Ephemera

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It's the 250th birthday of Guinness!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Guinness-original-logo.png




http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=31796420&postcount=2562

 

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Shell Output Set to Pass BP With $40 Billion Spent on Projects
By Fred Pals

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc, held back by almost seven years of falling production, is set to overtake BP Plc after about $40 billion of investment from Qatar to Brazil.

Shell will boost its oil and gas output by a third, adding 1 million barrels a day to capacity by the end of 2012, according to company estimates. That would push Shell to 4.25 million, more than the 4.1 million BP anticipates for 2012.

Record investment in 2009 let Shell Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser expand programs including an oil-sands venture in Canada and the Sakhalin II project in Russia’s Far East. The outlook may help revive Shell’s London-listed shares, which have fallen this year even as competitors like BP gained.

“Shell will have so many startups in the coming five years that it will be impossible for European peers like BP to keep up,” said Peter Heijen, an Amsterdam-based analyst at Theodoor Gilissen Bankiers NV. He recommends buying Shell and predicts the stock will climb by 14 percent during the next year. “Shell has the biggest spending program and that is paying off.”

Shell, which reiterated the targets in a presentation yesterday, is Europe’s biggest oil company by market value, yet trails BP in production after militant attacks hurt operations in Nigeria. The exploration and production division is the top earner for oil companies.

The Hague-based Shell’s output averaged 3.25 million barrels of oil equivalent a day last year, while BP pumped 3.84 million. BP, which reversed two years of falling production in 2008, pushed output above 4 million in the second quarter. Shell takes into account an annual decline rate of 5 percent as fields mature.

Stock Performance
Shell is down 0.7 percent this year, underperforming a 3.9 percent gain for BP. Crude oil futures in New York have rebounded 49 percent since January.

Following a reserves scandal in 2004 when the company was forced to slash its proven reserve estimates, Shell accelerated investments into so-called unconventional projects such as a gas-to-liquids venture in Qatar.

Shell predicts annual production growth of 2 to 3 percent going into 2011 and 2012 after output was held back in recent years by OPEC cutbacks and the attacks in Nigeria, where it’s the largest producer.

BP forecasts average annual output growth of 1 percent to 2 percent up until 2013, said David Nicholas, a company spokesman.

Total, Exxon
Total SA, Europe’s third-biggest oil producer, predicts output will fall this year and expects projects in Africa to help boost production an average of 2 percent through 2014. Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest U.S. oil company, warned it may not meet a 2 percent production growth target this year. It still plans to boost output an average of 2 percent to 3 percent annually during the next half decade, Senior Vice President Mark Albers said Sept. 9.

Shell’s share of the Sakhalin II project in Russia will total 108,000 barrels a day of crude at peak production, while Athabasca will add another 60,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from 2010. Liquefied natural gas projects in Qatar, Russia and Australia will boost output capacity to almost 26 million tons a year from 18.5 million tons in the second quarter once the Gorgon project starts in 2014.

“The projects are enormous and it remains to be seen whether they can deliver on the growth target,” said William Andrews, who holds Shell and BP stock among the $7 billion in assets he helps manage at C.S. McKee & Co. in Pittsburgh.

Debt Concerns
Increased output at Shell will come at the price of higher debt, which is estimated by Standard & Poor’s to exceed $35 billion by the end of 2010.

Expenses doubled between 2004 and 2008. The company estimates that Sakhalin II will cost $20 billion, while the Pearl GTL venture in Qatar required investment of as much as $18 billion. The expansion of the Athabasca oil sands development may cost as much as $11.6 billion.

“Though Shell has some material projects starting up in the next few years, it also has a chunk of its production in high-cost resources,” said Ivor Pether, a senior fund manager who helps manage the equivalent of about $9.9 billion at Royal London Asset Management. “The market naturally has some concerns about the high capex and rise in debt.”

Gearing, or the ratio of debt to equity, is set to triple by year-end as the company invests a record $32 billion. Voser pledged to cut capital expenditure in 2010 by about 10 percent and implement “substantial” job cuts after oil prices fell from last year’s record and the recession eroded demand.

S&P cited the prospect of “very sizeable debt increases” this year and next when it cut Shell’s long-term credit rating one step to AA, the third-highest investment grade, this month.

No Impact
The downgrade will have “no material impact” on Shell’s funding needs, said David Williams, a company spokesman, adding that the “balance sheet is a tool we’re using to underpin the investment program through the cycle.”

At the same time, S&P recognized that Shell’s cash flow is set to improve by 2011 to 2012 because of “forecast major contributions from various large projects.”

Shell has a 30 percent stake in the QatarGas4 project, which will have peak production of 280,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. The Perdido deepwater project in the Gulf of Mexico and the floating oil production unit at the BC-10 field in Brazil will add another 96,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day to output. Shell, the operator of both projects, has a 35 percent stake in Perdido and a 50 percent interest in BC-10.

Shell owns Pearl GTL, which will process 320,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day into 140,000 barrels of gas-to-liquids products and 120,000 barrels a day of ethane.

“Shell is clearly a must own stock by mid 2010,” Alexandre Weinberg, a Brussels-based analyst at Petercam SA, said in a note to investors in August. “These assets should generate massive cash flow, while their plateau production characteristics should lower the decline rate from the current 5 percent to 4 percent.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aJGoiYJJJBcE

 

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It's a damn good thing, too. I don't know where Germany is expecting to get its energy. They already get more than 25% from importation of Russian natural gas. If they were to shut down their nukes, there's little doubt in my mind that the lights would follow.


German Nuclear Plants May Get Reprieve With Merkel Re-Election
By Brian Parkin and Nicholas Comfort

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Germany’s nuclear-power industry got its wish yesterday, as Chancellor Angela Merkel won re- election and headed toward a coalition with the Free Democrats.

