The last fifty years or so, the data I’ve shuffled through suggests a warming trend of about .1°C / 11-year or so solar cycle with about a .3°C difference between solar minimum and solar maximum, and then a whole lot of random variation (weather) on top of that which obscures the signals, but they are obtainable by averaging out the noise.

We can argue all day about whether it’s natural or man-made or what percentage of the warming is attributable to CO₂ but I think the bottom line is that even if it is all man-made, the political will to do anything about it doesn’t exist.

It would seem in light of that the wise thing to do would be to start preparing for it, and here in the Pacific Northwest, one obvious change will be the amount of snow pack in the Cascades.  We depend upon that snow pack not only for summer water but also for much of our energy needs in the form of hydroelectric power.

In preparation for that reduced snow pack, and also to prevent massive flooding in the event of winter precipitation coming down as rain rather than snow in the Cascades, we should build more and larger reservoirs, to both hold the run-off and provide summer water for our needs.

The other big adaptation we should make is how we use water for agriculture.  Right now, if you look at central and Eastern Washington with Google Earth, you’ll see a pattern of circles in squares.  These are aerial irrigation sprinklers in a square field.  This is an extremely cheap form of irrigation, providing water is inexpensive, but it is inefficient.

With aerial sprinkler irrigation, first you loose a large percentage of the water to evaporation.  But then without any monitoring of how far water is penetrating down in the soil, too much water is used, and the result of that is the leaching of minerals out of the soil which results in a number of bad consequences.

First, it increases the salinization of rivers, and where that water is used downstream for irrigation, of soil, which inhibits growth of many crops.  The increased salinity of the water reduces the normal differentiation where it enters the seas and drives ocean currents.

Farmers then add phosphorus and nitrogen to their fields to get plants to grow.  Those plants however are deficient in other minerals, which we as humans need in our diet.  So one consequence of this poor farming practice is soil depleted in nutrients resulting plants also depleted in nutrients.

Then that phosphorus and nitrogen washes off into streams and rivers where it drives surface algae blooms depleting the water under the surface of oxygen.  The result of this are streams and rivers where fish can’t survive and huge dead spaces in the ocean where only surface algae and anaerobic bacteria (which don’t rely on oxygen but instead derive energy by combining hydrogen and sulphur producing in the process hydrogen sulphide which is a strong contributor to what gives farts their odour (methane the main constituent of farts is odourless).

There is some evidence to suggest that at least one of the great mass extinctions of the past was caused by conditions that resulted in huge blooms of these anaerobic bacteria resulting in atmospheric levels of hydrogen sulphide which were toxic (anything above about 300ppm).

Suffice it to say that global warming or no, the irrigation situation is something we should address.  The solution is drip irrigation with sensors placed at maximum root depth to turn off the water when it’s reached that depth.

There is no way of knowing the trend will continue as it has for the last fifty years, we could enter another Maunder minimum, or maybe a full scale nuclear war will result in a nuclear winter, but the odds I think favour a continuation of global warming.

Either way both of these things are good investments.  If global warming halts, we can make more electricity to sell to California, and investment in more sane farming practices will preserve our soil and provide us with more nutritious food.

     Google has altered their scheme to rank pages no longer based upon popularity, as determined by the number and quality of incoming links, but rather by what they are considering “truth“, as based upon the number of non-comforming “facts” upon a page.

     That is to say if your page agrees with the majority of tripe on the Internet as a whole, it is ranked high, if it disagrees, it is ranked low.  So mass-media, like, “Unfair and Unbalanced Fox News”, can flood the net with “facts“, and anyone who disagrees with them, no matter how valid and well supported their argument may be, simply won’t get heard because their page contains ideas that are counter to those of the majority.

     Do no evil?  I think not!  This is about as Orwellian as a twist as Google could have possibly given the Internet.

What bothers me is not what this person has to say, I know it’s true. What bothers me is that nobody cares?

I found this neat graph on a site that was discussing Global Climate.

Note the half degree centigrade drop during the period where we were doing atmospheric nuclear bomb tests.  There, all we need to do is be willing to suffer a higher cancer rate and we’ve got global warming licked.

Many explanations are given for the reason why we haven’t returned to the moon, ranging from general apathy to extraterrestrials warning us off.

