Ouch My Head Hurts!

When unusual things start to happen it's always good to go look at the actual numbers.

The EIA's (Energy Information Administration) is a good place to start. Their “analysis” seems politically motivated and should be ignored, but their raw numbers are the best available to the general public.

Using information from the EIA a couple of things are clear:

OPEC oil production is falling. Look here (xls warning) and here
Crude oil stocks are very high.
Gasoline stocks are dropping like a rock.

Although the MSM is pushing the oxygenate switch as the cause for the shortage this graph shows that argument as pretty bogus. The switch has been going on for quite a while and if a state is having a gas short fall they can request a exemption.

What I suspect is going on is that “light sweet crude” is becoming scarce and the the bulging oil stock are from “sour crude”. A product that is harder to refine into gas

Crisis management: Herbert Hoover and W

I was wandering the web and came across one of the impeach Bush articles, (this one because he won't do more about peak oil). It got me thinking about the last set of crises to confront the country. So while I put W in the title, I'm going to talk mostly about HH.

If someone had walked up to President Hoover, before the stock market collapsed, and provided him with graphs and data indicating a catastrophic collapse and depression, and he did nothing, would that be an impeachable offense? Hoovers defense could be “Well, most people believed we were not in trouble”, and it would have been true. After all, for most Americans, life was good up till the crash, and you couldn't prove things were going to go to heck. The majority of citizens thought the good times would last forever. Dust bowl and great depression were not yet part of the American vocabulary.

There was no Internet to amplify and broadcast concerns, nor was there a huge federal bureaucracy watching and compiling statistics on every conceivable facet of life. There also weren't cable news networks that would endlessly masticated the facts. You can bet that Hoover never saw a flashy PowerPoint presentation with disturbing graphs and trend lines (since computers were not yet invented).

Hoover was president from March 4, 1929 – March 3, 1933. When the stock market started collapsing on October 24 of 1929 Hoover was only in office less than a year. A collapsing economy isn't like an airplane hijacking. A couple of sky marshals and 24 hours notice couldn't stop it. In fact I would say the responsibility for trying to stop the crash would fall more on Calvin Coolidge and congress.

But let's face it, it would take a catastrophe and a new president before the American public, and its institutions, would be willing to implement sweeping reforms. Besides, IMHO, most of what FDR did was just exude confidence and act like he was having an effect. It took WWII to end the great depression.

What has made Hoover synonymous with failure, was what happened after the stock market crash. The things Hoover promoted just didn't help (at least not immediately), and some of them made the situation worse. After reading the Wiki article on him, I think he reminds me of Jimmy Carter. A good man who tried to live a good life. His life prior to becoming president shows what kind of person he was. He was just the wrong man at the wrong time, a bad match for the circumstances. W's life prior to becoming president doesn't show similar devotion to human suffering IMHO.

One thing Hoover and Bush II do have in common, again IMHO, is that their ideology blinded them to what was happening in the real world. Hoover beliefs, specifically about economic volunteerism and self-reliance, kept him from a reality based approach to the crisis. Viewing the world through his ideological prism hampered his effectiveness.

Impeaching Hoover for high crimes and misdemeanors doesn't seem viable. Being clueless or inept doesn't seem like either a high crimes or a misdemeanor. That doesn't mean that congress couldn't do it. But I would think passing a law that allowed for a recall election would be more appropriate.

It's been over 70 years since Hoover was president. In another 70 years, how will history look at W?

My guess is that he will be viewed as a failure, probably a worse failure than Hoover. After all Hoover didn't start any disasters, he just got steamrollered by life. Also Hoover seems (through the lens of history) to be a genuinely honest and caring person. Just as Jimmy Carter has used his life since being president to enhance his reputation, Hoover's life prior to becoming president will always reflect well on him.

Gas prices

For those of you who haven't noticed, gas is getting kind of expensive.

Polkatz has an interesting graph about W's approval rating and how they seem to inversely follow gas prices.

There's a lot going on to influence the increase in gas prices, besides the obvious supply and demand.

US refinery production has not totally recovered from last years hurricances. While at the same time some petroleum exporters have not been able to maintain output. (xls warning)

On top of that, we have the spring refinery maintenance and the government is mandating a switch away from the petroleum additive MTBE and towards ethanol.

Not that anyone cares about why gas is going up. They just want it to go back down. There is an interesting article over on energy bulleting called “Apocalypse, not ”. About what will happen when oil peaks. It's and interesting perspective, but I think he misses a critical point. Namely, that while most of the middle class can afford 5 dollar gas and its side effects, the poor can't.

I didn't warn the public about what was going to happen during the 2005 hurricane season. I had the data set, but I just didn't know how to embed the graph in a web site. Not that anyone would have paid any attention, but it would have salved my conscious. I don't want to make the same mistake in 2006.

Here is the graph I have been trying to post, for about a year. (Click on it to enlarge) I have added the 2005 data point to it. It shows tropical storm activity since the late 1800's for the North Atlantic. The data is from the Hurricane Alley web site but is also available at wunderground.com.
(When a storm's winds reaches 39 mph it is called a tropical storm, it receives a name and may go on to form a Hurricane) When you look at the graph, it is pretty obvious that something is going on. (UPDATE: I HAVE MADE A SIGNIGICANT ERROR IN MY CALCULATIONS. I ACCIDENTLY INCLUDED TROPICAL DEPRESSIONS IN THE GRAPH. AGAIN THE GRAPH INCLUDES TROPICAL DEPRESSIONS, TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES.)



When you also look at the graph of atmospheric Co2 levels it hard not to draw a correlation.

Here is another CO2 graph with the Ice core data overlaid.


Last September, Science magazine published an article on “Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment”

In it they stated that

“We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30), although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.”

From that article:
Here is a graph of intensities

And here also is a graph of ocean temperatures for the last 30 years.

IMHO, what is occurring is that man's activity has caused an extreme exacerbation of normal climatic variation.

Added factors to this already intense amount of hurricane activity is a La Niña that has formed in the Pacific and the start of a new sun spot cycle .

I do not fully understand the impact of La Niña on hurricane activity, but two separate predictions have indicated that the east coast is going to be more at risk this year (in addition to continued activity in the Gulf of Mexico).
AccuWeather
hurricanealley

For a previous post on hurricane predictions and their distortions click here

Note to the general public: I've done my part. Please take appropriate action to prevent your butt from being photographed by the MSM, as you scream for rescue atop of your flooded home.

Update: For an article by real climatologist on the link between climate change and hurricanes click on this link

2006 hurricane