A local academic meteorologist said on public radio that individual record highs were not indicative of global warming, but that the strongest evidence of climate change was the elevation of nighttime temperatures year round. No record there, but the average low is changing. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the ground barely froze this year. That has implications for insect populations, and adaptations for many species.

T-shirt weather here in mid France, switched off the heating (ie. the wood fire) as there's sufficient insolation from the sun to warm the house. Probably won't last, but who knows with our crazy weather these days.

Do the recent solar flares have anything to do with it? Do they affect the weather in any way, as well as potentially damage our technology?

"Is anybody listening?"

The problem is: So few are reporting, just as with Peak Oil.

People can't be experts on everything. To some extent people have to rely on others (such as government and the media) to alert people to important issues.

I can't deny I feel a certain anger at how the government, the media and the Oil Industry have, in my view, been criminally negligent in discussing Peak Oil. This is eventually going to come back to haunt them in a big way.

Black Dog

Sadly, the people that should be listening (Inhofe,etc) have their eyes and ears closed. I've been following your post on this subject every day this week and you are doing the right thing keeping this conversation alive. I've also been following the comments on the Weather Channel website as well as the Weather Underground. It never ceases to amaze me how ignorant the deniers are.

This weeks extremely high temperatures over such a large area for an extended period of time are more than an anomaly. While it may be difficult to claim that any one weather related event is directly related to climate change, this weeks heat wave appears to be far more than a statistical outlier. More probably it is a harbinger of things to come.

I'm concerned that this next summer will result in even more methane plumes being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. We may have our first ice free summers in the arctic ocean sooner than anticipated. If we haven't already hit the tipping point, we are on the cusp of runaway global warming.

Meanwhile, freakish weather continues :-

Tornado plows through Michigan village, but storm warnings give everyone time to take shelter

"Perry Samson, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Michigan, said it’s “relatively rare” to have such a powerful tornado in the state at this time of year. In January 2008, with temperatures in the 60s, tornadoes developed in southeastern Wisconsin. Temperatures topped 70 on Thursday in Michigan."

I was watching footage from St Paddy's Day last year, and everyone was in winter coats - this could be the 4th day in a row of 80-degree weather in Chicago.

With regard to elevated night-time temperatures, I was listening to a local radio show where they were attributing early flowering of spring bulbs to warmer-than-average soil temperatures.

EDIT : with regard to climate change denial, I think the R's have walked so far to the end of the plank, they are unable to walk it back without getting eaten alive politically. They likely have no choice but to double-down. Unfortunately, denial or no, they still leave behind the "hoax" meme in the general ranks.

Well, we're looking at close to 80* by the middle of this week. Somewhat unusual for mid-March in the Boston area, especially after the extraordinarily mild Winter we're just coming out of.
The weather bobble heads on the local stations just give a sheepish grin and remark how great it is for sports events et al.....

Weird weather: heat, twisters, 250K tons of snow

America's weather is stuck on extreme.

... "When you start to see the extreme events become more common, that's when you can say that it is a consequence of global warming."

Thanks for all your work, Dawg

In Face Of Blow-Out March Heat Wave, Meteorologist Masters Says ‘This Is Not The Atmosphere I Grew Up With’
By Joe Romm on Mar 17, 2012 at 2:09 pm

2012 Heat Records Demolish Cold Records 14-to-1 It has been a summer to remember. In winter.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/17/446621/blow-out-march-heat-wave...

I know weather ≠ climate, but still... here's Environment Canada's local seven day forecast:

Our "normal" high and low for this time of year is +4°C and -5°C, which puts our daytime temperatures three to thirteen degrees above the seasonal norm and our night-time temperatures five to fourteen degrees ahead of where we would normally expect them to be.

According to my own records, the average temperature for our first winter back east (the period spanning October 1st, 2002 and April 30th, 2003) was -0.8°C. With two more weeks of March remaining and the entire month of April to come, we're already standing at +1.5°C.

This is worrisome beyond imagination.

