not that i would ever have the final word. ....capitol,including the billions of dollars of outdated and perverse subsides of oil,coal,tar sand, and pipeline companies must be reduced and re-invested towards the development of enviromentally sustainable energy generation.... .it is the way out of this. .... sorry,base104,i am against fracking,fully, completely,and all drilling....we are second in oil production in the world.it is still not enough to sustain.alt fuels,bio,hydrogen,elec,wind,solar, are the new economy. ....you could be the guy sitting on the horse,yelling at the model ts rolling by,or,be the one looking forward....helping create a new economy,one that is in the new millenium
Even Neil's gettin' into it, here's a snip from his blog:
It is clear that we are not going to be able to survive a constant barrage of "Sandy"-like global warming super storms. By the time we finish rebuilding from one there will be another and another. We need to address the cause with reasonable laws that encourage change and responsibility.
The Chief might dig this, as it has to do with adapting:
Heated debate
The costs of climate change can be mitigated if economic activity moves in response
Dec 8th 2012 | from the print edition
WHEN Superstorm Sandy roared ashore in late October and the lights of lower Manhattan went out, New Yorkers were given a stark vision of a possible future. Climate-change science is still a realm of great uncertainty but there is consensus that the planet is warming dangerously and that people are to blame. A recent report commissioned by the World Bank warned that the world is on track to have a global mean temperature that is 4°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. If so, sea levels could rise by between half a metre and a metre by the end of the century, threatening hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities. Other regions would face the threats of droughts, bigger storms and changing rainfall patterns. That entails not just human costs but economic ones, too.
The question that preoccupies Klaus Desmet of the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University in a new NBER working paper* is whether there are ways to manage the impact of changing weather patterns by moving the location of economic activity. They note that roughly 90% of global production uses just 10% of available land. If that 10% is threatened, activity may at least theoretically shift to bits of the 90% made more hospitable by climate change.
Messrs Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg build a model economy, and then batter it with different temperature increases to see how it reacts. In their benchmark analysis, they allow people to move around as they like in response to these changes. In extreme scenarios freedom of movement doesn’t make much difference: temperatures reduce global agricultural productivity to near zero, “implying the end of human life on Earth”. But in more moderate scenarios, rising global temperatures improve agricultural productivity in northerly climes. Welfare losses are small because there are big movements of people northward. A relatively small temperature increase (by the model’s standards), of 2°C at the Equator rising to 6°C at the North Pole, causes a shift in the average locations of agricultural and manufacturing activity of about ten degrees of latitude by the end of this century—roughly the distance between Dallas and Chicago, or Frankfurt and Oslo.
Restrictions on movement dramatically increase welfare costs, however. The authors modify the model by introducing a rigid border at the 45th parallel, which runs through the northern United States and across southern Europe, with roughly 1 billion people living above the line and 6 billion below. The model finds that rising temperatures actually benefit the northern section of the globe. Agricultural productivity grows and northern manufacturers enjoy more trade with the throngs that mass just south of the border. Welfare in the south falls, by contrast, by about 5% on average relative to the no-warming case. The model is simplistic, of course, but it suggests that limits on migration have a big effect on the costs of global warming.
Unfettered migration is obviously a lot more likely within countries. But even then, wouldn’t it matter if people left a really productive place for somewhere less dynamic? Real output per person in the New York area is some 70% higher than in Buffalo, for instance; a New Yorker fleeing upstate may suffer a large income loss. Matthew Kahn of the University of California, Los Angeles, reckons that this, too, is manageable. In his book “Climatopolis”, Mr Kahn points out that the productivity of rich places often has little to do with unique geographical advantages. Instead, cities profit as magnets for skilled workers attracted by other skilled workers. New York’s financial wealth stems not from its port but from its brimming community of firms and workers.
Mr Kahn argues that as the climate warms, vulnerable areas like lower Manhattan will become less desirable relative to rival centres: midtown Manhattan, New York’s suburbs, or Chicago. Rational workers and firms should assess the risk of floods or the like and migrate, raising the productivity of the destination locations as they arrive. The move wouldn’t be costless. Investors in lower Manhattan property would suffer large losses, for example. Yet Mr Kahn says there could also be gains, as activity shifts from cities with an out-of-date capital stock (like New York’s ageing infrastructure) to more modern areas. The speed of climate change may also help, reckons Paul Romer of New York University, if broader shifts in habitability occur slowly enough to allow a relatively smooth geographic adjustment. But change may be too quick and unpredictable to allow for easy adaptation.
