Some Items from around the Net Today.

Three developments that are bad, the first very, very bad -- i.e., a new, almost fully-automated gigantic seaport. Very destructive of highly skilled, blue-collar jobs in my opinion. Let's see if this will be operational when fossil fuel extraction, particularly oil extraction, starts declining and in a big way.

From The Guardian - Inside the London megaport you didn’t know existed

London Gateway was built by Dubai, is twice the size of the City of London, is run by robots, has the world’s largest cranes – and it’s where everything you buy will soon come from. London’s docks are back in business.

…Running almost 3km along the Thames estuary is a £1.5bn new megaport that has literally redrawn the coastline of Essex, and wants to make equally radical shifts to the UK’s consumer supply chain.

Welcome to DP World London Gateway, the latest international trophy of the oil-rich emirate of Dubai, and one of the biggest privately funded infrastructure projects the UK has ever seen. It is a gargantuan undertaking (on the scale of Crossrail, Terminal 5 or HS2) that’s projected to have a bigger economic impact than the Olympics – but you might not even know it was happening. The port has been up and running for almost two years, with two of its six berths now complete and a third well on the way.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/15/london-gateway-megaport-you-didnt-know-existed-docks?CMP=ema_565

As if this isn't already beginning to happen.

From ThinkProgress - This Is Your Brain On Climate Change

“We spend vast amounts of time and personal energy trying to calculate the most urgent threats posed by climate change. Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, however, says the most insidious danger may already be upon us. She’s not talking about heat, drought, floods, severe storms, or rising seas. She’s focused on the psychological risks posed by global warming.

 Van Susteren has co-authored a report on the psychological effects of climate change that predicts Americans will suffer “depressive and anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, suicides, and widespread outbreaks of violence,” in the face of rising temperatures, extreme weather, and scarce resources. Van Susteren and her co-author Kevin Coyle write that counselors and first responders “are not even close to being prepared to handle the scale and intensity of impacts that will arise from the harsher conditions and disasters that global warming will unleash.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/16/3701936/brain-on-climate-change/

And thanks to the developments in the Jet Stream that Jennifer Francis predicted, there is already climate warming amplification in the Arctic -- about 2x or more the global average temperature anamoly since 1880.

From Eureka Alert - Arctic mosquitoes thriving under climate change, Dartmouth study finds

HANOVER, N.H. – Warming temperatures are causing Arctic mosquitoes to grow faster and emerge earlier, significantly boosting their population and threatening the caribou they feast on, a Dartmouth College study finds.

The study predicts the mosquitoes’ probability of surviving and emerging as adults will increase by more than 50 percent if Arctic temperatures rise 2 °C. The findings are important because changes in the timing and intensity of their emergence affect their role as swarming pests of people and wildlife, as pollinators of tundra plants and as food for other species, including Arctic and migratory birds.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/dc-amt090915.php

Well here's a good development which hopefully won't be adversely affected by peak oil. Check out the photo of the interior of one of the apartments: the poster on the wall is actually a site plan of the constructed apartment complex -- looks very New Urban.

Return of the prefabs: inside Richard Rogers' Y:Cube homes for homeless people

With riotously bright colours, Rogers’s ‘move-on’ housing scheme is dressed in the child-like garb of a My First House. But design niggles mean nothing to the tenants getting their own homes for the first time.

Photograph Credit: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

“I still can’t quite believe that the same architects who designed Terminal 5 and the Cheesegrater have designed my house,” says Wendy Omollo. “To have people as grand as that doing low-cost housing projects is really quite amazing.”

Omollo has been homeless since January, but this week she will join 35 others when she moves into the YMCA’s first factory-built “move-on” housing scheme, designed by none other than multi-award winning, international airport designing Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. While Richard Rogers’ practice graces this year’s Stirling prize shortlist for the sixth time, with the controversial Neo Bankside development and its £22m penthouses, it might come as a surprise to learn that a little further south, in the London borough of Merton, his office has just completed this scheme for a cost of around £45,000 per apartment, to be rented at less than the council’s affordable housing allowance.

Developed over the last few years in partnership with the YMCA London South West, manufacturers SIG and project managers Aecom, this 36-unit “Y:Cube” project is the practice’s latest foray into off-site manufactured housing, a dream Richard Rogers has entertained since his “Zip-Up” concept house in the 1960s – an unrealised fantasy of a modular pink prefab pod on stilts.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/08/inside-richard-rogers-ycube-homes-for-homeless-people

End Triassic, End Permian, End Eocene Extinctions Marked by SEVERE C-13 Carbon Release.

