Do The Benefits Of Global Warming Outweigh The Risks -- For Oenophiles, Apparently, Yes -- June 28, 2018

The other day I asked this rhetorical question:

Speaking of which: do the benefits of global warming -- if it exists -- outweigh the risks?

Now today, this from The WSJ article on grapes, wines, and the Mosel River / Valley in Germany, near the French frontier:

Some Mosel vineyards, such as the famed Bernkasteler Doctor, are nearly 100 years old, while others are quite new. There has been a good deal of planting in the region of late, particularly of non-Riesling grapes. The day after my visit, Mr. Selbach was planting Pinot Noir, which has become more common in the Mosel recently thanks to a warming trend. “Nothing has changed in the Mosel,” he said. But then he allowed, “The climate has gotten better.”

The weather was certainly warm the week of my late-April visit, which happened to coincide with spargelzeit (asparagus season). This season is short—April-June—so every restaurant around had at least one and often two or three asparagus dishes on the menu.

When I arrived at the Zeltinger Hof Gasthaus des Rieslings, the modest but charming hotel where I stayed, I found the proprietor, Markus Reis, laboring over a large pile of asparagus, shaving the thick stalks down to a more manageable size. (I found him repeating the task at breakfast time the following morning and again later that day.)

The same is being said of North Dakota and Montana. North Dakota is growing more corn, and Montana wheat production is increasing -- some say due to changing weather. It's all good.

Especially the wine.

I learned to love asparagus after living in Germany. 

A Thousand Miles From Nowhere, Dwight Yoakim

The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+25 -- June 25, 2018

We need some music, I think.



We talked about this years ago, it seems. When you take into consideration all the factors, EVs are not "greener' than ICE.

Now, again, the issue is raised. Reporting in the [London] Daily Mail: Teslas may be no greener than petrol and diesel cars despite being marketed as the world's most environmentally friendly vehicles.

• energy used to build Teslas and generate electricity for them is equal to petrol 
• battery-powered cars such as Teslas are charged with power station energy 
• luxury Tesla Model S battery powered cars cost £66,730 each 

Analysts found the amount of greenhouse gas used in building a Tesla and generating the electricity to charge it was no different to petrol cars.

Wow, we talked about this years ago. Comes up again. Glad the Brits are on top of things even if Americans are not.

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Saving The World

Green graph of the day, from JoanneNova:

Apparently Someone Missed The Three-Day Forecast -- June 21, 2018; Long-Term Forecast -- Arctic Sea Ice Volume Growing At Alarming Rates

Updates

June 27, 2018: Arctic Sea almost completely frozen over. It's summer in the northern hemisphere. Source here.

Original Post 

Pardon the interruption. I was going to post this "growing ice" story at the bottom of this post but in certain respects it's more important than the Garrison story.

Huge correction: a huge "thank you" to a reader. I posted this as an "Antarctic" story originally -- no wonder I was confused. It's my understanding that the Antarctic is declining a bit this year, so when I saw the story below, I was confused. Then a reader noted that this was an article on the Arctic and not the Antarctic. It's been corrected.  

I've been following the Antarctic/Arctic ice story this year closer than usual. We're getting a lot of conflicting information -- apparently it depends which source one uses to follow the Antarctic/Arctic ice volume. This story and the graphic below pertains to the Arctic.

This is from the recognized best source -- the DMI -- the Danish Meteorological Institute. In addition to the graphic, there is an explanation why the story is so confusing this year -- lots of "fake news."

The blackest line (on the chart below) shows current Arctic sea-ice volume. Note that it is greater than in 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and is on track to break the 2004 to 2014 mean.

“Actually the current news should not be that there is less sea-ice, but more,” says ready Caleb Shaw. “How much more? The DMI “volume” graph suggests there is 4500 km³ more ice this year than last year. But the media? Crickets.”

Crickets.

The graphic:

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Back to the Bakken

 
Three days ago, it was reported that the US Army Corps of Engineers would be increasing the Garrison Dam release from the usual 44,000 cfs to 52,000 cfs.

We know that the earth is going to be 0.2 degrees warmer a hundred years from now but apparently we all missed the forecast for more rain.

This from The Bismarck Tribune:

Operations manager Todd Lindquist confirmed Wednesday evening that water releases from Garrison Dam will be increased again from 52,000 cubic feet per second, equal to 388,987 gallons per second, to 60,000 cfs by Saturday. On Wednesday, the flows had reached 48,700 cfs, according to a daily report by the corps.

Just on Monday, the levels were expected to reach the 12-foot stage overnight near Bismarck, but now those water levels will reach 13 feet by Saturday, Lindquist said. 

“The increased flows from the Garrison Dam represent a real concern for downstream communities,” said Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., on Wednesday. “We need to ensure the entire river system is being managed in a way that prevents an unexpected rise in river levels, that includes releases from Garrison Dam as well as from dams further downstream."

And this from MyNDNow:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers today made it official today: Garrison Dam water releases will increase to 60,000 cfs by Friday.

In a statement issued this morning, the Corps' Missouri River Basin Water Management Division said releases will be stepped up from 52,000 cfs to 60,000 cfs over the next three days.

The Garrison reservoir is currently at 1851.6 feet. It is expected to peak near 1852.4 feet in the next two weeks as runoff from the remaining mountain snow pack tapers off.

The 60,000 cfs release rate is expected to continue into mid-July.

The increased release means the river stage near Bismarck will rise from 11.5 feet to 13 feet.

Flood stage at Bismarck is 14.5 feet.

Garrison releases are being increased due to recent rains in the area from Fort Peck to Garrison.

“Widespread rains across much of the Missouri River Basin have increased inflows into the System dams and have also increased flows on tributaries downstream of the System,” said John Remus, Chief of the Missouri River Basin Water Management Division.

One can't make this stuff up.  

And then more, from Don. Thank you. This is from MyNDNow.com. 

The rising levels of the Missouri River. The water level has raised concern as the Army Corps of Engineers continues to release more water from the Garrison Dam. For a lot of North Dakotans, it's creating fear of a repeat of the 2011 flood.

