"Little" wars cause huge problems

Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts
by A. Robock, et al
Published in Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics Discussion 11/22/06

Last fall, a decidedly unpublicized climate conference revealed what anyone with common sense probably already suspected: even little nuclear wars suck.
Read it here
Not only would a regional war using "just" 100 Hiroshima-sized warheads (about 15 kt each, or a total of 0.03% of the globe's nuclear killing capacity) potentially kill the same number of people as died globally in World War II, but it would likely cause temperature and precipitation changes that would rival those that made the Little Ice Age (c. 1450) such a fun time to be alive, with the Black Death, famines, and related problems.
The report, by six scientists including Turco and Toon of TTAPS fame, argues that such a war would cause the average amount of shortwave radiation reaching the earth's surface globally to fall by nearly 10 times the amount it would rise given a doubling of atmospheric CO2. But while the latter doubling has been projected to occur over decades, the post-war decrease would happen within the first year, and conditions would only gradually improve over the next 10 years or so. During that time, the world would likely see a 10% average decline in precipitation and a 1 deg. C average temperature decline for at least five of those years.
While that may not sound bad to the average person, the report's charts and maps are significantly more chilling right after a war: Some parts of the world could see temp. drops of as much as 7 deg. C, with large swaths of western and central Canada, most of Europe, parts of Siberia,most of Australia and the African Sahel hardest hit. At the same time, screwed up atmospheric circulation could cause huge precipitation changes, cutting the rainfall over much of N. America by 20-40% and the Amazon by around 70%, while increasing rainfall by 70-100% over the Sahel and Sahara.
Obviously, losing 70% of the Amazon's rain is likely to have a significantly larger effect than doubling the Sahara's.
Add those things together, and the Robock team is predicting large changes in the growing season for most of the world's breadbasket regions, with North America, western Eurasia and southern South America losing up to a month's growing time for several years.
In doesn't take much to realize this combination of factors bodes ill for lots of people. What the report doesn't look at, however, are other synergies: radiation and/or toxins making some areas uninhabitable (Hiroshima was reinhabited quickly because its bomb was an airburst with little fallout, but wars using multiple bombs detonating in a fairly small part of the globe -- say, India & Pakistan, or Israel & Iran -- aren't likely to be so clean.); numbers of traumatized refugees and injuries that will easily overwhelm the world's medical and humanitarian system; long-term genetic concerns, for those directly affected and globally because of the increase in average radiation levels; economic chaos possibly leading to further wars that might involve the major powers, etc. These may seem exaggerated -- after all, the study looks a war that doesn't directly touch any of the world's major industrial nations -- but the last time we saw such a death toll and economic impact, most of the world had several years to prepare for and absorb it. This one could happen literally overnight.
Our government is making a big deal of Iran's supposed quest for the Bomb, and that should indeed be a global concern. But we need to put as much pressure on India, Pakistan and Israel to come clean about their programs and, far more importantly, resume GLOBAL negotiations to get rid of nuclear weapons forever...

When media muddy the waters

Last night, I caught the last half of 20/20's special "The Last Days of Earth." Much of what they said was pretty accurate, albeit seriously lacking in depth, detail, and source citation. The problem I have with the show, however, is that even I as a layman could see some things they said (or, more often showed) did not help the cause of good science.

If you didn't see it, you can probably guess what it was about by the title and the fact I'm writing about it on this blog -- various forms of apocalypse. They looked at seven, but I can't remember them all and only caught the last four: asteroids, nuclear war, global pandemic, and climate change, ranking the last as the most serious threat.

Common sense says all of those things are in fact real threats; but I'm not sure I'd give them the same order. To me, the most serious in terms of what it can ultimately do to humanity and nature is nuclear war, because, in a very real sense, it combines many of the effects of the other three. The combination of megadeaths plus long-term radiation plus a massive smoke pall plus other "synergies" would very likely destroy human civilization for a very long time and cause major changes in the genetics of human and natural communities alike.

Admittedly, I rank that a little higher than asteroids because, while a really big asteroid can actually sterilize Earth and I don't think we can nuke Earth into sterility, if a nuclear war happens it's our fault. Asteroids are impersonal; nuclear war is not.

