Month: November 2019

Watch a Dog-Like Robot Climb Straight up a Ladder

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By Kristin Houser – Re-Blogged From Futurism

We’ve seen four-legged robots dance, crank out some push-ups, and even backflip through autumn leaves.

But now, IEEE Spectrum reports that a team of Japanese roboticists has taught a dog-like robot a new trick: how to autonomously climb a vertical ladder.

Thumbs Up

The team from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Okayama University presented their quadruped robot at the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems on November 5.

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Gold and the Lender of Last Resort

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By GE Christenson – Re-Blogged From The Deviant Investor

Investopedia says, “In the United States, the Federal Reserve acts as the lender of last resort to institutions that do not have any other means of borrowing, and whose failure to obtain credit would dramatically affect the economy.”

The Fed has created $billions in the past ten weeks (more on the way) and fed those billions into troubled banks, hedge funds, foreign banks and others. Lack of Fed transparency forces us to guess which institutions the Fed helped with $billions of nearly free currency units.

The Fed “Party Line:” We don’t disclose the recipients because it might cause a run on that institution. The Fed is important because it protects the economy from massive and destabilizing failures.

This is like announcing that we ignore graft and corruption in congress because telling the truth about our “leaders” could destabilize trust in congress.

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The Silly Notion of “Speed Limits for Ships”

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By Steve Goreham – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Occasionally a report appears which claims to be wisdom, but after careful analysis, offers solutions that don’t make much sense. Such a report was issued earlier this month by United Kingdom consulting firm GL Reynolds, titled “The multi-issue mitigation potential of reducing ship speeds.” The report proposes that we can reduce global warming by imposing speed limits on ocean-going ships.

The GL Reynolds report concludes that a 10-20 percent reduction in ship speeds would have a “highly positive potential impact” on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and nitrous oxide (NOx) and sulfur oxide (SOx) pollutants. The report also projects that a ship speed reduction may reduce fatal collisions with whales.

Container Ships Article

Originally published in TheT&D.

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How Much Sun Could A Sunshine Shine?

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It has been pointed out that while many of the global climate models (GCMs) are not all that good at forecasting future climate, they all do quite well at hindcasting the 20th-century global temperature anomaly [edited for clarity – w.]. Curious, that.

So I was interested in a paper from August of this year entitled The energy balance over land and oceans: An assessment based on direct observations and CMIP5 climate models. You’ll have to use SciHub using the DOI to get the full paper.

What they did in the paper is to compare some actual measurements of the energy balance, over both the land and the ocean, with the results of 43 climate models for the same locations. They used the models from the Fifth Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5).

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Why Worse Wildfires? Part 1

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By Jim Steele – Re-Blogged From WUWT

What’s Natural?

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There are several theories trying to explain the recent uptick in wildfires throughout the western USA. Some scientists blame increased human ignitions. Others suggest accumulating surface fuels due to a century of fire suppression. Others argue landscape changes and invasive grasses have amplified the amount of easily ignited vegetation, while still others blame climate change. What’s the Sage Grouse connection? Like human communities, the Sage Grouse’s habitat is being threatened by fast spreading wildfires, and that increase in bigger wildfires in sagebrush country is due to invading annual grasses, like cheatgrass.

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Holiday Sales May Be Missing In Action

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By Dave Kranzler – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

I’m sure most of you are inundated with “Black November,” “70% off” and “clearance” email promotions from the usual cast of brick/mortar/online chain retailers. It started with my inbox in October.   This is because retailers are terrified of what could be one of the worst holiday spending seasons in years.

The mainstream financial media, planted with sound-bytes from Wall Street snake-oil salesmen, have already created this year’s “the dog ate my homework” excuse for poor holiday spending with the absurd notion that the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is shorter this year.  Quite frankly, I would not be surprise if many households used Amazon’s Prime day and easy Amazon credit lines offered to buy holiday gifts early this year.

Speaking of AMZN, it warned that its expected holiday sales would be lower than previous guidance.  And Home Depot lowered its Q4 revenue estimates for the second time in three months.

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Fracking Saved Americans $1.1 Trillion Over Past Decade

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By Tim Benson – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A new report prepared by Kleinhenz & Associates for the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program shows increased oil and natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing  (“fracking”) has saved American consumers $1.1 trillion in the decade from 2008 to 2018. This breaks down to more than $900 in annual savings to each American family, or $9,000 in cumulative savings.