Over to the policymakers
Governments may hinder the process of adjustment. Subsidies like government-provided flood insurance to those in vulnerable areas may mute price signals that would otherwise encourage people to leave threatened places before they have no choice. “Climate-safe” cities, if any exist, might limit their own development when confronted by flows of migrants from vulnerable areas. That, in turn, could deflect migrants, who might wind up not at the next best alternative to lower Manhattan but the tenth-best option. If those who stand to gain from warming use government to protect their interests, the costs of climate change could soar.
Policymakers can also help. Messrs Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg reckon that a carbon tax would raise the relative incomes of innovative cities that rely more on ideas than natural resources for production, encouraging people to migrate toward more productive places. Mr Kahn also worries about market failures. Areas that lose value as they become riskier may become magnets for poor families seeking affordable housing. That may set the stage for humanitarian disaster. Climate change demands a lot of governments that have done little to justify confidence.
Sources
"Turn down the heat: Why a 4 degree Celsius warmer world must be avoided", World Bank report, November 2012
"On the spatial impact of global warming", by Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, NBER Working paper #18546, November 2012
"Climatopolis", by Matthew Kahn, Basic Books, September 2010
Economist.com/blogs/freeexchange
My emphasis on "simplistic..."
Much is not even mentioned, such as the continued viability of the oceans as a food supplier.
Still all this stuff is worth considering as it is the most likely scenario we will be facing. This from comments section sums it up pretty well:
I see two main problems with this.
First, that minor activity that uses 90% of land, agriculture, is the basis that allows us to have everything else. You are not going to move major cereal growing areas, and no, southern Russia is already prone to droughts and wildfires.
Second, there's no way that developed countries will ever willingly let tens of millions of Africans and Indians inside their borders. What is being proposed would dwarf the current levels of immigration.
I think it is much mroe likely that developed countries will keep doing what they have done for decades: whatch people in poor countries die. Since poor countries will suffer worse and suffer first, my prediction is apathy and delay. Pretending that the damage can be so easily avoided does not help.
Which of course alludes to the morality of the dilemma. The Chiefs solution may be pragmaticaly possible for some, morally reprehensible for most.
The comments section is always a bit interesting. Mostly because it reveals that many people still insist that in fact the world is not warming at all.
But we should also consider the possibility that it will be only the next decade that looks like the last.
I think a lot of folks believe it's a long-term scenario that unfolds over many, many decades. However, I think that long view suffers from the unknown cascading effects of an Artic devoid of summer ice - that a drastic and permanent (for contemporary societal purposes) loss of Artic ice cover represents a serious tipping point whose consequences we don't as yet fully understand and may result in more rapid climate change than otherwise predicted.
12/8 Edit: the topic must be percolating as I'm just today seeing this:
The latest scientific report, which comes on the immediate heals on what campaigners called a "sham" of a climate summit in Doha, shows that the climate study released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 has proved remarkably prescient more than twenty years after its initial release.
As is this, I suppose:
Despite the accuracy of early IPCC studies and the mountains of scientific evidence that have followed, it is startling to see that politicians around the world are unable to craft treaties and confirm commitments that acknowledge the seriousness of the problem.
I haven't read all of this thread, nor am I going to, but I thought you guys would be interested in this link. it is a link to a study done by psychologists evaluating beliefs and the relationship between being a climate change skeptic and holding other beliefs. It is the final version of a peer reviewed manuscript that is accepted for publication (i.e. in press) and published electronically ahead of appearing in a journal.
It was in a news story here http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/12/10/166733644/what-do-aliens-climate-change-and-princess-di-have-in-common
Thanks - I only have time for the news article but maybe I'll check out the whole paper later. This is old stuff being replicated I think but maybe just maybe they actually dig into not just whether or not they are nuts but why. Thats the interesting stuff. Oh if only Freud was still around he would be doing cart wheels!
Before The Chief gets his wind tunnel going, I'd like to put forth this quote:
Michael Mann, a climatologist and the director of Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, elaborated in an email message to HuffPost:
There is nothing in the new IPCC report about solar forcing that isn't already well known from the peer-reviewed literature.
...
But my work, and indeed all work that I'm familiar with in this area, shows that solar forcing cannot possibly explain the warming of the past half century. In fact, solar forcing has been flat over the past fifty years during which we've seen the greatest amount of warming. There is NOTHING in the new IPCC report that in any way calls that conclusion into question.