Merkel, 53, may now scrap a law that required Germany’s 17 nuclear plants to close by 2021. Her effort was stymied by her junior partner, the past four years, the Social Democrats, who imposed the deadlines in 2002 when they were in power.

“The new coalition will almost certainly now seek to extend the life-cycle of the younger atomic plants,” said Claudia Kemfert, an analyst at the Berlin-based DIW economic institute. “The nuclear bogey plainly didn’t help the SPD, for it played no role in this election.”

German businesses are concerned about how much it will cost to keep the lights on if the plants are turned off. Nuclear- power stations run by Dusseldorf-based E.ON AG, RWE AG of Essen, Vattenfall AB, which is based in Stockholm, and Karlsruhe-based EnBW Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG generated 23 percent of Germany’s electricity last year. Seven plants, producing 10 percent of Germany’s power, are scheduled to close by 2014.

******​

Germany’s nuclear phase-out was implemented by Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrat-led government with the Green Party. Merkel’s coalition stuck to the law, under which all nuclear plants will be shut by about 2021...

 

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It's that time of year. I damn near hit one last night— a mere five miles from the very center of a large urban area.



West Virginia Drivers Hit Most Deer, State Farm Says
By Jamie McGee

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- West Virginia drivers lead the U.S. in collisions with deer for the third straight year as a larger population of the animals meets increasing traffic in once-rural areas, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. said.

One in every 39 drivers in West Virginia is likely to hit a deer in the next 12 months, State Farm said today. The probability was 1 in 45 in last year’s study. Michigan ranked second, with odds of 1 in 78, according to State Farm claims data and motor vehicle registration counts from the Federal Highway Administration.

“We see thousands of dollars worth of damage,” said Spyro Nicoloudakis, co-owner of A-1 Body Shop in Charleston, West Virginia. “Everybody, one time or another, has had an experience with hitting a deer.”

Crashes reach their peak from October through December -- deer mating season -- and cause more than $1 billion in vehicle damage annually, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said in a separate study. Urban sprawl and limits on hunting contribute to the increase, wildlife specialists said.

“You have deer that are very actively seeking each other out and competing with each other for mates,” said John Niewoonder, big game specialist at Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources. No matter the time of year, “you have more roads and more people driving around,” he said.

The average property damage per accident rose 3.4 percent to $3,050 in the latest period, Bloomington, Illinois-based State Farm said.

‘Don’t Veer for Deer’

Michigan is combating the problem by advising motorists not to “veer for deer.” People can put themselves at greater risk when they try to avoid hitting the animals, said Bob Felt, a spokesman for the state’s transportation department.

“They end up going off the road and hitting a fixed object like a tree or a pole,” Felt said. “They get more seriously injured than they would have. To prevent fatalities and reduce injuries, we ask people to hold on to the steering wheel and brake firmly and come to a controlled stop.”

Hunting restrictions in populated regions mean the number of deer is rising in suburban areas, said Paul Curtis, an associate professor at Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources.

“Deer are in those areas to start with, and they have low mortality because they are not hunted,” he said. “Adult does are having twins and occasionally triplets, so the population can increase pretty rapidly.”

Pennsylvania remained third on the State Farm list, with odds of 1 in 94. Drivers in Hawaii have the lowest deer collision frequency, of one in 9,931, State Farm said.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=agCGOzW9xVNk

Volcker Says China’s Rise Highlights Relative U.S. Decline
By James Tyson and Michael McKee

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker said the rise of China and other emerging economies has underscored a decline in the comparative economic and intellectual leadership of the U.S.

“I don’t know how we accommodate ourselves to it,” Volcker, an economic adviser to President Barack Obama, said in an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose taped yesterday in New York. “You cannot be dependent upon these countries for three to four trillion dollars of your debt and think that they’re going to be passive observers of whatever you do.”

The former Fed chairman also said unemployment at 9.7 percent will slow the pace of recovery from the U.S. recession as consumers default on mortgages and consumer loans. Moreover, commercial real estate loans are likely to cause further losses for lenders.

“This recovery will be slower,” he said. “We can’t just pump up consumption and pump up housing again.”

Group of 20 leaders, meeting in Pittsburgh last week, announced plans for more durable economic growth, including reducing U.S. dependence on overseas capital and cutting the reliance of emerging nations such as China on exports.

World leaders decided that the G-20, which includes emerging economies such as China and Brazil, will replace the Group of Eight as the main forum for global economic coordination. The shift illustrates how the excesses that led to the financial crisis have compelled industrial nations to share governance of the world economy.

Less Dominant
The growth of emerging economies is “symbolic of the relative, less dominant position the United States has, not just in the economy but in leadership, intellectual and otherwise,” Volcker said.

The G-20 accounts for about 85 percent of global gross domestic product and was created after a spate of currency devaluations plagued emerging markets from Russia to Thailand in the 1990s. The G-8, which comprises the most advance industrial economies of Europe and North America plus Japan and Russia, accounts for about half of global GDP.

China has overtaken Germany to become the world’s third- largest economy and may soon become the biggest exporter. It passed Japan a year ago as the main foreign investor in U.S. government debt. China, Russia, Brazil and India together hold about 42 percent of international reserve assets, excluding gold.

Herding Cats
“I would like to think that given the history of the past, given the strength, actual and potential of the American economy, we can still provide a kind of indispensable element of leadership here,” Volcker, 82, said. “But it’s not going to be dictatorial, I’ll tell you that. It is very hard to herd these cats together.”

Volcker repeated that under a new regulatory structure the Fed should be given primary responsibility for supervising banks rather than a council of regulators led by the U.S. Treasury.

The Treasury has “no professional background and no traditions in the area of banking supervision,” Volcker said.

“In the distribution of authorities among regulatory institutions, it’s really the Federal Reserve that naturally should to be surveying the whole world, so to speak,” he said.