These savings come from the lower cost of natural gas due to increased production. According to the report, “natural gas as measured using the average Henry Hub price has declined from a 2008 high of $8.86 to an estimated 2018 price of $3.16.” For households in the lowest economic quintile, the bottom 20 percent, the lower price for natural gas amounts to a savings of 2.7 percent of their annual income. “This is equivalent to a raise of 2.7% for the poorest households,” the report states.

The paper singles out the states of the “Shale Crescent”—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—noting they are “responsible for 85 percent of the net growth in natural gas daily production over the past ten years and now [account] for nearly one-third of U.S. natural gas annual production.”

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Fracking is Saving Families $2,500 Annually

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By Tim Benson, The Heartland Institute – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A report released in October 2019 by the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) estimates increased oil and natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing  (“fracking”) saves American families $203 billion annually on gasoline and electricity bills. This breaks down to $2,500 in savings per family per year.

“From 2007 to 2019, innovation in shale production brought an eight-fold increase in extraction productivity for natural gas and a nineteen-fold increase for oil,” the report states. “These productivity gains have reduced costs and spurred production to record-breaking levels. As a result, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both commodities, surpassing Russia in 2011 (for natural gas) and Saudi Arabia and Russia in 2018 (for oil). CEA estimates that greater productivity has reduced the domestic price of natural gas by 63 percent as of 2018 and led to a 45 percent decrease in the wholesale price of electricity. Shale production has also reduced the global price of oil by 10 percent as of 2019.”

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Radicals Bully NH Munich Conference Center…Force Cancellation Of 13th Skeptic Climate Conference!

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By – Re-Blogged From No Tricks Zone

Just like the 1930s, and again Munich. There’s no question that freedom of science and speech are under heavy attack in Germany after dozens of distinguished but dissenting scientists have seen their long planned science conference cancelled due to intimidation by leftwing extremists.

Germany caving in to leftist extremists. A skeptic climate conference gets cancelled at last minute due to coercion. Image: Antifa action in Phoenix, 2017, cropped from Carptrash – I, Einar Kvaran, License: CC BY-SA 4.0

This latest climate conference cancellation comes just after leftists coerced the University of Hamburg to disinvite political leaders from making speeches.

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Climate Extremism in the Age of Disinformation

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By Roy W. Spencer – Re-Blogged From Roy Spencer’s Blog

Do the global warming wars ever change anyone’s mind?

I suppose there are a few people whose minds have been changed. As I recall, Judith Curry has said Climategate (now “celebrating” its 10 year anniversary) was her wake-up call that institutionalized climate science might not be all it claims to be. She is now a well-informed and unabashed skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans.

While I’m sure there are other examples, the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth.

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Gold Mid-Tiers’ Q3’19 Fundamentals

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By Adam Hamilton – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

The mid-tier gold miners just reported their results for a phenomenal gold quarter.  In Q3’19 this metal surged after its first bull-market breakout in years, driving much-higher prevailing prices.  That should’ve led to soaring profits for these mid-tiers in the sweet spot for stock-price upside potential.  Last quarter’s results are the most important this sector has seen in a long time, a key fundamental test for gold miners.

Four times a year publicly-traded companies release treasure troves of valuable information in the form of quarterly reports.  Required by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, these 10-Qs and 10-Ks contain the best fundamental data available to traders.  They dispel all the sentiment distortions inevitably surrounding prevailing stock-price levels, revealing corporations’ underlying hard fundamental realities.

The global nature of the gold-mining industry complicates efforts to gather this important data.  Many mid-tier gold miners trade in Australia, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and other countries with quite-different reporting requirements.  These include half-year reporting rather than quarterly, long 90-day filing deadlines after fiscal year-ends, and very-dissimilar presentations of operating and financial results.

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What’s green, employs ten times as many people as the “fossil fuel industry” and fake?

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

What’s green, employs ten times as many people as the “fossil fuel industry” and fake? The “green economy“.

Hat tip to Kevin McNeill…

US green economy has 10 times as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry

ENVIRONMENT 15 October 2019
By Adam Vaughan

The green economy has grown so much in the US that it employs around 10 times as many people as the fossil fuel industry – despite the past decade’s oil and gas boom.