Our Malique Rankin has been researching water releases from the Army Corp.
She compares and breaks down for us how those numbers look in 2018, in comparison to 2011.

During the 2011 flood, on May 30th, water was released from the dam at 85,000 CFS.

To put that in perspective, that's 25,000 CFS more than the rate we are expected to hit this weekend. In 2011, releases hit a high on June 17th, at 150,000 cubic feet per second. Releases were rising on a near daily basis for weeks in June. 

There is a tag for the 2011 flood at the bottom of the blog. 

The Market, Energy, Political Page, Part 2, T+19 -- June 19, 2018

Background

Energy 101: capacity factor vs substitution factor.

Capacity factor equals {(total actual power output)/(total rated capacity assuming 100% utilization)}. The Capacity Factor of wind power in Germany equals about 28%. However, capacity factor is not a true measure of actual usefulness of grid-connected wind power.

The true factor that reflects the intermittency of wind power is the substitution capacity, which is about 5% in Germany – a large grid with a large wind power component.

Substitution capacity is the amount of dispatchable (conventional) power you can permanently retire when you add more wind power to the grid. In Germany they have to add ~20 units of wind power to replace 1 unit of dispatchable power.

I assume on one needs to sort out costs involved in adding 20 units of wind power vs one unit of dispatchable power.

Links:   

• Energyskeptic, December 14, 2018: 41 reasons why wind energy cannot replace fossil fuels
• World-Nuclear, updated October, 2018: renewable energy and electricity
• Forbes, January 24, 2017; why Germany is struggling and will continue to struggle; 
• MasterResource, March 14, 2010: key industry terms

Updates

June 23, 2018: Germany Neglects Renewables, Set to Miss 2020 Climate Goals.

Earlier this month, the German government conceded that the country is on track on miss its 2020 climate goal targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent compared to 1990.

Due to the economic boom, immigration, and high carbon emissions from the transport sector, Germany is on track to cut emissions compared to 1990 by 32 percent—an 8-percentage-point gap short of the goal.

Companies from all energy sectors and environmental organizations have criticized the German government for failing to clearly state future policies, incentives, renewables targets, and emissions targets. Germany has been lately slowing down climate action “domestically and at the European level,” Simone Peter, president of the Renewable Energy Federation, told Clean Energy Wire.

Original Post 

 As noted over the weekend I am not watching any television for the next week or so until the current nonsense fades away. Exceptions: sports, movies, comedy. I guess when I say I'm not watching television it means no mainstream media with talk shows, news, business news, etc. That includes Fox Business News which I don't watch much at all any way.

It really is refreshing. I say that because my notes may be completely out of sync with what's going on in the real world. I certainly don't get any up-to-the-minute analysis of what's going on.

A reader sent me this story from Forbes: an EU-China-Canada climate summit is about to get underway. I saw the headline and thought only those three "countries" were going to attend, but then I read the entire article: 35 countries. After reading the article my first thought: I am embarrassed to say I used to subscribe to Forbes. Not only have I not subscribed to Forbes for a very, very long time, I never read it unless a reader sends me an article or some other source I'm reading links me to it.

I digress.

What an incredibly poorly written article.

The article says 35 countries are attending, but doesn't list the countries. We know that the EU, China, and Canada are attending. China needs to solve their a) pollution problem; and, b) their overall energy problem,but China has absolutely nothing in common with either the EU or Canada when it comes to CO2 emissions.

Apparently the meeting is to set the agenda for the next UN climate summit to take place in the dead of winter in one of the colder spots in the world that time of year: Katowice, Poland.

The writer never provided any journalistic rigor when he/she wrote the following paragraphs:

The summit caps off a week of climate diplomacy in Europe. Today the ninth Petersberg Climate Dialogue wrapped up in Berlin, co-hosted by the German and Polish governments.

The main purpose of the Berlin summit was to stump up money for the Green Climate Fund, the vehicle to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 from the developed world to help the developing world fight and adjust to climate change. The fund is almost out of the $19 billion in start-up contributions it received at its launch several years ago.

Just those two paragraphs raise these questions/observations:

• Petersberg is not misspelled; it's a mountain/resort (apparently) near Bonn, Germany; I guess it's the equivalent of our Camp David; we lived near Cologne, Germany, for three years; never heard of Hotel Petersberg; must be for the really, really elite;
• the goal: $100 billion / year each year from now until 2020;
• the fund: it began with $19 billion in start-up contributions but is now gone; where did it go? who is accounting for it? what is there to show for that $19 billion? (my hunch: a lot of Hollywood and political celebrities made a lot of money giving speeches);
• a goal of $300 billion: where is it to go? how will it be spent?
• my understanding is that, seriously, there is a committee in South Korea that receives the money and then doles it out to atoll nations in the Pacific to help them combat raising sea levels; 
• how much of that $19 billion went to Tuvalu? and,
• of course, the blame for the failure to get any farther along rests almost completely on "Trump" -- who reneged on an American promise for $2 billion

I was surprised I read that far.

I was more surprised that the blame on Trump was not in the first paragraph. 

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US Exits UN Human Rights Council

A good start.

Members include: China, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Federal Appeals Court Rules: Coal Industry - 1; Faux Environmentalists - 0 -- June 18, 2018

Wow, this is an important story. From The Hill. A reader alerted me to it. If you have time for only one post today this might be it. The fact that the article is in The Hill tells me it's an important ruling.

From the linked article:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected environmentalists’ arguments that the Trump administration has to evaluate the climate change impact of leasing federal land for coal mining.

The three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled that the Interior Department is not obligated to update its 1979 review of the environmental impact of the federal coal program, despite substantial new scientific findings about climate change and the significant role that coal plays in warming the atmosphere.

The judges said that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) doesn’t compel a new environmental impact statement.

In addition to all the subjective comments one might make, in addition to the ruling itself, this is the most important observation: the ruling was unanimous.

The faux environmentalists? I'm sure the plaintiffs arrived in court every day having made their journey in gas-guzzling SUVs and using computers running on electricity produced by coal plants. Whatever.