Cheers,
Paul

But "Alaska had its coldest January on record"

http://www.adn.com/2012/03/17/2376012/anchorage-eyes-record-snowfall.html

Douglas

Obviously, not the Republicans!!!

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."

-Albert Einstein

There is only one party in the US - the Capitalist Party.

Rgds
WeekendPeak

I'm australian. our weather service, www.bom.gov.au, indicates that min and max temperature anomolies for the past year have been down continent wide, especially over this past summer where anomolies in mean-max temps have been -4deg cel over a large portion of the eastern states.

The two previous summers i had been in europe where hear-say suggested they were experiencing extreme cold, roughly matching in time and severity to unseasonal heat waves that were being expeeiwnxed in australia.

Hearsay only, yet it's been my observation that extended unseasonal weather in one hemisphere is roughly reciprocated in the other.

Re: Holy Land Leaders: Muslims, Jews, Christians Link to Save the Planet above;

Do you think there are many americans in the christian delegation?

You mean the Alabama Republic of Canada? We Creole Rednecks are wayyy ahead of you.
http://alabamarepublicofcanada.com/

Yes – Good observations and good questions. First, that imbalance. A number of factors but the primary cause is the abundance of small independent oil companies in the US…thousands of them. And in the KSA, for example: one. Most of the development projects outside the US are done by a few international companies and the national oil companies. Then add the fact that the vast majority of mineral leases in the US belong to private citizens and companies. In most of the world the oil/NG belongs to the governments. The US is very unique in these regards. The major benefit of these factors is that wells/fields that would be ignored in other areas of the globe are the backbone of US production. Folks may be impressed when they see a press release about a 300,000 bopd Deep Water US field comes on line. But the average US oil well produces less than 10 bopd…and last time I saw the stat we’re the third largest oil producing country on the planet.

The reasons we have such a disproportionate number of rigs is simply a result of demand due to the fact that the US is a major oil producing province and our small independents can make a profit with wells that bigger companies/NOC’s can’t. But, as you note, the results of all this activity doesn’t seem proportional to the effort. Just because oil prices are way up and a lot of rigs are running doesn’t mean we’ll produce a lot more oil/NG. I can bear witness to the results of the late 70’s drilling boom. I started my career in 1975 and had a front row seat. We had more than twice as many rigs running as we do today and I can swear to you that a great many of them were drilling very poor prospects with little chance of success. I cannot over emphasize the how wasteful the combination of greed, stupidity and dishonesty was during that period. I managed a joint venture for one such inept company. The company and its partners paid 100% of the cost to drill 18 exploratory generated by a small independent company. They drilled 18 drill holes…yes…never made one penny back of their investment. And the independent company that generated and drilled the prospects for us? Its senior management retired millionaires. Even worse were foolish non-industry investors who sent $millions to post offices boxes of companies they found in the ads in the Wall Street Journal and were mad when the never saw a revenue check.

I see some similarities between then and now. The public companies were heavily into the shale gas plays…at least while NG prices were higher. Now they’re switching to more oil prone shale plays. Folks can debate how much new production may or may not be developed by those companies. What can’t be debated is the low profit margin the companies are accepting. But there is a great deal of potential profit. One of the early big shale gas players in Texas, Petrohawk, made a huge profit. But not by drilling and producing their shale acreage…they sold their company for $12 billion. Sold it to another public company desperate for projects that would help them add reserves to their books. And thus be able to satisfy Wall Street demand for an increasing asset base without a great concern for the profitability of those assets IMHO.

I enjoy what I do for a living and take pride in how my company conducts business. But sometimes I think about the old joke about the guy that died a while back but doesn't have enough sense to stop moving. LOL.

...and said there is no evidence of climate change and that the world is actually cooling. He also struggles with geography- not very clear on what countries make up the Middle East.

