Gas alert as demand and prices rise

[emordnilap]

It's a work in progress. Please give chapter and verse on typos.

There's someone suitably qualified in TT Louth, I'm sure.

F'r instance:

under it's land and offshore

= under it is land and offshore

but will involve frracking

all further expolitation

The proposed. drill site

There are others.

[Little John]

Which is why, having done the global thinking, I'm acting locally to prevent hydrocarbons being extracted from my neck of the woods.

But what are you going to do to offset all the carbon you've relied on in your own life time? The roads you've used, the fuel you've burnt, the society on which you have relied?

It's all very well trying to enforce communistical supply side top down thinking on the next generation but what are you going to do to clean up the mess left by you & yours?

I am not a climate change denier Biff - I simply see far more evidence that warming will not be anywhere near as disastrous as those with communists agendas want me to believe.

You calling me a commie JSD?

How dare you...

On a more serious not, though JSD; I want to drill down into your response a bit.

Are you merely saying that you are against supply-side market manipulations because you think they are unnecessary? Or are you against them even if it could be demonstrated, beyond doubt, that over consumption would to lead to massive climate change?

[Tarrel]

But what are you going to do to offset all the carbon you've relied on in your own life time? The roads you've used, the fuel you've burnt, the society on which you have relied?

surely, what's done is done. we should learn from our past, but not be constrained by it. A dangerous line of thinking would be; "I have behaved negatively in the past. If I now try to change, or suggest that others do so, it will make me a hypocrite, so I'll do nothing." And so the situation is perpetuated.

Regarding climate-change denying, or otherwise, there are many other issues apart from CC. The whole way we live our lives in the "developed" economies (and those who would become developed) is unsustainable. It doesn't benefit the majority of humans, it certainly doesn't benefit other species, and it just can't continue to work ad infinitum from a practical point of view.

In common with many others on this forum, I have read countless arguments for why infinite economic growth cannot continue. These are mostly well-reasoned and logical. However, I have not read a single argument for how it might be able to continue in the face of the (somewhat obvious) barriers against it. There are many arguments saying; "It must continue", or "We will be saved by some future technology", but nobody is saying; "Yes, it will continue, despite the limits on resources, and here is exactly how."

Even those who buy into the shale gas / oil promise know that fossil fuels cannot last forever, so why not accept it and start making systemic changes to the way we live while it's still possible to do so? (And, yes, stand up against those who would just perpetuate the current fossil fuel energy dependence).

[biffvernon]

There's someone suitably qualified in TT Louth, I'm sure.

Dunno about qualified but the typos are all mine and I've now corrected all the ones you pointed out plus a few others. BIG THANK-YOU.

To object to the Biscathorpe proposal fill in the Online Comments Form. http://eplanning.lincolnshire.gov.uk/eP ... plId=35911 More info: http://transitiontownlouth.org.uk/frack.html

One is allowed 3900 characters, so that's like doing 27 tweets

[adam2]

To return to the subject of gas supplies, total storage is now about 80% full, and I doubt that much more filling is likely, indeed withdrawals are likely to commence soon.

So lets hope that we dont get a long or cold winter !

[PS_RalphW]

Indeed LRS and MRS has stopped filling up, these past 3 days, even though demand is well below seasonal normal, and spot price is stable. Short range storage has begun filling, but far too late and it is tiny anyway.

Hope for a mild winter and no frozen pipes in the North Sea...

[clv101]

Up front and flat out we do not know what impact 'an amount' of CO2 will have on our climate because we do not know how the climate works. We can make predictions but the certainty levels are low.

Anthropogenic climate impact is undeniable. Climate change is undeniable. That there is a linear relationship between emitted CO2 and the temperature in Cardiff in 2050 is less clear.

Yes, this is quite right. "The community" has been generally poor at first understanding and quantifying climate projection uncertainty and secondly communicating uncertainty. For the last few years climate projection uncertainty has had increased research attention.

