Climate change and other predictions of Imminent Doom

[Typhoon]

Review | The Earth is not a God

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein

The seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon argued that the human mind had been squandered on superstition: metaphysical speculation, theological disputation, and violent political delusions. Bacon’s greatest American disciple, Benjamin Franklin, agreed. It would be better, both believed, to focus on the conquest of man’s common enemy: nature. Bacon and Franklin were right, but they misjudged superstition’s staying power. Fast-forward to a conversation I had with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. With a straight face, Naess told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. For Naess’s deep ecology, the smallpox virus “deserved” and needed our protection, despite having maimed, tortured, and killed millions of people.

In his sprightly recent book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein takes on Naess’s American progeny—people such as Bill McKibben and David M. Graber—who have become influential opinion-makers on the environment, fossil fuels, and technology. Epstein asks us to imagine someone transported to the present from a virtually fossil fuels-free England in 1712, when the Newcomen steam engine was invented. What would that person think of our world, where 87 percent of all energy is produced from fossil fuels? In short, he’d be amazed to find clean drinking water, sanitation, enviable and improving air quality, long life, freedom from much disease, material prosperity, mobility, and leisure.

[Simple Minded]

Review | The Earth is not a God

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein

The seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon argued that the human mind had been squandered on superstition: metaphysical speculation, theological disputation, and violent political delusions. Bacon’s greatest American disciple, Benjamin Franklin, agreed. It would be better, both believed, to focus on the conquest of man’s common enemy: nature. Bacon and Franklin were right, but they misjudged superstition’s staying power. Fast-forward to a conversation I had with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. With a straight face, Naess told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. For Naess’s deep ecology, the smallpox virus “deserved” and needed our protection, despite having maimed, tortured, and killed millions of people.

In his sprightly recent book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein takes on Naess’s American progeny—people such as Bill McKibben and David M. Graber—who have become influential opinion-makers on the environment, fossil fuels, and technology. Epstein asks us to imagine someone transported to the present from a virtually fossil fuels-free England in 1712, when the Newcomen steam engine was invented. What would that person think of our world, where 87 percent of all energy is produced from fossil fuels? In short, he’d be amazed to find clean drinking water, sanitation, enviable and improving air quality, long life, freedom from much disease, material prosperity, mobility, and leisure.

Excellent post. "Intellectualism" is a much a fad/fashion as is skirt length or tie width. Unfortunately, in countries with representative governments, "the people" demand that their elected leaders be the "cool kids."

Hardly a new phenomena: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1621 ... _of_Crowds

"Against stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain!"

[Typhoon]

Global warming starts at the Office. IPCC Chief heats up his office

IPCC Chief Resigns After Sexual Harassment Accusations
Interim chairman takes over as longtime head Rajendra Pachauri faces sexual harassment accusations from several former employees
February 24, 2015 |By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire
. . .

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... cusations/

Yet another ideologue who took his ideology, man-made warming, too seriously and too literally.

So it seems that the evidence for unwanted man-made local warming driven by frottage is stronger than that
for unwanted man-made global warming driven by CO2.

[Typhoon]

NRO | Global Warming: Follow the money

[Doc]

NRO | Global Warming: Follow the money

Exactly big bucks for the rich and politically connected to game the system.

I just started reading this book BTW

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Winter-Causi ... john+casey

Climate change has been a perplexing problem for years. In Dark Winter, scientist John L. Casey, a former White House national space policy advisor, NASA headquarters consultant, and space shuttle engineer tells the truth about ominous changes taking place in the climate and the Sun.

In Dark Winter, Casey argues that a decrease in the Sun's activity led to an abrupt end to global warming in 2007, as the earth entered a new solar minimum — a 30-year period that will lead to record cold weather across the globe.

This new cold climate will dramatically impact the world s citizens. In Dark Winter, he provides evidence of the following:
•The end of global warming
•The beginning of a "solar hibernation," a historic reduction in the energy output of the Sun
•A long-term drop in the Earth's temperatures
•The start of the next climate change to decades of dangerously cold weather
•The high probability of record earthquakes and volcanic eruptions

Casey has studied past solar minimum periods. He argues the last great one sparked the French Revolution of 1789. In Dark Winter, he predicts the new era of cold weather will spark major political and economic upheavals with massive crop destruction, food shortages and riots in the United States and abroad — not to mention significant global loss of life.

