The Polar Vortex And All That Jazz -- February 4, 2018; Nothing About The Bakken

Nothing about the Bakken.

Updates

Later, 4:41 p.m. Central Time: two stories linked below regarding cost of coal in China and the "mini ice age" the Chinese are now experiencing. No we won't here any of this on the evening news. Why? Chinese coal, unlike coal from the rest of the world, does not release CO2 when burned, nor do the diesel-run trains release any CO2 when running. It's something unique in China.

From Reuters:

Perfect storm: China's blizzard exposes flaws in rail, coal policies.

China’s worst blizzard this winter exposed a flaw in Beijing’s drive to create remote coal mining hubs as it tries to streamline heavy industries and clear the air in populated regions: a lack of railroads to get the fuel to market.

Heavy snow storms snarled the world’s largest rail network this week, closing highways, freezing ports and cutting off critical supplies of thermal coal. The bottlenecks added to a month-long coal price rally and prompted four top utilities to warn of potential heating and electricity shortages ahead of the upcoming Lunar New Year.   

Some headlines as we anticipate the coldest Super Bowl in history.

• the high for the day, Hettinger, ND: -10 degrees
• global warming crisis fails to appear; scientists bewildered; sea level rise grinds to a crawl; half that forecast: 3.0 mm/ year? nope, now down to 1.5 mm/year
• global temperatures drop back to pre-El Nino levels: "temps drop to levels not seen in six years"
• no link needed: Trump delivered first SOTU address in 8 years that did not mention "global warming"
• EU turns to razing forests; will produce lots of CO2 (FWIW): and in the 21st century the EU is burning wood chips from the US 
• China's CO2 emissions (FWIW) jumped 4% last year: and it' gonna be worse this year, see next story
• coal futures jump 10% in China as sever cold sweeps the country
• by the way, all that talk about "demand for oil" going to go away? LOL. Asian demand for 16,000 airplanes will drive requirement for more jet fuel (i.e., US crude oil) through 2100; all that talk about the end of the fossil fuel age is just that talk: talk fake news. 
• heaviest snowfall on record blankets Moscow

Now a graphic. illustrating the failure of the "Paris Accords" in one graph:

Note the drop in gasoline demand during the Great Recession.

From the same link:

• fossil fuel growth during the years of "climate diplomacy", 1993 - 2016: 1.6% / year
• fossil fuel growth during the twelve years preceding "climate diplomacy", 1980 - 1992: 1.6% / year

Laughable claim: 2017 was the warmest year ever -- except for all the others.

My hunch: no major party presidential candidate will run on the "global warming" platform in 2020.

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Flashback: Global Warming 2008

Reported breathlessly by ABC News, home of the #1 nightly news show with David Muir.

By the way, after that issue of the National Geographic came out, I never subscribed again. I still pay for a subscription for our granddaughters because they enjoy the magazine so much, but I no longer read it. 

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Note to the Granddaughters

Family recipe handed down through 6+ generations. My Japanese mother-in-law introduced our family to cucumber-octopus salad, about forty years ago.

Photos and recipe by our daughter Kiri. Sophia was going to try some and then said she was not hungry after having yogurt at our house.

Recipe:

• fresh cucumber, thinly sliced
• boil octopus for 25 minutes (have head removed at seafood market); covered pot
• remove octopus skin from the tentacles after boiling
• vinaegrette: 2 parts vinegar : 1 part sugar plus a dash of soy sauce and black pepper (one wonders if substituting dashi for soy might work?)
• serve cool/cold; great for hot summer afternoon treat