Truth Is Our Religion

We have crossed the technological Rubicon, perhaps 6,000 years ago, when Neolithics men erected thousands of Menhirs, man made giant stones, generally aligned sometimes by the thousands, the greatest concentrations of them found in what is now France’s Brittany. The largest menhir known was nearly twenty-three meters tall, weighted 350 tons, and was probably ferried in a gigantic raft across the Gulf of Morbihan (the orthogneiss it was made of came from 20 kilometers away across the sea). The greatest set of menhir alignement is in Carnac, over 4 kilometers, involving several rows of menhirs. It seemed to have had an astronomical significance, according to Alexander Thom, the UK founder of archeoastronomy.

When I was very small child my dad, an Algiers-born geologist, carried me on his shoulders through such a field of menhirs. But he sprained an ankle badly and I had to call my mom for rescue. 

Rescues and tragedies are everywhere. The “Right Whale” is now no more than 350 individuals, 100 of whom are females. There used to be hundreds of thousands.  They were called “Right Whales” because they were slow, and could be caught easily, differently from, say, Blue Rorquals who outsped boats before steamships. Also, when dead, those fatty mammals would float to the surface.

They have long been protected, but their population is now facing extinction… from human activity.

Seafood Watch, part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, provides scientific guidance to businesses, including some of the country’s major seafood buyers, about what they sell to customers. 

Seafood Watch put the American lobster, as well as some species of crab and fish, on its red list because of the effect fishing for lobsters has on North Atlantic right whales. Commercial fishers still use traps, to catch lobsters. Loaded with bait and lowered to the seafloor, they have one way tunnels to the kitchen. To recover the traps, they are connected to a buoy floating at the surface by a vertical line of rope.

Whales can easily become entangled in these ropes, which can prevent them from reaching the surface to breathe or from diving. Entangled whales may drag gear for years, causing deep lacerations.

And so it is, all around the biosphere: deep lacerations from human frolicking.

***  

Humanity has a huge, and increasing impact on the biosphere. With a population of 8 billion people, this impact is here to stay, and will only get worse as, say, everybody gets access to electricity (more than a billion people have no access to it).

There is no more wilderness: plastic and excess CO2 and other human generated poisons are everywhere. For example “wild” salmon eating “wild” fish ends up more contaminated with human made poisons than farm trout fed on genetically engineered soja.

The solutions out of these gigantic human impacts will be found along two main axes, and both have to be exploited: 1) we have to modify human behavior: say not eating lobsters until lobster procurement changes, because present lobster fishing kills into extermination Right Whales; or have Australians, Canadians and Americans reduce their CO2 emissions by 75%, to reach French or Swiss, and world average, levels of CO2 emissions… 4 tons of CO2 per person, per year… instead of the 20+ tons Australians are presently enjoying… and that doesn’t count all the coal they sell all over…

Before cutting CERN out, European authorities should cut out ski resorts which are huge consumers of power… to make artifical snow. Of course elected oligarchs will pontificate that millions live of, and from, and for, skiing on artificial snow. Let ski resorts use the renwable resources at their disposal! (Some do.)

We have to modify human behavior, and that means changing how we amuse ourselves.

2) we have to research, develop, deploy and use more advanced technology (here built smart, autonomous lobster traps). In any case we have to develop and progress. Shrinking back into old ways will only make the situation worse. Whereas what one should call colonial Anglo-Saxons, the Australians, Canadians and Americans want to keep on growing into Armageddon, the other excess is those (pseudo-) ecologists who argue for what they call de-growth (decroissance)… They are particularly festering and multiplying in France, with disastrous results…

We have to GROW mentally and energetically out of the problematic we are in. Cognitively, scientifically, technologically… Financing science, any science, is part of the solution. Present difficulties are from a lack of science, and, or lack of smarts (betting on the long tradition of Kremlin, or Chinese, dictatorships.) Developing science helps to develop smarts.

We have to progress towards a more scientific, more technological, more deliberate world. And debating the problems at hand, or over the horizon, is crucial, because only that way will the best solutions be found. Scientist have been derelict in evaluating the dangers we are in, and the solutions we urgently need to get out of our 84% dependency upon fossil fuels for primary energy (for example hydrogen and small batteries, instead of giant batteries and no hydrogen).

Paradoxically, the survival of the wilderness demands more, and smarter tech! Direct intervention to save entangled whales is one of these tech solutions. Recent science has revealed that whales tend to live very long lives, and that means their reproduction rate is much lower than once believed, thus any living adult whale is very hard to replace. And a source of knowledge: we don’t know what biology enables whales to live centuries. And what they talk about.

***

We don’t know what Neolithic Europeans, working three thousand years before the Celtic invasion, were thinking of, when they built those gigantic alignements of stones sculpted by men. Their motivations may have been similar to those of Easter Island Natives, 5,000 years later.

Why we want to go to the Moon and Mars is clear: those planets (yes, the Moon is a planet) are colonizable… Very likely: they have water.

Why were the Menhirs cut, shaped, transported, aligned and erected? They may have been early astronomical observatories of the movements of the Moon! 

Yes, science didn’t start a few centuries ago!

Truth Is Our Religion, says the Department of Defense of Ukraine…

Truth Is Has Long Been Our Religion

Truth is us.