On Earthquakes and Solar minimums:(The Earth's largest semiconductor is the Earth?)


http://www.holoscience.com/wp/electric-earthquakes/

Electric Earthquakes

Posted on December 21, 2005 by Wal Thornhill


Civilization’s interest in predicting the location and time of damaging earthquakes is clear. The potential for devastation of property that otherwise could be secured, and the loss of life that otherwise could be prevented, are powerful reasons to find predictive factors.

Earthquake
Picture Credit: history.library.ucsf.edu/imagelib/ Chart: New Scientist

Some scientists have become aware of a correlation between sunspots and Earthquakes and want to use the sunspot data to help predict earthquakes. The theory is that an intensification of the magnetic field can cause changes in the geosphere. The NASA and the European Geosciences Union have already put their stamp of approval on the sunspot hypothesis, which suggests that certain changes in the sun-earth environment affects the magnetic field of the earth that can trigger earthquakes in areas prone to it. It is not clear how such a trigger might work.

In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 37–71, 2003, there is an excellent report that addresses the more down-to-earth problems facing geophysicists trying to understand earthquakes. The paper is titled, Rocks That Crackle and Sparkle and Glow: Strange Pre-Earthquake Phenomena, by Dr. Friedemann T. Freund, a professor in the Department of Physics, San Jose State University, and a senior researcher at NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Freund writes:


“Many strange phenomena precede large earthquakes. Some of them have been reported for centuries, even millennia. The list is long and diverse: bulging of the Earth’s surface, changing well water levels, ground-hugging fog, low frequency electromagnetic emission, earthquake lights from ridges and mountain tops, magnetic field anomalies up to 0.5% of the Earth’s dipole field, temperature anomalies by several degrees over wide areas as seen in satellite images, changes in the plasma density of the ionosphere, and strange animal behavior. Because it seems nearly impossible to imagine that such diverse phenomena could have a common physical cause, there is great confusion and even greater controversy.”

Freund outlines the basic problem:


“Based on the reported laboratory results of electrical measurements, no mechanism seemed to exist that could account for the generation of those large currents in the Earth’s crust, which are needed to explain the strong EM signals and magnetic anomalies that have been documented before some earthquakes. Unfortunately, when a set of observations cannot be explained within the framework of existing knowledge, the tendency is not to believe the observation. Therefore, a general malaise has taken root in the geophysical community when it comes to the many reported non-seismic and non-geodesic pre-earthquake phenomena. There seems to be no bona fide physical process by which electric currents of sufficient magnitude could be generated in crustal rocks.”

Freund makes an excellent attempt to explain all of the phenomena in terms of rock acting like a p-type semi-conducting material when placed under stress. Normally rock is a good insulator. For example, the emission of positive ions from the Earth’s surface may act as nuclei for the ground-hugging fog that sometimes occur prior to earthquake activity. And although the surface potential may only be in the 1–2-Volt range, the associated electric field across a thin surface layer can reach hundreds of thousands of volts per centimeter, enough to cause corona discharges, or “earthquake lights.” Thermal anomalies seen from space before an earthquake may be due to the emission of infra-red light where the semi-conductor charge recombines at the surface. Disturbed animal behavior may be due to the presence of positive ions in the air.

As Freund says, this theory places an explanation in the realm of semiconductor physics, which means that geoscientists are not the best people to judge it. That explains why the paper appears in a speculative journal. Freund laments, “the peer review system often creates near-insurmountable hurdles against the publication of data that seem contrary to long-held beliefs.” Freund has identified a source of charge in stressed rocks that was not believed possible. He says, “once fully told and understood, the ‘story’ [of p-holes] is basically so simple that many mainstream geoscientists are left to wonder why it has taken so long for them to be discovered. If they are so ubiquitous as they appear to be, why did p-holes go unnoticed for over a hundred years?” Confronted with this question, by a twist of logic, many ‘mainstreamers’ succumb to the impulse to reject the p-hole concept out of hand. Other geologists find it hard to believe that positive holes liberated so deep down could flow to the Earth’s surface and collect there without being reabsorbed. However, earthquake lights are a real phenomenon, and some kind of mechanism must be creating them. Whatever it is, says Chris Marone, who works on the physics of rock deformation at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, it will involve maintaining charge over surprisingly large distances. “This is a very, very hard problem.”

