Democracies Do Not Operate This Way.

One of the saddest parts of contemporary Canada is that we have a government that doesn't hesitate to use the power vested in it by the Canadian people against them.  It does this in a myriad of ways including secrecy and spying. 

It also works hard to warp public consciousness.   It freely spends millions of dollars advertising the success of a  jobs action plan that doesn't even exist.  Perhaps most insidious is the way our government has worked to avoid informing the public conscience about the reality and risks of climate change.

When Harper and his cronies mention it at all, it's invariably in the form of one-liners that purport to acknowledge the magnitude and gravity of the problem and then segue into something else such as jobs and growth.

When it becomes too difficult to change the subject, they raise an Iron Curtain of spin.  They begin by gagging government scientists and severing the public's access to information.  Next they slather themselves with credit for emissions reductions efforts undertaken by provincial and municipal governments and then go on to boast how Canada, i.e. the federal government, is already half-way to meeting its emissions reductions targets.

Meanwhile, as the minions of the gutted shell of what once was a free press stand mute, Harper slips a mandatory report to the U.N. in which the government admits that, far from slashing greenhouse gas emissions, Canada's emissions will soar 38% by 2030 due mainly to expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands.  Even those numbers the U.N. suspects are cooked, especially the magical claims for LNG emissions.

This is a government that doesn't seek to serve the public but to control it, to blind it, to manipulate it for the benefit of, well someone other than the public.  We live under a government that has turned on us.

How Dry Is It? The Wet Coast is Parched.

Forest fire warnings in Oregon in January, are you kidding me?  July, August, yeah.  January?  Hell no.

In January, Oregon, always a rainy place, is supposed to be smack in the middle of its high rain season.   Not this year.  Take a look at Applegate Lake which should be full at this time of year.

And now the State has imposed a Red Flag forest fire warning - in January.

The drought is worse in California.  The San Francisco Chronicle warns that the State's Coho salmon are facing extinction.

Further south, in San Louis Obispo, they haven't had much in the way of rain for almost a year.

No relief is in sight.

 

Long-range forecasting by the National Weather Service calls for drier than normal conditions through spring. And time is running out – typically about half of the state’s precipitation occurs in December, January and February. Even cool weather and fog would help. But temperatures in San Luis Obispo have been breaking records by reaching into the low 90s in recent weeks.

 

“We essentially haven’t had any rain since last spring,” said San Luis Obispo Cal Fire Chief Rob Lewin. “It’s just very strange and difficult for us. We desperately need a wetting rain.”

 

To top it off, the San Jose Mercury News has a dismal piece on how California has endured past droughts lasting up to 200-years in duration.

 

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

 

In the Bay Area of San Francisco, the current rainfall pattern is set to be the lowest since 1580. 

 

Coastal British Columbia is experiencing the tail end of the American Pacific drought.  It's been unseasonably warm and unseasonably dry.  People are getting nervous about the state of snowpack on the local mountains.  Even the ski resorts are hurting.

 

 

 

Read more here:

"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580 -- more than 150 years before George Washington was bor

"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580 -- more than 150 years before George Washington was born. The question is: H

"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580

"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580 -- more than 150 years before George Washington was born. The question is: How much longer will it last? -- more than 150 years before George Washington was born. The question is: How much longer will it last?ow much longer will it last?n. The question is: How much longer will it last?http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2014/01/25/2893547/parched-earth-impacts-of-extreme.html#storylink=cpy

Arms Race Update - China Goes All Hyper

There's a dangerous tendency in the West to take a condescending view of Chinese technology.  We tend to think of it as it was twenty or thirty years ago - rudimentary, crude, unreliable.  That was before the Chinese got the hang of capitalism and Western industrialism and they've been catching up fast ever since.

How far the Chinese have come was demonstrated earlier this month when its military tested a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) capable of maneuvering at speeds upwards of Mach 10.  Fired atop an ICBM, an HGV warhead can give the most sophisticated missile defence systems absolute fits.

A conventional warhead follows a ballistic arc which makes its path pretty easy to predict which makes it relatively easy to intercept and destroy.  An HGV is fast but it's also maneuverable which means it's not predictable which makes it very difficult to intercept and destroy.   China has now joined the U.S. and Russia in the exclusive, hypersonic club.

Commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Sam Locklear, noted that China has been able to make breathtaking advances in military technology, observing, "They have different processes that allow them to get to it faster." 

Yes, Admiral Sam, they do indeed.

