This Photo is From Washington DC This Past Week

What other countries does this remind you of?

"...priests of the industrial system"

“Psychologists are in danger of becoming the priests of the industrial system.”

— Erich Fromm

Very perspicacious. I would say this is exactly what happened.

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Back-to-School Notebooks

 I just can't help myself this time of year when notebooks are 3 for $1.

Peak Oil Demand Again, by the Numbers

I couldn't resist analyzing the numbers in the peak oil demand projection chart in the previous post.

The peaks are at about 200 qBTU (quadrillion BTU). Silly, but that's the unit they use. That's about 2e20 joules. 200 exajoules. Used over a year, that comes to an average of 7 terawatts (TW). 

The last number I've seen for world energy consumption is about 20 TW. So about 35% of world energy consumption comes from driving ICE* cars (and sure, a little from heating). I don't know why but that's not hard to believe.

* Internal combustion heating

Trump is Angry Oil Demand Might Peak

Trump, of course, is angry that many groups are predicting global oil demand will peak by 2030. Or maybe has already. That's not what the oil companies bought him for!

From the NY Times:

Trump's administration is so angry at this they are threatening to leave the IEA (International Energy Agency, where the US gives 14% of their funding. That will show them not to dare make a projection Trump's purchasers don't like. Even though BP is making such a projection, and ExxonMobil is saying oil demand will flatten. 

La'An Noonien-Singh

Spock: They’ve become used to episodes of violence for centuries. The true cost of a civil war is abstract.

La'An Noonien-Singh: Not believing you’re gonna die is what gets you killed.

Star Trek - Strange New Worlds, S1E4.

Lieutenant La'An Noonien-Singh was a female Human Starfleet officer who lived during the 23rd century, and the sole survivor from a Gorn encounter that had eliminated her entire family.

There's a lot of truth in her sentence.

Cumberland Gap

I'm just posting this song because I really like it. And because I could have become the narrator of the song if I wasn't born intelligent and sensitive (which I got from my mother, definitely). I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is considered northern Appalachia. There was no one around me, for miles, who went to college. Not until my aunt went to college to get a degree in teaching. Nobody was well off. We didn't have a bathroom in my house growing up, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower down in the cold coal cellar. We took our baths in the kitchen sink until we were 5 or 6 years old. One winter all the pipes from our well froze up and we had to haul water from a spring a few miles up the road, in big plastic tubs. There was an abandoned strip mine (for coal) just a few hundred yards up over the hill behind our house--an abandoned mine and an abandoned pit and abandoned machinery and big mounds that were great to ride bikes up and down. My father, who dropped out of college after one semester then drove trucks then joined the Air Force and went to Korea as radio technician--wanted me to be a hunter and a fisher, and work on cars, but I was more interested in algebra and chess, and all he ever had me do was "hold the light," he never taught me anything about the mechanics. Nothing. And we had to crawl under the house in the "second basement" to thaw pipes with a butane torch in the winter in Pennslvania.) It eventually caused a big division between us--I completely failed when we went out hunting and fishing--and that and the fact that he abused my mother, and me and my brother a couple of times. I was done with him and we were estranged for 40 years, until his death. There wasn't even a funeral, because no one would have gone to it. He worked in a steel mill and didn't even care if I went to college. In fact, I came home for Christmas after my first semester as a freshman, and, when I was watching a Nova broadcast about 9 pm about Einstein and special relavitity (I was just then reading Ronald Clark's biography of Einstein, and planning to switch my major from electrical engineering to physics), my dad came home drunk and began berating me for not having a job. So I could have been this song's narrator if things had gone another way. I never thought about it much when I was younger, but I think about it now that I'm older, and my parents are dead, and now that the United States in a real decline. There are a lot of guys trapped in these small towns, their labor no longer needed or wanted. No other jobs, like in manufacturing or mining or construction. They're angry, and I don't blame them, and almost all of them voted for Trump. I'm very happy I escaped. Also, I like Jason Isbell's music a lot, his lyrics are often spot on ("Mustang Lounge" is the absolute perfect name for a bar in a rundown, declining coal town), it's such a raw, angry song--and it's my blog so I can post what I want.

US Electricity Prices

Saw this chart today on Paul Krugman's substack: Electricity prices under Trump:

 

So up 6%. US inflation is only up 1%.

As Krugman notes, Trump said during his campaign that he would cut electricity prices in half after 12 months in office. It's was a stupid claim, but a lot of the dumb MAGAts fell for it, just like him saying he would end the Ukraine-Russian war on his first day in office. It's so disheartening that his voters and the media let him get away with that kind of sh... crap.

Here's the full chart since 1979: 

Comparing that to US inflation, the average electricity price now is up, since Nov 1978, by 311%, whereas US inflation is up 377% over that time.

