The Perils and Pitfalls of the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline - They're Very Real

To hear many east of the Rockies tell it, a dilbit spill in British Columbia's coastal waters isn't going to happen, although it is, and, should it, they have a "world class" oil spill response programme, although they don't. Those are just lies they have to spin to scrub the narrative of their "national interest" claim. Isolate all the problems and then you can say it's a matter of economics and one recalcitrant province.

South of the border, the Americans are remarkably candid about the realities of an increase in tanker traffic resulting from the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline expansion. Their honesty is a refreshing break from the nonsense this prime minister tries to force feed British Columbians.

The presence of that much more oil puts the Strait at a “very high” risk of spills, according to one study by Canadian authorities. Another showed that in six of seven simulated spill-response drills by B.C. officials, more than half the oil during a major spill would have remained in the water five days after a hypothetical accident. 

“We haven’t felt that in the past the standards and capability across the border were as strong as they are on the U.S. side,” said Jensen, with the Department of Ecology. 

In addition, oil-sands petroleum has in previous accidents proved more difficult to clean up than North Slope crude. A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chemist has argued that oil from Alberta could sink if left on the surface too long, making cleanup virtually impossible.

“We don’t really know how to clean a spill of that stuff up,” said Kongsgaard, of the Puget Sound Partnership. “You’re not going to hear from the cleanup people that we really understand how it behaves at all.” 

But the fact that Haro Strait and Boundary Pass just to the northeast are the most likely place for any serious accident poses a special kind of concern for many officials. 

The region’s endangered killer whales concentrate in those areas, and “We’ve seen that they don’t move around to avoid spilled oil,” said Brad Hanson, a marine-mammal expert with NOAA.

It's times like these that you get to know your friends from your, let's put it this way, your adversaries. The way I see it, our adversaries are the Alberta thugs, Notley and her soon to be replacement, Jason Kenney, and the Ottawa thugs, your prime minister Trudeau and his pack of drylander MPs. It is passing curious that on this pipeline/supertanker steamroller, Justin doesn't have one of his British Columbia MPs leading the charge. Those cowards have gone mute, perhaps Justice Minister Jody excepted and even Jody is keeping her lip buttoned. The rest are fretting about whether they'll get their asses handed to them next year. No, the Gang of Four are Quebec's Trudeau, Manitoba's Carr, Ontario's McKenna and Quebec's Garneau.  A dilbit spill will be no skin off their asses. And, to prove it, McKenna even approved massively toxic Corexit as an oil spill dispersant.

But we do have friends. We have friends in Washington state and Oregon and California, even in Alaska. Notley and Trudeau remind us of the difference between friend and - well, adversary. Notley showed that she's no friend when she passed legislation allowing her government to cut off oil and gas supplies to British Columbia. Trudeau, our other adversary, let her get away with it.

Washington governor, Jay Inslee, however showed that we have a real friend to the south when he assured BC premier Horgan that Washington would supply us with the required fossil fuels if Alberta put the screws to us. It almost seems reminiscent of the Berlin airlift. Notley, with Trudeau's concurrence, threatens to disrupt life for ordinary British Columbians if we don't submit to her will. And then the Good Guys put in an appearance with a friendly "fear not."

Times like these make me just a little sympathetic to Donald Trump who cannot find the billions of dollars he'll need to build his wall along the Mexican border. British Columbians already have the wall we might need. It's huge and it's granite and it reaches thousands of feet into the sky. It's even aligned right, north and south. It's the Rocky Mountains and all the other mountain ranges west of it.

It's not unusual for newcomers to have trouble adjusting to those mountains. They complain that the mountains make them somehow feel cut off from their families and home provinces. Some just go back from whence they came. Some find those mountains distressing but most of us find them assuring, our own Great Wall.

Our majestic mountains create not just a physical divide but also a psychological separation. I wonder if Trudeau gets that. I'm not sure he does.

Okay, I Think We Can See Where You're Going With This.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has announced a milestone. April was the 400th consecutive month of warmer-than-average temperatures.  The last time NOAA logged a cooler-than-average month was 1984 during Ronald Reagan's second term in office. So that would be Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the Trump administration - hot, hot, hot, baby.

400 consecutive months. That send a message. Maybe that's our new normal. Might we not come up with a new metric to make this warming a bit more meaningful?

You May Find This Hard to Believe

Just in from NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. January, 2015 was the second hottest January on record.  I know, I know - the Polar Vortex, all those snowstorms, - yada, yada, yada.  But, you see, that's the "global" part of global warming.

Much of central and eastern North America has been in the deep freeze for several weeks but much of the rest of the planet has been toasty.  Recently Barrow, Alaska has been logging warmer temperatures that many states in the lower 48.  Here's what the world looked like in January.  Red is warm, blue is cold.

