Fun With Graphs -- March 4, 2019

The NOAA is tasked with and is predicting a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature one hundred years from now. That two-degree Celsius rise is not trivial. For example: the record wind chill this past week in North Dakota of minus 53 degrees would have been a more tolerable minus 48 degrees with a 5-degree rise in average global temperature.

The NOAA is also tasked with and is predicting the effects of El Nīno six months out. Repeat: six months out. See graphics below.

It should be noted that the y axis does not identify what is being measured, but it ranges from minus three to plus three. The "K" could suggest "degrees Kelvin."  Or maybe it's the number of fake news stories (on average) that will be published between now and then. I don't know.

The "best" case scenario trends to "zero" (no change); the "worst" scenario trends to "three."

I'm glad the NOAA was not responsible for forecasting the odds of successfully landing Apollo 11's lunar module on the moon. 

This is the forecast models:

The screenshot came from this tweet:

It would be interesting to extrapolate the results of those sixteen "models" out to one hundred years.

Bakken Boom Explored In Exhibit At MIT In Cambridge, MA -- Best Story Of The Day -- March 4, 2019

An excerpt from the linked story below, from a photojournalist/artist:

When I first saw fracking operations in North Dakota, it looked like surrealism in infrastructure.

The visual power of it was stunning. No one really knows what fracking looks like because it’s so politically sensitive that they mostly keep photographers out. If you looked up fracking on Google right now you’d see a picture of something else – an oil drilling derrick, something that’s been going on long enough that people have seen images of it.

In fracking, all these massive tubes look like giant octopi or sea creatures with men walking among them like weeds, tending them. It’s biblical. It’s very moving. Leave value judgements off for a moment. Fracking is part of our world. Why shouldn’t we see what it looks like? 

Wow, this is so cool. A reader sent me the link -- I would have completely missed it. MIT in Boston has an exhibit exploring the Bakken boom. The artist spent four years photographing and recording audio in the Bakken region of North Dakota, documenting the rise of the oil industry there and the large migration that went along with it.

From the oil rigs to the “man-camps” where workers live, artist Valery Lyman’s two-day power plant pop-up “Breaking Ground” looks unflinchingly at the landscape of American industry. In Lyman’s moving installation, centuries of boom and bust give way to new boomtowns and the latest technology; but while the infrastructure of extraction has changed, the optimism, hard labor, risk and loneliness are a constant over more than 200 years of the American experience. 

Photographs from Lyman’s work have been installed around the country and published by The [London] Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor in the past few years. The installation this week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology incorporates those images, along with audio from Lyman’s exploration of North Dakota from 2013 to 2016 – projected directly onto machinery throughout MIT’s Central Utilities Plant in Cambridge, making a singular art experience out of a plant providing electricity, steam heat and chilled water to more than 100 campus buildings.

Archived, because one just knows this article will disappear into the ether-net. 

North Dakota Cities Hit Wind Chill Records In Midst Of AGW; Extremely Cold At (The) Beach -- March 4, 2019

Fortunately it was a "dry" cold.

From The Bismarck Tribune, re-posting for the archives. We may never see this again.

Some of the coldest wind chills reported Sunday morning were 53 below zero in Beach and Bowman, 49 below at Denhoff and 48 below at Hettinger, Wishek and Grassy Butte, according to the National Weather Service.

In Bismarck, the wind chill was 44 below zero early Sunday morning.

The rest of North Dakota is in a wind chill advisory through noon Monday, with wind chills expected to be as low as 40 below zero.

Some western North Dakota cities set records over the weekend.

On Sunday, Dickinson at least tied its record low temperature for the day at 19 below zero.

On Saturday, Dickinson and Williston set records for the coldest maximum temperature recorded that day. The high at Dickinson was 1 below zero and the high at Williston was 5 below.