What we do know for an absolute fact is that CO2 levels were higher than they are now for the majority of the period that life has been on this planet and yet we are here.

This is non sequitur, when we start to look millions of years back through time, the very "rules" of the Earth system change. The movements of the continents, and for example the recent closure of the Panama seaway have significant impacts on dynamics, energy distribution, ice sheet mass and ultimately temperature. Even the solar constant changes significantly on timescales of millions of years. In short 2000ppm 200 million years ago is an extremely poor analogue for 2000 ppm today.

I find that difficult to square away against the 'we are doomed' claims.

It all depends what you (and others) mean when they say 'we are doomed'. Are we talking about the ability of the planet to support the volume and biodiversity of life that it does today? Or are we talking about the 'collapse' of post-industrial civilisation with a die-off of several billion humans during the coming century? Even with a stable climate, there's a fair chance we won't be able to satisfactorily feed and water this century's population. Change the rainfall distributions, temperatures just a little bit and all bets are off in my opinion.

It's not so much about the magnitude of the changes, it's about the speed of change and our civilisation's degree of investment in the current climate. Our cities built <1m above sea level, our population's reliance on agriculture etc. Map the projected climate changes onto Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago and they'd hardly have noticed. They didn't have multi-generational investments and the world was huge compared to their 'footprint'. Some 10-14k years ago, only just pre-history, our ancestors witnessed a ~120m sea level rise which flooded them out of what is now the southern half the North Sea. It took a few thousand years, they didn't have cities like London - most folk alive then probably didn't even notice! Apply a similar (not that it could happen) sea level to today's civilisation and it would change everything.

Change is normal.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, change is just what our civilisation doesn't like. We don't have the slack. 2 degrees hotter or 2 degrees colder, 20% more or 20% less rainfall - change is bad as we're hyper invested in the past few thousand years stability.

"Life" will find a way, even with 4-6C temperature rise by 2100. I'm far less confident of the chances for a thriving 10bn strong human population by 2100 in a 4-6 degree warmer world.

[kenneal - lagger]

Unfortunately, JSD, like Owen Patterson, seems to select the science that they believe in according to whether or not it fits in with their political beliefs. Science, fortunately, is not like economics where you can choose from a myriad of different theories one which suits your beliefs and run with that one.

Unlike economic theories, science is peer reviewed and tested by many different scientists and only those theories which are proved by many different scientists are accepted as the consensus approach by science in general. Economic theories are not subject to the above rigour and virtually anyone can publish a book of economic theory which could then be adopted by anyone who finds that it suits their own particular way of thinking.

The majority of economic thinking dates back to the sixteenth century when to own the land was to control the energy supply of a nation. Economies were completely solar powered at that time; horses were fed on hay and oats grown on land: wood came from trees grown on land: food was grown on land: water and windmills were sited on land. Own the land and you controlled the economy. Output was a function of labour and capital. If you had capital you could buy men and machines and the animals or wind or water to power them. You could throw more people at the process as well to increase output.

This system has fallen down of late and economists found that their equations no longer worked so they had to introduce a fiddle factor to make them work. They called this fiddle factor technology. Unfortunately they failed to see that the fiddle factor required was fossil fuel rather then technology because all technology requires fossil fuel to function.

Fuel in their opinion is just one of the many inputs required for an economy to function. Because they do not recognise the huge value which we have got from cheap fossil fuel they fail to recognise that expensive fossil fuels will have an adverse effect on our economies.

People like Owen Patterson then fail to see that a reliance on fossil fuels will damage the economy and that things like fracking depend on high fuel price and won't be able to ensure that we have cheap gas. They fail to see the economic consequences of the pollution of the atmosphere. Even an economist like Howard Stern has said that there will be severe economic consequences if we continue to add pollution to the atmosphere. But I suppose his report was tainted by the socialist agenda of the people who commissioned it so cannot be believed by a true Tory (pratt).

