Define 'Amount'.

The surface area of sea ice in the arctic as a whole is below the long term average - as it has been continuously for the last nine years.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg

However, the volume, or mass of arctic sea sea ice is calculated to be equalling last year's all time low for the time of year.

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2_CY.png?%3C?php%20echo%20time%28%29?

If this trend in the rate of melting continues, we will sea the Arctic completely ice free at its summer minimum before the end of this decade, possibly even in September 2015.

Gas - the energy of the future?

UK natural gas production fell 20% last year. It fell 15% the year before and 12% the year before that. We now import more than half the gas we burn, a lot of it inherently expensive LNG. There is growing global competition for this gas, with Japan and China amongst others. Prices have risen relentlessly in the last few years, and Sterling has decline 20% in value in the last 3 years, so we are paying near record prices. Demand for gas has fallen, because it is cheaper to burn coal, and our CO2 emissions are rocketing as a result. (we already import 2/3 of our coal, and we also import an ever increasing percentage of our oil).

Shale gas is also an inherently expensive technology, the UK reserves are uncertain, and the logistics limitations means we will never be able to ramp up shale production faster than North Sea production is falling.

Importing energy into this country is already costing our country tens of billions of pounds a year, is rising exponentially, and we are already broke.

It may be cheaper to build a gas power station than a wind farm, but if we can't afford to buy the gas, then it is no more than a giant rusting monument to our own stupidity.

shale oil

Shale oil is a light oil that is extracted from the same hole in the ground as shale gas. Recent widespread deployment of horizontal well drilling combined with multistage fracking (facturing of the source rock by pumping in liquids under high pressure) has lead to an increase of both oil and gas production in the US in recent years, US oil production has increased from 5.1Mbpd to 5.6Mbpd, but US production peaked permanently at over 10Mbpd in 1971. The US consumes about 15 mbpd of oil products, and imports about 8 -9 Mbpd at the moment (and falling rapidly). (The numbers don't add up because of 'refinery gain').

Oil Shale is a oily shale resource rock found in huge quantities in parts of the US. Nobody has ever worked out a way of extracting oil economically from it, because it uses almost as much energy to extract as is contains. It is also hugely polluting. Oil shale will NEVER be produced.

This post could not be more wrong

Global conventional oil production peaked permanently in 2006, SIX years ago.

All growth of supply has since come from tar sands, coal to liquids, and biofuels.

The price of oil is $124/barrel today an all time record when converted to Sterling or Euros.

(Brent front month futures contract). When the UK North Sea supply peaked in 2001 it was below

$20.

Tar sands and similar reserves have a future production potential of 5-10 millions barrels per day, in 10 -2 0 years time. The world burns 85 million barrels per day.

Biofuel consumption has a global potential of 3-5 million barrels per day, but all it really does is turn natural gas into ethanol or prime rain forest into palm oil plantations. The US has just cancelled its bioethanol subsidy. Last year, Brazil IMPORTED both oil and ethanol from the US!

In the last 4 years US. Europe and Japan have cut oil consumption by 3 million barrels per day. The rest of the wold has increased consumption by 4 million barrels per day.

Last year another superspike in the price of oil was only avoided by releasing 60 million barrels from the US and EU strategic reserves. There is already talk of another release in the next few months.

The global supply of oil has peaked, and economically inefficient users of oil (Europe and the US) are being systematically priced out of the global market. At the rate that China and India are expanding imports, and the global supply of available exports is shrinking, then there will be NO oil available for import to any other country by 2025.

The US has not been self-sufficient in oil since 1964. We have been net importer since 2009.

Shale gas is not cheap natural gas. The production decline rates are very high on most wells, requiring the well to be regularly re-fractured to sustain economic flow rates. The true volume of economically recoverable shale is unknown, and any figure reported by a shale gas drilling company needs to be treated as pie in the sky. It will require drilling of thousands of on-shore wells, which will be at least as disruptive and more polluting and noisy than a large scale wind farm in the same area. There is widespread hysteria about the fracturing process itself, this has been widely used in the industry for decades already, and the dangers are well understood. The earth tremors recently caused were extremely small, but there is need for careful control and clean-up regulations to avoid serious environmental impacts.

It is a fossil fuel. It is a lot less polluting than coal, which is the fuel it will replace in our power stations. It will not, however, prevent us being a net importer of natural gas because we cannot drill wells fast enough to offset North Sea decline. It will make the coming energy crisis sllightly less painful, but we are still facing fossil fuel powerdown in the next twenty years, We cannot burn what is not there.

