109 degrees in the shade in the Hollywood Hills at around 3:30 PM.

This is a very old, inaccurate thermometer that tops out at 110, and the measurement was taken in the shade near a west-facing wall, which tends to be a heat trap.

I really need to get a better thermometer and try the backyard. There's still a lot of concrete back there, so I'm going to get higher readings than I would in Griffith Park, maybe.

But that's what I walked out into when I step out my front door. I wonder what that will be like 20 years from now when I'm 75.

I'm glad I didn't buy a motorcycle back in '08.

RE Ozone Recovery Article: Ozone Hole measurements are about the only good news this year, though some numbers are better than others. Last year was terrible, almost tied the record; this year is looking a bit better, hopefully the area of the hole will peak out at 20 million square kilometers-- though the curve looks funny this year, I thought it usually peaked just after Labor Day, and was still climbing as of 9/15. Minimum Ozone seems to have peaked at 152 and is climbing again-- sweet. None of this double-digit crap this year.

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Good news for the penguins in Tierra del Fuego.

Was 108F in the shade, in my backyard of San Gabriel both Friday and Saturday.

From NSIDC:

Quick Facts on Arctic Sea Ice

What is sea ice extent, and why do you monitor that particular aspect of sea ice?

Sea ice extent is a measurement of the area of ocean where there is at least some sea ice. Usually, scientists define a threshold of minimum concentration to mark the ice edge; the most common cutoff is at 15 percent. Scientists use the 15 percent cutoff because it provides the most consistent agreement between satellite and ground observations.

They are talking about the "extent" record. Extent is defined at greater than 15% coverage, so naturally you can find lots of water there if you go and look for it. A place with 80% water/20% ice counts as within the extent of the sea ice coverage.

If you are interested in how much area is actually ice, or what the volume of ice is, then you can find those figures too, and they are also at record lows. Indeed, the volume has decreased over the past decade or two much more than the area or extent, so its no great surprise that the extent is now capable of dramatic decreases. When the volume hits zero, and for a few years its been looking like hitting zero in the second half of this decade, the area and extent are going to be zero too.

Take a look at neven1.typepad.com/blog/ if you want to follow up on the different measures of Arctic Ice and how they have been behaving.

I believe the satelites see more ice than there is. NSIDC showed ice in the Riga Bay and the Sea of Åland as late as in july. While my brother reported the water in the Bay of Riga was "ice cold" in july, I am very sure no ice floats around there in the summer. (The Bay of Riga was the second most popular seaside resort in the Soviet Union.)

And http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.00... still shows ice in The Great Lakes and the Ladoga. I just don't guess there are any.

Put it this way: it is a record record. Records have been broken before,but not this hard. Personally I care little about actuall numbers and much about general trends. And the trends are the one of acceleration. If you come across a graph with the individual curves for all years since 1979 you will see that clearly.

But the numbers are staggering. I live in a swedish province called Skåne. It is a suspiciously square shaped piece of real estate with a side of roughly 100 Km. The people who made the maps of the middle east after WWI would be thrilled. 700 000 Km is, lets see... 70 of my home province. Wow...

Excellent news! Looks like humanity is right on track to make Soylent Green a reality.

It's fascinating to see the schism growing between what appears to be two camps in the climate science. On one hand there is the growing alarm over methane emissions as represented by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, and reported by the Arctic News Blog. On the other hand are what I will call the mainstream climatologists as represented by the RealClimate blog.