The fossil fuel sector, from coal mines to gas power plants, employed around 900,000 people in the US in 2015-16, government figures show. But Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin at University College London found that over the same period this was vastly outweighed by the green economy, which provided nearly 9.5 million jobs, or 4 per cent of the working age population. The pair defined the green economy broadly, covering everything from renewable energy to environmental consultancy.

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Climate Science Has Died

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Reposted from the Fabius Maximus blog

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 17 November 2019

Summary:  Let’s hit “pause” in the climate wars and see how we got here, where we are going, and what we can learn from this mess.

“I can’t use this result. It doesn’t support the narrative.“

Climate scientist at work - Dreamstime-99364552

Photo 99364552 © Standret – Dreamstime.

At the time I thought this statement was daft. Now I see that she was spot on, but not in the way she meant it. And with results that she did not intend.

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150 Years Of Bank Credit Expansion Is Near Its End

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By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From GoldMoney

The legal formalisation of the creation of bank credit commenced with England’s 1844 Bank Charter Act. It has led to a regular cycle of expansion and collapse of outstanding bank credit.

Erroneously attributed to business, the origin of the boom and bust cycle is found in bank credit. Monetary policy evolved with attempts to control the cycle with added intervention, leading to the abandonment of sound money. Today, we face infinite monetary inflation as a final solution to 150 years of monetary failures. The coming systemic and monetary collapse will probably mark the end of cycles of bank credit expansion as we know it, and the final collapse of fiat currencies.

This article is based on a speech I gave on Monday to the Ludwig von Mises Institute Europe in Brussels.

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Research: DMT’s Effects on Brainwaves Could Explain Consciousness

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By Kristin Houser – Re-Blogged From Futurism
“It’s like dreaming but with your eyes open.”

In April, Imperial College London launched the Centre for Psychedelic Research, a first-of-its-kind facility focused on the study of mind-altering substances.

While much of that research has centered on psilocybin and LSD, one team out of the Centre recently published a study focused dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the ingredient that makes the psychoactive brew ayahuasca cause hallucinations — and they say the insights gleaned from that research could help us finally understand consciousness.

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Gold Stocks Now?

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By GE Christenson– Re-Blogged From The Deviant Investor

You know the monetary drill:

  1. Commercial bankers and central bankers create more digital dollars from nothing, inject them into the economy, dollars devalue and prices rise. They issue press releases claiming they are doing a great job.
  2. Commercial and global central bankers are counterfeiting (legally). This benefits the financial and political elite. Don’t expect this nonsense to change.
  3. Prices for stocks, food, consumer goods and gold rise as dollars buy less.
  4. Inflation statistics (official) are “managed” to show minimal inflation. Check out the Chapwood Index.

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Oil Begins To Move Lower

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By Chris Vermeulen – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

Recently, we posted a multi-part research post suggesting a collapse in Crude Oil could be setting up and how we believe this decline in energy prices may lead to a broader market collapse in the near future.  Crude oil fell more than 3% on November 19 in what appears to be a major price reversal.  On November 20, inventory levels and other key economic data will be presented – could the price of oil collapse even further over the next 60+ days?

Here is a link to our most recent multi-part article about Crude Oil from November 13 (just a week ago): https://www.thetechnicaltraders.com/what-happens-to-the-global-economy-if-oil-collapses-below-40-part-i/

Our original research chart from July 2019

Our original research post, from July 2019, included this chart showing our Adaptive Dynamic Learning (ADL) price modeling system and where it believed the price of oil would go in the future.  This chart highlights expected price ranges and directions all the way into April 2020 with a low price level near $25 somewhere between February and April 2020.  Is Oil really going to reach a low price near $25 ppb in the near future?

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Scientists Place Humans in “Suspended Animation” for First Time

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By Victor Tangermann – Re-Blogged From Futurism

They cool your body — and replace your blood with an ice-cold salt solution.

A team of doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have placed humans in “suspended animation” for the first time as part of a trial that could enable health professionals to fix traumatic injuries such as a gunshot or stab wound that would otherwise end in death, according to a New Scientist exclusive.

Suspended animation — or “emergency preservation resuscitation,” in medical parlance — involves rapidly cooling a patient’s body down to ten to 15 degrees Celsius (50 to 59 Fahrenheit) by replacing their blood with an ice-cold salt solution.