Another year, another set of climate records. Here are the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition:
1. Hot enough for you? Though it’s only mid-December, it’s already clear that 2012 will be the hottest year on record for the contiguous United States. “The warm November virtually assures that 2012 will be the warmest year on record in the U.S.,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently observed. “The year-to-date period of January-November has been by far the warmest such period on record for the contiguous U.S.-a remarkable 1.0°F above the previous record. ” The Web site Climate Central put it this way: “There is a 99.99999999 percent chance that 2012 will be the hottest year ever recorded in the continental 48 states.”
2. More hot air. Meanwhile, global carbon-dioxide emissions continue to climb. According to figures released earlier this month by the Global Carbon Project, run by the University of East Anglia and the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the U.K., emissions hit a new record high in 2011. Global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and cement production increased by three per cent, to 34.7 billion metric tons. “These emissions were the highest in human history and 54% higher than in 1990,” the project reported.
3. The future of ice. On August 26, 2012, the extent of the Arctic sea ice shrunk to a record low, breaking the previous record, observed in the summer 2007. By the time the Arctic melt season ended, in September, ice extent was 1.27 million square miles below the 1979-2000 average. “The Arctic is the earth’s air-conditioner,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center “We’re losing that." (In The New Yorker this week, Keith Gessen writes about a new shipping route where ice used to be.)
4. The future of ice II. A team of experts from NASA and the European Space Agency reported that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are now losing three times as much ice each year as they did in the nineteen-nineties. The acceleration was particularly dramatic in Greenland, which is now losing five times as much ice as it did in the mid-nineties. “Both ice sheets appear to be losing more ice now than twenty years ago, but the pace of ice loss from Greenland is extraordinary,” Erik Ivins, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.
5. Big trees down. A study by a trio of ecologists from Australia and the U.S. found that the world’s largest trees are dying at an alarming rate. The study blamed several factors for the decline, including land-clearing, man-made changes in fire regime, and rapid climate change. “Just as large-bodied animals such as elephants, tigers and cetaceans have declined drastically in many parts of the world, a growing body of evidence suggests that large old trees could be equally imperilled,” the three warned.
6. Six degrees of separation. A report by the global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that the possibility of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—a goal agreed to by the U.S. and virtually every other nation on earth—was rapidly slipping away. “Even doubling our current rate of decarbonisation, would still lead to emissions consistent with 6 degrees of warming by the end of the century,” the report warned. (That’s 6 degrees Celsius; in Fahrenheit the figure is 10.8 degrees.)
7. Water, water. Global sea levels are rising faster than predicted, a recent report on the journal Environmental Research Letters documented. The finding has significant implications for coastal cities, like New York.
8. And the water that’s gone. Water demand from the Colorado River is going to outstrip supply in the coming decades, a federal study released this month warns. The forecast is based on a combination of population growth and climate change, and has obvious implications for the forty million people who currently depend on the river.
9. Not-so-great lakes. Last month, the Great Lakes fell to their lowest level ever recorded for November, and the lakes are within inches of reaching an all-time record low. High temperatures and low precipitation have been blamed.
10. Extreme weather. According to a report by the reinsurance giant Munich RE, the number of weather-related “loss events” in North America has quintupled over the past three decades. The report attributed this trend to several factors, including climate change: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.” The report was released just two weeks before Hurricane Sandy.
The UN..... leadership or conspiracy? Well perhaps if certain nations who are endowed with wealth that has been to a significant degree created on the backs and resources of the less wealthy were to actually provide leadership then any conspiracy, imagined or otherwise could be co-opted.
Canada, The USA, China, Russia have avoided their responsibility to lead. Russia and China likely never pretended to be worthy, but the other two sure as hell have.
Anyway, if there is a leadership vacume, you can hardly fault the UN or others from trying vainly to provide it.
Get your sh#t together America. Our useless tools have actually stated that they will do nothing until the USA leads.
Awesome vid, TGT. I'm gonna have to get me one of those masks! Fo show! An athlete/climber should be charged more to breathe than your average Walmart shopper! That CO2 is soooo evil! What about the rights of plants? Poor things, having to breathe that shite day in, day out.
Don't worry Bruce. The United Nations is the 1 world government.
See you at the bonfire!
I have been preaching from the rooftops to get off of hydrocarbons for most of my adult life.