The difficulties encountered in connection with p-holes are similar to others that have punctuated the history of science. The discovery of the p-holes as dormant yet powerful charge carriers in the Earth’s crust calls for a new paradigm in earthquake research and beyond. More often than not, any call for a new paradigm elicits opposition. Freund closes with a quote from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:


“all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

If Freund has a problem getting such a simple idea accepted, how much more difficult is it going to be to get both astronomers and geoscientists to accept that the Earth is a charged body in an Electric Universe?

The missing link between the sunspots and earthquakes is the fact that the electric discharges to the Sun that cause sunspots can also affect the Earth’s ionosphere. The ionosphere forms one “plate” of a capacitor, while the Earth forms the other. Changes of voltage on one plate will induce movement of charge on the other. But unlike a capacitor, the Earth also has charge distributed in rock beneath the surface. And if the subsurface rock has become semi-conducting because of stress, there is an opportunity for sudden electrical breakdown to occur through that rock. We should expect similar processes to occur underground as is found in atmospheric lightning. There will be precursor electromagnetic effects due to the small-scale travelling of charge – rather like “stepped leaders” between cloud and ground. That may be the limit of activity in small tremors. But in a large earthquake, the entire circuit may be involved, from below the Earth, through the atmosphere to the ionosphere. This would explain the massive disturbance of the ionosphere over a large area accompanying a major earthquake.

The mystery of the source of the current is solved – it comes from a charged Earth. And the link with sunspots via the ionosphere is exposed. Subterranean lightning causes earthquakes! Seismic waves are the rumble of underground thunder. The energy released may be equivalent to the detonation of many atomic bombs but only a small proportion need come from the release of strain in the rocks. Most of it comes from the Earth’s stored internal electrical energy.

The latest issue of the IEEE journal, SPECTRUM, features an article based on Freund’s work that looks at ways of predicting earthquakes. Once again, it seems that scientific advances fare better today in the hands of electrical engineers.
See http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec05/2367.

[Typhoon]

Crushing man made climate change thoughtcrime

[Simple Minded]

Crushing man made climate change thoughtcrime

"The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church."
Magellan or Da Vinci or Galileo or Copernicus..... depending upon who you ask.....

I used to think most Global Warm-ongers.... now Climate Changers.... were those with a religion of doomer porn.

Now I think a substantial number of them may simply be self-loathers, or those for whom the accident of their birth into a first world country is a great source of guilt.

[Doc]

http://freebeacon.com/issues/foreign-fi ... l-company/

Foreign Firm Funding U.S. Green Groups Tied to State-Owned Russian Oil Company

Executives at a Bermudan firm funneling money to U.S. environmentalists run investment funds with Russian tycoons

BY: Lachlan Markay
January 27, 2015 5:00 am

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy.

With oil prices plunging as a result of a fracking-induced oil glut in the United States, experts say the links between Russian oil interests, secretive foreign political donors, and high-profile American environmentalists suggest Russia may be backing anti-fracking efforts in the United States.

The interest of Russian oil companies and American environmentalist financiers intersect at a Bermuda-based law firm called Wakefield Quin. The firm acts as a corporate registered agent, providing office space for clients, and, for some, “managing the day to day affairs,” according to its website.

As many as 20 companies and investment funds with ties to the Russian government are Wakefield Quin clients. Many list the firm’s address on official documentation.

Klein Ltd. also shares that address. Documents filed with Bermuda’s registrar of companies list just two individuals associated with the company: Hoskins, Wakefield Quin senior counsel and managing director, and Marlies Smith, a corporate administrator at the firm.

According to documents filed with Bermuda’s registrar of companies, Klein Ltd. was incorporated in March 2011 “exclusively for philanthropic purposes,” meaning “no part of the net earnings … inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”

“The company does not propose to carry on business in Bermuda,” the documents stated.

