Apocolyptic Poets- Archibald Macleish

A very nice short piece.  This is the Sopranos' version of an ending:  all goes black and their is no explanation (except here).  So I guess we could call this the "Members Only" version of the end of the world.

The End Of The World

Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe,

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over

Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,

There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,

There in the sudden blackness the black pall

Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.

Heat Shock

Since the political party that worries about global warming is also the one that is likely to try and take our guns away, global warming is not a popular scenario with survivalists.  IMO that is a mistake.  When you look at the less partisan sources out there it is very much an issue of concern.  Arguing that it is all a lie because it is cold in Texas (in February) while ignoring that it has been extremely warm in Washington DC (for February) is just not going to get us anywhere.

Another issue is:  so what?  Why should I care if it gets a little warmer?  Well today's post is along the lines of showing why it might be very much an issue.

When listening to a talk by Professor Homer-Dixon, he commented on a recent article on the problems likely to be faced in crop yields because of global warming.

He was referring to  David. S. Battisti1 and Rosamond L. Naylors' Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.  I have chopped it up a bit, but here are some of the points they made:

We calculated the difference between projected and historical seasonally averaged temperatures throughout the world by using output from the 23 global climate models contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 scientific synthesis. Our results show that it is highly likely (greater than 90% chance) that growing season temperatures by the end of the 21st century will exceed even the most extreme seasonal temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006 for most of the tropics and subtropics.

Although much attention is focused on threats of increased droughts in subtropical agriculture, the potential impacts of seasonal average temperature changes in both the tropics and subtropics, which are expected to be large relative to the historical range of variation, are often overlooked. Experimental and crop-based models for major grains in these regions show direct yield losses in the range of 2.5 to 16% for every 1°C increase in seasonal temperature.

Despite the general perception that agriculture in temperate latitudes will benefit from increased seasonal heat and supply food to deficit areas, even mid-latitude crops will likely suffer at very high temperatures in the absence of adaptation.

Severe heat in the summer of 2003 affected food production as well as human lives in Europe. Record high daytime and nighttime temperatures over most of the summer growing season reduced leaf and grain-filling development of key crops such as maize, fruit trees, and vineyards; accelerated crop ripening and maturity by 10 to 20 days; caused livestock to be stressed; and resulted in reduced soil moisture and increased water consumption in agriculture. Italy experienced a record drop in maize yields of 36% from a year earlier, whereas in France maize and fodder production fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25%, and wheat harvests (which had nearly reached maturity by the time the heat set in) declined by 21%.

Big Oil struggles to Find Oil

I saw this on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, as such it may avoid the usual pay wall, it ties in well with the earlier post.  They are finding natural gas in sufficient quantities to depress the price of coal.  And that is good in so far as the continued fueling of our electrical grid.  But I am at a loss at how we are going to avoid some expensive changes to our transportation system.

Exxon Struggles to Find New Oil

HOUSTON—Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, is struggling to find more oil.

In its closely watched annual financial report released Tuesday, the company said that for every 100 barrels it has pumped out of the earth over the past decade, it has replaced only 95.

It's a conundrum shared by most of the other large Western oil-producing companies, which are finding most accessible oil fields were tapped long ago, while promising new regions are proving technologically and politically challenging.

Exxon said in the report that it more than made up for the shortfall in oil by stocking up on natural gas, mostly through its acquisition of XTO Energy Inc. last year.

But the shift toward gas is troubling some investors, because gas sells for less than the equivalent amount of oil. Many observers feel the move toward gas—a trend across the oil industry—is dictated more by shrinking access to oil fields than by a strong desire to emphasize gas production.  Russell Gold and Angel Gonzalez, Exxon Struggles to Find New Oil, Wall Street Journal, page A1, February 16, 2011.

Another reason for commodities to get expensive

From Matthew Yglesias who is discussing Tyler Cowen

Think of a world in which there are two kinds of growth. One is leap-ahead growth in which technologically advanced societies dream up even more advanced technology. The other is catch-up growth in which technologically backwards societies learn to use the advanced technology that already exists in the advanced countries.

In the twentieth century we saw some instances of catch-up growth, but leap-ahead growth accounted for the majority of global growth in output. One result of that is that we got much much better at extracting natural resources (energy, food, metal) from the fixed supply of land, and commodity prices generally went down. But over the past ten years, catch-up growth in India, Brazil, and (especially) China has been the majority of world growth. Consequently, the rate of stuff-utilization is going up higher than the rate of stuff-production, meaning we’ll see rising commodity prices rather than falling ones.

For rich countries, that’s inconvenient but we’ll deal. For China, it’s fine—the whole point is that incomes will be rising faster than prices. But for poor countries that aren’t growing rapidly, it’s potentially a disaster. This kind of trend is what’s driving the current instability in North Africa and will probably be a major story for years to come.

I think the point is a good one for a number of resources where there is a lot of supply, but current limits to extraction.  However, with some other resources, oil being the obvious but not only place to start, there is an issue that there simply is not sufficient amount of it to extract.  When the resource is a power source versus necessary material (think calories versus vitamins) the nature of the resource use is also much more different.  With some energy sources (gravity) there is no cost to continually reuse the resource, it is all about maximizing extraction.  Most of these resources, including gravity, eventually come back as some form of solar energy.  So the first race is the race to extract solar power in its many forms before we run out, or over heat ourselves, on the other sources.

Tyler Cowen and Matthew Yglesias had a friendly discussion on Blogginheads.  There is a little bit of econo-speak, but most of it is simply speaking of adult subject matter at the adult level.