Volcker has criticized the Obama administration’s plan to give the Fed authority to supervise “systemically important” financial firms. Such a designation would imply government readiness to support the firms in a crisis, encouraging excessive risk-taking, he said in said in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee on Sept. 24.

Independent Agency
The central bank should instead oversee bank regulation carried out by an independent agency, Volcker has said. The chairman of that agency could also be a vice chairman of the Fed, to increase accountability and ensure the Fed is fully informed.

Volcker is chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a body created by Obama in February to recommend responses to the crisis.

Since January, Volcker has advocated that regulators prohibit financial companies whose collapse would pose a risk to the economy -- those considered “too big to fail” -- from engaging in certain types of trading and investing. The administration wants stricter oversight for such companies and tighter capital and liquidity requirements.

Volcker said the Fed and the White House “were right in providing massive support” to financial markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Sept. 15, 2008, and to bail out American International Group.

“Faced with those emergencies, they did what they had to do at the time,” he said.

Giving Succor
While more might have been done ahead of time to prevent Lehman’s demise, “I think if it had been rescued somehow and kept alive, I still think you would have had an attack on the other institutions,” he said. The government’s actions give “succor to the next institution that gets in trouble and to their creditors in particular,” Volcker said.

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Investors in Treasuries, Dollars Defy Common Sense
by David Pauly

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. should lose its golden credit rating. Bankers and investors around the world should dump dollars. Read any economics textbook and you come to that conclusion.

Massive government spending and money creation to rescue the nation from the Great Recession have deluged the U.S. Treasury market with new securities -- exacerbating the country’s already massive debt load.

Chronic U.S. trade deficits have led to the accumulation of vast stores of dollars in foreign bank accounts.

Classic economics theory says supply should overwhelm demand in both markets. Treasuries should no longer be considered free of risk. The dollar should no longer be the key global currency.

The U.S. has balanced its budget only five times in the past 50 years. The four straight years of surpluses starting with 1998 now look like a statistical error.

Total government debt at the end of 2008 was $10.7 trillion, compared with $5.53 trillion 10 years earlier. A bit of nostalgia: In 1978, the debt was $789 billion, with a “b.”

There’s little relief in sight. The latest budget deficit forecast for the new fiscal year that began yesterday is $1.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

While the recession has curbed the U.S. appetite for foreign goods, Americans still spend more overseas than they buy, as they have consistently since World War II ended in 1945. The deficit in July was $32 billion.

Using an index based on how much business the U.S. does with other countries, the value of the dollar has plunged about 13 percent since March 4.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, said Tuesday that though the dollar remains the dominant global currency, “nothing’s guaranteed.”

Stop Sign
The double whammy of soaring Treasury sales and the decline of the dollar should stop governments such as China and Saudi Arabia from investing large chunks of their trade-earned dollars in U.S. securities.

Instead, they are buying more. Foreign investors bought 43 percent of the $1.41 trillion of Treasury notes and bonds issued so far this year versus 27 percent of the $527 billion sold in the same 2008 period.

China more than once has said it might move away from Treasuries. Still, its purchases have increased by 10 percent this year and it now owns $800 billion of Treasuries, the most of any foreign country.

During the credit crisis, investors still considered America the safest bet. They were so eager that at one point they bought short-term U.S. paper that guaranteed them a small loss.

What Inflation?
As the economy begins to recover, they are buying Treasuries on the bet that inflation will stay tame even though the Federal Reserve is creating money rapidly in its recovery efforts.

Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Total Return fund, the world’s biggest bond fund, has increased its holding of government-related securities to 44 percent of its total investments, up from 27 percent in July. Bill Gross, the fund’s boss, says he views the move as protection against deflation, prices actually declining.

Notions about inflation will change if the U.S. and other industrialized nations can’t figure out when to ease off from their massive stimulus spending. No easy task.

To protect the safety of Treasuries and the dollar, the U.S. government must soon get its budget under control. History suggests this is impossible.

Can’t Last
Hard-pressed Americans now are saving more than they did a few years ago, curbing the demand for imported goods. How long will that last?

Textbook economics suggests that before long, Japan and other Asian nations will start converting their dollars into euro-denominated securities -- or perhaps a new international currency backed by a basket of, say, euros and yen along with dollars. That would mean a significant decline for Treasuries and the dollar. The U.S. no longer will be supreme.

Intuition alone should tell investors to look elsewhere for security. But who said investors -- be they governments or individual speculators -- had that much common sense?

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aWv7lRFfMUzI

Chinese 103-Year-Old Wall Street Emigrant Sees End of Communism
By Bloomberg News

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Zhou Youguang was a child of 6 when a revolution toppled China’s last emperor in 1912. He was 43 when he says he left a Wall Street banker’s job to help Mao Zedong’s Communists create what he thought would be a democracy after decades of warlord rule, occupation and civil war.

Now 103, he has seen China transformed from a country of 368 million being carved up by foreign powers to a nation of 1.3 billion and the world’s fastest-growing major economy, expanding at an average annual rate of 9.9 percent from 1978 to 2008. He says he still believes China will eventually become a democracy -- in spite of communism, not because of it.

“China will follow the mainstream of the world, sooner or later,” the pajama-clad Zhou said during an interview in the book-lined study of his third-floor walk-up apartment in central Beijing.

His experiences encapsulate the complicated legacy of the Communist Party, which celebrates 60 years in power this week with a military parade past Tiananmen -- the Gate of Heavenly Peace -- where Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct. 1, 1949.

While Zhou endured three years of forced separation from his family during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, he survived a purge of intellectuals that led many of his colleagues to commit suicide. He was also given the opportunity to devise a new system of spelling out Chinese characters with the Roman alphabet that helped hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants learn to read.

‘Lucky Ones’
“There were very few who returned from America who escaped the catastrophe,” Zhou said. “I was one of the very lucky ones.”