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People With Half Their Brains Removed Doing Surprisingly Well

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By Dan Robitzski – Re-Blogged From Futurism
“They have intact language skills. When I put them in the scanner, we made small talk, just like the hundreds of other individuals I have scanned.”

One of the greatest marvels of the human brain is neuroplasticity — the ability to restructure itself and adapt if chunks get damaged or removed.

Now, a new study reveals that neuroplasticity is more powerful than previously believed. In some cases, adults who had half of their brain taken out as children, in a procedure called a hemispherectomy, are living regular lives — and can have stronger neural connections than those who still had the full thing.

If scientists can figure out how that came to be, they may uncover new treatments for strokes or other forms of brain damage.

 

The new study examined the neural function and connectivity of six people, all now in their 20s and 30s, who underwent hemispherectomies between the ages of three months and 11 years, HealthDay reports. The procedure — which involves slicing the brain down the middle and taking out an entire half — is an extreme but not unheard-of treatment for children with violent, frequent, and dangerous seizures.

Hemispherectomy patients have long been known to lead normal lives after the procedure, but the piecemeal case studies didn’t reveal the extent to which the brain was able to recover. The California Institute of Technology doctors behind the new study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, say they were surprised at just how well the halved brains adapted and reorganized themselves over time.

“The people with hemispherectomies that we studied were remarkably high-functioning,” CalTech researcher Dorit Kliemann said. “They have intact language skills. When I put them in the scanner, we made small talk, just like the hundreds of other individuals I have scanned.”

“You can almost forget their condition when you meet them for the first time,” Kliemann added.

CONTINUE READING –>

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Pentagon Denies Report U.S. Mulls Pulling up to 4,000 Troops From South Korea

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Reporting by Joyce Lee in Seoul and Phil Stewart in Hanoi; Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin in Seoul, David Brunnstrom and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington of Reuters – Re-Blogged From IJR

The United States on Thursday denied a South Korean news report that it was considering withdrawing up to 4,000 troops from South Korea if it does not pay more for maintaining a 28,500-strong U.S. contingent deterring North Korean aggression.

South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported that the withdrawal of a U.S. brigade, typically 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers, had been discussed with the top brass of the U.S. military in South Korea, citing an unidentified diplomatic source in Washington.

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Marches in Hong Kong? How Many & What to Do.

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By Amanda Darrach – Re-Blogged From Columbia Journalism Review

Protests against a plan to allow extraditions to mainland China in Hong Kong, June 9, 2019. Photo: Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times

The crowd of protesters in Hong Kong on Sunday stretched more than a mile. As the city’s legislature considered a bill that would allow extraditions from Hong Kong, which is semi-autonomous, to China, Civil Human Rights Front, the group that organized the demonstration, estimated that more than a million people had come out to march. Hong Kong police, however, put the number at 240,000 people.

Crowd size is a marker for energy around a cause. “It’s hard to measure enthusiasm based on speeches or noise level,” says Steve Doig, who specializes in data-based crowd-counting as a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. “So the size of the crowd is the token that various sides will want to inflate or deflate.”

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #386

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The Week That Was: Nov 16, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “’Theories, ideas are wonderful, but to me, they become established when passing tests,’ he continued.

“’Theories of course, any bright physicist can make up theories. They could have nothing to do with reality.

“’You discover which theories are close to reality by comparing to experiments…’” – Jim Peebles, 2019 Nobel co-Laureate in physics.

Number of the Week: $143 billion over 10 years

After Climategate: Ten years ago, a scandal in climate science broke. Hackers took over a thousand emails from Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and revealed them in a series of releases. These provided the first solid evidence that the climate establishment was trying to suppress physical evidence that nature was not responding to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed and the climate modelers predicted / projected. Many of the lead authors of the IPCC Assessment Reports were involved in this suppression of physical evidence, which is contrary to the principles of the scientific method.

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The Perversity Of Negative Interest

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By Keith Weiner – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

Today, we want to say two things about negative interest rates. The first is really simple. Anyone who believes in a theory of interest that says “the savers demand interest to compensate for inflation” needs to ask if this explains negative interest in Switzerland, Europe, and other countries. If not, then we need a new theory (Keith just presented his theory at the Austrian Economics conference at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid—it is radically different).