Asteroids

Anyway, I'm digressing. 20/20's section on asteroids was simplistic but truthful about the prevailing theory that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving mammals a chance to take over the reptiles' ecological niches. But the "reporters" then argued that an asteroid of the same size hitting Earth now would burn the crust to a depth of 60 miles. Obviously, that's crap: there's no way our mammalian ancestors would have survived such a strike. They lived semi-nocturnal, semi-underground lives, but not that far underground. The only lifeforms that have ever lived that far down are extremophile bacteria.

You can test the effects of various sizes of asteroids here or here.

It mentioned that people have found around 100,000 asteroids, but didn't mention that we occasionally lose some, are constantly finding some only when they cross Earth's orbit, and suspect there are countless more out there. Chances are, if one hits us, we won't see it until it's too close to do anything about.

Of course, they could be right about the one they mention specifically -- an asteroid that's due to make a close (within the Moon's orbit) pass in 2029. They don't say that will hit us -- general consensus is that it won't -- but that the near-miss might alter its orbit just enough to cause a hit the next time around in 2037. What they don't mention is just how small the risk really is: 1 in 26,000 in 2029 and cumulatively just .00023% chance between now and 2054, during which time it'll have three close approaches. The show doesn't identify that chunk of rock, but astronomers know it as 2004 MN4 or Apophis.

The show's discussion of what people are likely to do if faced with a probable direct hit was kind of interesting, but also fairly predictable. It's pretty safe to assume chaos would reign as the time drew near as people try to do things they'd never before attempted (for good and ill). Nobody said they'd go out and commit crimes (obviously, they wouldn't say it on national TV even if they would do it), but a few said they'd want to have children. Excuse me?!? How can someone be so supremely narcissistic as to bring children into a world they knew was going to get walloped by an extinction-level-huge asteroid?

What was equally troubling was what the show didn't mention -- the probability that some people would try to organize a major space effort to keep humanity alive off-world. Such an effort may well be the only thing that could prevent such widespread chaos, and I've said before that I believe we need a good global space program as insurance against just such a catastrophe.

Nukes

The section on nukes was woefully vague and much shorter than the subject warranted. It didn't say anything about radiation or various other ill effects, although it did point out (accurately, I think) that the nuke threat from places like Iran and North Korea is being blown out of proportion to the risk caused by the thousands of nukes the US and Russia still have on "launch on warning" status. It failed to mention, however, that both nations are trying to create new, smaller, more mobile nukes, especially the U.S. Add that to the simmering problems in the Middle East, and it may be time to revisit the Doomsday Clock's setting of 7 minutes to midnight, which hasn't changed since 1992.

The one really questionable assertion they made was that "an exchange of just 20 missiles would cause nuclear winter for several years." The problem here is that the number of missiles is irrelevant, what matters is the number and strength of the warheads and where they explode -- urban or rural, airburst or groundburst. Burning cities are significantly more likely to spew the toxic smoke into the sky that can block sunlight and cool the land, especially if hit by warheads that explode close enough to the surface for soil and debris to get sucked into the fireball. Even the TTAPS study of the early 1980s predicted a 5,000 MT threshold for nuclear winters, which requires significantly more than 20 missiles.

Elsewhere Sagan (as cited by Alan Phillips), notes it could happen with as few as 100 warheads if the targets are predominantly oil refineries and associated structures. Obviously, we don't know for sure... and sane folks don't want to. There's some controversy over the TTAPS calculations, sparking some of the theory's supporters to acknowledge that there needs to be more research done in this area. We've got better climate-study technology and computer simulation capability than we did in the 1980s, let's target it on this threat.

Desmond Ball of the Australian Nat'l University argues even more specifically that even a full-scale war hitting both cities and strategic weapons sites, which Ball estimates at 4140 to 4650 MT, would throw up less smoke than Sagan's nuclear winter threshold of 100 million tons, largely because of where those missile silos are -- in farmfields and tundra, not forest.

Obviously, I'm not citing him to downplay nuclear war's horrors. Even without nuclear winter, it would be by far the worst calamity to have ever hit mankind, and for that reason, I'm still in favor of banning the bomb.