Like China’s leaders, Zhou divides Communist rule into two periods: the first three decades dominated by Mao, who died in 1976, and the second characterized by the opening of China to the world by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997. While Deng’s era sparked rapid growth, Zhou, an economist by training, considers it a mixed success.

Deng “reformed the economy but didn’t reform politics,” Zhou said. “In the political scene, there was absolutely no change; it was an autocracy.”

That wasn’t the outcome Zhou Enlai promised Zhou in the late 1930s. The two, who aren’t related, met in Chongqing when the Yangzi River city became the wartime capital following Japan’s occupation of Nanjing in 1937.

Meetings of Intellectuals
Zhou Enlai -- who would become China’s premier in 1949 -- held monthly get-togethers with intellectuals, including Zhou, who worked for Sin Hua Trust & Savings Bank, which was founded in 1914 and became part of the Bank of China Ltd. in 2001.

“Zhou Enlai told me at those meetings that the Communist Party was a democratic party,” Zhou said.

Zhou left China for New York at the end of 1946, where he represented Sin Hua at Irving Trust Co., the bank’s U.S. agent, at its Art Deco headquarters on 1 Wall Street. He and his wife, Zhang Yunhe, returned to Shanghai in June 1949, as the Communists neared victory.

“We thought that with China liberated, there was hope; everyone wanted to come back home and do something,” Zhou wrote in a 2008 autobiography.

When he arrived, Shanghai -- occupied by the People’s Liberation Army the previous month -- straddled the communist- capitalist divide. Zhou lived in both worlds: working at Sin Hua and at what is now the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics as a professor. There he and his colleagues, most of them scholars who returned from the U.S., watched as textbooks were jettisoned for new ones reflecting Marxist theories of class struggle.

Common Language
In 1955, Zhou, whose hobby was linguistics, was asked during a Beijing conference to lead a group creating a standardized system of writing Chinese phonetically with Roman letters. The project would supersede a hodgepodge of Romanization systems and was part of a drive that included simplifying the way thousands of characters were written and teaching a common language, Mandarin, in schools throughout the country.

“I said no way, I’m an amateur,” Zhou said. It was too late; the premier, who remembered his avocation from their days in Chongqing, had already called Zhou’s colleagues in Shanghai and told them he wouldn’t be coming home.

Zhou’s pinyin system, which turned “Peking” into “Beijing,” uses markers to identify which of Mandarin’s four tones to use. It became the national standard in 1958 and has helped reduce China’s illiteracy rate to 10 percent today from about 80 percent in the 1950s.

Mao’s Purge
His new career also kept him relatively safe when economics professors, especially those who had lived in the U.S., became targets of Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 to purge anyone he thought opposed his revolution.

“Every day there were people killing themselves,” Zhou wrote in his autobiography.

Zhou didn’t completely escape persecution. He was branded a “reactionary academic authority” in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution and sent to northwestern China’s Ningxia region, where, already well into his 60s, he spent a year toiling in rice paddies. He was allowed to return to his family in 1972. Since then he’s helped make pinyin a global standard and published books on linguistics.

Zhou never expressed regret in the interview for giving up his New York lifestyle. In 1949, the “common people trusted the Communist Party,” he said. Looking back over 60 years, he now believes the party, which he never joined, “cheated the Chinese people. They destroyed everything, especially the intellectuals.”

That doesn’t stop Zhou from saying that China’s economic boom will someday be accompanied by the democracy he had hoped to help create.

“I’m always optimistic,” he said.

 

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If ever there were a case of diametrically opposed conclusions, this is it. Kerry and Boxer look to be building a case that rests on an increasingly shaky scientific foundation.

If you are just joining us, the story is this. After 10 years of data being withheld that would allow true scientific replication, and after dozens of requests for that data, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit finally was given access to the data from Yamal Peninsula, Russia. He discovered that only 12 trees had been used out of a much larger dataset of tree ring data. When the larger data set was plotted, there is no “hockey stick” of temperature, in fact it goes in the opposite direction.

Simple check with station records around Yamal peninsula says the same:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222206740006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222236310000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222234720005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222202920005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222237110000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=222208910006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

There is no hockey stick, no unprecedented warming, no trumpeted release of Siberian methane. How can climatologists present a reconstruction of temperature, which obviously does not agree with local temperature records?​

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/...there-is-no-hockey-stick-in-yamal/#more-11328


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Senate Climate Plan to Cut Greenhouse Emissions 20%
By Lorraine Woellert and Simon Lomax

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer offered a plan to limit greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming, saying they will work to get it enacted by December.

“Our health, our security, our economy, our environment all demand we reinvent the way America uses energy,” said Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He said the proposal will put millions of Americans back to work.

The plan would curb emissions by creating a market for companies to buy and sell pollution permits. It would require U.S. power plants, factories, refineries and other polluters to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent through 2020, a deeper cut than the 17 percent approved by the House.

The bill numbers about 800 pages yet lacks provisions such as an allocation formula for free pollution permits to ease companies’ costs as they cut pollution and invest in clean technology....

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=adLF0kAZ3q14

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Claim:
The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is now ~30% higher than peak levels measured in ice cores for the last 800,000 years,

Response:
This is a totally meaningless number—30% of virtually nothing is still virtually nothing. Far more significant is the increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The total change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is only 0.008% !!

Do the math! The critical number is how much the actual atmospheric CO2 has increased, not the percentage increase—if you start with one atom and add one atom you’ve doubled the percentage, but still have virtually nothing. The statement above is very bad science and completely meaningless.

In addition, CO2 accounts for only 3.62% of the greenhouse gas effect (water vapor accounts for about 95% of the greenhouse effect). Verifiable calculations of the possible effect of increased CO2 on atmospheric temperature shows that the maximum effect of even doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 0.1°.