My father worked on a little known very early computer in the early 1950s whilst in the MOD. He designed a punch tape reader for it, using compressed air. Needless to say, it didn't catch on... He did use it for early neural net and image recognition experiments, I have seen the report, dated 1954. Vertical reel to reel tape drives were still employed by the MOD in the 1980s. My hippy brother got his locks trapped in one, and had to be cut free. The drive was wrecked.

Yes, the MOD did employ hippies ... he is still there

This does not provide energy independence

Even if these initial reports are true, and oil and gas companies drumming up investment are notoriously over-optimistic, this will not stop the UK being a large, and rising net energy importer of oil, coal, (nuclear) electricity and energy infrastructure hardware.

Shale gas has stopped the USA suffering a natural gas energy crisis this last 5-10 years, but even the USA is still a net importer of natural gas. In all probability this find will still result in the UK being a net importer of gas too. Shale gas wells are notorious for being 1. expensive and 2. having very rapid production decline rates, requiring multiple refracturing of the wells, with variable success.

I am not against these wells on pollution grounds - they are no more polluting than conventional wells, but this will not result in cheaper energy bills, or prevent an overall energy crisis in this country and the whole world.

Terrorism is whatever we want it to be.

So playing a stupid prank is now terrorism.

Wasting police time, yes. Terrorism no.

Throw the book at 'em on the sentencing. Make it clear that there are real terrorists about and even a tweet can cause major panic. But a tweet is a tweet. It is not killing people or planting bombs.

Death and Statistics

There are over 2000 deaths on our roads each year. That is enough for some statistics

Like the kind of road, which for mile driven, is the most dangerous. Which turns out to be quiet B roads. There is nothing physically dangerous about about quiet B roads, it is where all the stupid drivers go to try out their (in)ability to drive at lunatic speeds without having to worry about speed cameras.

Something fishy...

Two books got more votes than the next 48 put together. Something smells of trawler rigging.

Personally I think Foundation (3rd) was the obvious winner, not least because it is the only one I have read!

Why is petrol cheaper?

Petrol and diesel are two different fractions of the same barrel of oil. There is some overlap, and they have different additives. How much you get of each is a matter of the grade of oil, the complexity of the refining process, and the relative market prices. Europe uses more diesel then petrol, the US uses far more petrol. In Western Europe, which costs more at the pump is entirely decided by the tax man. In Turkey petrol is far more expensive.

Unfortunately, the best oil grades for diesel included Libyan oil. That has caused a massive headache for European refiners, and almost stopped me buying a diesel car. Any technology that improves petrol efficiency is to be welcomed, on energy security as well as environmental grounds. Unfortunately the technology will come too late to prevent the end of the oil age.

Saudi Arabia promised to make up any shortfall in Libyan oil from their spare capacity. However, far from increasing production by 1.6 million barrels per day, they have cut it, by 0.8 million barrels/day. Because the world is 'oversupplied' with oil. At $124/barrel.

Production is finally collapsing at Ghawar, the largest oilfield in the world. Saudi Arabia is running short of oil.

The price of oil will continue to rise until global demand is choked off. In 2008 most of the demand destruction was in the USA. Where will it fall this time?

We will all drive less in the future.

The RAC are completely out of touch with reality. Congestion is falling, because we are driving less. We are driving less because we have had the worst recession in 80 years and UK fuel prices are at an all time record high. These factors are directly linked.

Global oil supplies can no longer keep up with exponentially growing world demand. Even before the US stopped deep water drilling. When the financial bubble was at maximum inflation in 2008 oil production was stalled at 86M barrels/day, and the price just kept going up until the Western World's debt bubble burst. We are now stoney broke, and being systematically outbid for soon to be declining oil supplies by China and the developing world. We are simply going to have to consume less, and drive less, year after year. The supply is limited and we cannot afford it.

So, it will be electric cars, biofuels or nothing. Mostly it will be nothing. If it takes double double dip, triple dip or permanent recession, then that is what will happen. We will be consuming a lot less oil in future.

www.theoildrum.com

yawn

This is not news.

Roman soldiers were renowned weaklings relative to Northern barbarians. They made up for that with better training, weapons tactics and discipline.

When the Vikings invaded in the 9th century they were feared as much for their giant proportions as their fighting skills.

Modern man evolved on the plains of Africa, when keeping cool whilst tracking game long distances were more important than lion wrestling skills. It is no coincidence that African runners win a lot of marathons.

Neanderthals needed to be be stockier and stronger because they lived in the icy north and had blunter weapons.