My guess is that a full-scale nuclear holocaust would actually leave most people alive in the short-term, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, would not survive the social, economic, and agricultural disruption, radiation, temporary loss of the ozone layer, diseases, and other problems that can reasonably be expected after such a catastrophe, even if the temperature change is minimal. (Imagine what shape Europe or Japan would've been in for years after WW2 if the US had not created the Marshall Plan. That's the catch -- global nuclear war isn't likely to leave anyone untouched, even nations that don't get bombed, simply due to the nature of fallout and our world's high level of economic interconnectedness.) But I suspect humans will still be here long term, reduced in numbers and cultural complexity and possibly permanently unable to regain today's level of technology, science, and the possibility of reaching the stars.

Pandemic

I can't claim to have anything resembling detailed knowledge of this subject, since I'm not a doctor and have no medical experience of any sort. But as a layman with some knowledge of history, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little out of whack. In one place, they claim the 1918 Flu Pandemic "killed only 3% of those who caught it." That figure didn't ring true ... but it was. If anything, it was higher than the actual percentage (I came up with about 2.5%). The New England Journal of Medicine reports that "the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people" worldwide. NPR adds, "About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus." At that time, US population was about 104,550,000.

According to the same NEJM article, "more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ...If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenza virus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally."

The show also notes that smallpox & other germs could be used as weapons. In its present state, the show said, smallpox kills about 30% of its victims -- a significantly higher rate than the 1918 Flu. Under some circumstances, it's even more deadly -- some evidence suggests the death rate among the biologically unprotected Native American population exceeded 65%.

Climate Change

This was an unfortunate mixture of mostly good spoken fact and grossly misleading imagery. Most obvious was when they spoken of sea level rising if Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt -- 20 feet individually, 40 feet together. That's a pretty severe rise, one that would (as their sources, which includes climatologists and Al Gore, said) inundate south Florida, southern Louisiana, Bangladesh, parts of Manhattan and possibly London, and many other coastal areas. but teh graphics shown at teh same time exaggerated the flooding immensely: they showed blue covering over half of FLorida, huge stretches of the UK, and even mountainous regions of Southeast Asia and Africa far from the coasts.

As TV studios know quite well, people pay far more attention to images than words, a fact that makes such a presentation a major league disservice to the work the scientists are doing. By so exaggerating a threat that is serious enough on its own, it only provides ammunition to the very naysayers the show largely (and accurately) discounted verbally.

Instead of hyped up graphics of biblical proportions, they should have taken the time to show realistic maps of the potential sea level rise, scenery from areas that are already seeing problems, etc. Among those available are these ones from the EPA (note that they only show a 3.5 m rise), or go to places like this (USGS) or any decent topographic map of seashore regions and figure it out yourself from the contours.

will this never end?

Now that Hurricane Rita's weakening over Louisiana and Arkansas and everyone's beginning to take stock of the damage (fortunately not nearly as bad as it could've been had Rita stayed a Category 5 storm), the NWS is already getting worried about TWO more potential cyclone-developing areas in the Atlantic.

Are "Stan" and "Tammy" gestating while everyone watches Texas? If the past few months are any indication, the northern one will visit Florida and the Gulf while the southern one will sail off into the Atlantic harmlessly.

With two more months of hurricane season left, how many more of these will we see?? I'm betting we see "Tropical Storm Delta" before we're finally done... in other words, at least four storms beyond the end of the year's list of names.

Oil Crisis 2005: A Timeline

As many observant people worldwide have known for some time, we have been skating on very thin ice for a long time due to our addiction to petroleum. Starting August 28, 2005, that ice began to crack for real, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, which peaked as a Category 5 storm packing 175 mph winds and pummeled the US Gulf Coast only slightly weaker. En route to and on land, it ravaged the eastern half of a region that supplies & processes 25% of the US's oil and around 12% of our natural gas.

If that seems redundant with other recent posts, it's intended to be. I'm postdating this blog entry to 1/1/06 purposely, because I intend it to serve as a chart of gas prices, relevant events, predictions and commentary sparked by Katrina, which could become a major turning point in US history.

What happens from here forward depends as much on humans as on the weather. The National Weather Service is predicting 3-5 more major (Cat. 3+) hurricanes this year, and that fact defines the key weather parameters we're probably facing. As I see it today (9/1/05), the best case scenario is this: The NWS is wrong, and there are no more hurricanes, or all of those that form follow the path of Hurricane Irene to a harmless death in the Atlantic. The worst case scenario is that NWS is right, and one of those major storms is Katrina's twin, only this one heads west to plaster the Houston area, shutting down that major oil port. In Mexico, a similar effect would happen if the Tampico area gets hit.