Our economies are so wrapped up in these energy sources simply because they are very good fuels for cost vs. horsepower.
Replacements for fossil fuels have always lagged behind, mainly because there is more energy in a cup of oil than a whole gaggle of solar panels. The stuff is that energy dense, and far cheaper.
I was for a carbon tax long before climate change became a problem. As the U.S. production has declined, we have, by necessity, become chummy with some of the nastiest dictators in the world. People talk about blood diamonds, but oil probably costs about 1/10th of its weight in blood.
Now that climate change science has finally come around to the point that only the most ignorant oppose it (a generalization), it is obvious that we can't keep pumping sh#t into the atmosphere.
We will never stop using hydrocarbons as long as it is cheaper. It is that embedded in economics. About the only thing that I can say is that natural gas is by far lowest carbon emission fuel, and we should be doiing what Iran has been doing, convert the transportation fleet, or at least trucking, to natural gas.
Natural gas has always been the stepchild of coal and oil. Almost every oil well produces natural gas, and many gas wells also produce oil. They accumulate in the same way, other than the shales, and we are swimming in it.
Iran's revenue comes from oil sales. Iran also has a couple of the largest gas fields in the world. The gas is stranded too far from the market to be profitable, so the fields just sit there. Iran has been converting to NG and selling the oil that the population would guzzle at super low prices.
It makes sense.
Coal is more efficient and cheaper than natural gas for electricity. We have coal fired power plants sitting directly on top of some of the biggest natural gas deposits in the country.
Fracks are a red herring. It is too bad that they have been painted in that light, but they are a big industrial process that may last for a week, but then it eases up. When a shale gas play is going on, the countryside becomes industrialized. After the drilling is over, you just have a wellhead out there.
They have also been studied to death. Areas with methane in the groundwater have been studied to death.
I try to be a straight shooter. I don't even work gas shales. I know a lot of guys who do, and even my liberal deadhead old boss shakes his head in sorrow over the lies about it.
The northeast hates it. In the states with more production, it is literally no big deal.
The best idea is to transition to natural gas as a transportation fuel. It isn't as energy dense as oil, so you have to fill up twice as often, but fleet vehicles like busses and UPS converted to natural gas a long time ago. It costs about half as much as oil for the same distance traveled. You just have to fill up twice as often.
you know base,i do not hate fracking,its just that our groundwater here in wny is precious,i live on a creek where a chem dump happened in the 70s,you and i are still paying for its cleanup."the only thing left is a well head".you mentioned before that the wells are protected by layers of cement.that is my point of contention ,being around concrete and cement for over 30 years ,i know the moment you pour concrete in the northeast,is the moment it starts failing.if the fracking people came clean with its methods ,more people would get behind it,till then,many ,will and should question it.the finger lakes here are connected by groundwater,they do not even know where the bottom of seneca lake is.ny has a wild hydrologic identity,if that was comprimised ,bad things could happen.its nothing personal.just come clean w/the science.natural gas is a great fuel,i agree,i would rather see it being produced than mountains being mowed down in wv and pa ,for coal.not to mention coal,and its use,obvious affect on our atmosphere.w/respect,terence wilson
Cement used in modern wells is very, very, high tech. It is rare to have a channel behind the casing. It hasn't ever happened to me.
What you need to worry about is the old wells drilled up to around 1970.
The Appalachian Basin is covered with shallow gas, some of it overpressured. There are a zillion old wells out there that were not properly plugged.
The shale gas wells are so deep. For instance the Woodford is beneath 10,000 feet of rock, most of it other shale, and shale is very hard to frac.
I've also seen a lot of microseismic. That is where you lay out a 3D seismic array around a well, with long enough offsets to image the lateral, and passively listen to the frac job happen. From that you get a 3D model of every fracture popping. I've never seen one get more than a hundred feet out of zone. We use that technology to improve the amount of the gas shale that is getting fractures. It can take a year for a methane molecule to migrate five feet to a fracture, and this is with 6000 psi or so of pressure behind the molecule. The pores and pore throats are that small.
A modern oilfield cement job has to handle great pressures and high temps. It is not any kind of cement that you have seen. We also run cement bond logs over the wellbores to make sure that we have a good bond.
Fracking is just a huge industrial process. It's footprint has greatly improved in the last couple of years. Buying fresh water is a huge expense, so the recovered load water is now recycled. Even in areas where there is plenty of fresh water, it is now cheaper to just recycle it into the next well. This alone is pretty high tech, because you have to filter out all of the solids. I can't remember the company's name who came up with this, but they are stinking rich.