Perverse Inventives

Second, negative interest perversely incentivizes some very perverse behaviors.

For example, suppose you could borrow at -1% and just hold the cash. Your asset stays the same, while your liability is going down. You are making a positive return for doing nothing productive! It should be obvious to an 8th grader, though perhaps not a PhD economist, that there is something wrong with this. Grossly, monstrously wrong.

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How Big Government Hurts Women

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By Carrie Lukas

Government-mandated employee perks might sound like a good way to help out working women, but, in reality, these programs do more harm than good. European women are already paying the price, and American women might be next. Carrie Lukas, President of Independent Women’s Forum, explains how keeping the government out of the workplace goes a long way toward keeping women in it.

Please watch the VIDEO.

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Repocalypse: The Little Crisis that Roared

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By David Haggith – Re-Blogged From The Great Recession Blog

That didn’t take long. I just published an article showing how the Fed had responded with a quarter of a trillion dollars to save the economy from what it claimed was a mere blip. Since then, the recession-causing Repocalypse I’ve warned of has roared around the world, forcing the Fed to amplify its response again.

The Fed’s planners just cannot outrun the little monster they created. It is growing as quickly as they increase their running speed. In the article I just alluded to, I also stated,

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German Parliament Approves Climate Protection Plan

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Re-Blogged From DW

Germany’s parliament voted on Friday to formally accept most of a climate protection packet. The legislation aims to cut Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions to 55% of the 1990 levels by 2030.

Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz portrayed at Fridays for Future protest (Reuters/M. Tantussi)

German lawmakers voted to enshrine climate protection in law on Friday.

The new legislation will target sectors like energy, transport and housing. It aims to cut Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions to 55% of the 1990 levels by 2030. Parts of the so-called “climate packet” still need approval.

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Legacy of Climategate – 10 Years Later

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[For those of you who don’t know what ClimateGate is, look over the documents and other material at: https://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/  –Bob]

By Judith Curry – Re-Blogged From WUWT

My reflections on Climategate 10 years later, and also reflections on my reflections of 5 years ago.

Last week, an email from Rob Bradley reminded me of my previous blog post The legacy of Climategate: 5 years later. That post was the last in a sequence of posts at Climate Etc. since 2010 on Climategate; for the entire group of posts, see  [link]  Rereading these was quite a blast from the past.

While I still mention Climategate in interviews, the general reaction I get is ‘yawn . . . old hat . . . so 2010 . . . nothingburger . . . the scientists were all exonerated . . . the science has proven to be robust.’ I hadn’t even thought of a ’10 years later’ post until Rob Bradley’s email.

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U.S. Relations With China Just Were Destroyed

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By Michael Snyder – Re-Blogged From http://themostimportantnews.com

Our relationship with China just went from bad to worse, and most Americans don’t even realize that we just witnessed one of the most critical foreign policy decisions of this century. The U.S. Senate just unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the Chinese are absolutely seething with anger. Violent protests have been rocking Hong Kong for months, and the Chinese have repeatedly accused the United States of being behind the protests. Whether that is true or not, the U.S. Senate has openly sided with the protesters by passing this bill, and there is no turning back now.

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African Development Bank Will Not Fund Kenya Coal Project

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By Alexander Winning – Re-Blogged From Reuters

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The African Development Bank (AfDB) will not fund a coal-fired power plant project in Kenya and has no plans to finance new coal plants in future, senior AfDB officials told Reuters.

FILE PHOTO: African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina speaks to press after a meeting of the board in Abidjan, Ivory Coast October 31, 2019. REUTERS/Thierry Gouegnon/File Photo

The Abidjan-based lender published an environmental and social impact assessment in May for the Lamu project, which was planned near a UNESCO World Heritage Site but which was halted by a local environmental tribunal.

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Congress Close to Passing Anti-Robocall Legislation

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Re-Blogged From Liberty Headlines

Laws seek to take on ‘call-spoofing’ scourge and empower authorities to go after spammers…

(Associated Press) It’s looking like an anti-robocall bill will get sent to President Donald Trump this year, helping tackle an infuriating problem in the U.S.

House and Senate leaders said Friday they’ve reached an agreement in principle on merging their two versions of bills against robocalls.

Details about what’s in the final bill are still to come, but legislators say it will require phone companies to verify that phone numbers are real, and to block calls for free. It will also give government agencies more ability to go after scammers.