Another Reason to Worry About Overpopulation - Robotics

Maybe we picked the wrong time, possibly even the worst time, for a global,  population explosion.

We've been warned for years that the robot age is upon us and it's going to be a social game-changer.  Robotics obviously favours capital over labour.  Capital purchases robots to displace unruly, costly, whining labour.  Machines are simply faster, cheaper and infinitely more obedient than human labour at a whole variety of tasks.

Every day, it seems, brings us ever closer to the development of true, artificial intelligence.  We're also finding that, when it comes to AI, 'close enough' can be awfully lucrative in its own right - to the right people.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum offers some fascinating insights and speculation on what lies ahead:

...artificial intelligence and machine learning could allow computers and robots to increasingly replace labor in the production function for goods....In standard growth models, it is quite easy to show that this can lead to a rising capital share — which we intriguingly already see in many countries since around 1980 (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2013) — and to rising growth rates. In the limit, if capital can replace labor entirely, growth rates could explode, with incomes becoming infinite in finite time.

Disconnect Alert - wrong Kevin.  Robots can't "replace labor entirely" because labour, the wages from labour, is where the customers will come from to buy the stuff that robots produce.  Robots don't buy toothpaste or toilet paper, toasters or barbecues.

What I found particularly fascinating was Drum's take on public attitudes toward robotics:

The thing that gets me is that so many people continue to think of this as wild speculation. I don't mean the infinite incomes stuff, which is obviously hyperbole since we'll always need more than just capital to make the economy run. I just mean the general idea that robots and AI are pretty obviously going to have a huge economic impact in the medium term future. This is something that seems so obvious to me that I'm a little puzzled that there's anyone left who still doesn't see it. Nonetheless, an awful lot of people still think of this as science fiction. I put the doubters into four rough buckets:

1. Moore's Law is going to to break down sometime very soon, and we'll never get the raw computing power we need for true AI.
2. There is something mysterious about the human brain that we will never be able to emulate with silicon and software. Maybe something, um, quantum.
3. Meh. We've been hearing about AI forever. It's never happened before, it's not going to happen this time either.
4. La la la la la.

It sounds eerily similar to how many of us respond to global warming.  There's a lot of "meh" and "la la la la la" when it comes to climate change too.

Coming Soon to The Simpsons Channel - COSMOS 2014

Cosmos is coming back.  Premiering on 9 March on FOX, Neil deGrasse Tyson will be hosting an updated version of the legendary show created by the late Carl Sagan.  When you think about it, it's hard to imagine anyone but deGrasse Tyson who has the stature to fill Sagan's shoes.  Here's the trailer:

Steyn Stew

Another big setback for rightwing loudmouth, Mark Steyn, and another big win for climate scientist Michael Mann in his defamation action.  Mother Jones reports the defendants' camp is coming apart at the seams, leaving Mark Steyn abandoned, even by his lawyers, well out on a branch.

Global Warming Reaches the Factory Floor

It's about time.  According to The New York Times, industry is beginning to 'get' the reality of climate change now that it's beginning to hammer their bottom line.

Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke’s balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.

 

“Increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years,” said Jeffrey Seabright, Coke’s vice president for environment and water resources, listing the problems that he said were also disrupting the company’s supply of sugar cane and sugar beets, as well as citrus for its fruit juices. “When we look at our most essential ingredients, we see those events as threats.”

 

Coke reflects a growing view among American business leaders and mainstream economists who see global warming as a force that contributes to lower gross domestic products, higher food and commodity costs, broken supply chains and increased financial risks. 

 

The article suggests that, finally, industry generally is breaking from the fossil fuelers pitch that interference with carbon energy production is unduly harmful to an economy. 

Sportfishing Rules

Guardian enviro-scribe George Monbiot gets it.  Sportfishing trumps commercial fishing any day and in every way.  It's better for the environment and it's better for the economy, way better.

Here are a few ways that sportfishing is vastly better than commercial fishing.

1.  Bycatch.  Anglers take what they're after, what's in season.  If it's the wrong species, back it goes.  Better yet, it's landed on a hook and line.  It's not mashed up on some trawl or left to die on a long-line.

2.  Quotas.  Anglers accept modest catch quotas.  Hell, they're often happy to get anything and even if they don't, they're just happy to be out on the water. 

3.  Fuel consumption.  Anglers don't like to squander money on gas.  They trailer their boats to the nearest launch ramp to the fishing area.  Running long distances to a fishing hole is just a waste of fishing time and money.