David Archibald is a well known denialist. His presentation is clearly biased toward his belief that recent climate change is entirely due to variations in solar activity. Careful inspection of his presentation shows little interest in volcanic activity until the very end, in which he points out the potential impact of a repeat of the Tambora eruption in 1815. However, he misses the fact that there were more than one large volcanic event in that time period and the sum of these produced what was called "The Year Without A Summer" in 1816. In his entire discussion of the preceding 1000 years of climate data, he fails to mention the large eruptions in 1259, 1452, 1600, etc. He also claims that the Little Ice Age lasted until 1900, even though others have claimed that it ended much earlier. Of course, he also points to work by other denialist, such as the satellite record from Spencer and Christy, whose data over the Antarctic is clearly flawed. And, the graph of satellite data is a year out of date.

I tend to side with him on the other parts of his presentation, such as his discussion of Peak Oil and his Malthusian idea that world food grain production is going to run smack into real limits as population increases. However, his climate presentation with it's projection of another Maunder Minimum would seem to be off base, especially as solar activity has increased at the start of another cycle in solar activity. Direct measurements of solar insolation gathered outside the atmosphere suggest that there is little variation in the "solar constant" over the past 2 sunspot cycles. It's too bad that more data isn't available, but that's what we have to work with...

E. Swanson

Port Arthur Refiner

The expanded Port Arthur refinery will be capable of handling most grades of crudes, even the lowest quality.

http://www.shell.com/home/content/aboutshell/our_strategy/major_projects...

Dear God, I do wish someone would educate these television folks about how much oil we import and export.

Ron, why don't you copy and paste your comment into their comments section?

Or perhaps send a letter directly to Anderson Cooper? Maybe some of the staff and regulars at TOD would be willing to co-sign it.

"Jimmy Carter lost the election 1980 was because of very high gasoline prices a result of very high inflation."

A bit revisionist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis

Maybe people should consider changing their behavior,living patterns,consumption patterns, auto choices,and transportation choices. But noooooooo! Let's lower gas prices.

Bought a hybrid in 2002 and all I feel at this point is schadenfreude.

Oh I know. Let's implement price controls ala Nixon.

I think maybe Iran was a bigger factor than gas prices. And America wanted someone with a sunny disposition.

And as we know Reagan outlawed peak oil in America. Same with Bush.

You yourself admit that both Zakaria and Moore are saying lies and nonsensical statements.

I'll say it again: there's hardly anything worth watching on cable or tv news anymore. Maybe a few specials here or there, perhaps 60 min. or the occasional Charlie Rose interview. That's about it. Some people here have a hard time admitting this.

I've got better things to do than listen to a couple of clowns.

I'm pretty sure most Americans are now convinced America is now producing more oil than any time before in its history. Media propaganda on this is relentless.

It is not the temperture variation over 400 million years that is of interest, but rather the temperature over the period of agriculture and recorded history - say the last 12 to 15,000 years.

High gas prices is something I welcome and one of the last things I worry about. Love to see people wince when they fill up their SUV.

It is a whole lot easier to produce food without fossil fuels than it is without water. Ask the folks in Texas.

The graph that is shown is overly simplistic - there are many other variables, some of which include:

- the long term trend of increasing Solar output
- continental drift (the current situation where the poles are either over a large land mass (Antarctica) or largely surrounded by land is a relatively recent geological development
- a probable decrease in atmospheric density since the Cretaceous
- levels of volcanic activity

One of the big concerns is that the feedback mechanisms that affect the climate are not so well understood that we can reliably place bounds on the impact of future human activity (i.e., in engineering terms, we don't know what the impulse response is).

If you want to worry about something which is much worse, and we can do something about then worry about this:
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfimus1&f=m
because it means gasoline is going to get extremely expensive

What? No. Just because we import less refined product that does not mean it will get expensive. Our domestic oil production has increase such that we produce more gasoline locally. And even if it didn't, we could import more crude oil and refine it.

We are importing less refined product because our demand has gone down (due to recession & high price) and because we refine more of our own domestic oil. In fact we are now a net exporter of refined product.