For the sake of simplicity and clarity, these parameters don't address hurricanes that pummel non-oil regions, no matter how strong they are. Yes, such storms will add to the oil crisis burden indirectly and may cause major suffering on the Atlantic coast, in the Caribbean, or elsewhere; they'll certainly be noted in the timeline. But for the most part, the timeline will have capsule summaries of two things: social & political events here and abroad related to the US's quest for her next oil fix, and how the crisis is affecting me and the people I know. I'll try to update the gas prices at least every few days, but will only include key events.

In the comments, I would really appreciate you periodically jotting down your reflections on the situation wherever you are. That's especially true if you're not in the US. What America does could easily help or hurt people worldwide, but we Americans have a notorious tendency to ignore those effects when we're in crisis...

*****************************************

DATE......PRICES OBSERVED......EVENTS

8/29/05......$2.47-$2.54..........Katrina comes ashore in very early AM
8/30/05......$2.93-$2.99..........First talk of possible shortages
8/31/05......$3.03-$3.09
9/1/05.......$3.00-$3.47 (mostly ~$3.20)
9/2/02.......$3.09-$3.39..........60M barrels released from SPR, European sources
9/3/05.......$3.18-$3.43 (mostly ~$3.20)
9/13/05......$2.96-$3.39 ........ Prices falling. Good sign, but for how long?

Because prices have been stable and/or falling lately, I think I'll take this off the top of the pile. But I might bring it back if things start getting bad again...

9/24/05.....$2.75-$3.09....... Hurricane Rita hits East Texas, running through the western half of the Gulf's oil/natural gas fields. MSM predicting $5 gas by next week. Maybe time to start following this again...

photo ops while cities suffer

Have you seen this commentary from LA Sen. Mary Landreiu:

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

Or this, in Biloxi, as reported by German TV ZDF (copied from The Carpetbagger Report; a slightly different translation is at DailyKos):

On the ZDF web site, see

video is here

text is here

The relevent paragraphs are labeled
"Räumarbeiten nur für Bush?" My (non-expert)
translation follows.

Wo der US-Präsident das Katastrophengebiet besuchte, räumten Hilfstrupps vorher ordentlich auf - aber nur dort. Aus Biloxi zitierte ZDF-Korrespondentin Claudia Rüggeberg verzweifelte Einwohner, Bush solle in seinen Limousinen statt lauter Bodyguards und Assistenten lieber Hilfsgüter herbeischaffen.
Entlang seiner Route hätte Räumtrupps vor Bushs Besuch Schutt weggeräumt und Leichen geborgen. Dann sei Bush wieder abgereist "und mit ihm", so Rüggeberg, "die ganzen Hilfstrupps". An der Lage in Biloxi habe sich sonst nichts verändert, es fehle an allem.

------
Whevever the US President Bush in the catastrophie
area visited, helpers cleaned up beforhand, but
only there. In Biloxi, ZDF correspondent
Claudia Rüggeberg quoted demoralized residents
who said that Bush should bring food and water
in his limosine instead of bodyguards and
assistants.

All along his route, before his visit,
debri was cleared and bodies removed. Then
Bush travelled on and with him, according to
Rüggeberg, the entire troup of helpers.
As for the situation in Biloxi, otherwise
nothing changed, everthing is lacking.

I don't know German, but my stepmother IS German, so I'm going to send this text to her for translation. If it's very different, I'll post it here.

Fucking incredible. Bush and his stage managers piss me off so much I don't even have words for it. Both of these events are crass frat-boy selfishness on Bush's part, but SO typical of his entire admin. Make it look like things are getting done, but when the cameras shut down, go back to playing games and leave the suffering to the everyday people he abuses. How come there are prison terms for spousal abuse and child abuse and animal abuse but not nation abuse?