The only publicly available documentation of any business conducted by Klein Ltd. were two Internal Revenue Service filings by the California-based Sea Change Foundation, which showed that Klein had contributed $23 million to the group in 2010 and 2011. Klein Ltd. was responsible for more than 40 percent of contributions to Sea Change during those years.

The foundation passed those millions along to some of the nation’s most prominent and politically active environmentalist groups. The Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council, Food and Water Watch, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Center for American Progress were among the recipients of Sea Change’s $100 million in grants in 2010 and 2011.

Neither Wakefield Quin nor Sea Change responded to multiple requests for more information about their relationships with Klein Ltd.

“None of this foreign corporation’s funding is disclosed in any way,” the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wrote of the company in a report last year. “This is clearly a deceitful way to hide the source of millions of dollars that are active in our system, attempting to effect political change.”

The Sierra Club, which received nearly $8.5 million from Sea Change in 2010 and 2011, launched its “Beyond Natural Gas” campaign the following year. The effort has become one of the largest and best-funded environmentalist campaigns combating fracking and the extraction of natural gas in general.

Sea Change’s “skeletal staff quietly shovels tens of millions of dollars out the door annually to combat climate change. And that’s pretty much all it does,” noted Inside Philanthropy, which awarded the foundation its “sharpest laser focus in grantmaking” award last year.

Nathaniel Simons and his wife run the foundation and are, except for Klein Ltd., its only donors. Simons, a hedge fund millionaire who commutes to work across San Francisco Bay aboard a 50-foot yacht, also runs a venture capital firm that invests in companies that benefit from environmental and energy policies that Sea Change grantees promote.

Simons himself has ties to Klein Ltd. Several Wakefield Quin attorneys are listed as directors of hedge funds that his firm manages, and in which Sea Change has assets.

Senior counsel Rod Forrest was listed on documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a director of two investment funds, Medallion International Ltd. and Meritage Holdings Ltd., in which Sea Change had tens of millions invested while it received money from Klein Ltd.

Simons’ company runs the Meritage Fund. The Medallion Fund is run by Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund management firm run by his father, billionaire and Democratic mega-donor Jim Simons. Both funds listed Wakefield Quin’s Hamilton, Bermuda, address on SEC filings.

Wakefield Quin’s Hoskins and Smith, as well as a number of other employees of Wakefield Quin, have worked in some capacity for companies or investment funds owned by or tied to Russian state-owned corporations and high-level officials in the country.

Hoskins, Forrest, and another Wakefield employee named Penny Cornell were all listed as executives of Spectrum Partners Ltd., a fund with offices in Moscow, Cypress, and Bermuda, Cornell at the address of Wakefield Quin’s offices.

According to a performance report for one of Spectrum Partners’ funds, its portfolio consisted of “Russian and CIS [former Soviet state] securities and securities outside of Russia or CIS but having significant economic or business involvement with Russia and/or CIS.”

As of 2008, more than half of the fund’s holdings were in the oil and gas sectors.

Numerous executives at Wakefield Quin have ties to Russian oil and gas companies, including Rosneft, which is majority-owned by the Russian government and in 2013 became the largest oil company in the world.

Hoskins is the vice president of a London-based company called Marcuard Services Limited, and a member of the firm’s board, according to its website.

The company’s president, and the chairman of its parent company, Bermuda-based Marcuard Holding Limited, is Hans-Joerg Rudloff. Rudloff is also a former vice-chairman of the Rosneft’s board.

Hoskins is also a director at a Bermuda-based subsidiary of Russian investment bank Troika Dialog. That firm organized an initial public offering for Timan Oil & Gas, which is run by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev.

The Environmental Policy Alliance, which provided the Washington Free Beacon with a copy of an upcoming report on Klein Ltd.’s Kremlin ties, said Wakefield Quin’s ties to environmental financiers and Russian oil barons merit closer scrutiny.

“The American public deserves to know whether environmentalists are attacking US energy companies at the behest of a Russian government that would like nothing more than to see their international competition weakened,” Will Coggin, a senior research analyst at the EPA, said in an emailed statement.

“In the face of mounting evidence, environmental groups are going to have to start answering hard questions about their international funding sources,” Coggin said.