This information was posted recently by Leland Palmer at Robertscribbler's latest article, New Study — Risk of Significant Methane Release From East Siberian Arctic Shelf Still Growing:

During previous mass extinction events, carbon isotope excursions consistent with the release of hundreds of billions or trillions of tons of carbon from the methane hydrates occurred. This has happened several times, not just once or twice. 

Generally there is flood basalt activity going on, releasing massive amounts of CO2, much like our current fossil fuel use. But the flood basalt activity generally seems to precede the sharp mass extinction event, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of years, and often seems to go on after the mass extinction event. 

Methane release from the hydrates, triggered by flood basalt release of CO2, is the best mass extinction hypothesis to explain all of the geological evidence, I think. The sudden methane release hypothesis has the most explanatory power, the most predictive ability, and even makes quantitative predictions that turn out to be correct. It is consistent with all the geological evidence. When a new claim is made that contradicts the methane release hypothesis, that claim generally does not hold up, and turns out to be wrong. 

The methane release hypothesis turns out to be a unifying theory – it constitutes a general theory of most or maybe all mass extinctions.

Link: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/09/10/new-study-risk-of-significant-methane-release-from-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-still-growing/#comment-51528. Nota bene an excellent graphic of the End-Triassic with C-13 content spike consistent with the End-Triassic mass extinction.

Leland Palmer further notes that we don't want an End-Anthropocene extinction either, but with all the fossil fuels we've combusted up so far we just might get it. With 6,800 billion tons of methane clathrates in the Arctic and 1,600 billion tons of Carbon in the Arctic permafrost, I agree.

UPDATE: Mr. Palmer has since posted a graphic of the  negative Carbon Isotope Excursion (CIE) from the End Permian -- the mother of all smelly hothouse extinctions.

Link: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/09/10/new-study-risk-of-significant-methane-release-from-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-still-growing/#comment-51661

These repeated sudden CIE events, coupled with hyperthermal mass extinction events, are good consistent evidence of methane release from the hydrates. There have been maybe 20 or more of these flood basalt eruption / sudden negative CIE / extinction events, and hundreds of smaller apparent releases, I think. So, maybe our hydrates are less stable than we think.

Considering that the hydrates up in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are already letting loose, I think they are a LOT less stable!

My Other Blogs.

Presently I have three blogs going on.

This one, Fin des Voies Rapides (If Peak Oil Were No Object); and two others, International Highway Makeover 2 and 2015 Is Strange!

This one, as I've announced already, is being put back to its stated purpose reporting on peak oil and expanded to include climate change, since the Warmists always assume that humanity will be able to get to about 20,000 gigatonnes (20 GT = 20 thousand billion tons) more of fossil fuels in an economical, profitable manner at a price the consumers can afford.

International Highway Makeover 2 will go back to Route markers that I have designs for.

And 2015 Is Strange! will continue to report on our weird weather due to climate change.

My old crucifixion articles will be reposted in a blog called Crux Blog if that name's not taken, or some name like it.

Enjoy!

A demain...

Methane Warning from the Arctic!

The Royal Society has commissioned a study performed by the now well-known husband and wife team from Russia, Natasha Shakhova and Igor Semiletov, concerning the outgassing of methane (CH₄) from the East Siberian Sea Continental Shelf (ESS), which is essentially frozen tundra that drowned when the glaciers receded about 10,000 years ago and since then. There are about 1,600 billion (that's a b) tons (GT) of CH₄ frozen in hydrates.

Now that the Arctic is getting warmer, the marine ice cap is suffering a catastrophic collapse to the fifth or sixth smallest sea ice area on record, warm waters from the Atlantic and Pacific are sneaking in and storms are churning the near-shore Arctic seas from surface to bottom, methane is escaping from the Arctic Seafloor at an increasing rate, particularly at the ESS area. Previously Shakhova and Semiletov stated that 50 GT of CH₄ could escape at any time.

Natasha Shakhova on Methane Hydrates.

And what the Royal Society study has to say is that the Risk of Significant Methane Release from [the] East Siberian Arctic Shelf [is] Still Growing.