So we are being asked to believe that a change of 0.008% in the amount of a greenhouse gas (CO2) that accounts for only 3.6% of the greenhouse effect and which is incapable of changing the temperature of the atmosphere more than 0.1° is going to increase global temperatures by 10°F in the coming century! The argument that a small increase in atmospheric temperature by CO2 will increase the water vapor content of the atmosphere and cause warming is totally unsupported by existing measurements of atmospheric water vapor and is based entirely on undocumented assumptions.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aSnZ83.h2RE0

‘Ardi’ Pre-Dates Lucy on Gentler Path to Human Beings
By Rob Waters

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The 4.4 million-year-old skeleton nicknamed “Ardi” by scientists who found her remains in Ethiopia show the earliest known ancestor of humans was a lot more like us than chimps or apes.

The 4-foot-tall Ardi was more than 1 million years older than the best-known human ancestor, “Lucy,” whose remains were found 75 kilometers (46 miles) away. Ardi, from Ardipithecus ramidus, walked on two feet and lived in groups where males cooperated rather than fought and females chose mates based on the size of their fangs, according to an analysis published today in the journal Science.

Ardi’s bones, discovered in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia and described in today’s report, challenge previous assumptions that when humans and apes split into separate species millions of years ago, the ancestor they shared was a lot like a chimpanzee.

“The common ancestor was not like a chimpanzee,” said Andrew Hill, an anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who wasn’t involved in the research. “There were some good reasons we made that assumption, but it’s wrong.”

Some of the most compelling evidence of the divergent evolutionary paths humans and apes have taken is that the upper canine teeth of Ardi’s male peers were smaller than those of chimps.

“In Ardipithecus, the canine is no longer a weapon,” said Owen Lovejoy, an evolutionary biologist at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, who led the team’s anatomical analyses. “So there has been an enormous social transformation from heavily male-male conflict to virtual elimination of conflict. The males are cooperative.”

‘Lucy’ Not Oldest
The excavation and analysis of the remains of Ardi and her peers were conducted by a team of 47 scientists from 10 countries. Previously the earliest known pre-human remains were those of Lucy, a member of the genus Australopithecus afarensis.

Ardi helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of humans, said Tim White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the project’s co-director. “There’s been a tendency to view chimpanzees as the presumed stand-in for what the last common ancestor of both apes and humans looked like,” said Lovejoy. “This fossil changes that view completely.”

The report consists of 11 articles providing details of Ardi’s skull, hands, arms, pelvis and feet, and discussing how they illuminate the origin of humans and the evolution of behavior.

Finger Bone
Berhane Asfaw, an anthropologist with the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was walking with his colleague Yohannes Haile-Selassie in November 1994 when Haile- Selassie found the first fragment of Ardi, a half of a finger bone.

Haile-Selassie blurted out “It’s a hominid,” recalled Asfaw, the project’s co-director, in a telephone interview from Addis Ababa yesterday, using the scientific name given to modern humans and their now-extinct ancestors. Haile-Selassie is now curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

“Then the whole crew converged on the area and we crawled on the surface like a baby on hands and knees” searching for additional bones, he said. In the coming months, they found dozens of bones scattered over an area of 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 feet).

Lovejoy did an analysis on 145 teeth they found, including canines from as many as 21 individuals.

Not ‘Dagger-like’
They found Ardi’s group had teeth quite different from the “dagger-like” canines in male chimps and gorillas, Lovejoy said in a telephone interview yesterday. “Male gorillas use their canines to threaten and fight with other males and are usually successful in excluding all but one other male from the group.”

As a result, gorillas live in groups with a dominant male, sometimes a subordinate male, and up to 12 females, Lovejoy said. Male chimpanzees stake out turf for their clan, patrol it, and keep unrelated males from entering, he said. Invading outsiders can be killed.

In Ardipithecus, male and female canines differ little in size and the male canine has been “dramatically feminized” with a shape like a diamond instead of a sharp point, the report found.

Lovejoy theorizes that canines shrunk in males as a result of evolutionary pressure from females choosing mates with smaller fangs who were less aggressive.

Food for Sex
“Why did females pick males that didn’t fight?” Lovejoy said. “The answer is that they were doing something that we see occasionally in chimps: trading food for sex. The provider-male wins out.”

Ardi’s teeth, and tell-tale scratches and residue in the enamel, suggest that she and her relatives were omnivorous, eating fruit when it was available, along with beetles, grubs and grasses, the researchers reported. They didn’t have the spiky cusps on molars used by chimpanzees to crush fruit, a key staple of the chimp diet.

Though Ardipithecus had opposable toes to help them climb trees, they wouldn’t have been as adept at it as chimps, the researchers found. They also lacked the arch support to run far or fast and didn’t “knuckle-walk” on all fours like apes, Lovejoy said.

Though the part of Ethiopia where the remains were found is now a badlands, it was wetter and lusher when Ardi and her peaceful compatriots lived there, said White.

“If you got in a time machine and went back 4.4 million years and stopped and looked around, you’d see not desert, but a dense, tropical woodland teeming with life,” White said in a telephone interview yesterday.

 

[butters]

how fascinating!

I enjoy hearing how theories are merely that - extrapolations of evidence formed to fit pet ideas in some instances, wild guesses in others, pointers to the actual truth sometimes. With each new 'discovery' the theories have to remodel themselves. All good stuff

 

[trysail]

Britain’s MI5 Spy Agency Gives Up Secrets in Official History
By Brian Lysaght

Oct. 5 -- MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, gave up some of its secrets with the publication of an authorized history by academic Christopher Andrew.

“The Defence of the Realm,” which is 1,032 pages long and published by Allen Lane, an imprint Pearson Plc’s Penguin Books unit, is the result of the Cambridge University historian’s review of 400,000 files over seven years.

“Almost every day I said to myself, ‘Crikey, I didn’t know that,’” Andrew told reporters at a news conference in London today. Seated next to him was Stephen Lander, a retired MI5 director-general.

