Arctic ice loss (new graph)
Arctic ice shrinks to its annual minimum in (early) September and usually maxes out in April.
This graph uses one colour for each month, then graphs the monthly averages by year (based on PIOMAS data). The resulting image makes it look as if we're painting ourselves into a corner/bulls-eye.
Original posting is here:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/...loss.html#more
FSB Border Guard is looking to stand up 20 posts in the arctic. All I know is that they will be the most degenerate outposts in Russia – which is saying something.Originally Posted by Rick M
Upgrades to the Northern Fleet seem to be mechanism to (further) enrich Vladimir Vladimirovich's Peterersburg cronies more than anything else.
Rosneft signed another arctic agreement with Exxon this week.
“[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson
Personally I think that sometimes the reports of the big corporations are quite interesting and well done. RWE had a good summary of the financial impact of the German EEF. Of course they and others tend to paint the picture the way they want...
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
Damning study of biofuels
The latest item from US military researchers is a devastating critique of biofuels.
The biofuels industry has had over a month to respond/conduct damage control, but so far appears to have done nothing to refute Capt. Kiefer's data or his conclusions.
A review of this study was posted this morning:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/20...ogram-i-review
The basic problem of biofuels, low energy yield, was known for many years, see for example Pro. Tad Patzeks blog "life itself".
PV produces two order of magnitude more energy per square metre than plants and does not require land that could be used for food production.
The combination of biofules with combustion engines is stupid as stupid can be, no discussion here.
Kiefer's sources
I agree, Ulen
Kiefer credits Patzek and many others:
"The author gratefully acknowledges Randall Rush, Charles Hall, Paul Waggoner, James Bartis, Jesse Ausubel, Tim Garrett, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Freeman Dyson, Andrew Marshall, David Pimentel, Tad Patzek, Jason Hill, Wayne Henson, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, and Tom Elam for their contributions to his understanding of the issues discussed herein. Any errors are the author’s alone." - Acknowledgements (Kiefer, p. vii)
Kiefer's footnotes include references to other Peak Oil/ASPO/TOD analysts:
Murphy, Hagens, Rapier, etc.
The first peak oil book was written almost 30 years ago. "Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" (1986) states:
"A more frequent recommendation is that agriculture become a producer of energy, through the production of alcohol from crops and crop residues.
This approach has some appeal, but it's hardly a panacea. For one thing, alcohol's energy profit ratio is only slightly above 1. For another, current studies point to as much as a ninefold increase in erosion when all crop residues are removed for alcohol production." - Gever et al, p. 245
This editorial in the famous sientific-journal Angewandte Chemie by Michel Hartmut, who won his nobel prize for key work in the field of photosynthesis, is an excellent summary on the issue.
...Taken together, the production of biofuels constitutes an extremely inefficient land use. This statement is true also for the production of bioethanol from sugar cane in Brazil.
...Recommendations
Because of the low photosynthetic efficiency and the competition of energy plants with food plants for agricultural land, we should not grow plants for biofuel production. The growth of such energy plants will undoubtedly lead to an increase in food prices, which will predominantly hit poorer people. The best use of the biomass lies in its conversion into valuable building blocks for chemical syntheses. Usage of the available biomass for heating purposes or for generating electricity in power stations, thus replacing fossil fuels, is preferable over biofuel production. The saved fuels can be used for transportation purposes.
Clearing rainforests in the tropics and converting them into oil palm plantations is highly dangerous because the underlying layers of peat are oxidized and much more CO2 is released by the oxidation of organic soil material than can be fixed by the oil palms. The rainforests possess an important role for the climate and constitute a valuable resource for novel compounds for drug discovery. With respectto the carbon footprint, it would be even much better to reforest the land used to grow energy plants, because at a 1% photosynthetic efficiency, growing trees would fix around 2.7 kg of CO2 per square meter, whereas biofuels produced with a net efficiency of 0.1% would only replace fossil fuels which would release about 0.31 kg CO2 per m˛ upon combustion!
To come back to our old Saudi discussion their pricing policy gets even more criminal. We in snowy parts of the world suffer from a lower solar energy input, especially in the winter. Our batteries suffer from the cold and we need to heat our cars. This makes the economics of the combination less attractive*. The Saudis have far more energy input by the sun per m˛, hardly any opp. costs for that land use and in general suffer far less battery drain due to cold and do not need a similar of heating.The [Green] Alternative
Commercially available photovoltaic cells already possess a conversion efficiency for sunlight of more than 15%, the electric energy produced can be stored in electric batteries without major losses. This is about 150 times better than the storage of the energy from sunlight in biofuels . In addition, 80% of the energy stored in the battery is used for the propulsion of a car by an electric engine, whereas a combustion engine uses only around 20% of the energy of the gasoline for driving the wheels. Both facts together lead to the conclusion that the combination photovoltaic cells/electric battery/electric engine uses the available land 600 times better than the combination biomass/biofuels/combustion engine.
The future of our individual transport has to be electric!
A car gets heated by the thermal energy which is 'lost' to it's propulsion. This reduces it's efficiency gap compared to an electric car.
Last edited by Firn; 03-05-2013 at 05:55 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
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