Cardboard Spaceship

My Three Summer Panic Items, Number Two: Fukushima

Latest news from Fukushima, they have found hotspots at 10 Seiverts an hour.  What's the context here?  Maximum safe annual exposure for a worker at the Tepco site was raised to 250 milliSeiverts a year, from the original non-emergency 100 milliSeiverts a year. 

Peter Burns, former chief executive officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, says given the scale of the Fukushima emergency, the high reading is to be expected.

"The levels reported of 10 sieverts per hour are very high levels and it's going to be very difficult to manage workers going into those areas and doing operations," he said.

"To put the 10 sieverts into context, that 10 sieverts is actually a lethal dose of radiation. So you can't afford to be exposed for more than a few minutes at those levels.

"It means you're directly exposed to fuel rods in the reactors or the spent fuel ponds very closely and while it's possible to get to those levels it means there is very little shielding going on there."

My calculation would be that you would get the yearly limit in two and half minutes, which means that manual work is not going to solve the Fukushima clean up.

In fact, it's going to take decades, say Japanese sources.   Now, the next fly to swallow is the idea that the safe zone round this mess is 20 km, which is barely credible.  so, what do you do if you have to evacuate a large portion of the habitable land of a densely populated island, during a decade long clean up operation? 

This one will be a long term one to watch. 

Global Warming - a Very Necessary Read

More to the case that global warming is overstated, and mainly being talked up on economic grounds.  This report from former EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) employee Alan Carlin, whose work was at best sat on, if not actively repressed, when he was at the EPA.  He published the journal as non-peer reviewed, which was taken askance, but now here it is after peer review.

http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/8/4/985/pdf

His conclusions, from the abstract:

"The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor (CSF) is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting.

The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are very much higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified.

Geoengineering such as solar radiation management is a controversial alternative to CO2 emissions reductions that offers opportunities to greatly decrease these large costs, change global temperatures with far greater assurance of success, and eliminate the possibility of low probability, high consequence risks of rising temperatures, but has been largely ignored by economists.

CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the very modest benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used.

The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not
currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering."

My view is clear, we have many important problems to solve: environmental pollution and degradation, resource depletion, population (over)growth, and many related factors.  They all need sorted urgently, so let's not chase the wrong hare. 

Crop Shortages in North America - Row Crops Devastated.

I had seen this story on various sites, but had never seen a definitive version, and now I have, I am keen to share this.  In North America, the unseasonal cold winter has gone down as far Mexico, and basically frosted all of the plants.  Sysco, a major contract supplier of foodstuffs in the USA; put out this release:

—"The early reports are still coming in but most are showing losses of crops in the  range of 80 to 100%. Even shade house product was hit by the extremely cold temps. It will take 7-10 days to have a clearer picture from growers and field supervisors, but these growing regions haven’t had cold like this in over a half century. This time of year, Mexico supplies a significant percent of North America’s row crop vegetables such as: green beans, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, peppers, asparagus, and round and roma tomatoes.

Florida normally is a major supplier for these items as well but they have already been struck with severe freeze damage in december and january and up until now have had to purchase product out of Mexico to fill their commitments, that is no longer and option. With the series of weather disasters that has occurred in both of these major growing areas we will experience immediate volatile prices, expected limited availability, and mediocre quality at best. This will not only have an immediate impact on supplies, but because of very strong blossom drops, this will also impact supplies 30 – 60 days from now. Some growers are meeting with their boards right now to determine whether they should immediately re-plant, hoping for a harvest by late-march-to early-april, or whether they should disc the fields under and wait for another season."

So what you say, read on:

"On Feb. 8, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported prices of $22.95-24.95 for two-layer cartons of 4×4, 5×5 and 5×6 vine-ripe field-grown tomatoes from Mexico, up from $6.95-9.95 the week before and $5.95-7.95 the year before."

Prices tripling or quadrupling due to a weather event.  Man. 

 

Matt Simmons on the GoM Leak

Matt Simmons, who I link to in my blogroll, is a noted expert on peak oil, and the energy business in general.  Here is his take on the situation on MSNBC (starts at about 6:30, but the whole segment is worth watching.)

Uh-oh.  Not 5,00 barrels a day but 120,000.  The leak may be unstoppable with conventional means, and could gush for 9,000 days to deplete the well, that's 24 years.  If that is anywhere near right, then we are looking at the loss of the Gulf of Mexico as a habitable environment (oxygen depletion in the water) and likely most of the surrounding coastal areas. 

If anyone else said that, I would just ignore it as pure sensationalism, but this guy has a good track record, and he knows the people in the industry very well, so I would tend to say this is not the tin foil hat crowd talking, so he might be right.  Even if he is wrong by 50%, that's still terrifying.