4.  Revenue, revenue, revenue.  Tourists flock to places where there's good sportfishing to be had.  They spend big bucks on hotels, restaurants, gear and charter guides.  The return to the economy per salmon from sportfishing, for example, eclipses what the commercial fleet generates.  It's a few pennies per pound for the commercial fish and a few dollars per pound for the angler's fish.

According to Monbiot, it's the same situation in Britain:

Total value of landings by commercial fishing fleets in the UK as a whole: £770m.

Total spending by sea anglers (recreational rod and line fishers) in England alone: £831m.

Yes, surprising as it seems, fishing for a hobby appears to generate more value than fishing commercially.

The same report, produced for the Westminster government last year, found that sea angling in England directly generates 10,400 jobs: in charter boats, tackle shops, bed and breakfasts, restaurants and the rest.

Commercial fishing directly employs 12,450 people across the UK.

The report on angling doesn't provide figures for the whole of the UK, but if the jobs generated are proportional to the number of anglers, then the total for England, Scotland and Wales is 12,690. (There must also be a few hundred in Northern Ireland, for which I don't have any figures). So, in terms of direct employment, rod and line fishing appears to generate more jobs than net and pot fishing.

...Broadly speaking, we're looking at two industries of roughly comparable size, which exist in direct competition with each other. One – commercial fishing – constrains the income and employment generated by the other. The government survey found that the factor above all others that would encourage participation is "better fish stocks". The anglers it questioned reported sharply diminished catches over the past 20 or 30 years; which is unsurprising in view of the depletion caused by commercial overfishing and the habitat destruction inflicted by trawlers and scallop dredgers.

As Monbiot points out, commercial fishing also does constrain the income and employment of the sportfishing industry here in British Columbia.  Commercial overfishing leaves the sportfishing industry unable to attract clients.  Who wants to pay big money to go to a place to drag tackle through an empty ocean?  Damn few. 

A particular sore point is that, in British Columbia, our government, at taxpayer expense, maintains a chain of fish hatcheries to provide many millions of salmon fingerlings.  What's rarely recognized are that those fingerlings are subsidized life support for the commercial fishing industry.  Those hatcheries are a blatant admission of overfishing by a commercial fleet bloated in numbers and capability.   Why should the lucrative sportfishing industry be relegated to the overfishing and heavily subsidized commercial fleet's leavings?

Although you wouldn't know it to hear the commercial skippers talk, but the fish in the sea are natural capital, public property.  It's the responsibility of government to get a fair return from those who take that public property.   If we allowed the economics of sportfishing to determine the value of our fish and exacted something approaching that value from the commercial fleet and packing plants then I suspect we'd have far less dependence on hatcheries and far healthier fish stocks - not to mention much happier anglers. 
 

Today in Afghanistan - Inmates Still Running the Asylum

Outgoing (this year) Afghan president Hamid Karzai says the U.S. needs to start peace talks with the Taliban or they might as well just pack up and leave.

Given that the United States invaded Afghanistan in the first place with the intention of crushing al Qaeda and driving out their supposed Taliban sponsors, it's sort of like Karzai telling the Americans they can stay but only if they essentially admit defeat.

Just how does the United States negotiate with the Talibs?  Negotiations are a give and take process.  And just what exactly is "the Taliban" any more?  Today there's a Pakistani Taliban and an Afghan Taliban and then there's a gaggle of other groups more or less associated with the insurgency/rebellion.  When you consider the history of shifting loyalties and alliances, figuring out who you're actually dealing with from one year to the next is really an exercise in herding cats.

And how do you deal on behalf of a surrogate government that is, itself, a criminal enterprise and about to undergo a rigged electoral equivalent of regime change?  Hamid is going to gather up his foreign bank books and di di mau the hell and gone from Kabul this year.

Karzai's defiant tone struck a chord with those in the west who have already decided that further discussion with the Afghan president may be pointless and waiting for his successor to be elected is the best option. 
"The more people speak about it being signed after the election, the more irrelevant he becomes," said one diplomat. "Sad as it is, we might have to bank on the next guy."

Roll the dice and "bank on the next guy"?  Seriously, that's the game plan?  See, I told you.  The inmates are indeed still running the asylum.  What if the "next guy" is this guy?

Solar Panels Endanger Firefighters?

This should make the fossil fuelers happy.  Rooftop solar panels supposedly present a threat to firefighters.  They, supposedly, could even prevent firefighters from saving your home.  That's right, they might just have to let her burn right to the ground.