I believe what we’re really seeing is a symptom of having reached peak society.  July 20, 1969 represents peak society.  That’s the real peak that should concern us, not peak oil.

The reason we made it then and can’t make it back now is that the coherence of society has decreased since that time.

In my view, society is a living thing, and like anything it reaches a peak and then declines.  We’ve hit the peak, just barely made it to the moon during that peak, and now we’re on the downside.

I, in my mid-50’s, have come to realize that most of my decline has been more from apathy than from physiology, and so it is also with our society.

Right now we’ve got some serious illnesses in our society, ever increasing prison populations, a loss of civil rights, privacy, individual autonomy, unsustainable energy production methods, unsustainable agriculture, unsustainable water usage patterns, unsustainable mineral extraction and usage, unsustainable disposal of waste products.

All of these are these things are solvable with current technology, only the will to solve them is lacking.

Take prison populations, science tells us that longer sentences actually result in higher recidivism rates, and this shouldn’t be surprising.  You take someone away from living in society for a period, they forget how, they lose access to the resources necessary to do so, so what alternative do they have except to return to what they know to survive?

Science tells us that for every dollar spent in genuine rehabilitation programs, job training, chemical dependence treatment, sex offender treatment, schooling, providing the resources needed for felons to get back on their feet, three dollars in future prison costs are saved.  The savings aren’t just economic though, the social benefits of helping to keep families intact, the human savings, are enormous.

What to do about crime then?  One thing that influences crime significantly is the distribution of incomes.  The greater the economic diversity, the greater the crime rate.

Another thing that doesn’t seem to get much note, is mental health.  Having spent time at Airway Heights correctional facility, it is obvious that a large percentage of the inmates there are either bipolar or schizophrenic, not in a subtle way that might be difficult to diagnose but in a blatant “these people are just plain not functional” way.

One person I was with there was a Vietnam veteran who has been hit with a mortar or some form of explosive and it was estimated flew some 250 feet in the air.  He suffered severe brain damage which left him in a coma for six months.  After coming out of the coma he joined the Hells Angles where while drunk he shot and killed someone and was sentenced to life imprisonment.  He had been there for 27 years when I was there.

Now maybe my thinking is distorted, but he didn’t volunteer to go to Vietnam, he was drafted and sent there against his will, severely damaged as a result, and then punished with life imprisonment for his damage.  Maybe it’s just me but that’s screwed up.

Lacking treatment, they will still be non-functional when returned to society.  It costs approximately $46,000 a year to house an inmate in prison, I have to think treatment would be less expensive economically, and certain less expensive socially.

Take the issue of civil rights, those are being eroded because we allow them to be, we decide it’s okay to silence our opponents through the law, it’s okay to spy on everyone in the name of “safety”, it’s okay to take half of what we produce and do what mostly benefits the powerful elite.  We have to disarm ourselves from any weapons that might be effective in fighting a totalitarian regime.

Energy production, a decade ago we were told that solar and wind would never be economically competitive with fossil fuels, today solar and wind are both competitive with the cheapest and most environmentally damaging fossil fuel, coal.  They keep telling us that neither wind nor solar can contribute more than 20% to our power grid because of their unreliability but both Germany and the Netherlands have been able to exceed a 30% contribution largely through geographical diversity, and yet the United States which has the potential for much greater geographical diversity only gets about 2% of it’s electrical energy needs from solar.

The argument is made that wind and solar can’t provide baseload capacity and thus have to be backed up by an equal amount of conventional generation.  This would only be true if there were no diversity and there were no relationship between peak production and peak load.  With both there is very much diversity available in the United States and with Solar the generation closely matches electrical load.

Then there is Geo-thermal, we have ample resources in this area although the most ample, those in Yellowstone, aren’t allowed to be tapped.  In terms of overall environment, we should not only allow but encourage geothermal resources in Yellowstone to be tapped.

Unsustainable water usage is another problem, there are two big things we can do to greatly improve this situation.  The bulk of our water usage is for agriculture.  The first thing we need to do is plant crops that are suitable to their environment.  The second, is switch from aerial sprayers for irrigation to drip irrigation with soil sensors that shut off water when it reaches appropriate depths.  This will not only reduce wasted water but it will also stop leaching valuable minerals out of the soil.