Patrice Ayme 

The Universe shall be as we make it, proud, erect, domineering…

Smoking Us Blind With Carbon Capture And Storage, The Demo-Rats Are…

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is supposed to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources and pump them deep underground where the CO2 can be imprisoned under huge pressure, or, if pressurized into cracked basalt, as found in Iceland, CO2 quickly combines into rock. Indeed, CO2 can be dissolved into water as bubbly, acidic champagne. Basalts contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions that chemically react with CO₂ to make rocks such as calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. Stuff champagne, get rock. The process takes as little as two years. This is all true, and it is used on a very small scale in Iceland… a place full of pressurized CO2 and basalts…

Carbon Capture and Storage was a big winner in the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, signed into law during August 2022. But that version of CCS is a complete fake-out… Because the USA is not Iceland…. In the US, CCS is used to AUGMENT CO2 production. No way the clowns around Biden don’t know this.

 

C.C.S. is widely used by the FF industry, to boost the production of oil and natural gas. Natural gas processing facilities separate carbon dioxide from methane CH4, they are always mixed, similar bacteria producing  both. Some of these plants then pipe the “captured” carbon dioxide into what are known as enhanced oil recovery: it is re-injected into oil field reservoirs to increase their pressure and extract additional oil that would otherwise stay trapped underground.

 

Observe the cynicism of that conspiracy: CCS is presented as a climate solution, when actually it makes the situation worse!

 

Carbon Capture And Storage (CCS) is one more Public Relation way to sell Fossil Fuels (FF). 

On closer inspection, it’s just CO2 reinjection for FF, an old FF industry trick.

 

There are other ways to insure the survival of FF, such as so-called renewables without anything to store the energy they produce… except for ecologically, economically and financially expensive, inefficient batteries… which cannot be scaled up at the scale required, from lack of primary materials!  

 

Pseudo-ecologists have pushed for that renewables-battery trick, knowing full well it could not work at a sufficient scale for a positive climate impact, while extolling the virtue of Putin’s oil and gas, and hating nuclear solutions (except nuclear based in Russia or China).

 

Renewables, as they stand, are useless for transportation: no plane will move enough from windmills and solar panels on its back: the plane needs fuel. And that fuel can be obtained from renewables with pretty much only hydrogen. 

 

A gigantic infrastructure of renewables, and only renewables means intermittent energy, thus requires a full FF infrastructure capable of ensuring 100% production when there is no sun and no wind (a condition so frequent that it has a name the barometric swamp). If one has 100% of an extremely expensive equipment, one will use it.

 

CCS makes no sense at the most basic physics level: FF extracts Carbon C from the ground thn combines it with oxygen in the air, making CO2 and heat. CCS proposes then to return the C, with added oxygen into the ground. On the face of it, that looks circular: get C out, combine it with O2, then return CO2 into the ground. The latter step requires energy… On the face of it, as much energy as extracting C to start with, as it is to the same place it goes (and that makes no sense… except, as said above, if it is to pressurize a oil or gas field…).  

 

It is true that CCS works for special reasons in a particular place in Iceland. But they also have a new volcano in the area there: Iceland is a very special place (which produces enormous amounts of CO2 from its volcanoes). It is entirely possible that the capital of Iceland will disappear under a lava flow… propelled by CO2. But what is totally impossible is that CCS helps the world survive the present CO2 crisis…

 

That the Biden administration imposes on us this smoke and mirror is reminiscent of its promotion of women’s rights in Afghanistan… Carbon Capture and Storage is an example of conspirational, Machiavellian, plot. There is no way that its promoters do not know that this Fossil Fuels masquerading as “green”, or CO2 abating… Because CO2 augmentation is the way it is used right now, and no other usage is profitable.

Ah, but I forgot, there are no conspiracies, our masters told us, and if we think there are, we need to have our heads examined….

Patrice Ayme

This latest Iceland volcano produces up to hundred of thousands of tons of lava a day, all CO2 propelled. CO2 volcanic production prevents snowball Earth tendencies…. Notice the public on the slope, watching… In the Meradalir valley, 40 kilometers west of Reijavik…

CLIMATE EMERGENCY: Global Heating Is Accelerating Considerably: Alpine Evidence.

GLOBAL HEATING is accelerating. How can we see this? In the Alps, glaciers are melting at an incredible rate. Just looking out, as I can in the French Alps, it’s clear all glaciers below 3.500 meters will be gone in a matter of years: one can see that their upper slopes, which feed them, are bare. Just look at the accompanying photo.

Now this disappearance of glaciers below 3,500 meters was the pessimistic prophecy of glaciologists for… 2100! It’s happening now! If extended globally, this means a global heating of seven (7) Centigrade…. Way outside of the worst IPCC/GIEC predictions… And it is happening, I repeat… now! 

The obvious plot to underestimate GLOBAL HEATING is increasingly contradicted by the facts:

Glacier du Casset. From where the picture was taken to the top of the mountain in the clouds, 2,200 meters, 1.3 mile. The glacier was going as low as the first pink granite rocks in the valley bottom. It has retreated arounf 1,000 meters in denivellation. More importantly, its feeding slopes are bare, so it will entirely die. The peak of the mountain is higher than the 3,500 meters below which glaciers are supposed to disappear according to glaciologists in… 2100! This would correspond to a retreat of nearly 2,000 meters in denivellation, thus a temperature rise of 14 Centigrades!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The pink snow is caused by deposition of Sahara sand.