The mainstream group routinely downplays the implications of the emergency group on a number of points

• Methane is a small component of radiative forcing, especially compared to CO2 and water vapor
• The largest source of methane in the world is wetlands, dwarfing arctic emissions
• Applying an exponential decline to sea ice is a dangerous extrapolation
• Undersea methane clathrates are stable and not about to collapse, even with significant warming
• Even a large multi-gigaton methane emission would quickly mix in the atmosphere with little effect

Actual observations, on the other hand, can be troubling

• Arctic sea ice at record lows, area, volume and extent
• A much greater rate of warming in the arctic than at lower latitudes
• The appearance of large methane seeps in open water
• Greater methane accumulations in the northern hemisphere than that observed in the past
• The appearance of noctilucent clouds in unusual places, indicating that methane is accumulating in the upper atmosphere
• Dangerous positive feedbacks that could destabilize both terrestrial permafrost and undersea methane deposits that are measured in hundreds of gigatons

Even if some of the more extreme claims by the emergency group of an extinction level event prove to be alarmist, that does not give much comfort given how dire the alternatives could be. This plus the recent track record of the mainstream group being surprised by the rate and scale of changes in the climate and cryosphere.

How many times in the last few years have we heard "we didn't think that was going to happen for another hundred years"?

Cheers,
Jerry

Rick Santorum: 'Smart People' Will Never Be On Our Side
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/15/rick-santorum-smart-peopl_n_188...

http://www.google.com/#q=%22%27Smart+People%27+Will+Never+Be+On+Our+Side...
114,000 hits

Aspiring energy policy makers.

It was for this reason that I gave up on the MSM long ago. I mean, you just aren't going to find any reasoned, balanced reporting or analysis that takes into account the cost/benefits of anything.

It's all positive, all the time. Dow to 30,000, then to 100,000. 1% on Treasuries is an excellent rate and demand will continue to rise. We'll all become millionaires and live forever. Technology and happy thinking will save everyone.

Either that, or manufactured outrage that goes nowhere.

"Baffle them with BS" is modus operandi.

The technocrat arguments become increasingly relevant. The writers of the study course (e.g. King Hubbert) obviously thought an understanding of energy was a necessary background to the understanding of the ultimate failure of a credit economy, lessons 16 and 17 of
http://www.technocracy.org/study-guide

The point being that as factories shed workers in favor of the far cheaper engines (and nowadays robotics or outsourcing), the market for their products decreases unless the displaced workers can be tricked into buying the product through personal debt. When they see through such a scheme the government starts to generate the debt automatically, hence the Federal Reserve System.

TOD has several discussions of the technocrats, here is one:

http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/4808

Rocky – Just an educated guess but I suspect DW GOM fields will show a sharper decline rate compared to the North Sea for a couple of reasons. DW GOM developments costs are much greater. Some folks think the N. Sea is a DW play but actually relatively shallow and more similar to the GOM Shelf. Those high DW costs and longer development time lines push operators to max production rates, often at the expense of URR. I’m not familiar with the smaller N. Sea fields but I’ll guess there's more of them given the lower costs. In the DW GOM smaller fields, unless they are close to established infrastructure, won’t be developed even with high current prices. I don’t track DW GOM discoveries but it seems we haven’t heard much the last few years. The DW GOM trend doesn’t cover as large an area as some folks might think when they looks at a map of the entire GOM. The trend covers a relatively narrow strip just down slope from the shelf. It’s also dominated by very large geologic structures which is both good and bad news: large individual fields but also fewer fields for a given area.

During the power outage in New Orleans after Isaac, I was 1) enjoying the a/c 2) enjoying a beer 3) enjoying a hamburger 4) recharging my cell phone and 5) enjoying a chat with a PetE at a bar close to the French Quarter.

He works for a small company with significant shallow and "mid-depth" (down to 600' from memory) GoM wells and some South Louisiana on-shore wells. No deepwater. He is responsible for over 700 wells. Private ownership.

Some are in -30% to -40% annual decline rates and the overall trend is sharply down and drilling prospects are thin. Mid-depth drilling rigs are in surplus and being scrapped. Not enough prospects world-wide to drill at those depths.

He is worried that there may not be enough work left in his niche to last till he retires.

