Comments on: Energy and Global Warming News for November 6: Philippines targets $2.5 billion geothermal development

By: paulm

paulm — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:13:42 +0000

Now here is something to ponder…the dinosaurs were a very successful species like us. Taking over where every they move in. They then went extinct.

Did they cause their own extinction due to resource depletion and exhaustion, just like we are on course for?

Is man on course to cause the sixth extinction?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2009/ nov/ 08/ humans-sixth-extinction

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert ,Forthcoming book examines the role of humans in the eradication of species, and its findings are not likely to be pleasant

What remains unclear is the degree to which humans are now repeating this bloodletting, to the extent that we are about to set off a sixth extinction wave. If so, we will be the first single, biological cause of this kind of catastrophe. “If you add up the numbers of species that have been wiped out over the past few hundred years, then you find the figures fall well short of a mass extinction,” said MacLeod. “It is only when you look at the numbers of creatures that are poised at the brink of eradication does the picture become alarming.”

By: mikkel

mikkel — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:52:15 +0000

K. Nockles, I don’t think that has to be the explanation. The problem is that people are pouring into oil as an anti-dollar (and increasingly anti-any currency) play but gasoline demand is still really low. I’ve read that refiners profits are at record lows and a lot of them are at risk of shutting down because there is no pricing power for the end product.

They may be doing something, but I think it’s more likely that it’s just a consequence of our monetary policy.

By: K. Nockles

K. Nockles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:11:30 +0000

Joe a question for you, in the last two months the price of a barrel of oil has been between $74-$81. Prices at the pump in my state have just jumped 20 cents a gallon but only in the last 2 days. Is it because of the contract prices from the summer or are gas prices being held down by the oil companies in part to keep consumers from backing clean energy, since we seem to stay more complacent if gas prices stay lower, lower being realitve to last year at this time? I have been thinking along these lines since OIL hit $80 a barrel last week and no price increase at the pump was forthcoming at the time nor anything said about it on the news?

By: Tomas L.Martin

Tomas L.Martin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:04:33 +0000

The MIT report sounds fascinating, but the link you provide to it is dead (it leads to the EGS category of Climate Progress)

Very interesting post, particularly on the billion figure. There’s so many clean technologies achingly close to mainstream now. If only the politicians and general public realised just how competitive some of them are.

[JR: Fixed.]

By: P. G. Dudda

P. G. Dudda — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:15:50 +0000

[Off-topic] I don’t see an email link, but wanted to make sure Joe knows about these two articles, reporting that multi-year ice is for all intents and purposes gone from the Arctic:

http://www.sciencepoles.org/ index.php?/ news/ multiyear_ice_in_the_arctic_has_practically_vanished/ &uid=1645&lg=en

and

http://www.reuters.com/ article/ scienceNews/ idUSTRE59S3LT20091029?sp=true

This has rather frightening implications for AGW, especially considering how low ice coverage is trending this season (see http://nsidc.org/ data/ seaice_index/ images/ daily_images/ N_timeseries.png for example). It does not bode well at all for the ice cap next summer…