“Experts” keep on talking as if a global temperature rise of 1.5C could be held… But France has officially already experienced a two (2) Centigrade rise. So how come France is already at +2C and the rest of the world at +1.3C? France is smack in the temperate zone (45 degree latitude). I would suggest that the French experts on temperature are more honest.

California Sierra Nevada forests are destroyed by heat. Pests and drought rise the heat wave. One has to see the astounding amount of destruction to believe it. Last year I took an hour to cover half a mile on a trail, so many trunks of giant trees being in the way, in confusing entanglements. Sometimes I had to walk on trunks, 20 feet above the ground.  

Meanwhile, in the Western Mediterranean, the sea reached considerably higher levels. In Corsica 30.7 Centigrades (5C above what the temperature used to be). The temperature is so high that several emblematic species of Mediterranean corals are threatened with extinction. As they can’t migrate north, they will forever disappear from life on Earth. In Greenland, temperatures have been 10 Centigrades above “normal”. There is no more “normal”. 

Abnormality is the new normal.

This accelerating pace of global heating is completely outside of the misleading picture that the IPCC gives. It is more than alarming. It looks as if the IPCC, anxious not to displease the established order, is deliberately tweaking the data by underestimating the present global heating..

The IPCC is certainly distorting its models of how temperature will evolve: the models all include Carbon Capture schemes… But those do not exist, except on a small scale, when the CO2 is already in pipes (as is done in Iceland). Carbon Capture at the needed scale will be possible only when we have nearly free energy (say H fusion). Not something happening before 2100…

84% of world primary energy production is from fossil fuels (The rest is mostly hydro and nuclear). That’s not negotiable. It is a fact, and a very hard one. Governments have to ask themselves how they will lower that number. It will not be with electric plugs and batteries. Nor fake carbon accounting a la California, counting as stored carbon, forests which have already burned…. Nor will primary energy become mostly carbon free thanks to a bit of sun, and a bit of wind. 

The International Energy Agency says coal burning in 2022 will tie with its old record of 2013. Next year, in 2023, the record in coal burning, worst contributor to the CO2 crisis, will be surpassed. Please thank all the opportunistic, lying pseudo-ecologists, sun-struck and wind blown…

We have to thank the politicians who walked away from nuclear and hydrogen (Obama on day one for the latter!)
They walked away because they were paid… Not just by oil majors, and major oil exporting countries, and the financial sectors attached to them, and oligarchs, but even paid by the Kremlin…

The planet is firmly united, in the matter of major corruption by self-declared leaders, imposed by the powers that be… who got where they are because, for them, the best way to forget about the precarity of their own human life is to visit hellfire and subjugation onto others. If imposing suffering is good, receiving it, not so bad, our dear leaders reason in their maleficent hearts. The metaphysics of pain and power dominate the fate of the biosphere.

Patrice Ayme

Limits to Growth

Limits to erroneous growth have been reached, and broken straight through.
We are above 600ppm of CO2 equivalent manmade GreenHouse Gasses (GHG). Two-thirds of the thermodynamics forcing which heats up the lower atmosphere through infrared confinement (“global warming”) is caused by CO2… one third is caused by other man-made GHG gasses.

We have more than doubled the GHG “forcing” (from 280 ppm of CO2 to 600+ ppm of GHG). At such GHG ppm, the melting of the poles is guaranteed. Ultimately a 70+ meters sea level rise. This is never said enough..

The answer is more growth, but the right growth. Growth of intelligence.

For example, the present “renewable” push is rather dumb: lots of wind, smoke and mirrors. It is an OK form of growth, but it is insufficient: nuclear, thorium, hydrogen, fusion and fundamental research have to be pushed incredibly more. Instead Biden wanted to spend 3.5 billion dollars on electric plugs for the wealthy… Of the money which should go to fundamental energy research (he had promised 10 billions, now it’s down to peanuts… So much for being a “progressive”)

All the more as most countries will refuse to be bound by the limits to growth.

So what will happen when nobody feel limited by limits, and crash through them? War. The invasion of Ukraine is the first blatant case, it’s motivated by Ukraine having sun, water, soil, a natural huge breadbasket. But more wars will come, and quickly. Brazil’s president, an ex-MP and army captain, told the military to expect a war with… France… about the Amazon. As France is helping Brazil build its first nuclear sub, we can see contradictions galore are all over…

To limit the growth of war, the leading democracies will have to keep a technological edge over the rest… As science and tech progress is where the solution lies… War will bring a resolution to the problems which caused it. Tech will vanquish those limits, by making them irrelevant…

Denali: 5 kilometers of ice going up in the sky… Enjoy while it lasts…. This is shot from the only road in the National Park. The area is full of grizzlies which can be observed in plain sight, roaming to the point getting out of a vehicle is forbidden… My astute dad went to fish as close to this place as it could, as nobody else was clever enough to realize that there would be plenty of fish where fishers could be devored. While we got back to the car, an enormous grizzly showed up, nose in the air, irresistibly attracted by trout smell…

Patrice Ayme

ianmillerblog

A little over fifty years ago, the Systems Dynamics group at MIT produced a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Their message was, continued economic and population growth would deplete Earth’s resources and lead to global economic collapse by 2070. At the time, this was considered heresy. The journal Nature was scathing (See vol 236, pp 47 – 49, 1972). How could the foundations of industrial civilization, such as coal mining, steel-making, oil production, crop spraying, cause lasting damage? It was accepted that such industries caused pollution, but such effects were considered to be only temporary. At the time computer modelling was looked down upon. This is understandable; at the time computers were quite primitive compared with now, and big computers were only available to the major organizations. I recall four years before that someone doing a chemical bond calculation and coming back from the computer with what…

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Real Reason For Massive Electric Vehicles Push: Diverting Worthy Anti Fossil Fuels Efforts Down Rabbit Holes

Friend Ian Miller pointed out on July 8, 2022:
“Politicians are keen on EVs because they gave Musk huge grants. There are insufficient raw materials to make EVs a total solution, and they are doing very little for the alternatives because, well, they backed Musk.”