My God, that's enough to get me going into the basement.  (Europe is not immune either, our friend the Gulfstream will carry it here just dandy thanks.)

IPCC, Glaciergate, and the Increasing Doubts over AGW

It seems that the Himalayas are safe, the glaciers will not, as claimed, melt by 2035.  A claim that given that this is 25 years away should have raised some scepticism in the first place. 

Behind it, there is the usual peril of science for sale, and that's the bad bit.  Seeking grants from the Carnegie Corporation amongst others, the claim was added to the grant requests.  If, as a layman, you get such a statement from an apparently reputable source, then wouldn't you reach for the cheque book, after all, we are talking about the water supply to 40% of the world's population?

It is not that there was no dissent to this point of view.

"Last November, however, Dr Raina, the country's most senior glaciologist, published a report for the Indian government showing that the rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers had not increased in the past 50 years and that the IPCC's predictions were recklessly alarmist. This provoked the furious reaction from Dr Pachauri that tarred Dr Raina's report as "arrogant" and "voodoo science". Only weeks later came the devastating revelation that the IPCC's own prediction had no scientific foundation."

I've said it before, and here I say it again.  The world is a disastrous state of overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution.  We need to react, and react now.  What we do not need is one of the greatest potential misallocation of resources in the history of the world.  

My feeling is that with the total unravelling of the Copenhagen process, we may have dodged a major bullet.

Rings Around The Earth

A chap called Roy Prol has done an animation that shows what the Earth would be like if it had a ring system similar to Saturn's.  Very interesting little imagined scenario, and set to supernally beautiful music. 

The Fix is In, in Copenhagen

Didn't know whether to file this one under Environment, Tin Foil Hat, or World Economy, as it has elements of all three.   The Guardian, a very pro-green paper on the whole, has the story of a draft doing the rounds behind the scenes in Copenhagen, called the Danish Text. 

Why did I think about whether this is a conspiracy theory one or not, well, from the article.

"The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions."

In other words the existing UN process would be sidelined, and the money men are going to take it over.  Like that has to be the least surprising outcome in a long time.  The Banksters have found another way to screw the world, carbon trading and carbon trading derivatives. 

"Banks intend to become the intermediaries in this fledgling market. Although U.S. carbon legislation may not pass for a year or more, Wall Street has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring lobbyists and making deals with companies that can supply them with “carbon offsets” to sell to clients."

According to Blythe Masters, at JPMC, the person who invented the Credit Default Swap, one of the things that we the taxpayer are now paying trillions for:

"Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

“This requires a massive redirection of capital,” Masters says. “You can’t have a successful climate policy without the heavy, heavy involvement of financial institutions.”

Now, I have some genuine issues around the neutrality of the climate debate because of this kind of sudden involvement of the powerful vested interests of the banks and various other people who stand to gain.   To be clear, I think that the world is overpopulated, overpolluted, and we will have serious resource problems in the very near future.  This is why getting the allocation of resources, and the approach right is so utterly critical, because we're not going to get to go around again on this one.  

Still let's leave it to the Banksters to fix it in our best interests.  What could possible go wrong with that situation?

Climate Change Fraud?

The servers at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit have been hacked, and e-mails and other documents have been taken and spread liberally around the Internet.  Why is this interesting, well, because they show what looks like some pretty damning evidence of data manipulation to make the case for global warming. 

Sample from one Phil Jones, talking about the fact that rather than increase as predicted, global temperatures have actually declined in thelast few years.

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."  

Read more about the significance of this here .

Well, the issue with this is, in the midst of a huge economic dislocation, potential huge problems with the resource overstretch on the Earth, with overpopulation and resource depletion, and these knaves are trying to make us destroy industries, and launch some of the greatest effort misallocations in history to solve a problem that may not even exist outside of their seemingly less than open and trustworthy efforts.

Don't Buy Houses in the Maldives

Well, the Arctic is going to potentially be ice free by 2013, and the melting this year is the largest recorded.  Icebergs melting does not raise sea levels, as the ice already displaces the same weight of water, but if the land based Greenland ice melts, then it will raise them, and if the ice shelf on the Antarctic melts, then its very bad.

Bangladesh, Maldives, Some of the American East Coast, Bits of Holland, all swallowed up.  See it interactively here, if you want a bit of a shock. 

Interesting Follow On to Global Cooling

Got a useful response to the post on our heating being off about local cooling, with a link to a free computer energy management system from a company called Uniblue.  I will give this a go myself, as the amount of surplus energy that I get through in the house, where I regularly run four computers, must be astonishing. 

Give it a go if you like, I know that I will.  (I have no relationship with Uniblue, just to be clear.)