I could go on but the bottom line is all of these problems we are experiencing, there are social and technological fixes, the one problem we don’t seem to get over, is the same one that is keeping an extra fifty pounds around my mid-section, and that’s apathy.

Search the Internet for the year 2100, and what you will invariably find are post apocalyptic scenarios where civilization has been destroyed by a combination of resource depletion, starvation, and environmental destruction.

It might turn out that way, if we make poor choices, but I do feel there are alternatives.

In 2013, 30+% of new energy infrastructure installed was renewable.  We have reached the tipping point in which renewables are often the least expensive energy option, even cheaper than coal.  As fossil fuels continue to deplete and renewable energy technology and scales of production continue to improve, this trend will continue and accelerate.

If Lockheed Martin makes good on their plans for a working prototype 100MW compact fusion reactor by 2017, and commercial units by 2022, then energy will become a non-issue, cheap abundant non-polluting energy.  The only waste will be helium which actually is industrially quite valuable. Even without this, the trend in renewables will change our future drastically for the good.

If the energy issue is resolved, then so are many of our other resource depletion issues because with adequate energy recycling of many materials, now considered too energy costly to recycle, becomes viable.  Metals, plastics, concrete, asphalt, paper, all are recyclable if adequate energy is available.

Food production is limited by the amount of arable land.  What prevents much land from not being arable is lack of water.  We have no shortage of water, just most of it happens to be salty and therefore not useful for things like growing crops or human or animal consumption.  However, with adequate energy, desalinization becomes trivial, more land becomes arable, and food production ceases to be a problem.

Destruction of our environment is still an issue, carbon dioxide is probably still the number one issue, becomes a non-issue with these new energy sources.  Other issues remain, medical wastes, industrial wastes, sewage, these are things we still need to address.  Again energy helps.

Nuclear waste, what can we do with that?  Well, a type of reactor that has the fuel dissolved in liquid salt, and uses on site reprocessing, can ‘burn’ the actinides, that is the waste products heavier than Uranium.  In the process it can provide almost 100 times as much energy as the first past through a conventional reactor provided.

It leaves only fission products, most of which decay to safe levels in days to decades, not in 100,000 year time frames that many of the long-lived actinides require.  Of those, only a couple of isotopes have significant half-lives, and those could be destroyed in accelerators, if we were willing to invest the energy to do so, and that investment would not seem to significant if we had adequate renewable or fusion energy available.  It would be a bargain compared to trying to find a safe way to dispose of or contain this stuff for 100,000 years.

All of these gives me reason to believe that all the doom and gloom sites might be wrong.  We need not run out of energy or destroy our environment creating it.  We need not run out of other resources if we stop wasting them.  And we need not glow in the dark and die an early cancer death from high radiation in our environment.

There are other concerns that I do have, like ZERO privacy as surveillance technology continues to improve, or a totalitarian government, a much larger difference between the haves and have-nots in society if greed continues to prevail, a society where the small percentage that are wealthy can live in near perfect health almost indefinitely owing to continued advancements in medical technology while the rest of us live an unhealthy life and die an early death.

These aren’t things we necessarily must experience, it’s a matter of choice now.  I keep hoping that people will wake-up and make better choices than they are now.

There are some fusion developments I can get excited about but the recent news from Lawrence Livermore isn’t one of them.

Although they achieved technical break-even, which is the point at which more energy came out of a fusion reaction than went into initiating it, it’s a long ways from real break even, given the inefficiency of the lasers, and certainly from economy break-even given that 192 extremely high power lasers need to be fired, and a single firing can’t be repeated with any frequency, certainly not the frequency that would be required for practical power generation.

The NIF is primary a research facility for understanding how a nuclear fusion bomb, that is a hydrogen bomb might work, given that we aren’t testing the real thing now.  It likes to present itself as a peaceful energy development resource but really it’s not a practical route to peaceful fusion energy.

On the other hand, Lockheed Skunk Works, which traditionally has created military hardware, expects to have a prototype 100MW trailer sized fusion reactor by 2017, and commercial production of same by 2022.  Skunk Works reactor is a magnetic confinement reactor similar to Tokamak, but unlike a Tokamak reactor where the magnetic field decreases as you get away from the center of the plasma, and thus is inherently unstable, Skunk Works design has a magnetic field that increases as you get away from the center of the plasma and thus is inherently stable.  It is also much more compact than a Tokamak design, and therefore likely to be less expensive.