If history serves me right,

There is an unpleasant term which refers to a polity where private commercial interests like ACPO become part of the legal system of a nation. It was popular in Germany in the 1930s.

talking hot air

Jupiter is just that - a gas giant with a small , dense liquid core. The density of an ideal gas like hydrogen is proportional to its temperature, all other parameters being constant. This planet is so close to its sun, it must be much hotter. It probably has its core heated by gravitational and magnetic effects as well. The only surprise is that it hasn't boiled off into space. Perhaps it has only entered this orbit recently, and will be boiled away in a few (tens of ) million years.

Whatever you think of 'leccy cars...

...this government is bankrupt. UK plc is running out of excuses and 'the cheque is in the post' just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

Our civil service are in denial. We are not going to honour our pledges. We are going to start defaulting on our treasury bonds soon, then the IMF will come knocking and we will really learn the meaning of crisis capitalism.

Pension? What's a pension?

Very expensive electricity...

...is not avoidable.

In case you hadn't noticed, ten years ago the UK was a net energy exporter. North Sea oil and gas were a major revenue generator, for the private sector and the public purse.

UK oil production peaked in 1999 and has declined at 7% per year for a decade. Gas similarly. We are now a net importer of oil, gas, coal and (French nuclear) electricity. This is not cheap, and it is going to get a LOT more expensive. The UK government has a current account deficit of £800Billion, and yet is paying to bail out private banks who are largely owned by foreign shareholders. The banks, previously our other main revenue earner, are on life-support. What little is left of our manufacturing industry (cars, steel, wind turbines) are all being shut down.

The current value of Stirling is unsustainable. It is bound to fall hard soon.

If we don't invest very heavily in renewables, (mostly wind, some tidal) then in ten years a bankrupt UK will be importing 80% of its energy needs using ever more worthless pound notes.

Renewable energy infrastructure may not be cheap, but the wind is free, forever.

Nuclear stations will not be built fast enough to offset the decline in available energy, Without energy we do not have industrial society. The UK has a critical energy crisis.

(Not to mention the global supply peak of oil that happened last year - or climate change!)

It's well known...

That the US and the UK do not spy on their own citizens.

We spy on theirs, they spy own ours, then we exchange intelligence...

Too little too late

Passenger traffic down 5%. Freight traffic down 15%. Oil price double what it was five years ago. Air India not paying staff for two weeks. BA threatening not to pay them for a month.

The global supply of oil peaked last year, permanently. Mass aviation is dead. Shaving 5% or 10% off the fuel bill here or there will not save it. Most air travel is a luxury, not a necessity. It is a luxury the world will choose to do without.

Have you seen the price of fuel?

OK, it's probably no thirstier than a US style SUV, but the world past peak oil production last year, and after slumping in the credit crunch, the price has once more doubled in the last six months to $68/barrel.

By the time this thing is ready for production, the world will have stopped building anything thirstier than Polo bluemotion.

www.theoildrum.com

Just because it is a critical system...

...does not mean it cannot fail.

It will not stop overnight in 2010. If the coverage started dropping to a level that affected military operations, then a satellite would be in orbit in 24 hours.

However, the US military do not give a monkey's fart about supporting critical civilian infrastructure.

And in the long run, it will crash and burn, just like the rest of IT.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/economics-of-decline.html

For an unbiased analysis of options...

Read David McKay's 'without hot air' free at

www.withouthotair.com

He knows his chips. Hydrogen stinks.

Duhh

We are moving back to Victorian levels of teaching. By age ten I was doing independent research and writing reports on the history of timekeeping. These days you are lucky if a ten year old can tell the time on an analogue watch. By maths they mean arithmetic, useful for the little consumers they are being trained to be, but it will teach you nothing about the fundamentals of maths.

We need less emphasis on conforming to the median. As long as schools meet their targets the best and the worst just get ignored.

Don't I know it!

In addition to this, Parcelforce REQUIRE my organisation to use this interface to log all our parcels, and it is impossible to link to the site directly from our intranet, requiring our operators to double-type the full dispatch details for all our orders. What's more, they need to run PC emulation on their Macs even to to do that.

We ship a lot of parcels to many countries.

Didn't stop the bicycles...

...here in Cambridge.

I walked the first 200 metres of ungritted road just to be safe. I didn't want to be totaled by an out of control 4X4 on the rat run that my suburban road has become.

Four miles to work and only two minutes slower than usual.

Fiddling whilst Rome burns...

Thanks to the European free market in natural gas, and political/business dispute in eastern Europe, our national winter reserves are at the lowest level for several years. We may not import gas from Russia, but for three weeks we were exporting it to Europe as fast as week could pump it. If we see another cold spell like we did two weeks ago, we could yet see power cuts.