Put Another Nail In The Coffin Of The Peak Oil Theory -- Bakken Setting New Reocrds -- June 16, 2018 -- Baseball Attendance Drops Due To Global Warming

Reposting:

From The Bismarck Tribune:

North Dakota oil production jumped 5.4 percent in April to more than 1.2 million barrels per day, coming in just shy of the state’s record.

Director of Mineral Resources Lynn Helms called it a big surprise to see production levels within 2,500 barrels of the all-time high of nearly 1.23 million barrels per day.

“We were not expecting that kind of a surge until late May, early June,” Helms said Friday while discussing the preliminary figures.

Natural gas production increased 7.4 percent in April, setting another record at more than 2.24 billion cubic feet per day.

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Global Warming

The US Open on Long Island: miserable cold, rainy weather, June, 2018. No sign of global warming in NYC.

Also this: major league baseball is reporting a sharp drop in in attendance -- The WSJ. League-wide attendance of 27,328 per game is down almost 7% from this time a year ago.

With the regular season approaching the halfway point, it seems safe to say that this is baseball in 2018: lots of home runs, even more strikeouts—and, relatively speaking, not a lot of people in the stands to see them.

League-wide attendance entering Friday of 27,328 per game is down 6.6% from this date last year and 8.6% overall, according to Stats LLC. The sport hasn’t seen an attendance drop of more than 6.7% in a single season since 1995, when the average crowd fell nearly 20% following the player strike that canceled the 1994 World Series. MLB attendance has remained consistent throughout this decade, never changing more than 1.9% in either direction.

While unwelcome to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, small decreases in attendance aren’t unusual or cause for alarm. Crowds sank 0.7% last year and 0.8% the year before that. But this season has been more than a minor dip, raising legitimate questions about what is happening.

And to what are they attributing the decline in attendance?  It's been too cold this year.

I can't make this stuff up.

The simplest answer, and the one Manfred would prefer, is the weather.

And undoubtedly, it has been a factor.

Rain and unseasonably cold temperatures plagued an unusual number of markets throughout April and May, causing 36 postponements already in 2018. There were 25 weather postponements total in 2016. Attendance always climbs in the summer, when schools are closed and the thermometer is friendlier, and Manfred said he thinks “weather’s a big part” of the drop so far.

Global Warming Has Run Its Course -- WSJ -- June 5, 2018

Without question, this is the best op-ed we will see this week. From The WSJ, "Climate Change Has Run Its Course. Its descent into social-justice identity politics is the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality."

Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.

A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.

The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.

The op-ed is behind a paywall but one should be able to get to it using the usual methods.

423 comments to that article already -- must have touched a nerve. Let's see the gist of the comments:

The best comment was off-topic.  A reader noted that the majority of plastic that is thrown in the ocean comes from liberal west coast cities. Pretty funny.

The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+10 -- May 18,2018

From the blog April 9, 2018:

Federal transportation grant program: $500 million / year?

This is hard to believe. Need to fact check. Federal government gives $500 million / year to Planned Parenthood.

One would think with research and sales, Planned Parenthood would be self-supporting.

Now, today: Trump to cut Planned Parenthood funding.

On Friday, the Trump administration will announce a proposed rule to cut taxpayer funding to abortionists like Planned Parenthood under Title X, a program that provides $260 million annually in federal funding for contraception and other “family planning” initiatives.

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Burn Coal, Not Trees

For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would want to burn precious, beautiful trees. Wow! How misguided can folks get?

From JoanneNova:

Any day now the giant tree-eating-machine called Drax will be shifting back to coal as Greens and politicians realize they’ve made a planet killing mistake.

Lordy!

At the moment, Drax is supposed to be saving the world and making electricity for the UK by burning trees cut down and shipped from the US.

This temple to carbon neutrality happens to be the largest plant in the UK. It generates about 7% of all the megawatts used there. But a new study by Sterman et al, suggests the Drax plan is backfiring badly.

See why at the linked article.

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Way Too Political

Trump derangement syndrome.  Look at the comments at the linked article. It's clear that the writer is completely off-base. Or nuts. Or deranged.

In case the link is broken, "Obama's Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed," Andrew Sullivan, in New York Magazine. What a doofus.

An Inconvenient Truth -- May 15, 2018

This is an incredible story. Many decades ago, I spent a summer north of the Arctic Circle, near Barrow, Alaska, studying the photosynthesis of grasses growing that far north. We assumed --one of many potential fudge factors -- that atmospheric CO2 would not change. Arctic grasses are much more efficient than Iowa corn using solar energy to convert CO2 to carbohydrate energy. We were studying whether it was possible to help Iowa corn increase its photosynthetic efficiency based on what we learned in Alaska. Something tells me that research came to a dead end.

Had we known that atmospheric CO2 would increase over the ensuing decades, our research would have been redundant, as the British say.

So, here it is, from the Brits:

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually, it could be the other way round: greening is a bigger effect than warming.

It is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated. Four years ago, I came across an online video of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University in which he presented an ingenious analysis of data from satellites. This proved that much of the vegetated area of the planet was getting greener, and only a little bit was getting browner. In fact, overall in 30 years, the green vegetation on planet Earth had increased by a rather extraordinary 14 per cent. He said this was occurring in all vegetation types — from tropical rainforests to arctic tundra.

What was responsible for this ecological good news? He credited rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere for half of the greening — rather than, say, the application of agricultural fertiliser, warmer temperatures or increased rainfall.

Carbon dioxide, along with water, is the raw material that plants use to make carbohydrates, with the help of sunlight. So it stands to reason that raising its concentration should help plants grow.

Bring A Gun To A Knife Fight -- Macron -- May 14, 2018

Shouldn't be too difficult: Kim Jong-Un says he will dismantle "their" nuclear test site. The Brits have this link. Considering that it's buried under a mountain and likely completely destroyed, this shouldn't be too difficult. Simply post a sign on the road to the mountain: "Closed. Nuclear Site Dismantled By God Upon Instructions From Trump." The Japanese probably wish Fukushima was under a mountain.