Last night I had a dream where I was in an area of large rolling hills.  It was a suburban area with houses and a lot of open grassy area.

My wife and I were walking and all the sudden a couple of military jets flew over at a low altitude and then they started dropping bombs.  On another pass I saw they were Russian MIGs but somehow I knew they were not being flown by Russian pilots.  It was a false flag operation intended to start a war with the Russians.

Up on top of the hill were some institutional buildings, one of which belonged to the Federal Reserve.  It was a 4 or 5 story very heavily built stone building.  It had a large arch entrance way that I felt would be safe from the bombs.  I also felt it would be safe there for another reason, I believed the same people behind the Federal Reserve were also behind this false flag operation.

As we were running for this building my alarm clock went off.  What a lousy way to wake up!

2014 is already here in most of the United States, less than an hour away where I am.

I’m looking forward to the new year, I see many positive signs.  Two things have been dragging the economy down, energy shortages and education.

Where energy is concerned, anytime the economy would heat up, so would energy consumption, demand would exceed supply, prices would skyrocket, and the economy would recede.  This is beginning to change.  First, fracking, with all it’s environmental problems, is temporarily expanding the availability of fossil fuels.  This is only a temporary fix however.  The second thing is that both wind and now solar have reached the point where they are becoming economically viable and competitive with conventional energy sources, and as a result their adaptation has been increasing exponentially.

Where education is concerned, we’ve run into a situation where there are jobs that go unfilled because we don’t have enough people trained in new technologies that are being widely deployed, while we are artificially creating ditch-digging jobs to employ people with inadequate education but this is not sustainable.

Artificial intelligence is starting to supplement human intelligence in technologically demanding areas and technological education is becoming widely available online and as competition expands, there are educational bargains to be had.  More and more information is available online allowing people to self-educate more effectively.  Conventional colleges and universities are also going online, which broadens their perspective audiences and forces them to be more competitive.

In 2014, I see both of these trends continuing and expanding.  As our energy supplies become more sustainable, predictable, and environmentally sound, I believe we’ll see our economy continue to expand.

I also believe we will be seeing more technological developments that will make new energy sources available to us and allow us to use existing sources more effectively, such as improvements in batteries, electrical transmission, and developments in fusion, both cold and hot, and understanding of physics.

We will see some of these developments come out of China, which more than any other nation, has an urgent need to develop cleaner energy sources.  Their pollution is so bad that it is actually reducing agricultural output.  They have made significant advances in their fusion research program, particularly the EAST nuclear fusion tokamak reactor proved the super-conducting magnet technology necessary for commercial power producing tokamak fusion reactors.

Another thing that has hurt our economy is “The Fed”, which has intentionally held the money supply at levels that keep the unemployment rate above 6% and the inflation rate below 1.5%.  I believe more reasonable inflation rate target would be 3%.  I believe that BitCoin and possibly other electronic currencies will lift the cap off the Feds ability to restrict the economy.  I believe this will contribute to a stronger world economy.

God or whatever label you might want to call a greater power or awareness is tweaking things beyond our control in ways that save us from ourselves.  For example, if we look at the subject of global warming, global temperatures has been increasing at a rate of about .1ºC per decade, but this is masked by changes in the solar radiation over the 11 year solar cycle that result in about a .3ºC swing between the solar minimum and maximum, so during times when the solar activity is decreasing, global temperature decreases happen faster than global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor and people point at that and say global warming isn’t real.

Well, for those of us who actually understand this cycle we know that it is real, however, this solar cycle, the peak has been extremely weak, and perhaps it will remain weak long enough for oil from fracking to run out.

I’m going to make another prediction, Fukushima won’t significantly impact our health, even those of us on the West Coast, except maybe mental, and perhaps dietary changes that people make because they’re afraid they’ll get radiation poisoning from eating seafood. This isn’t to say that it’s a good thing, it’s just that the ocean and the world is a huge thing and by the time the radiation reaches us here it is very dilute.  People that are nearby where the radioisotopes haven’t been heavily diluted will be more affected.  I’m not saying Fukushima is a good thing, but it’s not the end of the world, and in many ways might even be good, for example by pushing us to saner sustainable energy sources.

