Archive for 2008

Climate outcome ‘hangs on coal’

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

If growth in carbon dioxide emissions is to be constrained and even reversed then the world cannot afford a coal renaissance, scientists have said.

Some commentators have argued that falling reserves of oil and gas will automatically limit CO2’s rise.

But at an American Geophysical Union meeting, researchers said reserves of coal dwarfed those of other fuels.

It was even possible oil’s demise could trigger an acceleration in emissions through more coal use, they added.

“We can replace oil with liquid fuels derived from coal,” said Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California.

“But these liquid fuels emit even more carbon dioxide than oil, so the end of oil can mean an increase in coal and even more carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, and even more rapid onset of dangerous climate change.”

More…

Tidal energy system on full power

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

A tidal turbine near the mouth of Strangford Lough has begun producing electricity at full capacity for the first time.

The SeaGen system now generates 1.2MW, the highest level of power produced by a tidal stream system anywhere in the world.

The system works like an “underwater windmill” but with rotors driven by tidal currents rather than the wind.

It has been undergoing commissioning trials since May.

SeaGen will now move towards full-operating mode for periods of up to 22 hours a day, with regular inspections and performance testing carried out.

The power generated by the system is being purchased by Irish energy company, ESB Independent, for its customers in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

The turbine has the capacity to generate power to meet the average electricity needs of around 1000 homes.

Martin Wright, managing director of SeaGen developers, Marine Current Turbines, said that having the system generating at full power was an important milestone.

“It demonstrates, for the first time, the commercial potential of tidal energy as a viable alternative source of renewable energy,” he said.

“As the first mover in tidal stream turbine development, we have a significant technical lead over all rival tidal technologies that are under development.

“There are no other tidal turbines of truly commercial scale; all the competitive systems so far tested at sea are quite small, most being less than 10% the rotor area of SeaGen.”

To the original…

Changes ‘amplify Arctic warming’

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Scientists say they now have unambiguous evidence that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating.

Computer models have long predicted that decreasing sea ice should amplify temperature changes in the northern polar region.

Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that this process was under way.

Arctic ice cover in summer has seen rapid retreat in recent years.

The minimum extents reached in 2007 and 2008 were the smallest recorded in the satellite age.

“The sea ice is entering a new state where the ice cover has become so thin that no matter what happens during the summer in terms of temperature or circulation patterns, you’re still going to have very low ice conditions,” she told the meeting.

More…

Fresh bird flu outbreak in India

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Authorities in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal say they have identified the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in thousands of dead chickens.

Tests on poultry from two villages around Englishbazar town in the Maldah district have returned positive results, a health official said.

He “few thousand” birds in the area will be slaughtered, he said.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is regarded as highly pathogenic and can also cause disease and death in humans.

Bird flu has returned to West Bengal after an outbreak in 14 districts of the state in January this year.

Separately, authorities in the north-eastern state of Assam say they have finished culling of more than 300,000 chickens and ducks to control the spread of bird flu in the state.

Poultry in seven districts in the state have turned up cases of bird flu.

More…

– Just go to the search box at the upper left and enter “Bird Flu” for more of the same.

Network Neutrality Update

Friday, December 19th, 2008

– I’ve written on this before. The big corporate folks ‘own’ most of the media we have; TV, Radio, Newspapers, etc.

– The Internet is the one place left where all information comes to you equally unencumbered – at least so far.

– But, the Internet represents big profits to some. It represents ways to control the information we see to others. It is the most powerful form of media still existing not under the control of those with deep vested interests regarding what may appear on it.

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NETWORK NEUTRALITY UPDATE….Slowly but surely, support for network neutrality on the internet is eroding:

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same — nobody is supposed to jump the line.

….Separately, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have withdrawn quietly from a coalition formed two years ago to protect network neutrality. Each company has forged partnerships with the phone and cable companies. In addition, prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.

….Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service.

It’s not too surprising that big content companies are quietly changing their tune on this: big companies are usually willing to pay for preferential treatment that helps them keep little guys little, and preferential access to the internet is no different from any other competitive advantage.

More…

Here are links to three earlier pieces I posted that touch on this important topic.