Over-qualified woman withdraws her name as nominee for US ambassador to Singapore. Stories everywhere. No links needed. Rose from typist to top US executive. Alt-left can't handle that. Not supposed to happen. All the time raising five kids. It was the last fact that probably doomed her nomination.

Too cold or too much snow. Regardless, the annual faux environmental expedition to study the Great Ice Patch has been canceled for this summer. The snow was simply too deep and wasn't going to melt before summer vacation was over. Google "great ice patch."

#1, again. I've posted many lists over the years where North Dakota is ranked #1 among the 57 US states. A reader caught this one last week: the link is here. I assume the ranking is based on "per capita," if not, it's worse/better than I thought in my home state. If the link breaks, it's under MSN: Health and Wellness -- again, I can't make this stuff up. As the reader noted, Texas did not even make the top 20. Nor did California.

Bringing a gun to a knife fight. No link, the blogger app blocks Fox News.

A 20-year-old Frenchman born in Chechnya rampaged through a festive Paris neighborhood Saturday evening slashing passers-by with a knife, investigators said. The man, identified as Khamzat Azimov, killed one person and wounded four others in a festive area near Paris’ old opera house. Police shot him to death as he charged them.

Comment: good for them. I did not know French police were allowed to carry guns.

The Market, Energy, And Political Page, Part 3, T+1 -- Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Top conventional wells to watch in 2018 -- WoodMac -- over at Rigzone:
A full list of the most anticipated conventional wells this year can be seen below:

• Pemex – Yaaxtaab-1
• Repsol – Bon Bini-1, Ivela
• Repsol & Shell - Boyuy, Jaguar
• Kosmos Energy – Anapai-1, Requin Tigre-1
• Statoil – Guanxuma, Aru Trough
• BP – Aspy, Peroba
• Eni – Santola-1, RD-1, 4118-4-1, Calypso-1, Cuttlefish
• Siccar Point Energy – Lyon
• Total – Tucano-1, Paddavissie-1, Tepat, Antelope South-1
• Far Limited – Samo-1
• Tullow Oil – Cormorant-1
• Statoil – Gjokasen
• Rosneft – Maria-1
• Gazprom – Bautinskaya-1
• Petro Matad – Takhi-1

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Global warming: this was in the Philadelphia Inquirer so it must be true --  it was the coldest April in 20 years across the United States, feds say.

Temperatures in the contiguous United States were 2.2 degrees below 20th century averages last month, making it the coldest April in 20 years, according to the government analysis released Tuesday.

Overall it was the ninth-chilliest April on record in Pennsylvania in records dating to 1895, said the National Center for Environmental Information.

In Philadelphia, 21 of the 30 days were cooler than normal, and coincidentally the official temperature at Philadelphia International Airport also finished 2.2 degrees below the 30-year average in a month that featured a significant snowfall.

Summer energy -- from Drudge Report today:

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The Literature Page

I'm still in my "China" phase. See also Zheng He.

These are the four books I have recently read:

• 1421, Gavin Menzies, c. 2008; softcover; Powell's in Portland, OR
• 1434, Gavin Menzies. c. 2009, softcover; Half-Price Bookstores;
• A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-Wei Wang, c. 2017
• The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another, W. Travis Hanes, c. 2004

I am now reading:

• Tai-Pan: The epic novel of the founding of Hong Kong, James Clavell, c. 1966 

And, I am ordering The Chinese Typewriter, from Amazon next week. Powell's had a hard copy for full price ($35) and one can get hard copy from Amazon for about $28 (free shipping) or a softcover for much less. 

After I mentioned that I was in my "China" phase and had just completed The Opium Wars, a reader highly recommended that I read James Clavell's Tai-Pan. I bought a copy today at Powell's in Portland, OR, and have started reading it. I am taking my time to read it; reading it very, very slowly. When I first read the subtitle ("The epic novel of the founding of Hong Kong") my hunch was that this was an "Ayn Rand novel set in China." Wow, having just read the first 15 pages, my hunch seems right on.

I was very fortunate to have read The Opium Wars first; this novel makes so much more sense knowing the background.

So, to the reader who recommended that I read Tai-Pan, thank you.

May 8, 2018 -- Making America Great Again

Updates

May 8, 2018: CNS News on labor force participation:

Last month, a record 95,745,000 Americans were counted as "not in the labor force," meaning they are not employed and are not seeking a job, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statics. "This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work," BLS said.

In a March 2018 report, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a lower labor force participation rate is associated with lower gross domestic product and lower tax revenues. It is also associated with larger federal outlays, because people who are not in the labor force are more likely to enroll in federal benefit programs, including Social Security.

Lower tax revenues? April, 2018, tax revenue -- sets all-time record. See original post.

Original Post

Making America great again:I was traveling yesterday. I see this was mentioned by the Washington Times. I assume it got wide play across all major networks including MSNBC and CNBC:

Weren't we told by mainstream media, Obama apologists, and never-Trumpers that the Trump Tax Bill would result in greatly reduced revenue for the US government? That's what I recall.

April: IRS tax haul collected $515 billion, swamping the previous monthly record of $190 billion set in 2001 -- wow, that's amazing -- all the way back to 2001. That takes us back to King George III, doesn't it?

And not only that, the haul of $515 billion greatly outpaced spending which was reported at less than $300 billion.

***********************************************

Summer in North Dakota: a reader tells me that folks in North Dakota hope to see summer sometime later this year. Right now, the forecast is this: "official" summer for North Dakota will be from August 15 - August 18, and then first signs of winter. Here it is, May 7, 2018, last evening, over at the Grand Forks Herald, Lake Sakakawea could challenge last ice-out date. This, despite global warming:

Ice remains on a good portion of Lake Sakakawea and it may remain that way for at least another week.The upper end of Lake Sakakawea has been ice free for several days. However, the middle and lower ends of the reservoir remained coated in a great sheet of ice. Sakakawea's latest ice-free date is May 17, 1979.

Comment: my hunch is that folks are going to be watching this very, very closely. There are few stories in North Dakota that are bigger than a) flaring; b) pipeline protests; and, c) ice-free dates.