Another positive I see this year is that sales of electric cars and LED lighting will grow and this will contribute towards a positive energy situation.  17% of the electricity in the United States is used for lighting and LED lighting is even more efficient than compact fluorescent, doesn’t contain mercury, is longer lasting, can be dimmed, is available in non-flickering varieties, and almost any color you could want.  Prices are rapidly coming down and as they do we’ll see the percentage of energy used for lighting come down significantly.

With respect to electric cars, because most will be charged overnight, and there is enough surplus generating capacity at night that if the entire US fleet went electric they could be charged without adding any additional capacity, switching to electric will save huge amounts of energy.

Many people will tell you electric cars just move the pollution source but this isn’t true because most power plants can’t be rapidly throttled so at night huge amounts of energy are just dissipated as heat into the atmosphere when there isn’t demand for it on the grid.  The exception to this is hydro and to a lesser degree natural gas plants.  But for the most part, electric cars will use energy that otherwise would have just been dumped as heat in cooling towers.  They will allow the electricity generated to be used more efficiently and should result in a reduction in the cost of electricity.

On an energetic level; if you take a metal plate and put it on top of a speaker and sprinkle some salt on it, and feed it with an amplifier fed with an audio signal generator, at various frequencies the salt will form various geometric patterns as resonances in the metal plate are found.  As the frequency increases, the complexity of the patterns increases.  Between resonant frequencies the salt takes on a very chaotic state without a clear pattern.

Now I think something like that happens in terms of the kind of spiritual energy of the planet, and as time goes on the energy frequency increases.  In the 50’s and 60’s we had low frequency resonances and patterns that were rather simple.  Then in the 70’s we went through a period between resonances and things were rather chaotic.  In the 80’s we went into another kind of resonances, a bit more complex than the 60’s and kind of ugly where greed became not only socially acceptable but popular.  In the late 90’s and the early 2000’s, we went through another chaotic period, and now we’re entering another higher frequency resonance and clear patterns are begin to emerge again but they are even more complex than those in the 80’s but also to me at least, they feel more positive.  I think a lot of the apathy we’ve seen in the last 15-20 years has been a direct result of this chaotic energetic pattern, and now that a new resonance pattern is starting to materialize, people will want to take an active part in shaping it to be a more beautiful one, and I see this as a positive.

One of the outcomes of this is that I think people are going to start to reject negatives like war, hatred, greed, restrictions on creativity, freedom, and I think this will be a natural aspect of the new resonance we’re coming into. I think this will have a positive impact on things like music, literature, and other forms of art.

I think it will become apparent that what is bringing us through these new energies is bigger than us and I think this will be a positive thing for the planet.

That’s not to say that we don’t have significant challenges in the coming year but I feel much more positive about our ability to confront and tackle them.

Getting there may be ugly, we will undoubtedly experience more energy shortages as we delay investing in our future until the combination of fuel shortages and environmental ruin force our hands, but I am optimistic we will make the transition.

Solar panel production has reached a critical point where the economies of scale have brought costs down to where solar is economically competitive with conventional energy sources.  In 2013, 36 Gigawatts of new solar energy was installed.  In 2014 that number is projected to be between 45 and 49 Gigawatts.

The image below is taken from NASA’s Earth Observatory.  It illustrates what happens when we depend upon fossil fuels, especially coal, for our energy needs.

Heavy smog, resulting primarily from coal, covers Eastern China.

This is not the future I want, but if we don’t ramp up renewable capacity to displace fossil fuels, this is the future we’ll be getting.

I’m not suggesting solar should be the only source in the mix, I think we have lots of clean options, wind, liquid-salt nuclear reactors that can burn the transuranics in existing nuclear waste, hydrogen fusion, Geo-thermal, but solar has reached the point where it is economically competitive with conventional sources, and that gives me cause for optimism.

Solar has the additional advantage that solar output tends to track grid demand fairly well, especially in southern states, and it can be installed anywhere, close to where demand and transmission facilities exist.  Wind is often cheaper to produce but the best wind resources, in the US that would be in the Midwest states, rarely coincides with where demand or transmission facilities exist, and wind tends not to track demand.  That may change somewhat as more electric vehicles hit the roads.