Disclaimer: I am not an economist! But recently a marketing guy pretended to be an atmospheric scientist, so I figure it's my turn to pretend to be an economist.

The price for a barrel of oil broke through $130 today, a 30% increase in under 5 months. It will fluctuate some, but those fluctuations will be around an ever increasing trend. I hope everyone here has been thinking about how you'll be coping with energy prices in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years.

It's not just the direct price of oil, of course. Our use of oil and other fossil fuels have driven up the cost of food and everything else with embedded FFs, and over time has affected climate as well. This is going to get worse before it gets better, and if we maintain our addiction to fossil fuel this will NOT be getting better. If we stick to business as usual this may be the century that loses New Orleans, parts of Florida and the Atlantic seaboard to water, and parts of California and the West to lack of water. And this will come sooner and harder than we want to think about.

This post is a bit long, so here's the (not exactly profound) short and sweet: we need a stiff price on carbon, and to repudiate modern Republicanism.  

If I may interrupt the BHO/HRC catfight for a moment ... there have been extremely disturbing and eye opening testimonies by Attorney General Michael Mukasey to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees these last couple of days. I don't want to dwell on the details, which have been diaried by Magnifico, CrazyDrumGuy, Smiley Sam, and others, and by Marcy Wheeler on her blog at firedoglake. There have been the predictable and calls for Mukasey's impeachment, and scathing criticism for Schumer's and Feinstein's poor judgment. They're all correct, and they all miss the point.

At this writing coastal Bangladesh is still picking up the pieces from the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Sidr, a tremendously powerful tropical cyclone that packed peak winds of at least 250 km/h (however public attention seems to have fallen off). I've noted earlier that such a storm gets its power from the release of latent heat on condensation of water vapor to liquid water. The East coast is getting much needed rain, while Southern California is seeing a return of hot dry winds (the Santa Ana). It turns out that water in the atmosphere is maddeningly difficult to predict. It is also crucial to climate and ecology. The first thing to do, then, is to describe it.

Severe Cyclone Sidr is a potentially catastrophic tropical storm in the Bay of Bengal that will likely make landfall at the India/Bangladesh border in about 24 hours. At 14/18Z (1800 GMT on the 14th --it is 15/0130Z at this writing) it was packing 130 kt maximum winds (that's 149 mph, or a high end Category 4 on the Saffir Simpson scale). The northern end of the Bay of Bengal is basically a funnel, and water has nowhere to go but up the Ganges delta. The last time a storm of this magnitude hit here, over 130000 lost their lives. Even that pales compared to the terrible Bhola cyclone of 1970, which also hit the area and took at least 300000 lives and likely upwards of 500000.

This is an update to my previous posting here and FishOutOfWater's here.

Tropical cyclone Sidr in the North Indian Ocean is currently headed for NE India and Bangladesh. It is currently running 115 knot max winds, which would qualify as borderline Cat 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale and is expected to strengthen slightly in the next day or so. Of course one thinks immediately of the Bhola cyclone 37 years ago yesterday, which struck with 120 mph winds and killed some 300000 to 500000 people in what was then called East Pakistan, the worst natural disaster in recent history. In 1991 a cyclone packing 155 mph winds struck the same area, taking over 130000 lives.

Subtitle 1: The Thermodynamics of Water

Subtitle 2: Hurricanes, Ice Sheets, and Polar Bears, Oh My!

A little respite from all the bad news from Pakistan, Mukasey, the freefalling dollar, etc ...

They call our home the water planet, and for good reason: the surface of the Earth is not so much earth but water -- 71% water by area. From space it has been described as the Blue Marble. Water is unusual in many ways: for one thing it can and somewhere on the planet always does coexist in all three phases: ice, liquid, and vapor. As a vapor it has a very small visible and a very large infrared cross section (it is a good greenhouse gas). The solid phase is less dense than the liquid, which is a good thing or our oceans would freeze solid from the bottom up. Changing phases involves transfer of energy. It turns out that these phase changes are important to the energy budget of the planet.

What a week we had, weather-wise. In the East, several days of rain, desperately needed (if insufficient) in a parched South, flooding in New Orleans, warming in New York City. In the West, Santa Anas setting Southern California on fire, nearly a million people evacuated, hundreds of thousands of acres burned. Both were caused by the same event, a deep kink in the jet stream that stalled over the central US.

Some of you may recall that the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation is suing the government over what it claims was illegal surveillance. That they were able to claim standing is only because call logs and other information known as "The Document" was mistakenly released by the Treasury Department. litigatormom describes the situation here. Arguments were to be heard today, August 15, at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

We love them, we hate them, we've created a society which is totally dependent on them and we can't live without them: the internal combustion engine. Even if we don't drive we're stuck with them. They'll be with us a while yet, and they'll likely always have a part to play, so it's worth reviewing the ICE, specifically the piston engine ICE, comparing gasoline and diesel with an eye to efficiency.

The ICE is a prime mover, it converts an energy source into power. It is my hope that eventually the vehicle distribution will be largely electric (and that there will be far fewer of them): the electric motor in that case will not necessarily qualify as a prime mover, since something has to charge the battery (EVs using fuel cells taking methane or liquid fuel would be an exception). This has implications when comparing relative efficiencies. But I'll talk about EVs another day.

It's a bit long, so if you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the upshot: if you're trying to get the most performance out of a given engine displacement, use gasoline. If you're trying to get the most performance out of a given volume of fuel, use diesel.

Well, it would be a Cat 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Tropical Cyclone Gonu, a powerful storm with 160 mph winds gusting to 195 mph, is headed for the Gulf of Oman. It will likely make landfall late Tuesday or early Wednesday as a Cat 3 (as we could classify it), skirting the coast of Oman. It appears the the Gulf of Mexico is not the only oil-producing region that may be affected by severe weather. Gonu is unusual; however, if (and this is a big if) this year's Arabian Sea anomaly indicates a trend, that may change.

Going into Memorial Day weekend and the start of the summer driving season and gasoline prices are at $3.22/gallon,  approaching the all-time record of $3.29 (inflation adjusted).  There are a number of reasons for this: some are transient, such as refinery tightness, social inequities in Nigeria and other oil producing states, etc; some are structural, such as peak oil, the way our society and economy are set up, etc.  The long term trend in gasoline prices appears to be volatility overlying a constant increase.

My contention is that at $3.22/gallon we cannot afford such cheap gasoline. The costs we've so conveniently externalized are building up and will be paid, one way or another, with interest. On the other hand, the way society is set up, at 3.22/gallon we cannot afford such expensive gasoline. So it is high time to ask some questions.

Earlier this week it was announced that a solar system containing small planets around the red dwarf Gliese 581 has been identified.  Of course there was immediate speculation (starting with the discoverers themselves) that one of them, 581c, might be Earth-like, since scientists think it is rocky and has a temperature that might allow for liquid water.

This then is a planet which just might be favorable to life as we know it, and even better, it's right next door, only 20 light years away. So let's look at what other factors we will need to maintain life on a planet and look at what observations we might make at this distance which could provide evidence for the presence of life.  Let's start with the Earth itself.

More below the fold -- it's a bit long, but then this is a big subject (I hope you don't mind my borrowing the Science Friday tag) ...