China cull amid bird flu outbreak

Friday, December 19th, 2008

More than 370,000 chickens have been culled in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu after an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, say officials.

The outbreak is thought to be the first in mainland China since June.

Meanwhile, a man has reportedly contracted the virus in Cambodia, while Taiwan is investigating suspected infection among birds.

The death of a teenage girl from H5N1 was announced in Egypt on Tuesday, and a bird cull is also under way in India.

More than 200 people in a dozen countries have died of the virus since it resurfaced in Asia in 2003, say global health authorities.

Experts fear that the virus could mutate into one that is easily transmissible from human to human.

Migrating birds blamed

China’s Ministry of Agriculture said it received notification that the H5N1 virus had been found in two areas of Jiangsu on Monday.

The usual precautions have been imposed: birds have been slaughtered in the surrounding area, farms quarantined and disinfected, and the transport of fowl banned.

But no information has been released about the scale of the outbreak – how many birds were found to be carrying the H5N1 strain of the virus and how many of them died.

Officials say they think migrating birds might have been the source of the disease.

They are currently testing samples of the virus to check it has not mutated into a form that would pose a risk to human health, reports the BBC’s Chris Hogg in Shanghai.

More…

New Blogroll entries

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

For those of you who might occasionally take a look at the other Blogs and Websites I like and recommend, you should be aware that I’ve added two new ones to my Blogroll today.

The first is The Automatic Earth which is written by Stoneleigh and Ilargi.   They describe their site as, “…a daily overview of Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung“.   Dämmerung being the German word for twilight.   An interesting combination.   This site I added based on how impressed I was with an entry I found on their site that I Blogged about earlier here.  It was excellent piece and I’m thinking that where there is smoke, there’s likely to be fire.

And the second is Canadian Paul Cherfurka’s Blog which he entitle’s “Approaching the Limits to Growth“. I could try here to say a lot of nice things about Paul’s thinking and his approach the what I call The Perfect Storm but there’s no need. If you follow the link to his Blog, he’ll lay it all out for you on the opening page. If you’re not hooked after that, you never will be.

– Research thanks to Kael for connecting me to both of these fine sites.

Thinking about a thousand-year depression

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

– An excellent piece from The Automatic Earth; a Blog I’ve just started following.

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Cyclical terms like “recession” and “depression” are looking less appropriate by the day. It’s like calling the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance a “depression”.

I know the our situation is vastly different from the state of the world in Roman times, but the idea that we could be on the brink of a fundamental reset of civilization is intriguing, to say the least.

I’ve been convinced for several years that we are looking at the convergence of a set of wicked interlocking global problems — ecological problems (climate chaos, the death of the oceans, fresh water shortages etc.), energy shortages due to fossil fuel depletion, and overpopulation with the resulting pressure on the global food supply. This convergence is happening under the umbrella of the current global financial collapse that constrains our ability to respond to any of these problems individually, let alone any further problems that might emerge from interactions between them.

This unfortunate collision makes the future of our civilization very murky indeed. Writers like James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker and Sharon Astyk (along with people like Stoneleigh and Ilargi at The Automatic Earth) have been warning about the possibility of a generalized, unrecoverable collapse of modern civilization for a while now. They have generally been derided by the mainstream as millennialist prophets of doom — driven more by their own subconscious fears and dark desires, their research full of confirmation bias.

The events unfolding around us now, however, cast their optimistic mainstream critics in a somewhat different light. None of them — even the Roubinis and Krugmans – have fully appreciated the severity of the world’s financial predicament. Their comforting bromides (and even their more pessimistic utterances) have been overwhelmed by events on a weekly basis. It has become clear that for all their careful analysis of trunks and tails, nobody truly understood the shape of the entire elephant.

This evident failure of comprehension brings their entire analysis into disrepute. And that should make us ask – if they failed to comprehend the underpinnings of a calamity in their own domain, what does that say about the possibility that they also failed to understand the dangers being trumpeted by the doomers they have derided?