This is a story that has gotten wide circulation in papers and news outlets  across North America.

In New Jersey, a state assemblyman and volunteer firefighter has introduced a bill that would require a warning sign on buildings that have rooftop solar arrays.  This is what the story is about, a September fire at a Dietz & Watson warehouse in New Jersey.  The company was a meat processor and, by all accounts, the smell during the fire and in the days afterward was horrific for the neighbours.

Because Nothing Screams "Invasion" Like the An-2

North Korean garden gnome, Kim Jong-Un, is reported to have recently overseen exercises that simulated a special forces attack on South Korea's busy Incheon airport.

The attack involved airborne troops dropped onto the airport from An-2 biplanes like this one.

With a cruise speed of 120 mph. and a really loud, radial engine, the venerable An-2 (NATO designation "Composter") can drop a squad of 10-paratroopers, eventually, somewhere.  The idea that 15-of them would be able to get into South Korea undetected is, however, a bit of a stretch.

That's What Bitumen Is For - The Great Flood

You know that whole Noah's Ark business?  Well the Noah before the Judeo-Christian Noah was apparently told by God 1.0 , the Mesopotamian original,  to build an Ark with the standard terms - all the animals, two of each - only the original ark was to be a circular vessel about two-thirds the size of a soccer field.  The previous ark was to be made out of rope, reinforced with wooden ribs and sealed with bitumen.  So there, that's what bitumen is for.  It's to make really big boats to help you ride out god's wrath until it's safe to walk on terra firma again.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle — as well as the key instruction that animals should enter “two by two.”

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It’s also the subject of a new book, The Ark Before Noah, by Irving Finkel, the museum’s assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered in the jagged cuneiform script of the ancient Mesopotamians.

The tablet records a Mesopotamian god’s instructions for building a giant vessel — two-thirds the size of a soccer field in area — made of rope, reinforced with wooden ribs and coated in bitumen.

Finkel said that on paper (or stone) the boat-building orders appear sound, but he doesn’t yet know whether it would have floated. A television documentary due to be broadcast later this year will follow attempts to build the ark according to the ancient manual.

 

Is Rex Murphy CBC's In-House Tipping Point?

Rex Murphy gives curmudgeons a bad name.  The jumped-up little shit has exploited his perch at the CBC to promote outrageous climate change denialism.  Murphy, whose educational background lies in English literature, skilfully never allows science to inform his opinion on matters such as global warming.  In short, he's a hack.

Simon Fraser University communications prof,  Robert Hackett, argues that Murphy demonstrates how badly CBC's journalism standards need overhauling.  He contends that Murphy illustrates the slippery slope by which a public broadcaster can be deformed into a state broadcaster.

Why is it that Rex Murphy appears regularly on the network's flagship news program, while voices of environmental sanity like David Suzuki or Naomi Klein don't?

To be sure, CBC is still capable of the excellent watchdog journalism for which it has been renowned in the past; a recent collaborative series on offshore tax havens is an example. But informed long-term observers like the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting worry that faced with political and funding pressures from the federal government, CBC is at risk of sliding down a slippery slope, from a respected public broadcaster, to a state broadcaster on an increasingly tighter leash to the government of the day. Off the record, respected CBC journalists talk about "leftwing phobia" and political timidity at the level of management.

 If we want a society alert to the danger of climate change, excessive dependence on fossil fuel exploitation and consumption, and the violation of aboriginal treaty rights, then revitalizing CBC's journalism needs to be part of a more hopeful picture. 

For all his vaunted intellect, Murphy's ranting about climate change, his raw denialism, is eerily similar to Donald Trump's.  Having an intellect is one thing.  Leaving it at home when you go to work is another.

The Tyee Asks: Are the RCMP Ready for the Battle of The Northern Gateway?

It's looking increasingly unlikely that Harper will ever get bitumen into supertankers at Kitimat wihout one hell of a battle against First Nations, environmentalists and just ordinary citizens of British Columbia willing to stand against the Northern Gateway pipeline.  The Tyee questions whether the RCMP is really up to the job.

The RCMP clearly can manage a demonstration or two.  They can bring in buses and haul away the passive resisters, again and again and again.  That, however, is a far cry from having to defend that pipeline from the Alberta border to Kitimat.   The pipeline will be crossing through hundreds upon hundreds of miles of wilderness where it's vulnerable and almost impossible to defend against people who know how to move through that wilderness by cops who haven't a clue.