The overlap between executives at firms with ties to Russian oil interests and a multi-million-dollar donor to U.S. environmentalist groups has some experts worried that Russians may be replicating anti-fracking tactics used in Europe to attack the practice in the United States.

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly NATO’s secretary general, said last year.

It is unlikely that the Kremlin is directly involved in doing so in the United States, according to Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

“If anybody in Russia is behind all the secretive Bermuda investment house and law firm action, it’s most likely some oligarch bidding against U.S. competition,” he said in an email.

Arnold, the author of Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environmental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future, said that the opacity of Klein Ltd.’s involvement with the Sea Change Foundation exemplifies attempts to shield the source of donations to such groups.

“In my experience of trying to penetrate offshore money funnels for U.S. leftist foundations and green groups, I have found that Liechtenstein, Panama and Bermuda are the Big Three green equivalents of the Cayman Islands for hedge fund managers—totally opaque and impervious to my specially designed research tools,” Arnold said.

[Typhoon]

FP | Save Willie: The global warming movement is anti-science, oblivious to how little we know about climate

A good article on why the science of climate is far from settled.

[Simple Minded]

FP | Save Willie: The global warming movement is anti-science, oblivious to how little we know about climate

A good article on why the science of climate is far from settled.

Excellent article. A fitting example of little more than human prejudice and bigotry.

"Anyone who stands in the way of the savior who promises to protect me from the boogeyman I have chosen to believe in is bad. They must be stopped!!!"

[Typhoon]

Follow the money

[Doc]

The more the evidence goes against them, the more shrill they get.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... 000-years/
Global Warming Could Hit Rates Unseen in 1,000 Years

[Typhoon]

The more the evidence goes against them, the more shrill they get.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... 000-years/
Global Warming Could Hit Rates Unseen in 1,000 Years

Indeed.

That paper is completely climate model based:



In other words, GIGO.

I'm not going to lose any sleep . . .

[Typhoon]

Meanwhile in Switzerland . . .

92% Of Swiss Voters Reject Carbon Tax In Referendum

Sunday’s result was the second worst in modern Swiss history.

[Typhoon]

Causes and Consequences of the Climate Science Boom

Abstract

Scientific disciplines, like economies, can and do experience booms and busts. We document a boom in climate science, sustained by massive levels of funding by government entities, whose scientific direction is set by an extra-scientific organization, the IPCC, which has emerged as a “big player” in the scientific arena, championing the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. We note the difficulties in obtaining definitive empirical clarity due to the complex nature of climate, the feedback between the effects of the IPCC’s advocacy and the government’s willingness to fund the science, the ideological and political agendas at play, the dangers to the integrity of scientific procedure in the context of ideological bias, and the poor performance of the “crony capitalist” enterprises that have grown on the back of politicized science.

[Doc]

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro ... urns-nasty

Climate debate turns nasty

By Timothy Cama - 03/14/15 10:58 AM EDT

The debate over climate science has taken a nasty turn.

Vice President Biden painted skeptics of climate change as stupid in a recent interview.

“I think it’s close to mindless,” he said of skeptics on the HBO program “Vice.” “I think it’s like, you know, almost like denying gravity now.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) at a March meeting was surprised to see that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy did not know the details of previous climate change models.

“This is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who should know more than anybody else in the world, who’s proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in costs to prevent this climate and temperature increases, doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong,” Sessions said.

[Endovelico]

California Is Turning Back Into A Desert And There Are No Contingency Plans
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/16/2015 22:45 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-1 ... ency-plans

Once upon a time, much of the state of California was a barren desert. And now, thanks to the worst drought in modern American history, much of the state is turning back into one. Scientists tell us that the 20th century was the wettest century that the state of California had seen in 1000 years. But now weather patterns are reverting back to historical norms, and California is rapidly running out of water. It is being reported that the state only has approximately a one year supply of water left in the reservoirs, and when the water is all gone there are no contingency plans. Back in early 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency for the entire state, but since that time water usage has only dropped by 9 percent. That is not nearly enough. The state of California has been losing more than 12 million acre-feet of total water a year since 2011, and we are quickly heading toward an extremely painful water crisis unlike anything that any of us have ever seen before.

But don’t take my word for it. According to the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti “is the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine”. What he has to say about the horrific drought in California is extremely sobering…

As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.

Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir.

Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.

Are you starting to understand why so many experts are so alarmed?

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, essentially the entire state is suffering drought conditions right now. And as you can see from the map below, most of the state is currently experiencing either the highest or the second-highest classification of drought…



Nearly 40 million people live in the state of California at the moment.

What are they all going to do when the water is gone?

In some rural areas, reservoirs are already nearly bone dry. And in other areas, the water quality has gone way down. For example, in one Southern California neighborhood black water is now coming out of the taps…

Residents of a Southern California neighborhood are concerned about the fact that the water flowing out of the taps in their homes is the color black. That’s right; the water coming out of their faucets is indeed black — not gray, not cloudy — but black. Inky, opaque black water that the water company says is okay to drink.

Those who live in Gardena, California, are understandably skeptical when asked to consume water that strongly resembles crude oil or something emitted by a squid. The water reportedly also has an “odor of rotten eggs or sewer smell,” according to one resident.

Perhaps you don’t care about what happens to California.

Perhaps you believe that they are just getting what they deserve.

And you might be right about that.

But the truth is that this is a crisis for all of us, because an enormous amount of our fresh produce is grown in the state.

As I discussed in a previous article, the rest of the nation is very heavily dependent on the fruits and vegetables grown in California. The following numbers represent California’s contribution to our overall production…

-99 percent of the artichokes
-44 percent of asparagus
-two-thirds of carrots
-half of bell peppers
-89 percent of cauliflower
-94 percent of broccoli
-95 percent of celery
-90 percent of the leaf lettuce
-83 percent of Romaine lettuce
-83 percent of fresh spinach
-a third of the fresh tomatoes
-86 percent of lemons
-90 percent of avocados
-84 percent of peaches
-88 percent of fresh strawberries
-97 percent of fresh plums

Without the agricultural production of the state of California, we are in a massive amount of trouble.

And of course there are other areas all over the globe that are going through similar things. For instance, taps in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo are running dry as Brazil experiences the worst drought that it has seen in 80 years.

The world simply does not have enough fresh water left at this point, and that is why water is being called “the new oil”. The following comes from CBS News…

It’s been said that the wars of the 21st century may well be fought over water. The Earth’s population has more than doubled over the last 50 years and the demand for fresh water — to drink and to grow food — has surged along with it. But sources of water like rainfall, rivers, streams, reservoirs, certainly haven’t doubled. So where is all that extra water coming from? More and more, it’s being pumped out of the ground.

Water experts say groundwater is like a savings account — something you draw on in times of need. But savings accounts need to be replenished, and there is new evidence that so much water is being taken out, much of the world is in danger of a groundwater overdraft.

And if scientists are right, what we are experiencing right now may just be the very beginning of our problems. In fact, one team of researchers has concluded that the Southwestern United States is headed for a “megadrought” that could last for decades…

Scientists had already found that the Southwestern United States were at great risk of experiencing a significant megadrought (in this case meaning drought conditions that last for over 35 years) before the end of the 21st century. But a new study published in Science Advances added some grim context to those predictions.

Columbia University climate scientists Jason Smerdon and Benjamin Cook, and Cornell University’s Toby Ault were co-authors on the study. They took data from tree rings and other environmental records of climate from the Southwest and compared them to the projections of 17 different climate models that look at precipitation and soil moisture. When they made the comparison between past and future, they found that all the models agreed: the next big megadrought is coming, and it will be way worse than anything we’ve seen in over 1,000 years–including droughts that have been credited with wiping out civilizations.

Needless to say, along with any water crisis comes a food crisis.

Virtually everything that we eat requires a tremendous amount of water to grow. And at this point, the world is already eating more food than it produces most years.

So what is going to happen to us as this water crisis gets even worse?

While this is going on the US major concern is Russia, Putin, the Ukraine, and spending more money on weapons... Eventually California will be as pleasant as Saudi Arabia... but without the oil...

[Typhoon]

Sci | House approves EPA 'secret science' bills despite White House veto threat

Defying a White House veto threat, the U.S. House of Representatives has approved two mostly Republican-backed bills that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses scientific data and advice in writing its regulations. The bills, closely related to two measures that came up but died in previous Congresses, now go to the Senate. White House officials have already said that they would advise President Barack Obama to veto the bills, which have drawn opposition from science and environmental groups, if they arrive on his desk in their present form.