Headline a bit over the top, from Reuters: "oil surges on Venezuela-Conoco disute, Iran sanction worries. In fact, WTI goes slightly over $70 (hardly surges), and then falls back to slightly under $70. This morning: $69.92. Hardly surging.

Comment: For its current budget Saudi needs $88-oil to stay afloat; last year it needed $83-oil. Right now, Brent well below that at $75. 

From the linked article:

Oil prices rose for the fourth straight day on Monday to hit levels not seen since late 2014, boosted by the latest trouble for Venezuelan oil company PDVSA and the possibility that the United States could re-impose sanctions on Iran.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose $1.01, or 1.5 percent, to settle at $70.73 a barrel. This was the first time since November 2014 that WTI had climbed above $70. Brent crude futures jumped $1.30, or 1.7 percent, to settle at $76.17 a barrel.

U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips moved to take Caribbean assets of Venezuela's state-run PDVSA to enforce a $2 billion arbitration award.

Iran sanctions: pending. Trump expected to make announcement today.

API US crude oil inventory numbers to be released later this afternoon, 3:30 p.m. CDT, I believe.

Boom: Comcast to make ALL CASH unsolicited offer for Fox. Like this will go anywhere.

Boom:

• Apple's march to a trillion-dollar-market cap.
• Some say fair value for AAPL: $400.

Gone: NY attorney general resigns over reports of really weird activity. No links. Story everywhere. Good riddance. Makes Donald Trump look like a Boy Scout.

I wonder if the NY attorney general story will be reported on MSNBC this morning. More likely, Eric Schneiderman will become MSNBC analyst for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #Hey,WeAllDoIt; and, #What'sTheBigDeal. Rumors are Bill Clinton continues to keep a very, very low profile.

It appears the story was broken by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker. Really? The New Yorker actually published this story. Hell must be freezing over.

Ronan Farrow: an American journalist, lawyer, and former government advisor. In late 2017, Farrow's articles in The New Yorker helped to uncover the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. For this reporting, or this reporting, The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service, sharing the award with The New York Times.

Short squeeze: reported previously -- Elon Musk getting ready to pull off a huge short squeeze. Yesterday/today it is being reported that Elon Musk bought $10 million worth of TSLA. He could flip them today and make a tidy profit -- shares were up almost 3% yesterday on news of that deal, trading up almost $9 and back over $302/share.

ConocoPhillips Appears Ready To Take Control Of Venezuelan Oil Sector Assets To Enforce $2 Billioin Arbitration Award -- May 7, 2018

From SeekingAlpha:

• ConocoPhillips has moved to take Caribbean assets of Venezuela’s PDVSA oil company to enforce a $2B arbitration award, actions that could further harm PDVSA's declining oil production and exports
• COP has targeted facilities on the islands of Curacao, Bonaire and St. Eustatius that accounted for ~25% of Venezuela’s oil exports last year and play key roles in processing, storing and blending PDVSA’s oil for export
• COP’s actions could further impair PDVSA’s declining oil revenue and Venezuela's collapsing economy; the country is almost completely dependent on oil exports, which have fallen by a third since its peak and its refineries ran at just 31% of capacity in Q1

See post, May 5, 2018, just two days ago.

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Global Warming? What Global Warming?

June 1, 2018, we start the "new" global warming tag.

If It's DMI, It's Not Fake News -- April 18, 2018 -- The Middle Kingdom

From realclimatescience.com:

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Notes For The Granddaughters

I'm still in my "China phase." Absolutely fascinating.

From wiki, two items.

First:

Zhōngguó is the most common sinitic name for China in modern times.

The first appearance of 中國 on an artifact was in the Western Zhou on a ritual vessel known as He zun.

It is formed by combining the characters zhōng (中) meaning "central" or "middle", and guó (國/国), representing "state" or "states"; in contemporary usage, "nation".

Prior to the Qin unification of China "Zhongguo" referred to the "Central States"; the connotation was the primacy of a culturally distinct core area, centered on the Yellow River valley, as distinguished from the tribal periphery.

In later periods, however, "Zhongguo" was not used in this sense.

Dynastic names were used for the state in Imperial China and concepts of the state aside from the ruling dynasty were little understood.

Rather, the country was called by the name of the dynasty, such as "Han dynasty" (Hanchao 漢朝), "Tang dynasty" (Tangchao 唐朝), "The Great Ming" (Daming 大明), "The Great Qing" (Daqing 大清), as the case might be. Until the 19th century when the international system came to require a common legal language, there was no need for a fixed or unique name.

Second:

The English translation of "Zhongguo" as the "Middle Kingdom" entered European languages through the Portuguese in the 16th century and became popular in the mid 19th century.

By the mid 20th century the term was thoroughly entrenched in the English language to reflect the Western view of China as the inwards looking Middle Kingdom, or more accurately the Central Kingdom.

Endymion Wilkinson points out that the Chinese were not unique in thinking of their country as central, although China was the only culture to use the concept for their name.

The term Zhongguo was also not commonly used as a name for China until quite recently, nor did it mean the "Middle Kingdom" to the Chinese, or even have the same meaning throughout the course of history.

For our marine biologist, from wiki:

A polynya is an area of open water surrounded by sea ice.

It is now used as geographical term for an area of unfrozen sea within the ice pack.

It is a loanword from Russian: полынья (polynya) Russian pronunciation: [pəɫɨˈnʲja], which refers to a natural ice hole, and was adopted in the 19th century by polar explorers to describe navigable portions of the sea.

In past decades, for example, some polynyas, such as the Weddell Polynya, have lasted over multiple winters (1974–1976).

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Remembering People's Names

There are various tricks for remembering people's names. Of course, the first "trick" is to determine immediately if someone/someone's name is "worth" remembering.

I was reminded of that yesterday. I ran into an individual I met for the first time some weeks ago while standing in line at some Texas bar-be-cue. I really enjoyed the conversation. I don't recall if we exchanged names, probably thinking this a chance meeting, unique, that would not happen again.

Well, it did. I happened to see him at the same bar-be-cue yesterday. Groundhog day, I guess. I had a great time talking about my quick trip to Tucson. We exchanged names. This time I won't forget. Pro-fat. Prophet. Eli.

