Update on bee deaths

According to Michael Snyder, about a third of US bees were wiped out this year. He goes on to discuss suspected causes and give a long list of important crops that require insect pollination.

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Peak Oil, EROEI and the Muffled Drum

An interesting thing happened last month. The Oil Drum, a well-regarded website + blog, announced it was ceasing operations and archiving itself for posterity. Well, everything has its day - we can all list blogs that were thriving a few years back but are no longer with us.

Some have suggested it was the extraordinary shale-based renaissance of US gas and oil production that did for the Drum. Probably not. But, fairly or unfairly, the Drum was associated with 'peak oil', which at its simplest is a view (or theory or doctrine or whatever) that global oil production - as a function of oil-in-the-ground - is doomed to peak, after which we start 'running out of oil'.

At its simplest, it is Malthusian hogwash. Of course, there are more nuanced versions than that, and the Drum shouldn't be tarred with the brush one would use for countering hogwash. Much more important is the concept of EROEI - energy return on energy invested, which has been another Drum favourite. And this concept really does bear careful consideration. Declining EROEI could be the end of civilisation as we know it for, in the immortal words of James Lovelock - "civilisation is energy-intensive". Better believe it.

So - no more drum-beat. But you'll not stop hearing about EROEI.


This post appeared first on the Capitalists@Work blog


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Are homicide and inequality inversely related?

http://www.libertarianprepper.com/the-sinister-roots-of-socialism/gini-index-usa/

 

 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

 

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Who's Who in the UK Government

See the full-sized list here (pdf).

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UK News media "among most corrupt in the world"

Transparency.org's 2013 interactive Global Corruption Barometer lists only 4 countries (out of 107) where the media are perceived to be among the most corrupt institutions: Egypt, Australia, New Zealand - and the UK.

Less surprisingly, political parties in about half of the 107 countries are also perceived to be corrupt. And that includes the UK.

Here, it's getting worse. When I first looked at Tranparency's surveys in 2008, the UK's overall perceived-corruption score had dropped from 8.4 the year before, to 7.7 (10 represented squeaky clean). The scoring is slightly different now - out of 100 - but for 2012 the British figure is 74, which I assume translates to 7.4 under the old system (the US scores 73).

Admittedly, these surveys are about the perception of corruption, and news-fed democracies may perhaps tend to be more cynical nations. But perceptions matter, and this decline in public trust, also shown in dwindling electoral turnouts, threatens the legitimacy and stability of our system of government.

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Interest rates will trigger the meltdown - Hugo Salinas Price

In King World News (2 August) Hugo Salinas Price alerts us to the threat of interest rate rises, which he describes as "fatal" and leading to worldwide "massive bankruptcies".

I'd known that derivatives are a huge market; what I hadn't realised was that the overwhelming majority of the contracts are related to interest rates.

The graph below is a visualisation of data from this Wikipedia article on the derivatives market:

Theoretically all the bets net off against each other, but we've seen what happens when a counterparty defaults (Lehman etc). Now consider that the annual GDP of the USA is only 3% of the notional value of interest rate contracts alone.

Frightening.

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Trees in the mist

Ronald Reagan is widely quoted as having said trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

Not true of course, but not entirely without foundation either. Trees and other vegetation, particularly conifers, emit terpenes, aromatic chemicals whose generic name is derived from turpentine. The delightful aroma of pine resin in conifer woodlands comes from chemicals such as α-pinene and β-pinene.

Yet according to the National Physical Laboratory :-

• In addition to anthropogenic emissions, the earth’s natural vegetation releases huge amounts of organic compounds into the air.
• An estimated 1300 Tg C of terpenes a year are emitted, 10 times more than anthropogenic emissions.

 As far as climate is concerned, the NPL has this to say:-

• Terpene emissions are expected to rise sharply as global temperatures rise.
• As carbon dioxide levels increase, the earth will warm and higher levels of terpenes will be emitted.
• This will increase cloud formation, which will increase the optical thickness of clouds resulting in an increase in the reflection of sunlight back into space.
• Terpenes constitute a significant potential for feedback mechanisms in the climate.
• Terpenes also mediate the generation of ozone in the lower atmosphere.

 Dramatic stuff - even somewhat over-dramatic. Yet all this does not imply Reagan was correct because terpenes are not pollutants. They may be involved in the photochemical reactions which give that attractive haze over distant forests, but haze isn’t smog and doesn’t have the same effect on lungs and mucous membranes.

Without oxides of nitrogen from, for example vehicle exhaust emissions, tree terpenes alone would not cause the notorious photochemical smog which first appeared in Los Angeles in the 1940s and subsequently other large, sunny cities.

To my mind, this is why electric vehicles such as trams make sense in large cities, especially those where photochemical smogs are a problem. The issue isn’t CO2 emissions as many now seem to suppose, but old-fashioned air pollution such as oxides of nitrogen, unburned fuel and particulates. Sunlight just adds to the problem but that was there long before we decided to whizz around in metal boxes.

Electric vehicles are not pollution-free modes of transport of course. They are effectively powered by whatever is used to recharge their batteries, but any polluting effects are moved away from the city to the power station and subject to simpler and more stringent regulation.

Reagan pointed the finger at trees, climate alarmists point to CO2 and as so often a fog of dramatic misdirection hits the headlines.

Anthropogenic fog?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.