So the amount of refined product we import does not drive prices. The reverse is more true . . . we import less because prices have gone up.

That paper is dated 2007. Please don't post climate links that old. This isn't the place to re-hash old arguments.

Plant growth depends on many things, such as water and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Lets say we pot a plant in very poor soil containing a dearth of all such nutrients. Over the next 20 years we vary the watering of the plant from so dry it almost dies, to so wet it almost dies over say 3 to 8 month periods, and we slowly but steadily increase the amount of fertilizer we add over the 20 year period. By Nebraska’s logic, clearly the plant’s growth could not display any dependence at all on amount of fertilizer added. Oh sure, you can pick smaller periods of time, “smaller samples” when the watering was optimum and plant growth correlated well with the increase in fertilizer, but that doesn’t prove anything, it is just due to the well-know larger variability of smaller samples. Therefore, plant growth does not depend on nutrient availability. But of course it does, it is just that another strong effect on plant growth, water, was varied over a wider range so its effect swamped the effect of available nutrients, except during times when the water supply was in a more optimum range.

Over the last 400 million years enormous changes have taken place, such as continental drift, and ocean currents, as some previously mentioned. These swamped the effect of CO2 on climate when considered over such a long period of time. But that doesn’t show that CO2 doesn’t have a strong effect on climate. Some other parameters that effect climate just varied more widely.

Larger samples are more representative of a static, unchanging population than smaller samples. When applied to time series sampling this becomes confusing. This is the classic problem confronting control charting of a production process. How do you define the population? If you define it as all results over a very long period of time, say years, then none of the usual regressors show much effect on the response, if “glitches” in the production line, such as one of the required reactant supplies is depleted due to negligence, or a part on a processing machine breaks, are included in this population of results. Everyone working on the line knows you need to ignore such effects to construct control limits which will ensure high product yield, in other words be meaningful for their intended purpose. Likewise, we know that large effects have had big changes on climate in the distant past, but that is not germane to what has occurred during human existence. We care about what effects can drive climate beyond the range we have evolved to live in, beyond the useful control limits of the chart if you will, and the data shows CO2 is one of these.

If I understand your and Jean Laherrere's argument correctly, you are stating:

1. The geologic record over the last 600 million years shows no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and average global temperature as measured by geologic proxies.

2. Therefore, carbon dioxide does not affect global average temperature.

3. Therefore, the fossil carbon that man has emitted and continues to emit into the atmosphere is not affecting global average temperature.

4. Therefore, man is not at fault.

5. Therefore, man can not affect the global climate.

6. Therefore, man can do nothing to stop global warming.

7. Therefore, man can only adapt to natural changes in the Earth's climate.

There are multiple flaws in this argument.

Your climate model based only on global average temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is far too simple. You have not identified the causes of the variations in historical temperature and concentration and therefore assume that those causes are still operating today and will operate in the future. They may or may not. Your analysis needs to be more comprehensive.

Laherrere's figure 1 averages the data over very large time intervals, perhaps over intervals of 10 million years or more. It is so large that both the effects of recent ice ages and of anthropic fossil carbon emissions are averaged away. This time scale is much longer than one to which humans need to adapt. Conclusions based on this time scale could easily be faulty and inapplicable to current climate conditions. Humans do not need to adapt to the average temperature over a 10 million year period. We need to adapt to seasonal, annual, decennial and centennial variations. The ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide over an interval of thousands of years, and biologic and geologic processes (like making crude oil and rocks) slowly sequester it from the atmosphere. The effects of impulses of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere (like volcanic eruptions) would be averaged out over a 10 million year interval.

Laherrere's figure 1 does not refute the physical property of carbon dioxide to act as a greenhouse gas. You have acknowledged this, but persist in your belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide can not affect global climate. Perhaps you need to consider whether the amount of solar forcing caused by the fossil carbon that humans have emitted into the atmosphere is sufficient to change near term global climate.

Now be honest with yourself. Have you made a logical or ideological argument?

