Drilling in the Arctic and other disasters

When I read these articles I want to howl with rage and grief.

Not only will this Infinite Growth Paradigm bring great suffering to people.  It will destroy this beautiful world of ours and bring us to the brink of extinction!

Economic collapse?  Bring it on before it kills us all!

Great reporting from the Independant.

Oil exploration under Arctic ice could cause 'uncontrollable' natural disaster

The Independant,

6 September, 2011

Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the "new frontier" for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world's most untouched ecosystem, one of the world's leading polar scientists has told The Independent.

Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

For article GO HERE

Unlocked by melting ice-caps, the great polar oil rush has begun

the Independant,

6 September, 2011

Trillions are at stake, and the ecological risks are equally huge. Michael McCarthy reports

It's the melting of the Arctic ice, as the climate warms, that makes it possible — and you can understand why they're all piling in. In July 2008, the US Geological Survey released the first ever publicly available estimate of the oil locked in the earth north of the Arctic Circle.

It was 90 billion barrels, representing an estimated 13 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil resources. If you're an oil company, or an oil-hungry economy, that's more than enough to make your mouth water.

But wait. Less than a year later, the geologists involved in the programme, known as Cara, the Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal, had radically revised their estimate – upwards. Now – in June 2009 – they said the Arctic might in fact hold as much as 160 billion barrels, which would amount to more than 35 years of US oil imports, or five years of total global oil consumption, and be worth, at current prices, more than 18 trillion dollars. Forget mouthwatering. Think drooling.

In the historic opening-up to exploitation of the frozen north, hydrocarbons are the greatest prize (there is likely to be even more natural gas than there is oil.)

No matter that the polar regions are the most inhospitable parts of the whole globe. And no matter, either, that the Arctic constitutes the world's most untouched ecosystem. The oil industry's motto has always been "Can Do", and in the Arctic, it's already doing.

Cairn Energy, an Edinburgh oil exploration company founded by the former Scotland rugby player Sir Bill Gammell, was the first in: it is now in the process of drilling four test wells in Baffin Bay, off the west coast of Greenland (it began last year with three wells, none of which struck oil).

Next year Cairn will be followed into the high north by Shell: the Anglo-Dutch giant has already spent more than $2bn (£1.24bn) on seabed leases and hopes to start a massive programme of oil exploration in July 2012, with up to ten wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the north coast of Alaska, a region that, according to US Geological Survey estimates, holds 25bn barrels of oil. Shell will be followed in turn by the biggest of all the oil 

"supermajors", and the world's largest company – ExxonMobil.

Last week it was announced that Exxon had formed an Arctic exploration partnership worth $3.2bn with Rosneft, the Russian state oil group, to look for oil on the other side of the Arctic, in the Kara Sea off the coast of Siberia. In doing so, Exxon was taking the place of BP, which had done essentially the same deal with Rosneft in January, only to see it fall apart in May when it was blocked by BP's existing Russian partners. BP will be back, though; it was "actively looking for opportunities" in the Arctic, a spokesman said last week.

Yet this great surge of development is producing a great surge of concern, as environmentalists contemplate the possibility of a repeat of BP's catastrophic Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year – in the even more unforgiving conditions of the frozen north.

What especially angers green groups is the very fact that the melting of the Arctic ice through global warming is what is paving the way for the region to be exploited.

In mid-September 2007, Arctic Ocean ice cover dropped to a record low, at half its average extent over the years 1979-2000, and it is approaching a similar low this month.

Ben Ayliffe, an Arctic campaigner for Greenpeace, one of a number of environmental bodies strongly opposed to Arctic oil, said: "We've seen how our actions are changing the world, and the idea that we're going to go and use the retreating sea ice as a business opportunity is frankly madness. The risks of drilling and producing oil in this fragile and pristine natural ecosystem, one of the last great wilderness areas of the planet, are terrible."

Greenpeace has taken the lead in opposing the new oil rush with its traditional non-violent direct action: this summer it sent two ships, the Esperanza and the Arctic Sunrise, to disrupt Cairn Energy's drilling operations in Baffin Bay, and its activists did so briefly, until they were arrested and Cairn secured an injunction against the group.

In addition, Greenpeace has persuaded Greenland's government to publish Cairn's 200-page oil spill response plan, which the group subjected to a fierce critique last week, based on an analysis by Professor Rick Steiner, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska.

In a list of criticisms, the analysis pointed out that the plan itself admitted that oil clean-up operations after a spill would not be possible during an Arctic winter, and alleged that a "worst case" spill from a Cairn well would be very much worse than the company was allowing.

A spokeswoman for Cairn said at the weekend: "This plan has been reviewed and approved by third parties including Oil Spill Response Ltd, the Danish National Environmental Research Institute and the Greenland government. All are satisfied that the plan is robust and appropriately designed to deal with an incident in this area."

The case for a moratorium on oil drilling in the arctic is overwhelming

the Independant

6 September, 2011

The arguments against drilling for oil in the Arctic are so clear they should make themselves. Given that the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico proved such a challenge to technically-adept BP last year, the difficulty of shutting off a leak in a climate of sub-zero temperatures, which is pitch dark and frozen solid for six months of every 12, can only be imagined.