Best Hopes for a Trickle,

Alan

It remains to be seen how long the increases in North Dakota can outpace the declines in the GOM

I would love to see a chart extrapolating this- does it exist? Can someone create one on the fly?

mass – Rocky knows more about refining then me but I’ll take a stab at it. First, “heavy” isn’t necessarily bad in the world of oil. As you know oil is a composite of different hydrocarbon chains as well as other components. Second, how much a particular oil is valued by a particular refiner depends on what they need to produce. Heavy and light oil yield different proportion of products.

Perhaps a refiner can add some flesh to my bony answer.

I've been wondering about that myself. Syncrude is lighter and sweeter than WCS and is good substitute for WTI, but the discount for WCS seems excessive. There is certainly an excess of supply of WCS in the Mid-Continent area, but there must be a relative shortage of syncrude in order to cause that big a price differential. There are many older non-upgraded refineries that can handle syncrude but not WCS, so that may explain it.

In order to level out the difference, WCS needs to be able to get to more refineries that can handle it, and that requires more pipelines to get it to the US Gulf Coast and Asia.

New Riders Of the Purple Sage.

But get the drift.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtAj4MLOiTw

JW

It seems the US civilian nuclear power plants already have a solution they are using, nation wide:

They store all spent fuel on site, and say many things, but the spent fuel stays on site.

Anyone aware of any current US civilian nuclear power plants that have had thier spent fuel stored anywhere else?

Plate boundary trenches are areas of tremendous stress. Surface sediments tend to be scraped along the subducting plate by the overriding plate. And plates move at speeds of centimeters per year. Can you guarantee that the containers will not crack open and release their contents into the water before they are subducted?

There are two possible reasons.
The used fuel has too much energy left in it to throw it away permanently.
So far no one has been able to raise money for research into the idea.
Funny thing is I have worked for years in the Canadian Nuclear industry and have never heard the scientists directly involved in disposal research mention the idea, only the scientists involved in reactor safety research.

Yes, and notice the use of average rather than median. The average is undoubtedly way above the median, which itself papers over the real story, which is that the majority has bupkis beyond Social Security.

For the last several decades interest rates have been held below inflation as a form of taxation, a way to reduce the real-world magnitude of government and institutional debt by taxing savers with inflation. Basically, if you had a chunk of cash that you gave to the bank to earn interest off, you actually lost purchasing power. aka "financial repression".

The exception to this was in the early 1980's with Volcker's sky high interest rates brought in to shock the markets and prevent the runaway slide in the US dollar. This caused deflation and you can witness what happened to the economy as a result. Now the situation is much much worse and any attempt to raise rates would completely destroy the world's financial system. Rates are being kept low right now because the world is oversaturated with debt that can never be repaid.

Initially the QE was "sterilized", or prevented from entering the general markets which would cause massive inflation. Originally QE was meant to shore up the banks' balance sheets and prevent a systemic collapse of the financial system, with the idea being that if a collapse could be staved off, then the economy would recover and growth would pick up as it always historically has, thereby burying previous debt with GDP and allowing that QE money to be reeled back in as the banks improved their fundamentals as a result of the growing economy. Unfortunately, since central bankers and economists understand nothing about energy and limits to growth, the economy hasn't improved because it can't grow anymore, and that money can't be reeled back in without destroying the financial system. And the banks certainly didn't clean up their act; they continued on with their dangerous swindling and now require even further QE to continue to survive.

Now with QE3, the sterilization component is gone, it seems that the Fed is actually trying to create inflation to help the domestic jobs market, to participate in destroying the dollar in the global currency race to the bottom. I predict that they are going to do everything they can to keep oil price in check until after the election, then things will get out of control.

I recommend reading Daniel Amerman's explanation of how this system works. He does not understand resource constraints or Peak Oil, as with all economists and financial types, but he seems to have a good handle on the financial system and the derivatives market since that's where he came from.

http://danielamerman.com/articles/2012/QE3C.html

Here in Australia a term deposit or interest-bearing savings account will earn you about 5% interest, which is slightly more than inflation I think. You're saying in America such accounts will only you about 2%? And this is deliberate government policy? So it seems the government wants people to spend all their money or invest it in risky schemes like the stock market for example.