Enbridge Line 3 Delayed For At Least A Year; Minnesota's "Go Green" Scheme Doesn't Include Pipelines; QEP Starts Canceling Permits; Meanwhile, NDSU In DC -- March 4, 2019

First things first: from twitter, moments ago ---

Golf: it's only Monday and Tiger Woods has already withdrawn from one of the biggest tournaments of the year -- the Arnold Palmer Invitational -- blames a "neck strain." Must have been a bruisin' weekend.

Color it "dead." Enbridge to delay Line 3 by a year. Cites delay in getting permits. State now has new governor pledged to "go green." Pipeline don't fit a "go green" scheme. Update: I don't know if this is bad news or really bad news. Oilprice is reporting that Enbridge won't even re-start Line 3 for now. I may have that wrong, but it seems pretty clear. The article is pretty clear stating that the company won't re-start Line 3 as scheduled. The CEO is reported to have said that the company has been given assurance by the governor that everything will work out fine but the state needs six months to get all the permits in order before Enbridge can re-open the line. So, we'll see. Bottom line: more bad news for Canada just as Alberta was beginning to ease restrictions on production.

Colorado: meanwhile, another state that doesn't like jobs:

Colorado drillers are gearing up for a fight after Democratic lawmakers proposed overhauling the state's oil and gas commission and reforming regulations that could create new roadblocks to fossil fuel development.

Speaking of Colorado:

New England: tracking ISO New England here. Prices spiking and coal back in the mix.

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

Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$56.59	3/4/2019	03/04/2018	03/04/2017	03/04/2016	03/04/2015
Active Rigs	68	59	45	35	114

Two new permits:

• Operators: Hunt, CLR
• Fields: Werner (Dunn County); Banks (McKenzie County)
• Comments:
• Hunt has a permit in section 24-146-93, Werner oil field
• CLR has another permit in section 18-152-99, Banks oil field

Three permits renewed:

• Whiting (2): two P Earl Rennerfeldt permits in Williams County
• Resource Energy Can-Am: a Shorty permit in Divide County

Nine permits canceled:

• QEP: nine MHA permits in Dunn County, all in section 26-149-91

It's Great To Be A Senior Now That The US House Is Leaning Left -- March 4, 2019

Open book test.

Multiple choice question: with a left-leaning US House and Bernie Sanders at the top among those running to be the Democratic nominee for president, will US seniors see better days ahead with regard to social security?

__ better days
__ much better days

An op-ed from The WSJ helps clarify.

Among the many tax increases Democrats are now pushing is the Social Security 2100 Act sponsored by John Larson of House Ways and Means. The plan would raise average benefits by 2% and ties cost-of-living raises to a highly generous and experimental measure of inflation for the elderly known as CPI-E. The payroll tax rate for Social Security would rise steadily over two decades to 14.8% from 12.4% for all workers, and Democrats would also apply the tax to income above $400,000. 

I could be wrong, but I believe the "social security tax" levied on employees/workers is a regressive tax.

Wiki suggests that

• social security taxes are regressive
• social security benefits are progressive

And:

The proponents are also sneaky in the way they lift the income cap on Social Security taxes. The Social Security tax currently applies only on income up to $132,900, an amount that rises each year with inflation. But the new payroll tax on income above $400,000 isn’t indexed to inflation, which means the tax would ensnare ever more taxpayers over time. This isn’t a drafting error. Democrats claim they only want to tax the rich but they know there aren’t enough rich to finance their redistribution plans. They want their hooks deeper into the middle class without middle-class voters figuring that out.

It should be noted that a lot of these "sneaky" details aren't "sneaky" at all. They are bargaining chips.

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

Pompous Little Twit

From twitter today:

Patrick Moore was the co-founder of Greenpeace, Inc.

Not sure which is worse? Pompous? Little? or Twit?

Twelve years. That's all we have left. It's hard to believe that we were born just in time to see this happen.

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

The Book Page

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, c. 1986.

Every day I read 10 - 20 pages. An incredible book.

It is amazing to see how little physicists knew about the atom in 1941 and how far they came by 1945. The "science was never settled."

It is amazing to see how "compartmentalized" the researchers were, not only among countries (Germany, Britain, US, Russian, Japan, France) but also within countries.