Situation normal.

Military types really don't like being caught with their pants down and like to predeploy to close at hand if possible. Assets have to be somewhere, best to have them where you think you might need them.

Locations of air assets would be more key, particular stealthed aircraft suitable for taking out air defence.

This comment at the end made me smile :-

"The rise in popularity of urban beekeeping is not confined to New York, with city beekeeping associations worldwide reporting unprecedented growth. Fischer thinks the trend will last. "I wouldn't go as far as to say beekeeping is a path to spiritual enlightenment, but for urban dwellers the hive is a small box of calm in the midst of a world gone mad." "

It's certainly true.

Things getting out of hand here, govt is going bankrupt providing subsidies to the people and any attempt to remove the subsidies will lead to a defeat in elections. Democracy is a hard mistress.
My guess is that if oil prices don't come under control within the next six months you will see all kinds of springs. Arab, Indian, Chinese, you name it.

The craft of basketry, however, might be one of our species’ most important and diverse technologies, creating homes, boats, animal traps, armour, tools, cages, hats, chariots, weirs, beehives, shelters and furniture, as well as all manner of containers.

Sure, including architecture. Think of the fast growing grass also known as bamboo.

GROWING WITH STRENGTH AND SPEED...
With a tensile strength superior to mild steel (withstands up to 52,000 Pounds of pressure psi) and a weight-to-strength ratio surpassing that of graphite, bamboo is the strongest growing woody plant on earth with one of the widest ranging habitats of more than 1500 species thriving in diverse terrain from sea level to 12,000 feet on every continent but the poles. It also grows the fastest: clocked shooting skyward at 2 inches an hour. Some species grow one and a half meters a day.

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTOb__vlhz9w6kiOPU4kYQ_L3m64iZjf...

http://www.linternaute.com/savoir/magazine/photo/l-alter-architecture/im...

Not just the nefarious secret agencies, but also the even more nefarious corporations are collecting vast amounts of information on everyone. Seems even supermarkets and stores can now identify customers via their smartphones (for not so smart people) and track their purchasing habits via video surveillance, presumably to tailor personal marketing plans to relieve them of their money.

Anyway, more about personal data:

Facebook: The Value of Information in the Information Age

So what happened to the data, photos, innermost feelings, and nasty secrets that American users had posted on it? What happened to those compromising morsels they’d tried to delete? The data of their friends? Information in accounts they’d closed? Well, nothing happened to them. They’re on hard drives in data centers. Users can still access their information and export photos to Flickr and Multiply, but they can’t remove any of it from those hard drives. It’s become immortal. And it has value.

This is the information age. Users jump through hoops to hand over their information for free. Storage is so cheap it's a negligible factor in the decision making process. Selling information—or selling access to it for advertising purposes—is still easy enough. The same information can be sold from the same inventory millions of times. It never runs out. There are no cost of goods, no handling and shipping expenses. It doesn’t rot or mildew or rust, though it can get stale and does need to be updated, but users are more than happy to do that for free. User information is simply the best product ever invented

I guess the really scary thing is that bots will be making decisions about our personal future based on data-mining of stored information, and probably already are. As we leave the System to do our thinking for us, make decisions on our behalf and remove the impediment of morals and doubt from the efficiency of purpose. God help those that end up by accident on the robo-signed target list whose details are relayed by bots to autonomous drones that criss cross the skies of the future maintaining law & order for the 1%.

Moron mathematician.

All the money should go into conservation instead -- a much better use for the $24 billion would be to build high-speed rail lines. The one-time capital costs would pay for themselves in a decade or two. Subsidizing either renewable or even non-renewable energy is an ineffective way to spend the money in my opinion.

"Obama to Congress: Kill oil industry's tax breaks"
This is Obama acting as Panderer in Chief. From a CNN story last week:

When Obama is proposing ending subsidies to fossil fuels, an eminently sensible proposal given all we know about climate change and peak oil, and Gingrich and Bachmann are proposing bat-**** crazy proposals to lower gas prices to $2, there is no way that Obama qualifies as "Panderer In Chief".