Lower interest rates have multiple effects. One, as noted is that current net savers earn less on their saving. This borrowing OTOH will pay less (to the savers), so that facilitates some sorts of economic activity. Higher econ activity should mean that on average citizens should be better off, although not all will be winners.

Yes if interest rates are lower, its easier to buy a house. Many (but not all) people sell houses, or sell large houses and buy small ones at retirement, these folks might be winners (because they get a better price). Those with little stake in the economy, but savings will be losers.

Yes, but even sleeping under a bridge has a large footprint on the environment. From where comes the water that is used? Where is the potty emptied?

There's the hobbit house!

I suppose it (also) depends on who you are, or what you want, and/or what a standard house exactly is. Is it cookie-cutter? Developer shlock? Snout house? How does the house perform to your daily choreography/needs/sense of spririt/soul? What is its orientation to the sun or climatic elements or place on the land or neighborhood? What are its materials? Lead paint? Asbestos? How old is it? What shape is it in? How was the house taken care of? What kind of problems did the previous owners have with it? What's lurking behind the walls, in the basement, under the carpet, under the floorboards, or in the attic? What's the quality of the electrical and plumbing systems? Can its structural elements be dismantled and re-used?

BTW, you might want to see the estimate-cost of the "hobbit" house I mention and link to in this Drumbeat.

What about camel poop. Is there a market for camel poop?

ROCKMAN: Question from one who has edited and written many SOPs for sampling and sample management of hazardous and radioactive materials (in the environment)-- from taking the samples from the source, through lab analysis to recording of analytical results data and security of database of analytical results:

Is there a chain-of-custody requirement for recording who is responsible for the location of these instruments at all times? If not, do you know why not? (never mind on that one)

I don't know how much the US will back Japan over those islands, but the US has pressured allies in the past to hand over disputed territories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachen_Islands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_New_Guinea

Somewhat similar if less extreme stuff coming out of South Korea. This encompasses several nations, but all have decided that now is the crucial time to enforce whatever territorial claims they have. And several are enlisting citizen anger/mobs as part of the pressure tactics. Ugly, and dangerous.

"What makes you think people here are warming to Nuclear? Since Japan, I think it's been slipping the other way."

Fukushima; wind at parity or better; PV down to less than $1.00 a watt and still dropping; sodium-sulfur batteries in the large economy size; AP1000 already having cost overruns, and the ground is barely cleared. And we can add Crystal River and San Onofre to the problem list for nuclear.

The economics have changed, and nuclear's politics have not improved. If you can get more energy for the cost of AP1000 by using wind/solar, why would you fight through the permitting issues and future fuel supply risk? Or rely on the hope that Obama will stab Harry Reid in the back post-election and restart Yucca Mountain to solve your waste problem?

The data is here

http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=53&aid=1&c...

Then look at consumption and minus one from the other.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, I did not mean that Iraq would make up for the declines of all the declining countries since 2005 or indeed since the date they started to decline.

Some of the countries in decline are experiencing a slowdown in decline rates and I was looking forward on that basis over the next 5 or 6 years.

If Iraq does increase exports as stated and there is a reasonable chance it will then Iraq could make up for the decline of most of the declining countries.

When you take into account all the countries that are increasing exports, there is a very good chance global net exports will be higher over the next 3 or 4 years.

After all global net exports were higher in 2011 than 2010 and 2010 higher than 2009.

Yeah!

My Mom was up there this summer on an eco-tour to see belugas in the North West passage. I think she thought she was helping to protect wildlife by flying up there, and roughing it in relative luxury. Quite banal, but I have come to realize that the vast majority of people, including my Mom, just don`t realize that we`re past the point where we can blithely continue emitting CO2. The emissions of CO2 that will be needed to help us transition to a Post Carbon society will be enough of an extra burden to our children as it is.