After all, we are seeing the same outcome in the climate crisis as in the financial one – the trends are uniformly negative, and are unfolding much faster than the professionals in either field predicted. There are new signs from world bodies like the International Energy Agency that the same situation is developing with respect to the world’s oil supply – the more pessimistic members of the Peak Oil crowd appear to be heading for vindication.

So, following a “major, rapid contraction” (aka collapse), could our civilization end up staying on the mat, unable to rise from the ashes of our former glory? That’s unknowable of course, but hardly inconceivable. Several factors give that speculation some foundation.

The first confounding factor is the spectre of irreversible climate change. That could irreparably damage the world’s food production capacity through shifts in rainfall and the reduction of snow and glacial cover that supplies much of the world’s fresh water for agriculture.

The second factor is the permanent depletion of the compact, high-density, transportable energy supply represented by fossil fuels. We’re putting a lot of effort into developing electrical alternatives, of course. There are two major challenges in the way, though. The first is the relative infancy of the industry, and the fact that it will require both capital and fossil fuels to enable its continued growth. The second longer term problem is that the use of electricity requires a higher level of technology in the infrastructure needed to manufacture, distribute, store and convert it into work. This may not seem like much of a a problem today, but if our global industrial civilization goes into a decline, growing parts of the world may find the maintenance of such infrastructure increasingly difficult.

A third factor that may get in the way of recovery is the depletion of easily-recoverable resources such as metals. The decline in the average quality of various ores being mined today is well documented, and is likely to continue. While recycling can recover much of the metal currently discarded as waste, recycling facilities capable of producing enough output to feed our civilization’s needs do not yet exist. They would face the same hurdles as the build-out of electrical supplies I described above.

You might think that such a situation will take so long to develop that we will be able to address the situation before it gets quite that dire.

One consideration that works against that hope is that human beings are not, for all their cleverness, fully rational creatures. Research has shown that most of our “rational” decisions are made at a deeply unconscious level, to be dressed up with rational justifications only upon their emergence into the conscious mind some time later. The truth of this proposition can be seen all around us in the competition between environmental remediation and economic imperatives, in the obstruction of alternative energy development, in our repeated creation of financial bubbles — in all the myriad ways in which we as a society work tirelessly against our own best interests as individuals and as a species.

Even worse, events have recently shown a terrifying ability to outstrip our expectations, in both speed and severity. We may not have nearly as much time left as we think. A lack of time coupled with an inability to respond rationally (or even to accept the evidence of our eyes) does not bode well for the future of this civilization.

It’s conceivable that our current civilization will never regain its feet after this storm has burst upon us. We will endure as a species no matter what happens, of course, and it’s even probable that we will rise to new heights. It’s also quite possible that the rebirth of this Phoenix will take a long, long time and that those new heights will be unrecognizable to someone raised in today’s world of 401(k)’s, Credit Default Swaps, automobiles and gigantic concrete cities.

– To the original:

– Research thanks to Kael for this.

Top investors ‘hit by $50bn con’

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Zowie!Some of the world’s wealthiest private and corporate investors are reported to be victims of an alleged $50bn fraud by Wall Street broker Bernard Madoff.

Mr Madoff is alleged to have confessed to a huge Ponzi scheme (pyramid fraud).

Reports say the main owner of the New York Mets baseball team, Fred Wilpon, and former American football team owner Norman Braman are among the victims.

Others facing losses reportedly include French bank BNP Paribas, Japan’s Nomura Holdings and Zurich’s Neue Privat Bank.

Prosecutors say Mr Madoff, ex-head of the Nasdaq stock market, has described the fraud as “one big lie”.

A federal judge has appointed a receiver to oversee Mr Madoff firm’s assets and customer accounts, while the 70-year-old banker has been released on $10m bail.

More…

– do you want more of this same stuff, Sweetpea? Look no farther. Just follow this next link for another fine story of financial integrity.

And more…

– This second article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

Judge gives 7 year old right to decide

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Seattle, WA (AP) – A seven-year old boy was at the center of a King County courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with child custody law and regulation requiring that family unity be maintained to the highest degree possible.  The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried and said that they also beat him. After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who should have custody of him. After two recesses to check legal references and confer with the child welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Seattle Seahawks, whom the boy firmly believes are not capable of beating anyone.