From Robertscribbler:

Large plumes of methane bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean sea-bed, saturating the water column, venting into the air, adding significantly more heat forcing to an already dangerous, fossil fuel-based, accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a nightmare scenario. One in which human-forced warming, already at 1 C above 1880s levels, is further amplified through the feedback release of ancient carbon stored over the past 8 million years of Northern Hemisphere glaciation. And a recent study by the now famous Semiletov and Shakhova team provides still more reason for appropriate concern that such an event may be in the works.

Shakhova and Semiletov’s new study produces an increasingly clear picture of a destabilizing organic carbon store beneath thawing permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf region. The above images show organic carbon concentration [left frame] and rate of release of methane in grams per square meter per day over observed regions.

By now, many of us are familiar with the controversy over the potential risks of significant-to-catastrophic methane release due to human-forced warming of the Arctic.  An increasing number of observational specialists are pointing toward a risk that rapid human warming will set off the release of still more carbon in the Arctic. For some, this release is expected to be gradual. Others believe there’s enough risk of a rapid release to warrant an equally rapid emergency response.
But regardless of where you stand on the issue, new research coming to light from some of the Arctic’s top observational scientists more clearly describes what appears to be an increasingly dangerous situation.

Increasingly dangerous is right! The present CH₄ overburden is about 1846 ppb (1.85 ppm) which equates to about 5 GT of methane in the atmosphere. An addition of 50 GT of this stuff would add about 18.5 ppm for a grand total of 20.4 ppm of CH₄. At 25 times the heat-trapping efficacy of CO₂ over the lifetime of methane in the air would yield an equivalent of 510 ppm CO₂ E, increasing the global mean temperature by 3 degrees C quite quickly, to about 4 deg C above 1880s values.

Well at least a PB study is suggesting we are nearing peak oil demand. But it might not save us from Hell on Earth! This could be one of those situations where Peak Oil really is no object.

Fin des Voies Rapides, certainement!

Link: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/09/10/new-study-risk-of-significant-methane-release-from-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-still-growing/

Mega Dust Bowl by 2100. And a Refugee Crisis the World Has Never Seen.

As Joe Romm writes in this here article at Think-Progress, by 2100 continued fossil-fuel combustion will cause vast stretches of North America to become a massive dustbowl. Basically, everything from Panama to the the western and central US, and Canada's breadbasket, will be impossible to live in because of centuries-long drought.

Remember that the Medieval Warming period eventually caused a two-century long drought that killed off the Anastazi Indians' culture. They all had to leave, it was so bad.

SOIL MOISTURE

The darkest areas are equivalent to the 1930s USA Great Plains' dustbowl.

From Joe Romm's article:

"The Syria conflict has triggered the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II,” explains the European Commission. As Climate Progress has been reporting for years, and as a major 2015 study confirmed, “human-caused climate change was a major trigger of Syria’s brutal civil war."

But the unprecedented multi-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war is mild compared to the multi-decade megadroughts that unrestricted carbon pollution will make commonplace in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and Central America, according to many recent studies.

Given the current political debate over immigration policy, it’s worth asking two questions. First: if the United States, through our role as the greatest cumulative carbon polluter in history, plays a central role in rendering large parts of Mexico and Central America virtually uninhabitable, where will the refugees go? And second: will we have some moral obligation to change our immigration policy?

If we don’t take far stronger action on climate change, then here is what a 2015 NASA study projected the normal climate of North America will look like. The darkest areas have soil moisture comparable to that seen during the 1930s Dust Bowl.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/08/3699165/refugees-dust-bowl-mexico/

It's been a long time.

I've been busy for quite a while filling paperwork to obtain pro bono legal help solve two real-life financial problems before they blow up in my face. Now that they're done and I will receive an answer in eighteen days, I can add new posts to this blog.

This blog has strayed far from its original intent: the effects of peak oil and related subjects. I've been into the gay marriage fight in California, now surprisingly pleasantly successfully concluded, Bradley now Chelsea Manning's trials, crucifixion for a few years, the Historical Jesus (who?), local things and whatnot. It's time for me to bring this blog back to its original subject.

I may not get to write my own posts for a long time, but I'll keep the blog fed with repostings, usually from the Robertscribbler and Our Finite World blogs. Tomorrow I'll start the reposts. See ya then!

Derelict Buildings cont'd.

This one on Baronne Street corner of Girod.

There's a "For Lease" sign on the side of the building but who's going to rent it in the shape it's in?