More than 20 years ago I met an Air Force officer that I thought might someday be important for me to know/remember -- someone who might affect my Air Force career. I've never forgotten his name. His name: Colonel Waddell. My "reminder"? Duck. I even, to this day, remember where I met him. Our paths never crossed again after that.

Nothing About The Bakken -- Just Having Fun -- April 10, 2018

EPS, history, Yahoo!Finance:

Tesla: debt, CNN. 

Tesla: then and now, Goldman Sachs estimates --

• Tesla: 170 million outstanding shares
• a loss of $7.65 / share = 1,300 million or $1.3 billion
• that's for the year
• we'll get the first quarter's results next week

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Global warming: it took President Trump about a year to turn things around --

It Could Be Worse -- Only In The Dakotas -- Why I Love To Blog -- April 6, 2018

A huge thanks to Don alerting me to the current weather conditions in the Bakken.

Disclaimer: I often mis-read charts. If this information is important to you, go to the source.

Link here.

Link here.

Link here.

Unless I'm missing something or mis-reading something, Williston set a new all-time low temperature record this morning, hitting -3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unless I'm missing something, Williston has never recorded a temperature below 0 degrees on any previous April 6. The previous cold temperature record goes back to 1936 when it still did not go below 0 degrees.

By the way, my dad grew up in Newell, SD, and he still talks about the winter of 1936. He was about 14 years old at the time and remembers riding with his dad on an open horse-drawn cart delivering milk from their cows they had milked earlier that morning.

He remembers his dad (my grandfather) telling him, "it could be worse."  I guess my grandfather was correct. It could be worse. It could be "below zero."

Just to confirm:

Global Warming Hits NYC -- Not Even Mentioned On CNBC -- April 3, 2018

Had I not checked in with IceAgeNow,  I would not have even known -- was this reported on any mainstream media outlet?

The link is here. I am surprised it was not blamed on President Trump.

Trouble In Paradise -- How's That Renewable Energy Working Out? -- March 23, 2018

Inquiring minds want to know:

• why is the California PUC not directing solar energy companies to start storing solar energy to prepare for this summer's grid demands?
• why is Governor Moonbeam not asking the sun to extend its summer hours?
• why is the California PUC not directing wind turbines to start spinning faster in anticipation of grid demands this summer?
• where is Elon Musk when you really need him?
• where are those batteries?

The EIA graphic that leads to those questions:

From Forbes, 2016:

Besides having the most expensive electricity west of the Mississippi River in the continental U.S., California already has the least reliable electricity. California easily leads the nation with nearly 470 power outages a year, compared to 160 for second place Texas, which is really amazing because Texas produces 125% MORE electricity! California's reliability problems will be multiplied as more wind and solar enter the power mix, intermittent resources located in remote areas that cannot be so easily transported to cities via the grid.

It's crucial to remember that drought and less hydropower available in the Northwest was a determining factor in California's "2000-2001 Power Crisis" that cost the state $50 billion in added energy costs, illustrating the problems of California's over-reliance on outside energy (California also unsustainably imports over 90% of its natural gas, the nation's fastest growing major fuel, and the source that other states will increasingly lean upon most to meet the Clean Power Plan).

For the archives. It's March. Three months to June. 

Memo To The Kennedy Clan: Head To NYC Central Park; Take The Grandchildren And Their Sleds; It's Spring; We Haven't Seen This In 130 Years -- March 22, 2018

This was never forecast two months ago, nor was it forecast 20 years ago, but we know to the hundredth decimal point the global temperature in 2118 (57.82 degrees Fahrenheit).

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The Market

On another note, TSLA crashes through the $310 floor. Late last week the CNBC "Fast Money" folks heartily recommended TSLA. Whatever.

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Notes to the Granddaughters

From Convergence: The Idea At The Heart of Science, Peter Watson, c. 2016

I think this is my third entry regarding this book. One can do a search for the other entries. 

This note will be from Chapter 3: Beneath the Pattern of the Elements

Arianna (the oldest granddaughter) and I have spent a lot of time together on the periodic table. She knows it as well as anyone her age.

"Atomic weight" is now a historical term. Relative atomic mass is preferred these days.

A raft of priority disputes: who first noticed the periodicity of the natural elements; the intervals appeared to recur at multiples of eight of hydrogen.