Sure explicit fossil fuel tax breaks as scored by the CBO are lower than renewable tax breaks, but at this point in history, eliminating any fossil fuel tax breaks is the obviously correct policy, which should be followed immediately by a carbon tax. Why does an obviously sensible policy proposal like ending subsidies to fossil fuels, which are creating economically and environmentally catastrophic climate change, qualify as "pandering" at all?

Rather than pandering I think it shows political courage to take on the political power of the fossil fuel industry and the rhetoric of the "Drill,Baby,Drill" wingnuts.

"The article below could be a bit disturbing to some Americans."

Still not a bit disturbed about a country I don't live in selling it's finite resources to another country I don't live in, as I'm no longer being held hostage at the point of a fuel nozzle. It's all beginning to seem a bit childish, really. We'll adapt (or not) sooner or later. Sooner sounds better to me ;-/

Better brush up on your Chinese, Rocky, either way...

"Clean Energy" IS doing this in the U.S.

They anticipate having 70 LNG stations along major interstate trucking routes this year, and 150 next year.

Unfortunately it's more complicated than that.

The Democratic Party has proven, beyond any doubt, that it is completely servile to the military industrial complex and the big banks. That makes them just as if not more dangerous than the Republicans.

I have completely, totally given up on the two party system. I know longer believe in it, at all. Try to understand this. It's like losing your religion, or being diagnosed with an illness that will get you in six months. It's life changing.

So, please don't underestimate my conviction here. I expect political collapse/devolution in the United States and all of the associated turmoil. One or both of these parties may not even survive.

So, you aren't going to convince me, not know, not ever, to start believing in the Democratic Party. I've made up my mind. I'm done, finished.

Clearly there will be a shockwave generated. I think he will be at high enough altitude where the air pressure and density is pretty low, so the shock shouldn't be very strong. There was some dude, who has the current record set around 1960, I think he went supersonic. The dude is still alive and kicking. His test took some real Cahones, no one knew if it was survivable.

Sorry about your job. Hope you aren't in a tough spot, and can find something new.

(And it would be very interesting to hear what you have witnessed doing that cleanup..)

Bob

If Baumgartner goes supersonic, will he produce a sonic boom.

Baumgartner will never go supersonic, at least not with just a spacesuit on. Terminal velocity for experienced skydivers is around 200-250 mph. To go supersonic he will have to jump from the edge of outer space, and then he would need a very advanced braking system and heat shield to resist the deceleration from supersonic to terminal velocity. Chutes can only be deployed at below 15,000 feet or so, so it's free fall the rest of the way and that's a lot of speed buildup.

Anyways to answer your original question, it's unlikely that he will be in thick atmosphere when going supersonic so it's unlikely that he will produce a shock wave.

I am thinking about selling my car. Bike it and rent to move big things. In fact, I am reducing my big things too. I have a new theory. It is called the Reverse Goldfish Theory. It is commonly known a goldfish will grow larger if he is placed in a larger bowl but will remain small if he stays in a small bowl. That is why old people shrink. They get smaller cars and places to live, causing loss of mass. I saw it happen to my Korean mother. She never grayed, her body and living arrangements just kept getting smaller. Lots of love, but it was reduced to a bed at some point. Maybe the heartless Aleuts had it right. Just push the elderly off a small ice floe and goodbye. Can't work, so what good are they. Maybe what we are doing is really the heartless move. I don't think so either but the question should be asked.

hmmmmm... Let's see.

Hate to break it to you but the EPA rules that are affecting refinery profits were enacted under W in 2008. Regs

Even so, isn't this likely to be the bigger factor driving the decision?

Refineries in the Northeast US specifically don’t have the facilities needed to handle lower quality, cheaper crude while a lack of oil pipelines to the region makes access to cheaper oil expensive to procure.
Article

I do agree with the need to alter the Jones act, but that's not an Obama issue since it was enacted in 1920.