The book tracks MI5’s beginnings as a two-man operation in 1909, its activities during the two world wars, the Cold War and against terrorists ranging from the Irish Republican Army to Islamic extremists who bombed the London Underground in 2005.

Andrew describes how the agency opened a file on Harold Wilson at the time of the Labour Party politician’s election to Parliament in 1945 and tracked his official contacts with the Soviets as a member of the British government.

The file was kept under the pseudonym of Norman John Worthington, “because of its unusual sensitivity,” according to the book. Wilson, who was prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976, suspected a plot by the security services to undermine his government. Andrew backed the MI5 view that no such plot existed.

In 1961, then-Labour Party officials including leader Hugh Gaitskell drew up a list of 16 Labour members of Parliament they believed to be members of the Communist Party and passed it to the security service, Andrew said.

‘Hard Target’
Andrew, who is the professor of modern history at Cambridge, has written several books on spying, including “Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community.”

He said there were “just too many” Soviet agents in Britain during the Cold War for MI5 to monitor effectively until 1971, when the U.K. expelled 105 suspected spies. After that, Britain became a “hard target,” with better capabilities of outmaneuvering the Soviets, he said.

MI5 was well-informed about Adolf Hitler’s intentions before World War II because of an agent in the German Embassy in London, according to the book. Agency officials, seeking to draw Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attention to the threat, passed a memo to him saying that Hitler regularly disparaged Chamberlain.

The book describes the careful coaxing by the agency’s chief interrogator, William Skardon, of a confession from Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who worked at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear laboratory and passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. Fuchs was convicted and jailed in 1950, in what was the “most important secret ever betrayed by a British citizen,” according to the book.

‘Glass Ceiling’
Andrew said that MI5 “smashed” the “glass ceiling” that slowed the ascent of women to top jobs well before private industry did. Several of its leading Soviet experts were female during the Cold War, as were two of its directors-general, Stella Rimington, who held the office from 1992 to 1996 and Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was in post from 2002 to 2007.

Lander, who was director from 1996 to 2002, said the book, which will be published in the U.S. next month, was “a cracking good read.”

Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency has a similar project. It granted historian Keith Jeffery access to its most confidential papers, and his book covering the agency up to 1949 will be distributed next year by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

 

[trysail]

http://en.rian.ru/business/20091007/156379527.html

Finland to back Nord Stream gas pipeline project

BRUSSELS, October 7 (RIA Novosti) - Finland, which earlier raised environmental concerns over the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, is set to give its approval to the project, a Belgian radio station reported on Wednesday.

The Brussels-based radio station Contact said that Finland's Minister of European and Migration Affairs Astrid Thors expected his country to give an environmental approval for the Nord Stream construction.

The Nord Stream pipeline, which will pump gas from Siberia to Europe under the Baltic Sea, bypassing East European transit countries, is being built jointly by Gazprom, Germany's E.ON and BASF, and Dutch gas transportation firm Gasunie at an estimated cost of $12 billion.

The ambitious pipeline project is scheduled to be completed in 2012. The first of two parallel pipelines, approximately 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) long, each with a transport capacity of some 27.5 billion cu m per annum, is to become operational in 2010.

Some countries, including Sweden, Estonia and Finland, earlier questioned the environmental safety of the Baltic Sea pipeline.

 

[trysail]

Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years
Aradhna K. Tripati 1*, Christopher D. Roberts 2, Robert A. Eagle 3
1 Departments of Earth and Space Sciences and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.; Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, UK.
2 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, UK.
3 Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.


* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Aradhna K. Tripati , E-mail: aradhna.tripati@gmail.com

The CO2 content of the atmosphere has varied cyclically between ~180 and ~280 ppmv over the last 800,000 years, closely coupled with temperature and sea level. For earlier periods in Earth’s history, pCO2 is much less certain and the relationship between pCO2 and climate remains poorly constrained. We use boron/calcium ratios in foraminifera to estimate pCO2 during major climate transitions of the last 20 million years (myr). During the Middle Miocene, when temperatures were ~3 to 6°C warmer and sea level 25 to 40 meters higher than present, pCO2 was similar to modern levels. Decreases in pCO2 were synchronous with major episodes of glacial expansion during the Middle Miocene (~14 to 10 million years ago; Ma) and Late Pliocene (~3.3 to -2.4 Ma).




http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...ncreases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/

 

[trysail]

I'll be goddamned! The frickin' Beeb!


What happened to global warming?
By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News

Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on? ...

*****​

Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm


_______________________________________________

 

[trysail]

Remarks by John C. Bogle
Founder and Former Chairman, The Vanguard Group
The Wall Street Journal
November 18, 2004


"Most of the mistakes and major faults of the financial era that has just drawn to a close will be ascribed to the failure to observe the fiduciary principle, the precept as old as holy writ, that `no man can serve two masters' . . . . Those who serve nominally as trustees but consider only last the interests of those whose funds they command suggests how far we have ignored the necessary implications of the principle."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote those words in 1934. Today, they could have been as easily written by New York State's crusading attorney general Eliot Spitzer. At first almost alone, he turned the spotlight on the unprincipled conduct of too many financial intermediaries during the recent era.

His campaign to eliminate conflicts of interest between service providers and their clients began with Wall Street investment bankers in 2001, spread to mutual fund managers in 2003, and last month enveloped insurance brokers. While it would be unfair to tarnish the entire financial field with the brush wielded by the attorney general, the misconduct was not only rife, but practiced by some of the oldest, largest and once most respected firms in each of those fields.

The practices he attacked were open secrets to industry insiders, indeed often accepted as the normal way of doing business. On Wall Street, for example, it was hardly unusual for analysts to publish glowing "research" reports on stocks of companies that they believed were junk, often with the objective of puffing initial public offerings or winning investment-banking clients.