Fortunes and massive insider trading by politicians and allies were indeed made by giving subsidies to “renewable investment” that would have had no value if not given enough government support and money. However, that’s itself a coverup for the much more sinister reason hidden below the murky waters of plutocratic thinking and plotting…

My own interpretation is that any expert conversation shows that EVs can’t be a proximally optimal solution to the climate catastrophe… and suck up funding for real solutions. And THAT is the main reason why EVs are pushed: besides all the corruption, etc., EVs are pushed precisely because they solve nothing much in the dependance to fossil fuels but SUCK up the funds to implement real solutions…

EVs are fossil fuels in disguise, a Machiavellian plot.
One more plot… In plain sight, and the reason people do not see it, is that they have been told there are no plots. One can’t see what one has been brainwashed to believe does not exist. Manipulating people is about manipulating their minds. Advanced thinking is about proof of existence of concepts. Mathematicians spend a huge amount of time on existence proofs. If one is certain something does not exist, one can’t see it.

One of the many Tesla Lithium mines in Western Australia, far from prying eyes… Tesla also needs Cobalt mines, best left to kids who are best snaking down rabbit holes, and since they are Congolese, nobody know when they die… And Manganese, Nickel, Copper, Graphite, etc… All running out… The slaves will have to dig harder, so that pseudo-ecologists can display their virtue better, between 2 jet set vacations… Look at the tini tiny cars, for scale…

To a great extent, Electric Vehicles are fake news. Make no mistake: long term electric motors will replace ICE, Internal Combustion Engines, and that will be good for the climate. However, as it is, making EVs the number one priority, as is the case, is a delaying trick to keep on going with fossil fuels as replacement solutions in primary energy production are not researched, or deployed… EVs having sucked up all the government funding.

Yes children going down rabbit holes in Africa, digging for poisonous elements: the truth about EVs… (Smartphones too, but quantities are different…)

Nice trick.

Patrice Ayme

“Failed Solutions” To Pollution-Climate Crisis Are No Accident, But Invisible Plot…

All too many “Democrats” apparently believe that democracy consists in talking about Trump non-stop… Leaving no space for any other subject… Such as traditional “solutions” to various problems which have repeatedly failed to find, or implement.

This is not an accident. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a plot in favor of the statu quo, which is unsustainable.

By talking obsessively about irrelevant subjects, relevance can’t be deployed.

The global heating crisis is a scientific-technical problem. Some technical partial solutions already exist, for example heat pumps. Weirdly, the Biden administration spends many billions on electric cars, a tech of overall little positive impact on climate, short term, but very little on heat pumps, a tech which has a considerable advantage in the GreenHouse Gas Crisis (GHGC).

To solve the GHGC we need deployment of better available tech (heat pumps, hydrogen), and deployment or research in new fission, thorium, fusion… As China is doing.

The term “global warming” to describe GHGC is partial and rather meek. From space temperatures above 62C were observed in India in 2022. That’s global heating, not just warming. Also most of the CO2 goes into the ocean, where it chemically reacts to turn into carbonic acid. So acidification, not just heating, is a problem.

The best long term climate Federal policy would be to augment considerably the research budget in new energy research. As it is, 84% of world primary energy production is fossil fuels. Getting help from “green” hydrogen (produced by “renewables” and, or from cooling nuclear plants) could be done readily by using the present gas networks, and mixing some hydrogen in (a century old technique). Biden had promised ten billions in new energy research, but that morphed into EVs…

 

The true level is above 600ppm, including ALL man-made GreenHouse Gasses. Thermonuclear fusion will save us, but we don’t have it yet. And the less we research, the furthest in the future it lays.

Meuphys from Atlanta intervened with the partisan perspective:

There was no universe in which Republicans in a 50-50 Senate would have allowed that much to be spent on climate change solutions. Their doms in the fossil industries would have stopped paying their allowance! What is needed here is a strong federal mandate, one with teeth… the kind we will never have when the GOP has the votes to sustain a filibuster.

@ Meuphys Thanks for the comment. However, one has to see below the surface. A (nasty) Republican, Nixon, created the EPA, the Environment Protection Agency. Dems and Reps are playing a good cop, bad cop routine about the climate. So is the rest of the world’s leadership.

A point that I am trying to make is that present “solutions” to the pollution crisis (including GreenHouse Gasses, GHG) are not working: they are too expensive and too slow in worldwide deployment. What we need is fundamental research by the Federal government of new solutions, of which there are plenty of potential ones. Private industry can’t develop these solutions: too risky, especially in an uncertain regulatory environment. By the way, the Chinese government is doing just that: it is operating brand new experimental nuclear reactors of several types: pebble, thorium, etc.