At least in Iraq the pipelines were open with vast desert sightlines.  The Northern Gateway would be run across mountains and through forests.  Those willing to use force against the pipeline have the initiative.  They get to decide what to attack, where, when and how.   The defenders have to be everywhere, all the time.  It's a lot easier to defend against insurgents in a desert than in a jungle - or wilderness forest. 

Who knows, maybe Harper will declare the pipeline route a free fire zone and patrol it with drones armed with Hellfire missiles.  Who knows?

Why Do Trudeau and Mulcair Want to Govern Canada?

If they don't want to tackle the major challenges of the day, why do they seek to govern our country?  I'm not speaking of Stephen Harper, he's a dead loss, a total waste of keystrokes.  I'm talking about Trudeau the Lesser of the Conservative-Lite Liberals  and Tommy Boy Mulcair of the Latter Day Liberal New Democrats.

Both of these hucksters want to take over from Harper and both think that proposing to do a few things slightly differently is enough.  It's not, not nearly enough, yet that is all they're putting on offer.

As BCL reminds us, Trudeau (like Mulcair) is a bitumen booster.  Trudeau openly backs Keystone XL and the Kinder Morgan expansion.  He wants to send Enbridge back to the drawing board on the Northern Gateway which is a far cry from just saying no.

In other words, Trudeau backs plans for the massive expansion of Athabasca production and dilbit export.  Now I presume Trudeau is aware of the Harper government's recent report to the U.N. admitting that Canada's greenhouse gas emissions will soar by 38% by 2030 largely due to Tar Sands expansion.   Where the rest of the world is demanding GHG cuts and while the EU is committing to 40% cuts by 2030, Canada is set to go, full bore, in the opposite direction.  And Trudeau, by endorsing these pipelines, will happily be complicit in that.

Either you believe the scientific consensus that, unless we find some means of keeping warming under 2C to avoid tipping points triggering runaway global warming or you don't believe it.

Either you believe that our hope of staying within that 2C limit will necessitate that we leave 80% of our known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, unburned, or you don't believe it.

Either you believe that our only hope of staying within the 2C limit means opting for the cleanest, lowest-carbon fossil fuels and ditching the highest carbon products - coal and high-carbon petroleum, or you don't believe it.

If you support Keystone XL and the expanded Kinder Morgan and possibly a redesigned Northern Gateway, it admits of only two possibilities.  Either you don't believe any of those three statements given above or, far worse, you do realize they're true but you're willing to give on those points for pure political expedience.

As David Suzuki recently pointed out, people like Trudeau and Mulcair are harming us by debating what's the best way to do something when it's something that shouldn't be done period.

Worrisome Mutterings from Davos, the World Economic Forum

Stephen Harper will not be happy with the talk that's making the rounds at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  What he really won't like are the calls for fossil fuel companies to come clean on the true value of their assets and the chances of those assets becoming "stranded" in a world shifting to clean energy.

Stranded assets.  That's code for Athabasca bitumen.  It rings both bells, high cost and high carbon, the dirtiest petroleum on the planet especially when you factor in the petcoke that comes with it.

Alberta's bitumen reserves have been stranded before.   They were on the cusp of a major development initiative back in the late 50s/early 60s until the Americans discovered a huge reserve of conventional oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.  When that happened, Athabasca deflated like a birthday party balloon. 

It's interesting to imagine how the bitumen producers would explain to their shareholders the risks of Athabasca bitumen - or any other unconventional oil - turning into a stranded asset.   And not just the energy producers either.  Investment analysts and hedge fund managers will come under similar pressure and potential liability. 

The consensus is firming up that 80% of known fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground if we're to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.   That means there are trillions of dollars of assets on the energy producers' books that are essentially worthless.  That in turn means that the actual value of fossil fuel energy is grossly inflated which is even worse news for the unconventional stuff that's hard and expensive  to get out of the ground, high-carbon, hard and expensive  to process and hard and expensive  to transport. 

First They Shuttered Our Libraries, Now They're Coming for "the Black Bomb"?

It's an acquired taste, sort of like Guinness Stout.  It's a gooey, salty, beef-flavoured yeast extract that Brits like slathered on a piece of toast.  It's Marmite, popularly known in some corners as the "Black Bomb."

Apparently Marmite, loved by some throughout the Commonwealth, is under attack by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the same outfit that lets packing plants inspect their own meat products (we know how well that has worked, prime minister Listeria).   The Canuckleheads don't want Marmite coming in because it's enriched with vitamins and minerals.