When the people in danger are once again in a position resembling stability and safety, We the People need to do some homeowrk and find criminal charges to throw at Bush and company. One that seems plausible is negligent homicide, defined generally as "Unintentional killing(s) in which the actor(s) should have known they were creating substantial and unjustified risks of death by conduct that grossly deviated from ordinary care." Ordinary care in this case would've meant funding the levee reinforcements, ensuring the poor city folks had a practical form of transportation out of the city, ensuring the Guard and supplies got into the city without delay immediately afterward and other things. This horror, as I noted in a previous post, had been predicted in detail years ago, and those warnings were ignored.

What excuse does FEMA have for dilly-dallying? Other than its leader's ineptitude, I mean.

According to the N.O. Times-Picayune, LA is turning to a real FEMA administrator to clean up the mess, rather than some shmuck who got fired from tending horses:

Blanco Appoints Witt

Gov. Kathleen Blanco has appointed former FEMA Director James Lee Witt as a special adviser to help her manage the recovery and restoration efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Witt was FEMA director under former President Clinton, serving in that position from 1993-2001.

*********************

From Der Speigel's English version (the quote's from the cover story):

This isn't just any old city sinking into the water like some reincarnated Atlantis before the eyes of a horrified and still seemingly paralyzed America. It's one of America's legendary cities. It's New Orleans, "The Big Easy," the place Americans have always flocked to whenever they wanted to get a dose of sinful pleasure in the Deep South, a place whose seemingly well-functioning multiculturalism, whose largely harmonious blend of black, white and Latino has always been a beacon for the rest of the world.

I've always wanted to see that, but now doubt I will. We all hear talk of rebuilding N.O., but I'm not sure that makes much sense where it is. Maybe we should rebuild on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, where the land's a lot more stable, and build a big canal from there to the Mississippi River for the boat traffic. Since the French Quarter was largely unflooded, maybe that area can be cleaned up and reinhabited as a town in its own right.

Given people's tendency to be rather superstitious about visiting places of terrible calamity, it will take a long time for N.O. to get back on its feet even if it is rebuilt, and that points to something that hasn't gotten much discussion yet. That city, and LA in general, benefited hugely from tourism. Was that included in the official pronouncements that Katrina wouldn't have a long-term economic effect on America? As usual, they're talking just about money (even if it is $100 BILLION and rising), not about the impossible to measure things that make up the culture of such a city as N.O and the other devastated areas. It's almost impossible to rebuild that, because it wasn't manufactured; it evolved over 200+ years.

Also, did they include the ripple effects on such things as food prices? Probably not.

NOTE: Biloxi & negiligent homicide material added Monday early AM. I had to convert Carpetbagger's original written-out links to hyperlinks to make them fit.

this was predicted... years ago

Before I vent a little steam, let me suggest an idea my girlfriend came up with to help the stranded people in N.O: Have the various cruise ship lines send their ships to the city to provide floating housing. It'd be a lot more comfortable than the Astrodome or any other refugee camp, and would also serve as a form of transportation for maybe 1,000 people per ship (far more than any bus!). Maybe they could then arrange to take the groups to various cities nationwide so that the cost of helping them doesn't all fall on one region.

I understand the Navy is sending a carrier there, and that would provide space for many more people than a cruise ship, but the Navy's noted for pretty spartan accomodations. Given how much these people have already suffered and the poverty many of them have been facing for years, it's long since time they got treated well for once.

OK, now for the rant:

Anyone who's awake is sad at the suffering in New Orleans and/or mad at the fact that this could have been prevented. Obviously, Katrina herself couldn't have been, but the fact that N.O. flooded could have.

The following comes from National Geographic, Oct. 2004 (yes, 2004):

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"
(Hurricane expert Joe) Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."

Suhayda also comments in some depth in this PBS transcript from 2002.

Also, they had a "dry run" of this last year, with Hurricane Ivan, and apparently learned nothing...

Of course, Bush doesn't bother to read, especially anything that might have some semblance of science behind it. Instead, he told the world Tuesday he'd magnanimously cut his vacation short on FRIDAY, and when he did go to N.O., he flew OVER the city, but didn't bother to land in it. Any REAL leader would've gotten off his ass immediately and taken the next possible flight there. (Same's true of Dick(head) Cheney -- he apparently doesn't feel the loss of an American city by "merely" natural catastrophe is enough to even tell the country where he IS for six days. SO, wait... If BOTH Bush and Cheney are vacationing at the same time... who is running the show?!?