Massive investment in electric cars, at the detriment of the rest, is the poster child of these failed approaches… Still “Democrats” have been doubling up on them… probably for financial reasons… Including pleasing the fossil fuels industry which welcomes solutions to its existence that do not work! In other words, while the support of fossil fuels to Republicans is obvious, the one to “Democrats” is even more important, because it is hidden behind windmills which do not work most of the time, and batteries that can’t be made on the necessary industrial scale to make a dent on the climate crisis.. 

On the first day of the Obama administration, research on hydrogen and fuel cells was terminated. That was weird: the US got to the Moon thanks to fuel cells. The Trump administration found that the Alameda-Contra Costa fleet of hydrogen fossil fuel buses worked beyond the most optimistic expectations in all ways.There are less than 100 such buses in the US, and the problem has been cost of procurement, due to small numbers. Differently from electric, such buses can be refueled in minutes. 

“Liberals”, “Neo-Liberals”, “capitalists”, “free marketers”, economists, etc all laud the “Invisible Hand” of the market. What about the “INVISIBLE PLOT”?

Yes, we, the powers that be, want to change nothing much regarding fossil fuels, where power is from! 84% of primary energy is from fossil fuels. Hydrogen and nuclear have been carefully not developed. Dams are under attack. Without hydrogen & dams, “renewables” need fossil fuels

Going all nuclear and hydro (they are interrelated, as hydron can store nuclear) could have produced 100% carbon free electricity for the entire planet. Not a full solution, but a partial one. Instead, we are on target for Armaggedon, and Putin is our prophet.

Patrice Ayme

STANDARD CO2 WARNING, v 2022

There is immense inertia in the planetary climate system. Thermal inertia. Sea current inertia. CO2 sinks inertia. And so on. So the “climate changes” we have seen so far, are mostly changes of systems with small inertia. They are little warnings, rather than the full extent of what we are going to get.
In other words, all the effects we are seeing so far are just the shiny tip of the gigantic melting iceberg, and when it is disturbed enough, it will do what icebergs do, rotate, shatter or splatter suddenly.
In particular, small ice bound systems like part of Arctic regions, individual mountains, or mountain ranges have small thermal inertia, so the CO2 forcing is affecting them more readily. They are forecasting what is going to happen. Small inertia climate systems are on track for a 7 centigrade rise by 2100… And that means, therefore, a similar impact on large systems. Large impacts will simply enfold more slowly, but also more irresistibly.
California may end up like Costa Rica, as the equatorial climate cell extends northward… Meanwhile it should go through the desertic tropical climate zone…
In practice one should take vigorous countermeasures. Thanks to a craftily engineered confusion between total energy use and electric energy generation, most people do not realize that sun and wind renewables contribute little to the total energy generation (which is mostly fossil fuel, with significant nuclear and dams). So the non CO2 total energy generation needs to be augmented considerably… But that will not happen enough with the present strategy.
The CO2 crisis is way worse than realized…

Patrice Ayme

CO2 concentration keeps climbing up… In all locales (Barrow is at the northern tip of Alaska; Mauna Loa is in Hawai’i). Before the industrial, CO2 revolution, it used to be around 280 ppm…. It will become nonlinear self-accelerating at some point, from massive permafrost melting and reversal of oceanic sinks… By incorporating other greenhouse gases, CH4, NOx, CFlx, etc… one is around 600 ppm… This forcing in turn acts on H2O gas, the biggest greenhouse gas: it’s complicated…

The Antarctic Peninsula (the northwest tip near to South America) is among the fastest warming regions of the planet, almost 3°C over the last 50 years. Remote East Antarctica, by contrast, has until now been less impacted.

However, in the third week of March, research stations in East Antarctica recorded unprecedented temperatures. It rained on the coast! (Some of which is north of the polar circle… So it can be predicted East Antarctica may collpase…)

The warmth and moisture was driven primarily by an atmospheric river – a narrow band of moisture collected from warm oceans. Atmospheric rivers are found on the edge of low pressure systems and can move large amounts of water across vast distances. Nearly all the precipitation of California in winter of 2022 came from just two atmospheric rivers, one in October, and one in December, the latter making it the wettest December ever.

An atmospheric river in East Antarctica is rewriting record books and expectations about what is possible. Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica? Is Antarctica the new California? This is the new normal, in any case.

“We need to take action now or 1.5ºC will become out of reach, it will be physically impossible to get there. The report is very clear: we’re not talking about business as usual if we are to address #climatechange“ – #IPCC Working Group III Co-Chair Jim Skea at 4 April’s press conference for the release of the latest, 2022 #IPCC #ClimateReport on the mitigation of #climatechange.

***

The 2022 California snowpack results confirmed what those of us monitoring the state’s drought had feared: California’s snowpack is now at 39 percent of its average, or 23 percent lower than at the same point last year. This signals a deepening of the drought — already the worst in the western United States in 1,200 years — and another potentially catastrophic fire season for much of the West.

More from the same NYT article of 4/4/2022, saying what I hgave long been saying, namely that our models are lagging reality, just as the beatific models of tyrants’ characters, in particular Putin, lagged reality:

Many people have a rather simplistic view of drought as a lack of rain and snow. That’s accurate — to an extent. What it doesn’t account for is human activity and climate change that are now dramatically affecting the available water and its management. As more frequent and large wildfires and extended dry periods batter the land, our most important tools for managing water are becoming less and less accurate. At the same time, our reliance on these models to try to make the most of the little water we have is becoming more and more problematic.