Really, and that's going to take somebody by surprise?  It's right there on the label, "contains B vitamins." 

So it looks like, if you're into the Black Bomb and you're running low, you might want to stock up while it's still on the grocery store shelves.

Letterman Skewers Rob Ford - Again

The Americans love the guy, at least when they're looking for a bozo.

This Is No Time to Go Blind

 

 

Several research papers over the past year have pointed to major changes to ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation, that plays havoc with the weather around the world when it flares up.  It comes in two flavours, El Nino (the "little one") and his ugly stepsister, La Nina.   While ENSO impacts air currents, it's main sting comes in delivering major droughts and floods to entire regions with all the follow-on impacts such as heatwaves and crop failures.

Even as Australia bakes under all-time record heatwaves, its godsend has been a neutral ENSO state.  Had a massive El Nino come along the conditions in Australia could have been far more extreme.  It's important to remember than ENSO impacts not just the South Pacific but its reach extends to South and North America, Africa and Europe.

Yet now, just as ENSO may be growing from a firecracker into a hand grenade, the monitoring system that has proven so successful in spotting the onset of El Nino and La Nina phenomenon is falling apart. 

Nearly half of the moored buoys in the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array - a network of deep-ocean buoys at 67 sites in the equatorial Pacific that collect ocean and atmospheric data - have failed in the last two years, says a report published in the journal Nature.

 

Scientists are now collecting data from just 40 percent of the array.

 

"It's the most important climate phenomenon on the planet, and we have blinded ourselves to it by not maintaining this array," said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington, DC.

 

The network was developed over the course of a decade following the massive El Nino of 1982-83.

 

The array's troubles began in 2012 when budget cuts pushed NOAA to retire a ship dedicated to performing the annual servicing that keeps the TAO buoys in working order, added the report.

The TAO sensor system has been one of those things the Americans have funded out of their own pockets and we've all had the benefit of it for more than 30-years.   Maybe it's time everyone else finally bought a round, chipped in to get TAO up and running normally again.  We may regret it if we don't.  This is no time to go blind.

Update:  The Australian (paywall) is reporting this morning that the first signs of an El Nino building have been detected.   Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that, fresh on the heels of last week's record heatwave, another heatwave is about to hit Australia.  Fortunately Australians have elected a prime minister who knows that global warming is a fairy tale.

Say It Ain't So, Joe. Canada's Ghost Ship and a Tale of Cannibal Rats.

Somewhere out on the briny deep the abandoned cruise ship, Lyubov Orlova, may be drifting toward somebody's coast.   And she might be full of cannibal rats.   Who left the Lyubov Orlova adrift?  The Harper government, that's who.

It’s possible that this specific ghost ship, the Lyubov Orlova, sank — which would pose environmental problems of its own. But its lifeboats are designed to send off signals when they make contact with the water. Only two such signals have been received, presumably from lifeboats that fell off the ship’s side. The rest haven’t been heard from; ergo, the ship may very well still be out there.
 Also not made-up: Canada did it. The Lyubov Orlova was seized by Canadian authorities after its owners racked up $250,000 in unpaid debts. En route to being sold for scrap in the Dominican Republic in January 2013, a storm snapped her towline. Transport Canada decided not to pursue the ship, declaring
Also not made-up, probably: Cannibal rats. “Experts” believe the ship could still contain hundreds of rats, which naturally would only have been able to survive this long by feeding off one another. “There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other,” Belgian salvage hunter Pim de Rhoodes explained. “If I get aboard I’ll have to lace everywhere with poison.”

The saga of Canada's ghost ship doesn't sit well with the British newspaper The Independent which has speculated (rashly) about the Orlova wrecking on some British shore and releasing its cargo of diseased, killer rats into the countryside.

The authorities in Newfoundland tried to sell the hull for scrap – valued at £600,000 – to the Dominican Republic, but cut their losses when it came loose in a storm on the way.

Sending the ship off into international waters, Transport Canada said it was satisfied the Lyubov Orlova “no longer poses a threat to the safety of [Canadian] offshore oil installations, their personnel or the marine environment”.

Experts say the ship, which is likely to still contain hundreds of rats that have been eating each other to survive, must still be out there somewhere because not all of its lifeboat emergency beacons have been set off.

The head of the Irish coastguard, Chris Reynolds, said the ship was more likely than not to still pose a threat.

“There have been huge storms in recent months but it takes a lot to sink a vessel as big as that,” he said. “We must stay vigilant.”