Oh, BTW, he apparently believes he can shut down food deliveries at will, :

Bush visit halts food delivery
By Michelle Krupa
Staff writer

NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.

The more this goes on, the more convinced I am that Bush and others who took funds from the Army Corps of Engineers' plans to strengthen the levees should be prosecuted for the deaths the flooding and chaos have caused -- many counts of negligent homicide, at least. Politically speaking, Bush is a kind of father figure, and his treatment of the American people can be considered neglect, at best. Any real father who was warned that his children were in a situation that would harm them but did nothing about it would be prosecuted, and so should Bush & Cheney.

Oh, and if THAT's not enough to be pissed about, the Houston Chronicle reported that Halliburton is making money off the disaster by cleaing up the region's Navy facilities.

!@#$%^&&*^%$#@!!!!!

OK. Enough venting for now.

If you haven't already visited them, here are a couple of good sites on the unfolding crisis in The Big (Un)easy:

The Tattered Coat
The Interdictor
Broken Windows
Larry King interview re: Red Cross not being allowed into N.O.

And a list of major places to donate here. but if you go here, PLEASE ignore "Operation Blessing." That's terrorist preacher Pat Robertson's outfit, and if that's not enough reason to avoid it, see this.

Katrina presages energy woes?

Hmmm...

Woke up this morning and caught some of the news. Although I didn't hear anyone say it before the hurricane hit land, today, NBC's Today Show talked about the possibility that Katrina could endanger the oil refining & shipment facilities in Louisiana that supply 25% of America's oil.

The NBC anchor said speculation on the storm would cause gas prices to climb 20 to 30 cents this week. If damage to those facilities is minor, that price will probably fall again; if not, we could be in for a very long winter.

New York Newsday reports roughly the same thing, saying that seven refineries have shut down in that area:

Wholesale gasoline prices in the New York and Gulf Coast markets soared by 25-35 cents a gallon on Monday following reports that about 8 percent of U.S. refining capacity had been shut down ahead of the storm. One analyst said pump prices nationwide would likely average more than $2.75 a gallon by week's end, up from about $2.60 a gallon Monday.

snip

Unlike last year's Hurricane Ivan, which only hit the edge of the oil and natural-gas producing areas in the central Gulf of Mexico, Katrina is plowing right through the heart of that region.

PVM Oil Associates in Vienna, Austria, said Katrina had the potential to do more damage to southeastern Louisiana than Ivan, which damaged seven platforms, 100 underwater pipelines and shut down production at some facilities for several months.

Some analysts have said the only way to rein in surging prices would be for the United States to tap some of its petroleum reserves. A Department of Energy spokesman said the U.S. government was in touch with oil companies in the region and that a decision on whether to release oil from emergency stockpiles would likely be made in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Forbes.com reports that Standard & Poor's initial estimates have put refinery shutdowns at 12% of U.S. capacity, while evacuated offshore facilities are expected to affect 42% of Gulf oil production.

That could be a major problem, since Reuters reports that "Dealers are particularly concerned about damage as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is already pumping at near its full capacity, leaving it little room to make up for any lasting outages."

That doesn't leave the US much wiggle room, since our Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a capacity of just 727 million barrels. That may sound like a lot, but The Dept of Energy's own reports show that we consume about 20.7 million barrels per day and get 12.1 million BPD as imports while producing only 5.1 million BPD here at home. (By reading the chart, I'm not clear on what makes up the difference -- synthetics? recycled oil? oil shale and similar low-producing sources?-- but its something other than crude oil.)

That gives us a 35 day supply.

According to a different Reuters article, Katrina also affected natural gas production, which was reduced in preparation for the storm:

Natural gas pipeline operators reported that at least 5.6 billion cubic feet per day of offshore production had been cut from their systems, or nearly 60 percent of the 10 bcf total produced daily in the Gulf.

Gulf of Mexico natural gas output accounts for about 20 percent of the nation's total production.

And, as a footnote, Katrina also shut down three nuclear plants, but those will probably be up and running shortly.

Sounds like June's movie Oil Storm, which I wrote about here and here, might be coming true...