Droughts may last for several years or even over a decade, with varying degrees of severity. During these types of extended droughts, soil can become so dry that it soaks up all new water, which reduces runoff to streams and reservoirs. Soil can also become so dry that the surface becomes hard and repels water, which can cause rainwater to pour off the land quickly and cause flooding. This means we no longer can rely on relatively short periods of rain or snow to completely relieve drought conditions the way we did with past droughts.

Many storms with near record-breaking amounts of rain or snow would be required in a single year to make a significant dent in drought conditions. October was the second-snowiest and December the snowiest month on record at the snow lab since 1970, thanks to two atmospheric rivers that hit California. But the exceptionally dry November and January to March periods have left us with another year of below-average snowpack, rain and runoff conditions.

This type of feast-or-famine winter with big storms and long, severe dry periods is expected to increase as climate change continues. As a result, we’ll need multiple above-average rain and snow years to make up the difference rather than consecutive large events in a single year.

Even with normal or above-average precipitation years, changes to the land surface present another complication. Massive wildfires, such as those that we’ve seen in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in recent years, cause distinct changes in the way that snow melts and that water, including rain, runs off the landscape. The loss of forest canopy from fires can result in greater wind speeds and temperatures, which increase evaporation and decrease the amount of snow water reaching reservoirs.”

Degradation Of Civilization: Biden Calls Trump An “Arsonist” While Forests Burn From Mismanagement

Plutocratic media has claimed that the Federal government did nothing against the fires in California… After Trump spent years threatening to cut funding if California didn’t clean its forests (it didn’t and he didn’t).

In the ongoing Creek Fire, which burned more than 300,000 acres, the Federal Fire management authority has determined that the fuel was 80% to 90% beetle killed trees. Fuel loads are 2,000 (two-thousand) tons per acre (so 2 billion tons of CO2 were created by that particular fire alone… and Creek Fire is not extinguished, but still advancing! It is apparently trying to go across the entire Sierra Nevada, and is choking the other side!) Yes the drought and the beetle killing of the forests are caused by rising temperatures from man-made climate change. However these calamitous changes have got to be MITIGATED. I have pointed out that preciously nothing was done… to mitigate. 

A grant of a million dollars to make the local forest fire resistant was made to the town of Bear Creek. The idea was to remove brush and too many small trees over 125 acres… The grant was stopped by red tape, requests such as evaluating the impact on some birds, various plants, etc.

When I write this, making an aspect of Trump look objectively correct, some Trump Derangement Syndrome characters are sure to call me biased. So I got a reference from Trump hating, plutocratic NBC (NBC Universal is a joint venture between Comcast and GE, with Comcast holding a 51% majority stake. It is now a wholly psychologically owned subsidiary of the Chinese dictator Xi… Because of major common investments…)

Berry Creek Fire-Prevention Project Stymied by Red Tape. The Butte County community was leveled by the Bear Fire

[Associated Press • Published September 18, 2020 • Updated on September 18, 2020]  

BERRY CREEK, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 14: Cars destroyed by the Bear Fire sit in front of a burned home on September 14, 2020 in Berry Creek, California. The North Complex Fire, which includes the Bear Fire, has burned over 300,000 acres and has killed at least 15 people. Notice the ridiculous overabundance of trees, especially small ones. The area was choked by brush too. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The fire also destroyed around 2,000 structures… Associated Press: Two years before a deadly fire leveled Berry Creek and killed at least 11 people, the community was selected to receive an $836,000 state grant for pruning vegetation and clearing fuel from potential fire spots.

But the forest management project was never completed because of red tape, said local officials, who now wonder whether clearing the area of potential fuel might have changed the fortunes of Berry Creek, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

“I can’t guarantee that it would’ve stopped the fire, but it would have given them a place to fight it,” said Bill Connelly, a Butte County supervisor representing the district that includes Berry Creek.

Of course plutocratic media accused Trump of everything. Trump is like this big cat which prevent plutocratic mice to play… So I sent the following comment to Krystoff of the New York Times, who had the decency to publish it. Of course not many of the Trump haters reading the New York Times approved it:

  The Federal government is actually sending Marines to deal with some of the fires, such as the Creek Fire. The Marines have been in training for a while. So it’s not correct to say the Federal Government does nothing. 

The Feds wanted to do more, they were stopped by the ignorant. At Point Reyes National Seashore, the National Park Service proposed to make prescribed burns in the cold and wet season. Marin County Politically Correct associations threatened to sue… Over air quality. 

Ironically, and tragically, prescribed burns, by doing away with brush up to thirty feet high would have prevented the ignition of trees thousands of years old… something terrible. What I called the Cathedral Forest, above the sea, burned, with its trees ten feet across… And it is entirely attributable to the Politically Correct types who think they have an education because they have a postgraduate degree and read biased media owned, or influenced, by the wealthiest families in the world (as all media are). 

In Yosemite national Park, prescribed burning has been used for thirty years, to protect giant sequoias and human structures, with great success. 