Today, the House voted 241 to 175, mostly along party lines, to approve H.R. 1030, the EPA Secret Science Reform Act. It would bar EPA from issuing regulations that draw on data that have not been made public in a way that allows independent scientists to analyze it.

Yesterday, the House approved, on a 236 to 181vote, H.R. 1029, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act. It would change the membership and procedural requirements for the agency’s federally chartered advisory panels of scientists and economists.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Sci | House approves EPA 'secret science' bills despite White House veto threat

Defying a White House veto threat, the U.S. House of Representatives has approved two mostly Republican-backed bills that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses scientific data and advice in writing its regulations. The bills, closely related to two measures that came up but died in previous Congresses, now go to the Senate. White House officials have already said that they would advise President Barack Obama to veto the bills, which have drawn opposition from science and environmental groups, if they arrive on his desk in their present form.

Today, the House voted 241 to 175, mostly along party lines, to approve H.R. 1030, the EPA Secret Science Reform Act. It would bar EPA from issuing regulations that draw on data that have not been made public in a way that allows independent scientists to analyze it.

Yesterday, the House approved, on a 236 to 181vote, H.R. 1029, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act. It would change the membership and procedural requirements for the agency’s federally chartered advisory panels of scientists and economists.

Interesting, but no details or link to the bill in the article.

[Ammianus]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

Totally normal phenomenon. Things are just going back the way they were in 1200 AD. No evidence of climate change whatsoever. None. Climate never changes, this is just a natural return to ancient days you see!

[Typhoon]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

Totally normal phenomenon. Things are just going back the way they were in 1200 AD. No evidence of climate change whatsoever. None. Climate never changes, this is just a natural return to ancient days you see!

People build a major city and agricultural industry in the middle of a region that is historically desert and then
are surprised by/complain about the lack of water.
Go figure.

California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say



200 hundred year droughts before the Industrial Revolution? Before any AGW?

The earth's climate has been constantly changing since the earth first had a climate.

Linking, without causal evidence, a specific regional weather and/or climate event to
man-made CO2 driven global warming is nothing more than a just-so story.

[Heracleum Persicum]

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California orders mandatory water cuts of 25%

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California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered unprecedented mandatory water cuts across the Golden State after the latest measurements show the state’s mountain snowpack — which accounts for roughly a third of California’s water supply — has shrunk to a record low of 5% of normal for this time of year.

The Democratic governor took the action on Wednesday after accompanying state surveyors into the Sierra Nevada mountains to manually verify electronic readings that show an average snow water equivalent of 1.4 inches, the lowest ever recorded on April 1. “Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” the governor said. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action.”

Gov. Brown directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions of 25%.

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[Doc]

http://fee.org/blog/detail/does-califor ... -or-prices

Does California Need Rain, Rationing, or Prices?

Drought doesn't have to cause shortages

MARCH 31, 2015 by DANIEL BIER

Filed Under : Environmentalism, Regulation, Monopoly, F. A. Hayek

California is in the midst of a crisis. Its gorgeous weather has turned against it as its fourth year of drought drags on. Looming water shortages are leading to calls for rationing and restrictions on water use. The state has one year of water left, and 35-year megadroughts ahead of it. The New York Times bleats, “Reservoirs are low. Landscapes are parched and blighted with fields of dead or dormant orange trees.”

Why is there a water shortage? Almost every news story I’ve read blames the drought.

This sounds like a reasonable assumption, but just because the supply has contracted doesn’t mean that there should be a shortage. In normal markets, when supply shrinks, the price rises and quantity demanded decreases to meet quantity supplied. People naturally use less when something costs more. They conserve and prioritize.

But if for some reason the price can’t rise, usage won't change because the price isn’t signaling facts about underlying scarcity and incentivizing different behavior. What made sense to do with a resource when it was relatively abundant — say, 40 minute showers and turning your lawn into a lake — might not make sense when it’s scarcer. When the price is held down while supply and demand are changing, you end up with shortages, rationing, and use regulations.

