Articles by David Roberts

Cause sometimes nature isn’t enough

Have y'all heard about this Grand Canyon Skywalk? WTF?

The Atlantic Ocean is going to kill you

Speaking of Oil Drum, they remind me to point to a new study in Nature (sorry, $30) showing that Atlantic Ocean currents are shifting -- which, if verified, could portend a climatic worst case scenario.

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

...

Harry Bryden at the Southampton Oceanography Centre in the UK, whose group carried out the analysis, says he is not yet sure if the change is temporary or signals a long-term trend. "We don't want to say the circulation will shut down," he told New Scientist. "But we are nervous about our findings. They have come as quite a surprise."

This is potentially Very Bad News. Atlantic currents carry warm water to Northern Europe. If they stop, weather there could get mighty cold -- ice-age cold.

But as Stuart Staniford ominously notes (in quite a bit of technical detail, but fascinatingly): if all that warm water isn't going north, where ... ?

Smack into the region where North Atlantic hurricanes form, that's where it's going.

As the French say, l'eek.

Things that make you go ‘hm’

A guest poster over on Oil Drum shares, among other things, an interesting factoid.

A useful, easy-to-remember aphorism is: ONE BARREL of oil is equivalent to ONE YEAR of very hard labor by a human.

Hm.

Calming down the hybrid hype.

Treehugger mocks this, from the notoriously hack-a-rrific Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Petroleum not consumed by Prius owners is not "saved". It does not stay in the ground. It is consumed by someone else. Greenhouse gases are still released.

I'm all for mocking the WSJ editorial page, but this statement is quite true. Oil supply and demand are tightly coupled right now and are only going to get more so. Any dribble of oil you don't use will be snapped up by someone else -- perhaps one of the growing legion of Chinese drivers -- and so on and on until the remaining oil becomes prohibitively expensive and forces the market to provide alternatives.

It would be nice to think that environmental sentiment could free the world from oil, but it'll never happen.

If your goal is to save money or save oil, buying a Prius should be far down your list.

Buy a Prius, if you like, to express your values and make a statement to manufacturers that there's a market for these kinds of cars.

But let's not let the hybrid hype get out of hand.