed to do “a lot more”, as did every nation.

“We haven’t reached the stage where people think it’s serious enough to change the way we live,” he said.

More… ➡

No one is going to come to the rescue on the supply side — and, of course, we remain stuck with an administration that doesn’t believe in demand-reduction strategies.

As the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) reported in “OPEC’s Lever Loses Its Pull on Oil“:

Oil prices are hovering near historic highs, but consuming nations shouldn’t expect quick relief from OPEC, the world’s only source for big, quick supplies.

For several reasons, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has neither the clear leverage nor the inclination to open the spigots and drive down the price of crude, which jumped past $90 a barrel in intraday trading in New York last week for the first time.

This figure shows how little spare capacity OPEC has — essentially none outside of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have no inclination to initiate a major price drop, especially since these prices do not appear to be destroying demand.

Moreover, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned back in July that it saw “OPEC spare capacity declining to minimal levels by 2012.”

And the WSJ notes no one outside of OPEC will be coming to the rescue either:

Saudi Arabia has little to fear from the world’s other major producers, such as Russia, which in decades past have ramped up supplies in an effort to capture a greater market share. But at the moment, the world’s major producers for the most part are already pumping flat-out.

“They have little competition from non-OPEC suppliers and few worries about losing market share,” says Jeffrey Currie, senior energy economist at Goldman Sachs in London.

We cannot be far from $100+ oil.

=======================

Thanks to climateprogress for this piece.

To the original:  ➡

The long-feared saturation of one the world’s primary carbon sinks has apparently started. The BBC reports, “The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world’s oceans has reduced.”

After 10 years and more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption, University of East Anglia researchers reached this stunning conclusion:

CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.

The BBC writes: “Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.”

Sigh. Note to the BBC, you don’t need a double hedge: If you’re going to just say “might get worse” you surely can drop “Scientists believe.” Frankly I doubt you can find many, if any, reputable scientists — or even the few remaining deniers — who would say that if the ocean sink saturates, global warming won’t get worse. I would probably phrase it this way: Global warming will accelerate if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.

The researchers say, “it is a tremendous surprise and very worrying because there were grounds for believing that in time the ocean might become ’saturated’ with our emissions – unable to soak up any more.”

Why is that bad news?

Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major natural carbon sinks: the oceans and the land “biosphere”. They are equivalent in size, each absorbing a quarter of all CO2 emissions.

If the oceans stop taking up CO2, the atmosphere will inevitably take up more, accelerating global warming.

To the original article: ➡

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2007) — Could the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere rise more drastically than previously assumed? The air contains greenhouse gases such as CO₂, which are now known to be responsible for global warming because their concentration has risen continuously for a number of years. In contrast to the atmosphere, the concentration of CO₂ in the oceans is sixty times higher.

In the global carbon cycle the sea absorbs a proportion of the atmospheric CO₂ but also releases CO₂ into the atmosphere again. About half of the anthropogenic emission of CO₂ is absorbed naturally by the oceans. Thus it is all the more important to understand how the exchange of CO₂ between the ocean and the atmosphere functions with regard to a world that is warming up. The newly available study shows that the ocean was able to store more CO₂ during the ice age than it can today.

More… ➡

The train is picking up speed…

=======================================

Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen 35% faster than expected since 2000, says a study.

International scientists found that inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels increased levels of CO2 by 17%.

The other 18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.

About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural “sinks” but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen, the study suggests.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was carried out by the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia, UK, and the British Antarctic Survey.

It found that improvements in the carbon intensity of the global economy have stalled since 2000, leading to an unexpected jump in atmospheric CO2.

“In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slow-down of natural sinks and the halt to improvements in the carbon intensity of wealth production,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project.

More… ➡