As if that's not enough, we still have nearly three months to go in the hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center warns "for the remainder of the season, we expect an additional 11-14 tropical storms, with 7-9 becoming hurricanes, and 3-5 of these becoming major hurricanes" (that is, category 3 or above). If they're right, we'll be into next year's name list before it ends...

Stay tuned, sports fans.

"The Big Chill"

TV show; The Science Channel
June 2005
Issue: Climate change

Lots has been said about the global warming vs. next ice age debate. What this show points out, as other sources are beginning to, is that warming may cause an ice age, and possibly quickly.

To understand why that is, I need to briefly summarize a little oceanography for you (if you don't already know):

Normally, the Gulf Stream carries warm tropical water from the coast of South America north along the US coast, then across to northern Europe before losing enough heat to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic in the Barents Sea. At the bottom, it returns to the tropics to repeat the cycle. That's known as the Great Conveyor Belt, or, in technical terms, "thermohaline circulation."

But, as the globe warms, higher than normal quantities of meltwater from high-latitude glaciers and rainwater from rivers flows into the Atlantic and, being fresh water, it's lighter than the salty ocean. It dilutes the Gulf Stream at its northern end and prevents the water from sinking, causing the Conveyor belt to stop running, or at least to drop to the bottom at some more southerly point.

The Conveyor is the primary reason northern Europe is inhabitable at all. As one speaker on the show noted, it carries about "one million power stations" worth of heat to a part of the world that's at a latitude where Canada has polar bears and Siberia gets winter temps of -40 C on a regular basis. Look at a world map -- or, better yet, a night-time photo -- and you see a striking difference between Europe and other places at the same latitude: Europe is a beehive of cities, home to nearly 500 million people, while the rest of that strip of Earth (except eastern North America)is almost vacant by comparison. (I know the photo seems fairly bright, but a lot of the brightness in western Canada and Siberia is not from cities, it's from oil fields burning off natural gas.)

Right now, annual temperatures are rising, but how much is still debatable; climatologists predict a change of 1.5 to 6 C by 2100, and governments worldwide are to some degree planning for the effects of that heat. But, if this branch of research is accurate, the warmth will be temporary, followed in short order by a rapid cooldown that could last centuries.

Scientists have been finding that Barents Sea salinity is dropping, causing "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments," according to the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research. London's Independent newspaper, from which the above quote was taken, says this would cause "a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C" in Britain. The paper reports (link added):

When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.

Now, it seems really counter-intuitive to assume heat causes freezing, and that's where research by Thomas F. Stocker comes in (emphasis added):

He and colleague Andreas Schmittner looked at the problem through experiments with a simple, coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model in which a final carbon dioxide concentration of 750 ppm was attained over different time spans. They found that the thermohaline circulation weakens when the increase in carbon dioxide to 750 ppm is relatively slow, spanning several centuries or more. However, when the rate of increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (expressed as CO2) is similar to today's rate of growth (1% per year)--or the concentration of 750 ppm is reached in 100 years--the thermohaline circulation permanently shuts down.

Hmmm... It permanently shuts down. That's not too encouraging, is it? I suspect he means for the foreseeable future, centuries or millennia, not for the rest of Earth's lifespan, but that's a detail that would make no difference as far as humans go.

Despite the fact that the Bush II administration seems to be ignoring, even demonizing, climate research, the US Defense Department shows some signs of taking it seriously. (Of course... this admin focuses everything on military issues, rather than all the other effects such a problem could have...) In a report by Peter Schwartz & Doug Randall, they found that, "With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth's environment."

Schwartz & Randall admit their scenario, which is based on the events that caused a century of cooling 8200 years ago (and thus would NOT be as severe as an ice age), is "not the most likely, but (is) plausible." Overall, they predict, such a cooling could spark wars over food and water supplies and severely restricted energy availability due to frozen ports and increased storminess. "Unlikely alliances could be formed as defense priorities shift and the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honor."

While reviewing the history, they note that at least eight sudden temperature drops have occurred over the past 730,000 years, and note that a drop like one of the most recent, the Younger Dryas (c. 12.700 yrs ago) or the Little Ice Age (CE 1300-1850), would have a much more serious effect on humans now than then because of our much greater population and, I'd add, the fact that so many people are not living off the land directly.