Old wells are the source of almost all hydrocarbon contamination. Methane in the groundwater is extremely rare. I've seen it happen twice, and those were vertical wells drilling into super high pressure gas zones. 10,000 psi and great permeability zones.
I do know of plenty of old fields which have saltwater contamination in the groundwater. In the really olden days, they would just let the groundwater run down creeks, and saltwater in the groundwater pretty much ruins it permanently.
How it usually happens is in old waterfloods. You are injecting saltwater into your oil zone and there is an old well next to you that wasn't plugged by modern regs. This old wellbore provides a perfect conduit straight up into the groundwater.
To get a waterflood permit these days, you have to have core data providing permeability and required injection pressure data. If there is an old well even close to you then that well will have to be re-entered and plugged properly. It is very hard to get a secondary recovery permit today, and trashed groundwater lawsuits in the big producing states cost millions. So it isn't something you want to risk.
It is cheap to protect groundwater with modern wells. Groundwater protection is the #1 regulatory issue in Oklahoma and Texas. We have really stout casing requirements now, and they actually aren't that expensive to follow.
Dude, if you could look over my shoulder right now, I could calm your nerves completely over casing and cement job integrity.
For one thing, you have multiple casing strings in any well now. If you blow the backside cement during a frac, you see it instantly in the control truck. The wellhead has gauges on the backside of every casing string. I've never seen it happen, but if it does you can usually fix it. If you can't, you will have to plug the well. The main purpose of the innermost production liner is to isolate your producing zone from zones above that contain saltwater.
Contamination happens in the transportation process, not the drilling. Imagine how many trucks it takes to bring 3 million gallons out on location. After it flows back it is high in chlorides and if you spill saltwater, the salt binds with clay minerals in the soil and absolutely nothing will grow. You have to report any spill over 40 gallons, and you have to dig up the soil and replace it.
As for methane in the groundwater, ala Gasland, there are huge areas of the Appalachian Basin that have methane in the groundwater already. One of the guys who lit his tap looks pretty bad. What the filmmaker didn't do is go to the other 5000 residents of the town that have methane in their groundwater.
When I was working up at Chesapeake, they have been doing pre-drilling groundwater sampling for years now. They have a whole division in geosciences which is nothing but groundwater hydrologists who map the groundwater of the whole basin. They know where the methane already is.
We have tens of thousands of fracked gas wells in Oklahoma, and probably triple that in Texas, and we don't have a problem.
The problem with the Marcellus is that there is so much bullshit out there. The general concessus is that the PR campaign has been lost and many companies won't even play up there.
The rest of the country is fine with it. I could drive you around areas where there are hundreds of shale gas wells, we could knock on doors, and ask every landowner if their water quality has changed. Nope.
We have the regulatory history to protect groundwater. The same methods are used in the Marcellus, but there is one problem up there: No suitable disposal zone.
I'll go into that if you want, but it will take another thousand words.
And I know how amazing the upper New York watershed is. The water quality is nigh perfect.
In that area I would be super duper on top of the trucking of the load water. One spill isn't going to ruin it, but any spill isn't allowed here. If you don't report one, you can go to prison.
In the early days of the Marcellus, they would take the load water (AKA flowback water) and spray it on roads to salt them in the winter, run it into rivers through municipal treatment plants, etc. etc.
You can't do that here, If you sprayed produced water onto a road to get rid of it you would end up in jail.
Hence now the recycling, which has just caught on around the country.
hahaha... I know I can't bill.... you guys couldn't afford it...
Same here. You would choke at what they pay us right now.
When oil and gas prices collapsed in the early eighties, all of the geoscience majors switched to something else.
400 students tried to get in when I did. 200 were punted from ACT and GPA scores. Another 100 were weeded out in Mineralology. Hardest class I ever took. Way worse than any graduate course.
So they would let in 100 per semester. When I graduated with my Bachelor's there were 30 left for the whole year. Out of those I only know 4 who stuck it out and stayed in the petroleum business. A whole generation is missing.
So all of the old farts died, the new kids are blisteringly smart but inexperienced. So those of us with 25 to 30 years in get brain surgery money.
Resource prices are always cyclic....gas prices have cratered to the point that shale gas has slowed to a creep. Oil is high, so everyone is drilling for oil, which we are running out of onshore.
Let us know!