But I must admit to a huge WTF? to that last sentence. Even if the Jones act were repealed today, there are serious issues about how NY Harbor and it's docks could accommodate the increased traffic -- there needs to be big infrastructure put in place to handle the increased fuel shipping. And do you really think a 6 month moratorium on EPA regs (and you seem to indicate ALL EPA regs) would have any impact?

But it's nice tribal belief system you are expressing.

I hate to break it to you, but Northeast US refineries are being killed by the fact that they do not have access to increasing supplies of cheap North American oil (Texas, North Dakota, Canada) due to a lack of pipelines, and have to refine much more expensive OPEC and North Sea oil instead. They are competing against Midwest refineries which can buy much cheaper feedstocks and can undercut them on price any time they want.

Last closing prices:
North Sea Brent Blend: $123/bbl
OPEC Basket Price: $123/bbl
West Texas Intermediate: $105/bbl
Western Canadian Select: $74/bbl

Apparently I have to keep repeating this over and over again.

The Alabama State officials are probably unresponsive because they know the natural gas in the main pipelines is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. Gas companies only put mercaptans into the gas at the consumer distribution stage to warn people the NG pipes in their house are leaking.

Most likely what folks are smelling is hydrogen sulfide from rotting vegetation in the swamps nearby. If you want to know what it smells like, take a whiff of rotten eggs sometime. H2S smells just like that except much, much worse.

TFHG - Long story short everything in the article points to a pipeline leak that's migrating via ground water flow to where it is escaping to the atmosphere. Folks there should find a lawyer with the right background and file a class action suit. I have no doubt they would have a pack of lawyers offering to work it for no upfront monies but nice cut of the pie at the end. OTOH how are you connecting the gas leak to frac'ng? I haven't kept on oil patch acivity in the Mobile area for a good while but as I recall little or no frac'ng is happening anywhere close to the reported problem. OTOH methane leaks from local utility system are bcoming more common as the infrastructure ages.

They specifically refer to the SMELL. Now gas coming straight from the ground has all sorts of smells, and pure Natrual Gas is almost oderless. But when someone refers to the smell of gas, they are almost always referring to the smell of butyl mercaptan, which is added during processing to give an almost odorless and colorless gas a distinct odor so it's easy to detect. This rules out fracking and adds a lot of credibility to a pipeline leak.

What? Russian Media worried about calls from Moscow? Actually I would be fine with a call. It is when they don't call first that you pucker.

Related to the war against Iran/Russia/China?

Omega Protein = Soylent Corporation?

Just a reminder - the original company Zapata was started with the help of George HW Bush.

Just fill them with Hydrrogen, like we used to from the lab supply. Much more fun at parties!

I don't get it. It's scarce yet at the same time it's cheap enough for party balloons ?? Something more to the story ?

The world supply of helium oil, which is essential in research and medicine for many materials, pharmaceuticals and other things, is being squandered, says scientists nobody, except us here on TOD...

Future Drummer: "Can you believe they burned the precious stuff?"

http://chevronthinkswerestupid.org/

Eradication of the prairie dog population may have been another forcing factor.
http://www.ultimateprairiedoghunting.com/news/2010/10/08/black-tailed-pr...

That's pretty incendiary, and your link doesn't point right to anything backing it up.

I just read the text of the EO on the whitehouse web site link. Pretty scary -- what kind of scenario do they see coming down the road that would require this kind of blanket control over pretty much every sector of the economy?

The owner of that website, professor Chossudovsky, is a near lunatic 911 truther conspiracy theorist.

http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=1998&start=1

Your link points to a blank page. Maybe it is referring to, Executive Order -- National Defense Resources Preparedness, The White House, March 16, 2012.

Hmm, I suspect not so low.

Natural gas-directed rig count at lowest since May 2002
* Oil rigs up again, at 25-year high
* Horizontal rig count up 16 to 1,180.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/16/energy-natgas-rigs-idUSL2E8EG9...