Their model falls between the two in severity, but still predicts "mega-droughts" in parts of Europe and Asia and less severe droughts in America and elsewhere that "overwhelm available (water) conservation options." Europe's climate becomes "more like Siberia's" within the first decade. Crop yields and growing season lengths in key agricultural areas, including the US but possibly not Australia, "fall by 10-25 percent." Social unrest and wars occur, especially in nations already under economic and political stress, as a "more severe have, have-not mentality" takes over.

"With 815 million people receiving insufficient sustenance worldwide, some would say that as a globe, we're living well above our carrying capacity (already)..." they write. I'm one of those people, as I've mentioned in previous blog entries. But I'm also semi-optimistic; I hope we as a species can realize that such a climate change can best be handled through cooperation, not conflict. But they predict the US and Australia will turn inward, creating fortress nations that keep our supplies for ourselves, while keeping out hungry folks from elsewhere.

...More to come on this, I'm sure...

The other coming crisis...

From the Denver Post, 6/9/05:

Expert: water shortage inevitable
The Associated Press

Boulder - Water shortages in the Colorado River are almost inevitable by 2011 and could force feuding Western states to cooperate on managing the river, an expert said.

"All the states are at risk," said Jim Lochhead, former executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.

"And when all parties are at risk, there is potential for a mutually beneficial (resolution)." Lochhead spoke Wednesday at a University of Colorado symposium on the river's problems.

A long drought has left Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the river's two major reservoirs, dangerously low. Abundant snow last winter will raise both reservoirs, but not enough to replace what the drought and a booming population have drained.

"We wiped out the bad year of 2004 by having a wet 2005," said Terry Fulp of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. "But there is still an impetus to get some agreement." The 1922 Colorado River Compact divides the river's water between the Upper Basin states - Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - and the Lower Basin states - Arizona, California and Nevada. So far, the river has been able to satisfy the demand, but population growth is expected to outstrip the available water, officials said.
The Interior Department has begun writing a drought management plan for the river after the seven states failed to reach an agreement. The plan is expected to be finished by December 2007.

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Warning: serious snark ahead...

This is something that's been talked about for years in that part of the country, not to mention parts of the Great Plains and even in several foreign countries. Water, like oil, is a linchpin of civilization; even more important, it's crucial to life.

The problem in the American West, in a nutshell, is not just population growth in itself, but also idiotic use of water by those already there. Let's face it, most of the area the Colorado flows though is a desert, and has been for several thousand years at least. But in the past several decades, people have thought it cool (pun intended) to bring the trees, grasses, and lawn-ornament plants from more Northerly, wetter climes to places like Phoenix.

Fly into that city (I lived there four years, 1997-2001) and you'll see an immense trellis of brilliant green from miles away surrounded by greyish-brown scrubland. That's Phoenix & suburbs, sprawl central, with the trellis being roads that run arrow-straight for miles. It looks beautiful, but it's SO wrong where it is. Instead of adapting to the environment by decorating with local plants (which are beautiful, especially in Feb. and March when the desert blooms), too many places waste tons of water to grow that fashionable but utterly useless urban monoculture -- grass.

The worst violators are the ubiquitous golf courses; the only one I can think of that's truly a desert course is one in the fringe town of Apache Junction, well away from the ritzy hotels and wealthy neighborhoods golfers are more likely to frequent. Given what one golfer said when I lived there -- that the whole point of golf is to confront nature and win -- why don't they actually DO so on Nature's own terms, challenging themselves to fish their balls out of creosote bushes, rocks, cacti small and large, and avoid rattlesnake dens just like the hikers do?

A close second are the acres of cotton and orange groves, mostly on the fringes of the valley. Neither of those plants are native here, either.

Yes, there ARE people who encourage conservation methods such as low-water landscaping, and some of the homes built that way are beautiful (and expensive). Also, the valley boasts several big parks that preserve the desert's austere beauty, where I was able to easily escape from any sight of the sprawl if I wanted to. But when you contrast that with public authorities who, after draining all but the last drop of water from the Salt River (a tributary of the Colorado), proceed to spend millions to install inflatable dams and pump water back into the riverbed to create a boating lake (Tempe Town Lake) that's only going to evaporate without further pumping, you've got to wonder if some of the people were nuts when they got there, or just became that way from the heat.