In the mutual fund industry, managers enriched their own coffers by aiding and abetting short-term speculators in fund shares to engage in widespread market-timing and time-zone trading, at the dollar-for-dollar expense of their long-term owners. In insurance brokerage, bid-rigging and contingent commissions -- "preferred service agreements" -- were used to force insurance companies to pay rebates to brokers as a quid pro quo for winning the business.

These pervasive examples of conflicts of interest in the financial services field are violations of the public trust. Trustees who accept the responsibility for other people's money have a fiduciary duty to place the client's interest ahead of their own, and those who handle money for others no less so. "Put the client first," an obvious rule for any business, takes on a whole new imperative in the profession of handling other people's money. Why? Because the value provided to clients in the financial field is measured largely in dollars and cents.

Unlike consumer products such as food, television sets, automobiles and perfume, for example, whose value is measured as much by satisfaction and style as by intrinsic worth, the value of a financial service -- the performance of a brokerage account, the investment return on a mutual fund, the amount covered by a homeowner's policy, the face amount of a life insurance policy -- can be precisely measured in dollars and cents. And the cost of providing that service -- the advisory fees and operating expenses, the policy premiums, the sales commissions -- can be precisely measured in dollars and cents as well.

The fact that product cost directly impacts product value lies at the very heart of how well financial service firms serve their clients. Costs matter. So providing real, honest-to-God, dollars-and-cents value to our clients requires offering our financial services at fair, reasonable, and competitively determined prices. If our clients are to make the best possible choices within their budgets as they seek to protect their assets and property, fully disclosed pricing is essential.

As a result of that unique relationship between cost and value, the vast multitude of American families who have placed their trust in their financial service providers must be applauding Mr. Spitzer and his staff. But since fair and open competition in our system of free-market capitalism puts pressure on prices and profits alike, many, if not most, providers of those services are excoriating these determined regulators.

Much of their criticism has been based on the attorney general's reliance on New York statutes adopted long ago, for rather different purposes. For brokers and fund managers, it was the Martin Act of 1924, a "Blue Sky" law originally designed to prosecute the "bucket shops" that were rife in the early part of the century. For insurance brokers, it was the Donnelly Act of 1893, a "Baby Sherman" antitrust act designed to block collusion and price-fixing.

Even if it has not been used for 100 years, however, a law is a law. Consider our United States Constitution, ratified 217 years ago and still standing today as a monument to our commitment to "protect the general welfare." Mr. Spitzer's aggressive pursuit of the public interest seems entirely appropriate under state law, and wholly consistent with that national commitment as well.

The description of the attorney general as "politically ambitious" may well be accurate. But doubtless most capable state attorneys general are "governor-ambitious," even as most capable journalists are "Pulitzer-ambitious," and scientists "Nobel-laureate-ambitious." Bless them! And when we describe our businessmen and entrepreneurs as ambitious to build firms and create economic value, it's usually meant as a compliment. Mr. Spitzer is entitled to the same treatment.

While the "Spitzer effect" focuses directly on the scandals of the era, it also points to our need to attend to the forces that have driven them. Vast changes have taken place in the structure of the financial services field. Once dominated by a series of free-standing and largely privately held professional firms, it is now dominated by giant business conglomerates whose interests span a variety of wide-ranging services which themselves often entail conflicts -- commercial and investment banking; stock brokerage and mutual funds; insurance and consulting, a list that only scratches the surface.

Of course, the officers and directors of these financial titans have a fiduciary duty to serve the shareholders of their own firms. But they also have a directly conflicting duty to serve another master: the shareholders of the mutual funds they control; the holders of their insurance policies; the customers of their brokerages.

Mr. Spitzer has revealed how badly that balance has been distorted. When the chief executive of one of the nation's largest banks announces his goal of doubling the 7% share of the bank's revenues provided by the asset management group by "cross selling," he sets into motion a chain of events whose outcome is almost foreordained. Managers roll up their sleeves and try to make it happen. Witness this series of e-mails at one firm: "Market timing . . . is very disruptive to the portfolio managers and operations of the fund. (However) your call from the sales side . . . I don't want to turn away $10-$20 million . . . it's in our best interests (increased profitability to the firm)."

In taking constructive action to restore that balance, Mr. Spitzer and his counterparts in other states have been joined by state securities regulators and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of the "bad apples" that have betrayed the public trust have been indicted, fined and penalized. But that's not enough. It's the responsibility of the "good apples" that remain to put their own character on the line, beginning with the recognition that the financial services barrel that holds all those apples -- good and bad alike -- is badly in need of repair.

It's high time that our financial leaders acknowledge the mistakes and faults of the recent era and establish "best practices" that preserve, protect, and defend the interests of their customers and clients. But not only to serve them. To serve themselves. Without maintaining its character -- operating with integrity, responsible conduct, and service to others before service to self -- no financial service firm can achieve long-term success.

It will not be easy. As Demosthenes warned us two-and-a-half millennia ago, "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." Admitting mistakes requires character; so does introspection; so does changing the status quo; so does courage. But if our financial service leaders who do have character -- and there are many of them -- accept responsibility for what has happened, we can begin to take the necessary steps to restore the nobility of fiduciary duty to its pre-eminent place on our priority list.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of Vanguard's present management.

Speaking solely from my years of experience as a ( salaried, i.e. non-commissioned and therefore NOT a salesman [ in the parlance of the industry, I spent my life entirely on the "buy-side" ] ) professional investment researcher and investment manager, I was sorry to see Elliot Spitzer's fall.

He did A LOT of good as New York's Attorney General by effectively putting an end to many really abusive practices long practiced by the investment bankers, the stockbrokers and far too many mutual funds. It was high time and long, long overdue.

The "high tech" IPO bubble and boondoggle that went on from 1996-1999 was partially enabled by horrific conflicts of interest between underwriters, issuers and corrupt securities analysts. The minority of "honest" people employed in the field were well aware of what was going on as thousands of irresponsible "research" reports were written by "analysts" who were cowed by threats from the investment bankers.