The potential damage to the environment is equally extreme. The Arctic is indescribably hostile, but also fragile – a pristine, wilderness ecosystem barely touched by human interference. As Cambridge University's Professor Peter Wadhams, one of the world's most respected polar scientists, warns in this newspaper today, an Arctic spill could prove uncontrollable, and its impact catastrophic. In such a context, the case for an absolute moratorium on Arctic drilling is overwhelming.

For article GO HERE

Climate change could cause more wars

Thomas Kostigen

What strikes me about these articles from the United States is that they appear to be talking to an already dumbed-down audience - and have to tread carefully around the very idea of manmade climate change.

What a strange idea! - that the Infinite Growth Paradigm should be responsible for such a phenomenon (sic)!

The Independant (and the Guardian) are assuming that their readers are intelligent.

Climate change creates violence. That’s what can be concluded by new academic analysis of weather data from around the world over the past 60 years.

Market Watch

An interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute looked at arrivals of El Niño, which happens every three to seven years, and linked it to periodic increases in warfare. El Nino is an oceanic oscillation that warms temperatures and causes rainfall to decline in many places and to increase in others. The pattern affects half the world’s population in Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, as well as the Americas.

“We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’ This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now,” says Solomon M. Hsiang, the study’s lead author. (The paper is also published in this month’s issue of Nature.)

Notice please all you climate-change deniers that “man-made” climate change wasn’t the focal point of this study. We are talking Mother Nature here. (Although I’d be remiss by not stating the fact that anthropogenic causes exacerbate climate change.)

It seems that while we’ve pitted ourselves against nature (man vs. nature), we’ve ignored how nature makes us gang up on ourselves.

“If you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Hsiang. Social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise.

This is increasingly important to understand as global temperatures indeed are rising and civil conflicts abound.

Everything from energy sources to commodities and consumer goods are affected by this. In short, the global economy.

China, for example, has found itself in a pickle in Libya because of its support for Moammar Gadhafi. China’s oil supply from that country is now threatened as rebels take over the government. Coffee companies everywhere are taking financial hits because the civil war in Ivory Coast is cutting off supplies and boosting coffee prices. Ivory Coast is a leading coffee exporter. And if you are Bolivian, fresh water even stops flowing when civil conflict breaks out.

To be sure, these conflicts can be traced to myriad causes other than weather — political, social, and religious affairs take part in civil wars. 

But weather has never really been inserted into this mix.

Now it has. And the correlations are too large to ignore.

Take this: “In 1982, a powerful El Niño struck impoverished highland Peru, destroying crops; that year, simmering guerrilla attacks by the revolutionary Shining Path movement turned into a full-scale 20-year civil war that still sputters today. Separately, forces in southern Sudan were already facing off with the domineering north, when intense warfare broke out in the El Niño year of 1963. The insurrection abated, but flared again in 1976, another El Niño year. Then, 1983 saw a major El Niño — and the cataclysmic outbreak of more than 20 years of fighting that killed 2 million people, arguably the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. It culminated only this summer, when South Sudan became a separate nation; fighting continues in border areas,” the study concludes.

As the Boston-based group CERES found in a report released this week — most insurance companies aren’t dealing with climate-change risks.

All ought to be — and perhaps even taking a look outside their windows. Storm clouds are forming. And along with them, violence may reign

Expert: USA's extreme weather should raise questions

This should be so apparent to everyone that the article need not be written!

USA Today

6 September, 2011

A United Kingdom news organization is taking a look at what it terms "unprecedented weather extremes" in the United States over the last nine months and quotes one weather expert as saying that the intensity of temperatures over the last two summers should raise questions.

There have been 10 major weather disasters this year, leaving more than 700 people dead and causing more than $35 billion in damage, The Guardian attributes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This year has seen three times as many weather-related disasters than what is typical, and NOAA expects summer 2011 figures - due to be released next week - will show the warmest summer on record, The Guardian reports.

"Not since the great heat waves of 1934 and 1936 has the U.S. seen so many heat-related records broken as occurred this summer," 

Christopher Burt, author of Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book, told The Guardian. "The back-to-back nature of the intensity of the past two summers should raise some interesting questions - questions I am not qualified to address."

The Guardian also reports the USA is not the only place experiencing weather and related extremes. Among other phenomena:

• The Horn of Africa is experiencing its deepest drought in 60 years, and the situation is contributing to famine in Somalia.

• Earthquakes registering 6.2-magnitude and higher shook 14 countries in the first half of the year.

• The Arctic ice melt hit a record in July.

Ireland: Firmus Gas announces price rises

Just imagine the effect of this on people who are already struggling - as they go into winter!

BBC

5 September, 2011

Natural gas provider Firmus Energy has said it will increase its prices in towns outside Belfast by 28.4% from 1 October.

Firmus is the sole provider of natural gas to households in 10 towns across Northern Ireland.

It is expected to announce an increase in its price for Belfast consumers in the near future.

Firmus' rival Phoenix Gas announced a rise of 39.1% in its tariff earlier this year.

The company has blamed the increase on a rise in the price of wholesale gas and said that it was only the second time in six years that it had raised its prices.

For article GO HERE