The “Democratic” candidate to the presidency accused President Trump to be an “arsonist”, who sets America “ablaze”. “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” Biden said. This is not just the sort of talk which should be avoided, but it is also surreal, in light of the fact the Obama-Biden administration made the USA the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

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It is a case of the arsonist (fracking Biden) accusing another to have caused the fire. I detest many of the positions Trump has to take to get votes from climate deniers. However closer inspection, as in the case of Obama, reveals the opposite of the discourse. The usage of coal has been decreasing at a faster rate under Trump than Obama-Biden… Obama and Biden increased fracking deliberately to make the US number one in fossil fuels…

Meanwhile most, four fifths (⅘), of the “profits” of the famous electric car company Tesla are actually Federal financial transfers… yes, under Trump… This is why Tesla, although by far the largest market capitalization car company in the world, was not integrated in the SP500 index of the largest companies, yet, because most of its money is given by Trump, so to speak… So much for the climate arsonist… Watch what they really did, not what they said. You can’t watch what they said. The preceding is science based, and also rests on my personal observations.

As the famous technology known as MIT just wrote: “Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
It’s time to reverse a century of fire-management policy. That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.” [1]

The world is complicated, insects are simple…  All too simple.

And all this environmental red tape, the birds, etc, California “Democratic” red tape was worrying about? All up in smoke. Actually sometimes the smoke smelled of bacon, from all the wildlife burned, including threatened species…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Here is more of what MIT just wrote:

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.

That’s larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined, and nearly half the area of Massachusetts…

To anyone who lives here, or anyone who’s watching, the situation is maddening and seems utterly unsustainable. So what’s the solution?

There’s an overwhelming to-do list. But one of the clearest conclusions, as experts have been saying for years, is that California must begin to work with fires, not just fight them. That means reversing a century of US fire suppression policies and relying far more on deliberate, prescribed burns to clear out the vegetation that builds up into giant piles of fuel…

As much as 20 million acres of federal, state, or private land across California needs “fuel reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to earlier assessments by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other state agencies. That’s nearly two-thirds of the state’s 33 million acres of forests and trees, and six times the area that has burned so far this year…

If the goal is to burn up excess fuel, why not just let the wildfires rage? The problem is that runaway fires in overgrown forests don’t achieve the same results as controlled burns. These intense blazes can level vast stretches of the forest rather than simply clearing out the undergrowth and leaving the big trees standing, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Instead of restoring the health of the forests, large, uncontrolled fires often transform them into shrub land, where vegetation grows quickly and severe fires can rapidly return.

Back To The Jurassic In A Hurry: 500 Part Per Million Of Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases (GHG) used to be 280 parts per million. Now they are around 500 ppm (including CH4, Nitrogen oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, etc.). This is more GHG than in at least thirty  million years, when the Earth was much warmer, and it is similar to CO2 densities during the Jurassic.

So we are presently transiting to a Jurassic climate. The transition to the Jurassic climate is happening at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than changes in the past. This implies that most forests of the Earth , desiccating and incapable to adapt fast enough, are going to burn… worldwide. This generalized combustion has a drastic potential consequence: generalized hypoxia.

So we should talk about climate catastrophe rather than climate change, and global heating rather than global warming: recent fires got helped by temperatures dozen of degrees higher than normal, in part from compression of the air due to record breaking winds. This is why parts of the Pacific Northwest which never burn are now burning. This will extend to Canada, Alaska, Siberia and already did in recent years. The catastrophic massive release of frozen methane hydrates could happen any time (it already does, but not as bad as it is going to get). It has up to one hundred times more warming power than CO2 (fires release it by billions of tons).

What is the way out? Well, hydrogen is the solution, in two ways, but has not been deployed as it could be. A decade ago, thermonuclear fusion, on the verge of becoming a solution, was starved for funding, and so was green hydrogen (the then energy secretary, Obama’s Steven Chu, prefered investing in batteries, it was more lucrative for his little greedy self).

Green hydrogen enables to store energy for renewables, avoiding blackouts which cut electricity to pumps to fight fires

We, Spaceship Earth, went from 275 ppm of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) in 1750 CE to 500 ppm in 2020. That doesn’t mean we double the Greenhouse, because the main GHG gas is… water vapor (H2O). What we can guess the best at this point is the EXCESS radiative forcing since 1750 CE, and that’s already nearly 3 Watts per square meter… Equivalent to a million and a half nuclear reactors at full power…

Climate forcing is a fascinating subject, with vast areas without a high level of scientific understanding (LOSU). However we know enough to realize forceful mitigation has to be engaged in immediately.

Joan Katsareas from Philadelphia, PA wrote back: “Thank you @Patrice Ayme for sharing your knowledge of the causes and extent of the climate crisis. I will be seeking out more information on hydrogen as a solution.”

@Joan Katsareas Thank you for thanking me, that is much appreciated. Hydrogen is indeed the overall solution we need at this point. Actually Australia, in collaboration with Japan, is building a gigantic, 15 Gigawatts, project in north west Australia, AREH, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, to convert renewables from sun and wind into hydrogen products which will then be shipped to Japan. The same needs to be done all over, it would collapse the price of “green hydrogen” (99% of the US hydrogen is from fossil fuels).

In the case of thermonuclear fusion, the  international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) being built in France was slowed down by ten years, from reduced funding, and uses obsolete magnets (superconducting, but not High Temperature Superconductors, which can now be engineered with more compact and powerful fields). A massive effort would bring a positive energy thermonuclear reactor within 10 years… But that effort has not been made… except in China, the usual suspect, where a project, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), aims at an energy gain of 12 and a total power equivalent to a fission nuclear reactor. Its detailed engineering has been launched for a while (it’s supposedly symbiotic with the European DEMO project, which will produced as much as a large power station and will be connected to the grid. That too has been delayed, to the 2050s, although it’s feasible now).  The USA needs to launch a similar project, right away.