Regardless of the global energy situation, the UK is rapidly running out of fossil fuel, and given the hopeless state of our national finances, we will find it very expensive to be importing 80% of our energy in a few years time. We need all the indigenous energy we can get, and for all it's faults, wind power is cheap and quick to install, cheap to run and almost free to decommission. Recent worldwide experience with running and building nuclear is that they are prone to huge cost overruns and delivery delays, and our existing fleet is lucky to get 60% of boilerplate capacity. I'm not saying all nuclear is bad, but right now we need to be building as much capacity of both as fast as we can because ten years from now we will be grateful for every watt, at ten times the price (which is probably what it will cost us).

Don't ya just love it?

The great advantage of conspiracy theorists is that it is impossible to prove them wrong. Just imagine the lawer's fees if a UFOlogist was injured or killed by a falling , broken turbine blade, as he sought to retrieve incontrovertible proof of our alien overlords. Of course site security has been beefed up. We must keep that evidence (of inadequate maintenance? ) from the public at all costs.

The sad thing is that it all distracts from serious conspiracies like the stitch up of alternative energy suppliers by the nuclear lobby....

This is old hat.

There have been disaster movies already based on this scenario. I remember seeing one in which some astronauts got fried.

File it under 'another potential disaster we can do nothing to prepare for, so may as well ignore'.

In case you haven't noticed, we have already entered 'the long emergency' as industrial society collides head on with finite global resource constraints. I would be very surprised if GPS satellites are still operating when this solar storm hits.

Try reading 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' by Tainter or less academically, 'Collapse' by Diamond. 'The Long Descent' by Grier sounds good, too.

Bad answer to the wrong question

Hydrogen is an engineering disaster. It is expensive and inefficient to make , the current primary source being - you guessed it - fossil fuels. It is difficult and dangerous to store or transport. It's energy density is low. Fuels cells are expensive because they use rare and/or toxic and expensive metals and minerals that are global short supply. Converting the existing transport infrastructure to support hydrogen would cost incredible amounts of money and resources - that the world does not have to spare.

The world is facing a global energy crisis. Wasting millions on a flash but totally unsustainable technology is a short cut to economic collapse. We need to spend what limited resources we have left learning to adapt to a low energy future. We will ALL be using a lot less energy 20 years from now. Adapt or go without.

Just remember...

This is a leaked list of data of untested quality and veracity. In these days of rampant

identity theft, just because someone's name is on a nominal membership list does not

equate to that person being the party that put it on the list...

it has already been noted that the list clearly includes non-existent addresses.

Pathetic

Speed cameras were originally designed to stop people speeding. Speeding being defined as faster than the locally declared speed limit. ALL speeding is dangerous, because ALL speeding vehicles are driving in a way that other road users cannot predict, and therefore ALL other road users need to drive more defensively ALL THE TIME just in case some idiot decides he has more right to get there sooner than other road users. It is deeply antisocial behaviour.

I agree that clearly marked bright yellow cameras in well signposted locations are worse than useless. ALL SPEEDING IS WRONG ALL THE TIME. It makes ALL roads more dangerous.

Anyway, ten year from now speeding will be a thing of the past. Petrol prices might be down a bit because the credit crunch has hit demand, but the global supply of oil is now past peak. In ten years, no-one will be able to waste money driving too fast, fuel will be far too scarce.

Sunset industry.

I'm not really sure about taxing the oil and gas extracting (not 'producing') industry, but taxing the end user is a no-brainer. It is widely accepted that the global supply of oil excluding OPEC countries has just about peaked. Many people think OPEC is on the cusp of peak supply as well. The UK has gone from peak oil exports to oil importer in just SEVEN years. We exported our oil at $10 a barrel. We are importing OPEC oil at $113+ /barrel. We need to cut back, economically, environmentally, permanently. The £ is nose-diving even as I type, we are falling into an energetic and economic black hole.

The only way out of this is to use a LOT LESS ENERGY. Conservation is key. Smaller cars, better insulated houses, shorter commutes, fewer energy sucking household gadgets, colder houses in winter, no air con in summer, less long distance holidays, etc.

If the government had the balls to tax inefficient cars off the road, demand for oil would go down, the price would go down, the government could offset it's tax shortfall, the balance of payments deficit would improve, the pound would rise, further reducing the cost of oil.

It won't happen. The government will cut oil taxes in real terms, the country will go broke. We still won't be able to afford to drive.

Don't worry, be happy...

I used to rage at SUV drivers. Didn't they know they were destroying the planet?

Now I just think 'poor schmucks'.

http://www.theoildrum.com/

Hula-hoops are good exercise. My wife just bought one for each of our kids...