[adam2]

Looks like gas stocks briefly reached about 81% full and are now declining.
Not certain why filling has ceased, wholesale prices have increased only slightly, and demand though recently increased is still well below the norm for recent years.

Unless of course the LRS is in fact full, perhaps having been reduced in size ?
Or perhaps it is not full, but the increased energy cost of fully filling it is considered unworthwhile ?

[PS_RalphW]

Gas storage stopped filling a week ago. Clearly they have decided to risk running short rather than buying on the spot market. Given that Japanese demand for LPG is expected to rise as their last nuclear plant is shut, this has to be a very short sighted move.

I'm sort of glad I've moved to an oil burning house... although I miss-timed refilling the tank by buying the news, not the rumour. Oil is down $5 from the recent peak, and the $ is 3 cents down against Sterling.

Now I need to change the wiring in the house so that I can isolate the central heating and power the pump from batteries.

[edit]

Adam2 - you beat me to it! Minds thinking alike or just a slow day at work?

[kenneal - lagger]

We don't have a problem with wild claims at the moment. We have the opposite. Many positions taken in the IPCC reports are overtaken as the report is published. The IPCC reports are too conservative and do not show just how bad the situation is, for instance, the rate of ice loss in the Arctic and the rate of permafrost melting and methane release is that region.

Edited to add "permafrost" - 19/09/13

[kenneal - lagger]

Well yes but we know what happens when CO2 reaches higher concentrations because we can see it in the paleo-cimate records..

As Biff has said elsewhere but you seem to have ignored, there were other conditions at the time which make direct comparisons very difficult, such as the orbit of the earth and the positions of the continents changing.

[clv101]

50 million years ago the Sun was pretty much as it is now, our orbit has hardly changed but the continents were a bit skewed.

CO2 was 1000ppm and temperatures was 15degC higher.

Life flourished.

Were is the doom?

In fact so interesting is the Eocene comparison that there are rafts of papers on it.

I wrote about this a few posts above. 50 million years ago? The world was a very different place then, it's not correct to suggest 1000ppm wasn't bad then so it won't be this time.

The focus of paleoclimate research is to understand how the Earth system works. The planet 200, 100 and 50myr ago are essentially different planets, running on the same laws of physics. We can learn a lot about how the system works - but we absolutely can't draw linear relationships between the status of one parameter (like CO2) then and that same parameter today.

[kenneal - lagger]

..............Were (sic) is the doom?

The enormous financial, intellectual and physical investments to be made in changing our entire food growing, manufacturing and living arrangements in a period of less than one hundred years for a start.

Sea level rise will flood many of the world's main cities and much of the best agricultural land. Many nuclear power plants will go under water. Many countries, or major parts of them, will go under water displacing billions of people.

We have no idea how our crops will react, whether we will be able to grow them elsewhere or whether we will be able to feed the increasing world population. If things stayed as they are now, with a bit of redistribution, we could feed the projected increase.

I went through most of this on another thread, JSD, but you seem to have ignored it there. Perhaps you will explain how our already broken financial system would cope with the above strains in such a short period.

[Pepperman]

..............Were (sic) is the doom?

The enormous financial, intellectual and physical investments to be made in changing our entire food growing, manufacturing and living arrangements in a period of less than one hundred years for a start.

Sea level rise will flood many of the world's main cities and much of the best agricultural land. Many nuclear power plants will go under water. Many countries, or major parts of them, will go under water displacing billions of people.

We have no idea how our crops will react, whether we will be able to grow them elsewhere or whether we will be able to feed the increasing world population. If things stayed as they are now, with a bit of redistribution, we could feed the projected increase.

I think we can fairly safely say that a 15 degree increase would be game over for all but a few small pockets of humanity. We can't adapt to that kind of temperature increase.

Life in general, on the other hand, would be just fine and dandy. There'd be massive die offs but the survivors would adapt and thrive, no doubt about that.

But that's not really the point.