We face ecological constraints incomparably more severe than those of the Roman state. Rome did not solve its paltry problems, and let them fester: they had to do mostly with a dearth of metals, and the Franks solved them readily. This hindered the Roman economy. The situation we are facing, the threat of a runaway greenhouse is a terminal existential threat.

Look at Venus, we can look at our sparkling neighbor when the forests have finished burning, and the smoke dissipates (we were told it could be months). Once Venus probably had a vast ocean, and probably, life. But it died from a brutal greenhouse generated by Large Igneous Provinces (LIP). The same happened on Earth, on a smaller scale, more than once, in particular with the Permian Triassic mass extinction, which destroyed 95% of known species..

Now the rumor has it that indeed some life may have survived in the atmosphere.  This is not a joke. Consider: Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds. The detection of a gas in the planet’s atmosphere could turn scientists’ gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life on Venus? Ah, science, all those possibilities… We never imagined we would ever think possible.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: I argued in the past, before anybody else, that the dinosaur-pterosaurs-plesiosaurs extinction, and extinction of anything bigger than 20 kilograms was due to volcanism (I was at UC Berkeley when the two Alvarez were, and they seemed too full of themselves with the iridium layer, and I like to contradict certainties…)

How would LIP volcanism set forests on fire? Well, by the same exact mechanism as now: through a massive CO2 driven greenhouse, what may have terminated the Venusians…

In this perspective climate cooling, for millions of years, visible in the graph above, would have disrupted those species which were not equipped to generate enough heat, and then the LIP accelerated into a vast holocaust…

The end with general burning and acidic oceans is hard to duplicate with a bolide, so the impactophiles have argued that the bolide magically impacted the most CO2 generating rock imaginable… Maybe. But an enormous LIP does all that CO2 production/destruction of the oceans, effortlessly… A friend of mine who is the biggest of the big in this academic domain, he decides who publishes, replied to me that the 66 million year old Dekkan LIP is too small… To which I replied that we don’t know what lays below the ocean… 

Climate Change and International Transport

We need a hydrogen economy. However, on day one of his presidency, Obama ripped out all financing for hydrogen, including for hydrogen fuel cell research… It became clear later that the boy was advised by the frucking frackers: recently, thanks to Obama (not Trump!), the USA produced 30% more petroleum, 13.3 million barrels a day, than the country which produced the most aside from the USA (Saudi Arabia at its peak)

US fuel cells had enabled the US to go to the Moon (and provided fireworks for Apollo 13). I doubt Barry the Boy knew this (he is best at knowing very little besides how to feed people with what they want to hear).

Here professor Ian Miller, a chemist and physicist of renown, points out that shipping is an ecological disaster (one cruise ship in Marseilles, idling in port, pollutes as much as two million cars at speed limit). And the solution? Hydrogen (or Ammonia, roughly the same, but more civilized)…

Making “green” hydrogen is a must. Just use PV solar panels for energy (or even wind, which I like less). Storing it as ammonia is a no brainer for safe storage and transportation. Actually, last I checked there was such a giant project in North-West Australia to send “green” energy to Japan… Probably to calm the likes of yours truly about Japan’s much more real plan to replace its nuclear industry with Australian coal. So Japan and Australia get financed by states and countries which go clean… while they go fish whales and pollute North America, killing American frogs, smothering the planet… While pretending to go green by killing non-killing nuclear energy.

All boats could use sails, as supplementary power, either as rotors, or the turbosail invented by Cousteau and associates, or even computer controlled kites. Those have not been developed because of the subsidies and tax-free status given to shipping (although full scale prototypes have shown they work.. up to 25% reduction of energy). One can expect considerable reduction in energy demand (also achievable by reducing speeds).

[2018 Viking “Grace”, a 2800 passengers, 500 cars ferry between Finland and Sweden. the single rotor sail on top is supposed to diminish carbon emission by 900 tons a year; the ship is otherwise fueled by natural gas, CH4, which as close to hydrogen as it gets in a naturally occuring fuel… Thus less polluting…]

In any case, just like the fracking Obama, great fracker-in-chief, the Paris accord was self-satisfying hogwash (consider Japan, Germany and their coal reintroduction)… Paradoxically energy guzzling Texas led by rabid “Red” governor Perry (now Trump energy sec.), did way better in going green (lots of wind)… The problem with Paris is that countries are supposed to self-improve, at a pace of their own choosing. The virus is doing better to reduce CO2 production, quicker.

Maybe all we can hope for is to balance one catastrophe by another?

PA

ianmillerblog

You probably feel that in terms of pollution and transport, shipping is one of the good guys. Think again. According to theEconomist(March 11, 2017) the emissions of nitrogen and sulphur oxides from 15 of the world’s largest ships match those from all the cars on the planet. If the shipping industry were a country, it would rank as the sixth largest carbon dioxide emitter. Apparently 90%of trade is seaborne, and in 2018, 90,000 ships burn two billion barrels of the dirtiest fuel oil, and contribute 2 – 3% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions. And shipping is excluded from the Paris agreement on climate change. (Exactly how they wangled that is unclear.) The International Maritime Organization wants to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, but prior to COVID-19, economic growth led to predictions of a six-fold increase by then!

Part of the problem is the fuel: heavy bunker…

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