Andrew

With apologies to TS Elliot:

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a "ooh and aah"

A parable of one-way free trade

... As an admittedly muddy and imperfect example of this sort of situation, which I call "one-way free trade", take the recent case of solar subsidies. Starting in 2009, the Obama administration began dishing out loans and grants for solar power companies, since solar power was predicted to be the industry of the future. But starting in 2010, China unveiled subsidies for solar manufacturers and exporters that dwarfed those offered by the U.S. With their profit margins fattened by the subsidies, Chinese companies cut prices drastically in order to grab market share. The price of solar power plunged, dipping below the 7% "Moore's Law" rate at which it had been steadily declining for three decades.

U.S. solar manufacturers, unable to compete with Chinese prices, went bust in droves. Solyndra, the highest-profile failure, was ridiculed as a boondoggle of industrial policy. Somewhat belatedly, the Obama administration imposed "anti-dumping" tariffs on Chinese manufacturers; it is unclear how many U.S. manufacturers have been saved by the tariffs, which have drawn strong disapproval from most economists.

Meanwhile, what happened to those Chinese manufacturers who got all those government subsidies? Patric Chovanec reports:

Rock,

I very much love my Mom, which is why I brought her trip up as an example. It's not easy telling someone that you love that a meaningless eco-holiday that requires huge CO2 emmissions is not in the long term best interests of their grandchildren. So yeah, I cowardly point it out here. Not much hope when you can't even be honest with those you love most.

Anyway, I'm just having a hard time with so many people being aware and concerned superficially about climate change but oblivious to the challenge of addressing it.

As for the original post, one of the articles in the series was of an interview with a Norwegian PetE and senior civil servant at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. The interview kind of touches on your points. Anyway I need to get outside and do some work around the house.

Cheers,

Andrew

Rolf Wiborg's Tough Love for Canada

A top petro engineer for wealthy Norway says Canada is 'a fantastic country' that's 'totally mismanaged by design.'

My conversation with one of Norway's top oil engineers and enforcers of the national interest has taken the two of us down a twisting road of comparison between his nation and mine. It's clear he believes Canada has badly misplayed the oil-rich hand we've been dealt. Does Rolf Wiborg believe we've blown our opportunity once and for all? Not necessarily.

"You're in a better strategic position than we were and are. You should be among the winners in the globalized world. You should be where we are. Alberta Heritage Fund should have been the Canadian Heritage Fund. You can still make it. When are Canadians going to grow up and realize that they are a powerhouse with resources the world needs and take that responsibility seriously? Many good politicians in Canada have asked that question. So far they have been failed by their voters and by short-term thinking."

Wiborg leaves me with this sentiment: "I love Canada. I love Canadians. It's a fantastic country. But in my opinion it's totally mismanaged, and mismanaged by design."

While the feds pretend that they have significant influence on domestic energy policies they actually have very little IMHO.

Ummm..... I don't quite agree. Would you say the Feds have no influence on offshore energy policies? I seem to recall a bit of hand wringing down your way when those mean old Feds shut down deepwater drilling after that little hiccup at Macondo. You might also want to ask the folks out in Utah and Colorado how much influence the Feds have on drilling on BLM and USFS lands. You might even have heard of NPRA and ANWR perhaps?

/snark

Very similar dynamic to NZ and Australia. Very high pay but isolated and fairly unpleasant mining work in the Australian outback attracts a lot of New Zealand workers [also prostitution is the big downstream 'service' industry in these distant mining burgs].

Now that China's mine [Australia] is slowing down as its client does I suspect we will be getting a number of these people back [Kiwis are ineligible for welfare in Aus].

So it goes on the edge of Empire.

It is interesting to note in passing that the scale of the iron ore and coal mining oops in Aus are such that they are hugely automated and in fact employ only a small number of people in proportion to the value of the product. Extremely profitable and quite distorting for the Aus economy. The source of some real nasty anti-environment politics too of course.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/mining-workforce-...