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Engineer Finds Way to Pull Diseases From Blood Using Magnets

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By Kristin Houser – Re-Blogged From Futurism
“In theory, you can go after almost anything. Poisons, pathogens, viruses, bacteria…”

A British engineer has found a way to filter unwanted cells from blood using magnets — and his tool could be used in clinical trials as soon as next year.

Thanks to existing research, biochemical scientist George Frodsham knew it was possible to force magnetic nanoparticles to bind to specific cells in the body. But while other researchers did so primarily to make those cells show up in images, he wondered whether the same technique might allow doctors to remove unwanted cells from the blood.

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Pathway 2045 – Part 6

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By Rud Istvan – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Here are links to Part 1 ,  Part 2,   Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5~ctm

This is the sixth and final guest post dissecting SoCalEd’s new roadmap to full California (well, at least their southern California service territory) decarbonization by 2045. This last part of the plan is ‘simple’: sink the remaining CO2 through either biological or physical (carbon capture and sequestration, CCS) means.

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CalEPA Studying Ways to Sunset the California Economy

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By Ronald Stein – Re-Blogged From Fox and Hounds

Founder and Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure of PTS Advance, headquartered in Irvine, California

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

California is about to take one giant step toward following Germany’s failed climate goals which should be a wake-up all for governments everywhere. Yes, you guessed it, our legislatures have authorized CalEPA in the 2019 – 2020 California State budget and Assembly Bill AB 74 to conduct studies and identify strategies to manage the decline of in-state crude oil production and decrease demand and supply of fossil fuel.

Germany tried to step up as a leader on climate change, by phasing out nuclear, and pioneered a system of subsidies for industrial wind and solar that sparked a global boom in manufacturing those technologies. Today, Germany has the highest cost of electricity in the world.

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Oxygen Mystery on Mars

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By NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center – Re-Blogged From Eureka Alert

For the first time in the history of space exploration, scientists have measured the seasonal changes in the gases that fill the air directly above the surface of Gale Crater on Mars. As a result, they noticed something baffling: oxygen, the gas many Earth creatures use to breathe, behaves in a way that so far scientists cannot explain through any known chemical processes.

 

This is a sunset at the Viking Lander 1 site, 1976. Credit: NASA/JPL

This is a sunset at the Viking Lander 1 site, 1976. Credit: NASA/JPL

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Roadmap 2045 – Part 4

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By Rud Istvan, – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Here are links to Part 1 ,  Part 2,   Part3~ctm

This is the fourth of 6 posts dissecting SoCalEd plan for a carbon neutral service territory by 2045. It is a straightforward plan to electrify 70% of buildings. Why 70%? Because electrifying pre-existing commercial buildings beyond lighting and AC is virtually impossible.

The following SoCalEd image makes this reasonably clear.

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1 Meter of Sea Level Rise Now “Inevitable”… Eventually

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

When I first read this, I was all set to ridicule it mercilessly… until I noticed the timeline…

INHERIT THE WATER —
It keeps going: 1 meter sea-level rise by 2300 is now inevitable
Analyzing a longer timeline, even if we ceased emissions in 2030.

SCOTT K. JOHNSON – 11/7/2019

Climate change is often discussed in reference to where things will be in 2100, but the story obviously doesn’t end that year. Sea-level rise in particular has an impressive amount of inertia, and a very long time will pass before it has played out fully. What will our emissions have set in motion on longer time scales?

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Californian Climate Fanatics Demand All Electric Homes

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Because we all know how reliable Californian electricity is.

No more fire in the kitchen: Cities are banning natural gas in homes to save the planet
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Fix global warming or cook dinner on a gas stove?
That’s the choice for people in 13 cities and one county in California that have enacted new zoning codes encouraging or requiring all-electric new construction.

The codes, most of them passed since June, are meant to keep builders from running natural gas lines to new homes and apartments, with an eye toward creating fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources.

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Scientists Extract Hydrogen Gas From Oil and Bitumen, Giving Potential Pollution-Free Energy

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By Goldschmidt Conference – Re-Blogged From PhysOrg

Scientists have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen (H2) from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity; hydrogen is regarded as an efficient transport fuel, similar to petrol and diesel, but with no pollution problems. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Interestingly, this process can be applied to mainstream oil fields, causing them to produce hydrogen instead of oil.