So, as you scrape the ice off your windshield, consider yourself unique, somehow special.  The rest of the world doesn't get to do that.

Where Did All the Sea Ice Go?

America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has released a quick video showing what happened to the "old" Arctic ice (the most important stuff) from 1987 until 2013.   The video covers that 27-year span in just 60 seconds. The old ice is shown in white.  Behold.

About that Polar Vortex.

The first settled and most heavily populated parts of the United States and Canada are, of course, in the east.  That's why, when a major weather event sweeps everything east of the Mississippi, there's a tendency to inflate its significance. A case in point, the polar vortex that plunged the east into a deep freeze in January.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has run the January temperature numbers.  Guess what?  January, for the U.S., was an 'average' month, an average January.  How can that be?  Well that's because you in the east were too hunkered down, huddling for warmth, to notice what was going on in the west.

The cold conditions of the east were offset by unduly dry, hot conditions in the west.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other. 

NOAA’s national overview for January 2014 is out, and the results might surprise you … if you live in the eastern half of the U.S. Yes, those in the U.S. East this year have been shivering and digging out from under mounds of snow. On January 6, 2014, alone, approximately 50 daily record low temperatures were set, from Colorado to Alabama to New York, according to the National Weather Service. In some places temperatures were 40 degrees Fahrenheit colder than average. According to NOAA temperature data for the month of January 2014, however, the average temperature for the U.S. as a whole was about normal. That’s because a warm U.S. West balanced a cool U.S. East.

 

Overall, the average temperature for January 2014 in the U.S. was 30.3 degrees, only one-tenth of a degree below normal for the month. That makes January 2014 in the continental U.S. the 53rd coldest of 120 years of record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

 

Remember, the same day that Atlanta froze solid, the little town of Seward, Alaska basked in a balmy 61F.  That's Seward as in Alaska as in January.  So, you see, Seward, way up in Alaska, was enjoying the same temperatures that Atlanta, way down south in Georgia, might expect to see in January.  Sort of same-same, only different.

 

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I had an e-mail exchange with Ian Eisenman of UC Santa Cruz, lead author of the newly-released study of Arctic 'darkening' or albedo.  Using satellite data, Eisenman showed that the model-based projections were underestimating the darkening from loss of Arctic sea ice by a factor of two to three times, an error that produced a number of knock on miscalculations.   Eisenman's research seems to corroborate other science that suggests these harsh winter conditions in the east may become far more common.  Don't chuck out that old parka prematurely.

This Is Going to Trash Real Estate Prices

Starting this year, buyers shopping for a nice coastal dream home in the U.S. will be able to consult 'storm surge maps' produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  That is, unless Congress kills this idea before it came come to pass.

Starting this 2014 hurricane season, NOAA’s National Hurricane Center will begin issuing an experimental graphic, Potential Storm Surge Flooding, whenever a hurricane or tropical storm creates a threat of rising water from wind. It will be found on their website. You’ll see a similar version on WKRG-TV News 5 when a storm threatens our area. Using a color scale of blue on the low end and red on the high end, the graphic shows potential, not guaranteed, height of water above ground level in areas and neighborhoods in storm surge zones. This potential is different for every storm that comes near us.

Like many new products from NOAA, this one may be later modified to improve how it is received and interpreted by the public and other government agencies. The experimental period is two years.

 

Here's a sample storm surge map for Cape Coral-Fort Meyers, Florida.  If you're in the market, you might want to pass on those red and yellow areas.

 

 

From New Jersey to Louisiana this is bound to send state legislators and governors howling.  There's a lot of very affluent folks who own property in those waterfront areas.  They're already looking at major property value losses from massive increases in U.S. government flood insurance premiums and maps like these can only make that worse. 

 

I expect New Jersey governor Chris Christie will burst straight out of his double-wides over this.  After all he just defied every sea level rise/storm surge warning to spend massively to restore the Jersey shore. 

And If You Had Any Doubt the Radical Right Is Stark Raving Mad

House Republicans maintain that NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is a huge waste of money.   In fact it's such a huge waste of money they're planning to force through cuts that would trim NOAA's budget by 30%.

The agency is warning the cuts will leave it effectively blind and will destroy its ability to give 5-10 days advance information of approaching hurricanes.

The $1.2bn (£730m) of cuts will force NOAA to delay replacing ageing satellites – meaning that it could go for up to 18 months without an eye in the sky at some time in the next five years.

"Whether the gap is longer than that depends on whether we get the money in the next budget," Jane Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, told an audience in Denver earlier this month.

For a country that still hasn't recovered from hurricane Katrina and has just been blasted by hurricane Irene, blinding the one agency that furnishes advance warning of major storm events is utter madness.  This from a government that is still spending about $10 billion a month to wage a senseless, decadal war in Afghanistan.


Madness, Republican style.