• Mendeleyev: born in Siberia Russia; mother and son moved to Moscow, then to St Petersburg
• 1855: qualified as a teacher; took gold medal for the best student of his year
• government grant to Paris, to study under Henri Regnault, the man who first established that absolute zero was -273 degrees Celsius
• then to Heidelberg, where he worked with Robert Bunsen (of Bunsen burner fame) and Gustav Kirchhoff (who between them [Kirchhoff and Bunsen] developed spectroscopy, using a prism to refract light) -- when an element is heated, the light it emitted produced its own characteristic spectrum of colors
• returned to St Petersburg in 1861 (about the time of the US civil war); realized he was virtually alone in Russia in being up to data on discoveries in chemistry
• while writing his textbook, noted the periodicity while putting some notes on the back of an envelope (true, no apocryphal)
• worked three days, three nights without sleeping; fell asleep; dream led to the Periodic Table of Elements
• two bold claims
• where atomic weight of elements did not place them where their properties indicated they should go, he said the atomic weights had been predicted wrongly
• he left gaps where no atomic weights were know, predicting that the gaps would be filled in later
• he also noted that elements in the same group all had the same valency, the same affinity for other elements (measured by the number of hydrogen atoms they typically combined with); this tended to confirm that valency was related to chemical properties
• [valency/electrons: chemical properties; nuclear: physical properties of the element]
• Mendeleyev was the man who really first understood the layout of the periodic table and its significance
• chemistry came of age: alongside Newton's in physics and Darwin's in biology
• 1955: element 101 was named mendelevium
• now, on to physics
• Heinrich Hertz, b. 1857
• Hertzian waves = radio waves
• Guglielmo Marconi read the paper; rushed home to see whether Hertz's spark oscillator might be used for signaling
• Hertz left experimental physics for theoretical physics; died of bone disease at age 37
• quickly the rest of the chapter:
• a new form of energy: cathode rays; Rontgen; accidentally put his hand in between the cathode-ray tube and a screen (the rest is history); Becquerel (another accident) discovered "fluorescing" (naturally occurring radioactivity
• the discovery of radioactivity: Marie Curie; thorium, 150x more active than uranium; an "element" 330x more active than uranium (turned out to be two elements: polonium and radium)
• the discovery of the electron: Cavendish Laboratory; James Clerk Maxwell, d. 1879; laboratory only five years old; then Lord Rayleigh, short director-ship; then 28-y/o Joseph John (J. J.) Thomson -- like Mary Somerville before him, could use mathematics to bring order to physics; Thomson called them "corpuscles"; others called them "protyles"); today they are called electrons, a name first proposed by the Anglo-Irish physicist and astronomer George Johnstone Stoney; discovery quickly dwarfed by that of the quantum
• the discovery of the quantum: Max Planck, 1900, 42 years old, two years younger than JJ Thomson; University of Berlin; 1897: the year Thomson discovered electrons; Plank began work on the project that was to take his name; sketched an equation to explain the behavior of radiation in a black body -- electromagnetic radiation was not continuous, as classical physics had claimed, but could only be emitted in packets of a definite size
• the organization of the atom: Ernest Rutherford, March 7, 1911; notes taken by James Chadwick, a student at the time, in Manchester; alpha radiation; alpha particles (helium atoms); beta radiation; electrons with a negative charge [a third type of radiation, similar to X-rays, was discovered in 1900 by French physicist Paul Ulrich Villard; the most penetrating radiation of all, being stopped only by lead, called gamma radiation -- so, we had alpha, beta, gamma]
• the unification of JJ, Planck, and Rutherford: Niels Bohr -- "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules," the collective title of Bohr's three papers on the subject ("The Trilogy," became a classic, and after three years in Manchester, offered a professorship in his home city of Copenhagen)

Then on to Chapter 4: the unification of space and time, and of mass and energy.

But the chapter that will probably interest me the most, Chapter 12: "A Biography of Earth: The Unified Chronology of Geology, Botany, Linguistics, and Archaeology."

Green Energy -- The Harsh Reality -- March 20, 2018

Updates

Later, 6:34 p.m. Central Time: the Kennedy clan is no doubt getting ready for their fourth family reunion of the winter/spring to celebrate all the snow. Vencore Weather is reporting a major coastal storm with significant impact all along the I-95 corridor.  

Original Post 

This is interesting. When I first started investing in 1984, with an energy- and telecom-weighted portfolio, I always worried that I would not know when to liquidate my energy holdings, expecting that oil and natural gas would come to an end when i was in my early 60's or 70's. Not to worry. It looks like I can hold on to my energy holdings for another 50 years.

But before I get to the article, a screenshot from yesterday's Drudge Report:

Later: now it's in blue on the Drudge Report -- 11:03 a.m.:

From oilprice.com yesterday:

I recently asked a group [most likely millennials] gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world's energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.

Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.

The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide. [And this is after decades of cajoling, fake news, tax credits, incentives, regulations, federal and state mandates.]

The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.

I hadn't included hydroelectricity in my list, I told the group, which would add another 2.5 percent to the renewable energy category. But hydro, I explained, would be growing only very slowly since most of the world's best dam sites have been taken.

The category "Biofuels and waste," which makes up 9.7 percent of the world total, includes small slivers of what we Americans call biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), I said, but mostly represents the deforestation of the planet through the use of wood for daily fuel in many poor countries, hardly a sustainable practice that warrants vast expansion. (This percentage has been roughly the same since 1973 though the absolute consumption has more than doubled as population has climbed sharply.) 

As if to underline this worrisome state of affairs, the MIT Technology Review just days later published a piece with a rather longish title: "At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system."

In my presentation I had explained to my listeners that renewable energy is not currently displacing fossil fuel capacity, but rather supplementing it. In fact, I related, the U.S. government's own Department of Energy with no sense of alarm whatsoever projects that world fossil fuel consumption will actually rise through 2050. This would represent a climate catastrophe [LOL], I told my audience, and cannot be allowed to happen. [He needs to take a look outside -- see screenshots above -- and quit relying on Algore's PowerPoint presentations.]

And yet, the MIT piece affirms that this is our destination on our current trajectory. The author writes that "even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem."

Much, much more at the link.

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Notes To The Granddaughters

One book today: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 - 1850, Brian Fagan, c. 2000

A reminder: due to all the coal-burning Viking ships, the Medieval Warm Period lasted from around 1000 BCE to about 1300 CE.

A major -- get this -- one, single, major volcanic eruption generates a cold snap, 1258 CE.

1450: "greater storminess and unpredictable climatic shifts -- and very, very cold."

1670 - 1710: "the coldest period of the Little Ice Age."

Warming begins about 1850.

Algore notes the warming trend, 1994.

The author: Brian Fagan is a professor of archaeology at UC-Santa Barbara. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology.

Preface:

• people dancing at fairs on a frozen River Thames in London in the jolly days of King Charles II
• legends of George Washington's raging Continental Army wintering over at Valley Forge in 1777 - 1778
• only two centuries ago Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly cold winters, mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were lower than in recorded memory; pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year
• we live in an era of global warming that has lasted longer than any such period over the past thousand years [we won't mention the medieval warming period here or the era of dinosaurs -- it would not fit the story line]

Part One: Warmth and Its Aftermath

Chapter 1: The Medieval Warm Period, 950 - 1500 -- the story of the Vikings

• 980s: Norse settlement of Greenland
• 1066: William the Conqueror invades England
• late 1100s: cathedral building
• 1200: crusades begin; last for decades
• 1258: large volcanic eruption causes cold summer
• 1300: Hanseatic League rises to prominence
• between 1300 - 1500
• Great Famine (1315 - 1321)
• Black Death (c. 1348)
• Abandonment of Norse Western settlement, Greenland (c. 1350)
• Hundred Years War (1337 - 1483
• wine cultivation abandoned in England