Hydrogen powered vehicles, including cars, buses, and trains, have been in development for many years. These vehicles have been acknowledged to be efficient, but the high price of extracting the Hydrogen from oil reserves has meant that the technology has not been economically viable. Now a group of Canadian engineers have developed a cheap method of extracting H2 from oil sands. They are presenting this work at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona.

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Pathway 2045 Part 3

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By Rud Istvan, – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This is the third in a six part series.

Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2~ctm

The second SoCalEd component to its roadmap to decarbonization by 2045 is 75% vehicle electrification.

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Thanks to the California DMV annual registration database, we can learn what that implies. There were in 2018 about 25.6 million registered automobiles, 5.3 million non-CVRA trucks (pickups, delivery vans), 0.5 million CVRA trucks (Class 7-8 diesels), and 1.8 million ‘Foreign IRP’ trucks (CVRA licensed in another state but also registered to operate in California). The total is about 33.2 million vehicles excluding trailers and motorcycles. Since it is impossible (despite Elon Musk’s TESLA fantasies) for working pickups and big trucks to be meaningfully electrified with foreseeable battery technology, the SoCalEd roadmap implicitly means virtually all automobiles (25.6/33.2=>77%) will be full electric in 2045.

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The Brave New World of Ample Oil

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By Tilak Doshi – Re-Blogged From WUWT

In the oil universe, the September 14th attack on Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities is comparable to the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in New York City. Yet, the taking out of half of the Kingdom’s oil output led not to an oil shock but a whimper. Barely two weeks after the brazen attack, oil headlines were once again dominated by fears of over-supply and falling prices amidst a slowing global economy.  Following an initial 20% intra-day price surge after the attack, the benchmark Brent crude oil price quickly retraced its steps back down to pre-attack levels.

The US oil production surge benefits Asia

The shift from a perceived world of oil scarcity to abundance has been brought about in an astonishingly short period of time by the advent of the “fracking” revolution in the US. This combines horizontal drilling and hydraulically-fracturing shale rock with high-pressure liquids to extract “unconventional” oil and gas. In the past decade, US crude oil production more than doubled. By mid-2019, US production was rated at over 12 million b/d, surpassing Russian and Saudi Arabian output as the world’s largest.

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Gold Price Pre-Fed Update

usissuescom Monetary Policy, Stocks & Commodities , , , , ,
By GE Christenson – Re-Blogged From The Deviant Investor

President Roosevelt made owning gold for American citizens, with minor exceptions, illegal in 1933. See Executive Order # 6102. Begin the DOW to gold ratio analysis in 1933.

Many people have discussed the Dow to gold ratio. It fell from over 40 in the year 2000 when the DOW (11,750) was expensive, and gold sold for less than $300. In those days paper assets (DOW, bonds, S&P500 stocks) looked like they would rise forever.

Everything changes.

By 2011 the DOW (12,800) had fallen 10% from its 2007 high and gold peaked at an all-time high over $1,900. The ratio dropped to about 7.

The ratio rises and falls in long waves.

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In Case Of A Future Banking System Breakdown

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By Stefan Gleason – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

The banking system may not be as sound we’ve been led to believe. It continues to get propped up through central bank interventions, which strongly suggests it wouldn’t be able to stand on its own.

Last Thursday, the Federal Reserve injected another $115 billion into financial markets via “temporary operations.” The Fed is targeting the repo market in particular, through which banks lend to each other on an overnight basis.

For some reason, banks have grown weary of committing liquidity to each other in what should be one of the safest lending markets on the planet.

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2020 Vision

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By USAGOLD – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

Five charts to contemplate as we prepare for the New Year

 1. Gold’s annual returns 2000 to present

In the February edition of this newsletter, we ran an article under the headline:  Will 2019 be the year of the big breakout for gold? Though we would not characterize gold’s move to the upside so far this year as ‘the big breakout,’ 2019 has been the best year for gold since 2010 even with the recent correction taken into account.  Back in September when the price gold reached $1550 per ounce – up almost 22% on the year – 2019 was looking more like a breakout year. Now with the move back to the $1460 level, the market mood has become more restrained. As it is, gold is up 15 of the last 19 years and still up 14.45% so far this year.

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