The last 5 years clearly show the introduction of huge AI data centers. We're all paying for it. [Maybe those companies should provide their own power. In fact, some are doing that.] So what does Trump decide to do? Reduce electricity supply by now wanting to deny permission for new solar and wind projects, calling them "the scam of the century." Ironic. It's just a huge payout to the fossil fuel industry who gave him $500 million for his campaign. That's it. Same for all the denial of climate change, undoing CO2 restrictions for cars, the phony new climate assessment report by deniers, eliminating climate science from NASA (i.e. GISS, where James Hansen led for a long time and now Gavin Schmidt), and on and on. It's said that Trump hates wind power because he thought the windmills in the ocean off his golf course in Aberdeenshire were ugly but the Scots wouldn't remove them. (He even took them to court, but lost.)  

By the way, here's a bit of the inside stuff on how the five climate deniers were chosen to lead the administration's climate assessment report. It's full of errors. Of course it is.

About Today's Earlier Graph

BTW, there are some interesting comments underneath Climate Town's post with the graph I just posted. 

1) NASA's data starts in 1880, not 1850, so I don't understand their graph. I also don't see how they got 1.4°C of total warming--GISS's data from 1880 gives (with a linear fit) 1.20°C. 

For the second point, below, I found better data in the mentioned paper that the P-T warming lasted over about 60,000 years, not 100,000 years. I've made corrections below:

2) Of course, warming was very likely not linear during the P-T Event, as volcanic traps pumped out CO2. (CO2 rose from about 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm.) Warming took place over about 100,000 years according to this 2021 Nature Communications paper. There may have been "short-term" warming spikes that did some of the damage. Total global warming was about 8°C. That would give an average warming rate ~ 0.0008°C/decade, compared to 1880-2025's average linear rate of 0.082°C/decade. That's a factor of 100. (Linear rate over the last 30 years = 0.25°C/decade => a factor of 310.) Warming took place over about 60,000 years according to this 2021 Nature Communications paper. Total global warming was about 8°C. That would give an average warming rate ~ 0.0013°C/decade, compared to 1880-2025's average linear rate of 0.082°C/decade. That's a factor of 60. (Linear rate over the last 30 years = 0.25°C/decade => a factor of 190)

3) The extinction may not be all due to warming.

Reminder: The graph under consideration:

Modern Warming Compared to P-T Mass Extinction

Climate Brief has this graph from Climate Town:

That's quite startling, to say the least; it's downright frightening, to say the most. 

I don't know exactly where the blue line is at the "present"-- maybe 0.03°C? So we've warmed about 50 times faster than the worst extinction event in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction which ended about 90% of species on Earth. 

National Geographic:

...the greatest natural disaster in Earth's history. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all the trees died.

Trump is probably too stupid to understand this. But I really don't think he would care if he did. Not one bit.

Too Close to the Blowtorch of Progress

From Singularity Sky, a 2003 sci-fi novel by Charles Stross:

"If Burya had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity—a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity—is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed—the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress."

Here's the basics on the idea of a Singularity, if you're unfamiliar. No, it hasn't arrived yet, but....

Intellectual Activity During Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism, from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her writing is quoted with yellow lines to the left; in between is Paul Krugman from his substack.

Such persecution is now rampant in the Trump administration. I'm not going to depress myself by listing them, but you probably have some idea.

Trump is the most dangerous president who ever held the office, much worse than even Andrew Johnson (who succeeded Abraham Lincoln).

MAGA - Morons Are Governing America

[Title from Ken Caldeira on Bluesky.] 

 There are so many moronic things happening in America you almost can't help believing Trump & chronies are intentionally destroying the USA. Among them: This was a comment on a recent New York Times article that summarizes it all:

There's a great deal going on -- a fake US National Climate Assessment, a threat to rewrite all the past US National Climate Assessments, killing the Keeling Curve, the Endangerment Ruling, mRNA research and more. 

But I just don't want to feel angry about all of this. I've lost whatever spark was originally there and if a  majority of US voters want someone who will destroy the country there's nothing I can do about it. Frankly I just want to make enough money to move out of this country. It's not likely, but I'd like to. Otherwise I'll never be able to truly retire, I'd otherwise have to work until the day I die. The US has just gotten too expensive and it's only getting more expensive, quite fast. I'd rather just do nothing and read literature every day, watch some hockey, and keep a few spreadsheets on monthly temperature data and monthly sea ice and the like. I'm just too tired all the time, and I don't want to be angry all the time.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Nearing a 12-month Low

Arctic sea ice extent (SIE) is closing in on a new low for its 12-month moving average:

The previous low happened in March of 2021. Maybe it was the pandemic.

SIE data sources, NSIDC:

• Arctic
• Antarctic