Chapter 2: The Great Famine

• the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
• trade and geography made Flanders one of the leading commercial centers of 14th century Europe
• 1315: cold weather; crops not harvested; beginning of the Great Famine
• famine lasted for seven years
• the story of medieval farming as much as the weather

Part Two: Cooling Begins

Chapter 3: The Climatic Seesaw

• some experts: 1300 - 1850
• the heavy rains and great famines in 1315 - 1316 marked the beginning of centuries of unpredictability throughout Europe
• other authorities restrict the term "Little Ice Age" to a period of much cooler conditions over much of the world between the late 17th (1680; Industrial Revolution began about 100 years later) centuries to the mid-nineteenth (1850) centuries (right through the Industrial Revolution and into the US Civil War)
• what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer still eludes us -- centuries later [but experts have the current cycle of global warming all figured out, and it's all because of "America," specifically the US and the GOP]

Chapter 4: Storms, Cod, and Doggers

• back to the Vikings, when they first noted the weather change to severe cold and northern ice packs
• Eric the Red, Norse merchant ships (knarrs): most direct route from Iceland to East Greenland, along latitude 65 degrees north, then coasted south and west around Cape Farwell to the Eastern Settlement
• herring fishing
• herring abounded in the North Sea
• Dutch invented the buss, a much larger ship that allowed sailors to stay out at sea for a longer period of time
• Dutch and the Basques: skilled boatbuilders
• a small boat originally used on the Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea and for cod fishing: the dogger
• English were quick to make use of the doggers; the English dogger fleets were so efficient that Iceland's leaders soon complained to their Danish masters that the foreigners were decimating the fish population

Chapter 5: A Vast Peasantry

• village life in medieval France
• by the beginning of the 15th century (1400), the depopulation of the countryside by famine, plague, and war had led to the abandonment of as many as 3,000 villages across France alone
• the recurrent plagues and regular famines kept population in check for generations
• 1430s: a run of exceptionally harsh winters
• 1500s: glacial advance noted
• in 1599 - 1600, the Alpine glaciers pushed downslope more than ever before or since
• 1560 - 1600: throughout Europe, the years were cooler and stormier, with late wine harvests and considerably stronger winds than those of the 20th century
• farming difficult across Europe; farming was just as difficult in the fledgling European colonies in North America

Part Three: The End of the "Full World"

Chapter 6: The Specter of Hunger

• subsistence farming
• the severe weather of the 1590s marked the beginnings of the apogee of the Little Ice Age, a regimen of climatic extremes that would last over two centuries
• 17th century literally began with a bang; between February 16 and March 5, 1600, a spectacular eruption engulfed the 4,800-meter Huanyaputina volcano seventy kilometers east of Arequipa in southern Peru
• the scale of hte Huanyaputina eruption rivaled the Krakatau explosion of 1883 and the Mount Pinatubo event in the Philippines in 1991
• volcanic events produced at least four more major cold episodes during the 17th century, which is remarkable for having at least six climatically significant eruptions; none rivaled summer 1601, but 1641 - 1643; 1666 - 1669; 1675; and 1698- 1699 experienced major cold spikes connected with volcanic activity (note:1666 -- The Plague Year)

Chapter 7: The War Against The Glaciers

• 1680 - 1730: the coldest cycle of the Little Ice Age; temperatures plummeted; the growing season in England was about five weeks shorter than it was during the 20th century's warmest decades
• the winter of 1683 - 1684: particularly cold
• discussion of sunspots
• by any measure, the lack of sunspot activity during the height of the Little Ice Age was remarkable
• the period between 1645 and 1715 was remarkable for the rarity of aurora borealis and aurora australis, which were reported far less frequently than either before or afterward
• between 1645 and 1708, not a single aurora was observed in London's skies
• astronomers F W. G Sporer and E. W Maunder discussed
• glacial "high tide" in the Alps lasted from 1590 to 1850, before the egg began that continues to this day

Chapter 8: "More Like Winter Than Summer"

• "London has never forgotten the summer of 1666." 
• 1666: the Plague Year
• the London fire, September 2, 1666
• the late 17th century brought many severe winters, probably from persistent low NAOs
• the agricultural innovations of the 17th century insulated England from the worst effects of sudden climatic change

Chapter 9: Dearth and Revolution

• the remarkable transformation in English agriculture came during a century of changeable, often cool climate, interspersed with unexpected heat waves
• farms grew larger and more intensive cultivation spread over southern and central Britain
• more deaths came from infectious diseases due to malnutrition and poor sanitation than from hunger
• the importance of the wine industry to track climate change

Chapter 10: The Year Without A Summer

• April 11, 1815: the island of Sumbawa in eastern Java; Mount Tambora, at the northern tip of Sumbawa erupted with catastrophic violence
• volcanologists have fixed the dates of more than 5,560 eruptions since the last Ice Age; Mount Tambora is among the most powerful of them all, given rise the legend of Atlantic
• the ash was 100x that of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State in 1980; exceeded Krakatau in 1883
• the years 1805 to 1820 were for many Europeans the coldest of the Little Ice Age

Chapter 11: An Ghorta Mor

• Ireland, potato, and the Potato Famine
• summer of 1845
• by April, 1846, people were eating their seed potatoes
• 1846: widespread food shortages
• thus, the Little Ice Age ended as it began, with a famine whose memory resonated through generations
• Ireland changed radically as a result

Part Four: The Modern Warm Period

Chapter 12: A Warmer Greenhouse

• just a few short pages
• interesting that the entire book focused on science, nature, climate cycles, sunspots, volcanoes, North Atlantic Oscillation;
• the last few pages focused on climatologist James Hansen's testimony, June 23, 1988, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee "on a day when the temperature in Washington, DC, reached a sweltering 38 degrees Celsius" [as folks would tell me, that's weather, not climate, and completely irrelevant; what a doofus]

Note:

• El Niño and La Niña are not mentioned in the book (I didn't see this discussed, nor were the words in the index)
• a very Euro-centric focus; not much on North America; nothing on South America, Africa, or Asia, except in passing or to discuss specific volcanic events