As Alex Tabarrok points out, California has plenty of water. What it doesn’t have are prices — or rather, market prices. Although a lot of well-meaning people insist that water is a right, I notice that my “right to water” in no way changes the fact I have to pay the government monopoly for it ($44.91 last month). So even if there is a right to water, as Tabarrok quotes Matt Kahn, there is no natural right to always pay half a cent per gallon for it, regardless of supply or demand.

The price controls and subsidies for water use also have behavioral consequences:

As David Zetland points out in an excellent interview with Russ Roberts, people in San Diego county use around 150 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile in Sydney Australia, with a roughly comparable climate and standard of living, people use about half that amount. Trust me, no one in Sydney is going thirsty.

People in San Diego have lawns and cars and pour tons of water on them — and why not? It’s cheap. But when water becomes scarcer, rather than raise prices to reflect this fact and encourage conservation, California cities resort to paternalistic rationing, issuing edicts about when you can water your lawn and how much and how clean your car can be.

“Water conservation” (by any means necessary — as long as they don’t involve prices) is also the basis for the myriad of ludicrous federal regulations that have devastated our toilets and showers, as Jeffrey Tucker chronicles.

Prices aren’t just a way to avoid shortages and use resources efficiently, as David Zetland explains in his wonderful little book Living with Water Scarcity. Markets treat consumers like free and responsible adults whose choices actually mater, rather than dictating to them what’s “important” or “essential” for their own lives.

Prices generate revenues and reduce demand, but they also give customers choices. A regulation on outdoor watering may annoy a granny with flowers. A desalination plant may annoy environmentalists. An education campaign is condescending to some and a waste of breath on others. A campaign to install low-flow toilets may install sparkling receptacles in unused second bathrooms.

Prices send a direct signal at the same time as they accommodate many responses. Customers can choose their own mix of technologies and techniques. Some will take shorter showers. Others will install drip irrigation. Some will shower at work. Others will just pay more. A higher price for water, like a higher price for any commodity, allows people to choose how much water to use. Choice is a pleasant option compared to water shortages or tickets from water cops.

Markets can solve the shortage in California even if they can’t make it rain, while water rationing won’t do anything to alleviate the real problem because it exempts the biggest consumers. All the use restrictions are all a distraction — you could eliminate all car washes, showers, and lawns and not make a dent, because urban consumers account for just a fraction of California’s water consumption. The Economist notes (emphasis mine):

The first rule for staying alive in a desert is not to pour the contents of your water flask into the sand. Yet that, bizarrely, is what the government has encouraged farmers to do in the drought-afflicted south-west. Agriculture accounts for 80% of water consumption in California, for example, but only 2% of economic activity. Farmers flood the land to grow rice, alfalfa and other thirsty crops.

And while it may be sad that some of California’s farms are struggling, there is no logical reason why the rest of the state needs to suffer to subsidize crops (and inefficient irrigation techniques) that wouldn’t make economic sense if the farmers had to pay markets rates for water.

Tabarrok calculates that if farms used just 12.5% less water, Californians could theoretically increase the amount available for all industrial and residential uses by half.

Does that arrangement make sense? Probably not, but no planner or regulator could possibly decide how to weigh the demands of millions of people for water or any scarce resource. All we know is that we do not have enough water to satisfy every possible use for it.

Only the price system is able to coordinate those countless actors, factors, plans, interests, and industries. Maybe when California regulators turn on the tap and find it empty they’ll realize this.

[Endovelico]

Does California Need Rain, Rationing, or Prices?

Drought doesn't have to cause shortages

Price hikes could lower consumption but, to be effective under present conditions, would have to be so large that would bankrupt many agricultural firms and encourage large numbers of people to leave California. In other words, to save California from becoming a desert you may have to desertify it...

[Doc]

Does California Need Rain, Rationing, or Prices?

Drought doesn't have to cause shortages.

Price hikes could lower consumption but, to be effective under present conditions, would have to be so large that would bankrupt many agricultural firms and encourage large numbers of people to leave California. In other words, to save California from becoming a desert you may have to desertify it...

The farms will just have to charge more for their veggies. Traditionally Californians pay less for water because of federal subsidies than states that don't have water problems.