In another case, large mutual fund complexes were routinely allowing fund managers to make after-market-close-purchases by favored clients ( thereby baldly violating their fiduciary obligation to the rest of the mutual fund investors ).

Over the course of my career, I was aware of far too many shady practices that were tolerated with knowing winks. I can't tell you how absolutely thrilling and satisfying it was to see somebody FINALLY expose the thieves for the frauds that they were.

I was brought up to hold a deep suspicion of and an abiding hatred of Wall Street. The vast majority of people employed in that arena cannot be trusted because it is nothing more than a gigantic marketing machine.

This post on Elliot Spitzer and my comments are solely related to this aspect of his career.

 

[trysail]

Exxon Turns to Kosmos to Boost Oil Reserves in Africa
By Joe Carroll and Edward Klump

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Exxon Mobil Corp.’s agreement to buy the Ghana oil assets of Kosmos Energy LLC marks an effort by the world’s most valuable company to acquire what it couldn’t find after drilling dry holes in West Africa.

Closely held Kosmos, backed by Blackstone Group LP and Warburg Pincus LLC, said yesterday it agreed to sell its Ghana properties to Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil. The deal, which a person familiar with the sale estimated to be worth at least $4 billion, may still be blocked by Ghana’s government.

“Exxon Mobil is looking to expand there because West Africa is the place to be right now if you’re an international oil company,” said David Foley, who oversees $2.2 billion in assets, including Exxon Mobil shares, at Estabrook Capital Management in New York. “It’s one of the few places in the world where a company like Exxon can put the tons of cash it has laying around to good use.”

Ghana National Petroleum Corp. is still seeking to acquire a stake Kosmos holds in the offshore Jubilee oilfield, Thomas Manu, director of exploration and production at the state-owned oil company, said in a telephone interview today. Ghana National would then consider proposals from other foreign oil companies to enter a partnership, he said.

China National Offshore Oil Corp. is in talks with Ghana National on making a bid for Kosmos’s stake in Jubilee, the Wall Street Journal said yesterday, citing unnamed people.

Xiao Zongwei, a Beijing-based spokesman for Cnooc Ltd., the listed arm of state-controlled China National Offshore Oil, declined to comment on the report.

‘Completely Reasonable’
“It’s completely reasonable that Cnooc could make a counter offer to match any bid from Exxon for the stake in the Jubilee field,” said Gordon Kwan, head of regional energy research in Hong Kong at Mirae Asset Securities. “It has $10 billion in cash on its books and virtually no debt.”

The agreement with Exxon Mobil is binding, Kosmos Chief Financial Officer Greg Dunlevy said in an e-mail yesterday. When asked about the Ghana purchase, Exxon Mobil spokesman Patrick McGinn said he wasn’t immediately able to comment.

The purchase would give Exxon Mobil a 23.49 percent stake in Jubilee, as well as nearby prospects in Ghana’s Gulf of Guinea waters. After discoveries in the late 1990s and early 2000s made Africa the top source of crude for Exxon Mobil, the company’s exploration efforts stumbled the past two years. More than half of African exploration wells in 2007 and 2008 failed to find commercial quantities of oil, a company filing showed.

Output Target
The Jubilee stake will add about 28,000 barrels of daily oil production, the equivalent of 1.2 percent of Exxon Mobil’s worldwide crude output in the second quarter. The company may not meet its 2 percent target for production growth this year, Senior Vice President Mark Albers told analysts at a conference last month. Jubilee is scheduled to enter service in late 2010.

Exxon Mobil Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson is spending $79 million a day to search for reserves and build oil platforms after production fell in 2008 to the lowest since the 1999 acquisition of Mobil Corp.

The company is buying fields and prospective discoveries identified by a team of Kosmos explorers that includes Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxted and Senior Vice President Paul Dailly, both former geologists at London-based BP Plc.

Maxted made a series of discoveries off Equatorial Guinea for Triton Energy Ltd. in the 1990s that culminated in the $3.2 billion acquisition of Triton by Hess Corp., then known as Amerada Hess Corp., in 2001.

Exxon in Africa
Exxon Mobil already operates oil fields in other nations that rim the Gulf of Guinea, including Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, as well as onshore wells in Chad. The deal with Dallas- based Kosmos would mark the company’s entry to Ghana, which will become Africa’s newest oil exporter with Jubilee’s start-up.

Other companies with stakes in Jubilee include London-based Tullow Oil Plc, which is also the operator; Anadarko Petroleum Corp., based near Houston; Sabre Oil & Gas; EO Group; and Ghana National.

Buying a major asset rather than finding its new reserves is “very much out of sync” with how Exxon Mobil has grown in the past, said Doug Ober, who helps manage more than $600 million in energy investments as chief executive officer at Petroleum & Resources Corp. in Baltimore. “We think it could portend a new era in the life of Exxon,” he said.

Chinese Investments
During the past three years, Chinese oil companies have announced $16 billion in investments to gain access to Africa’s untapped reserves. China is the world’s largest petroleum consumer after the U.S. Other major producers of African oil include Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Chevron Corp. and Total SA.

“China is an aggressive bidder,” said Ober, whose biggest holding is Exxon Mobil shares. “Depending on how much Exxon wants this property, you can see them pushing Exxon to raise their bid for these properties.”

Kwan at Hong Kong’s Mirae Asset Securities said Cnooc may be ready to bid more than $4 billion for the Jubilee stake.

“The oil in the Jubilee field is light, clean oil that China needs, compared with the heavier dirtier crude it produces offshore in China in Bohai bay,” Kwan said.

Exxon Mobil rose 86 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $70.13 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has dropped 12 percent this year. Cnooc shares rose 2.15 percent to HK$11.40 at 10:59 a.m. in Hong Kong. The stock has risen 57 percent this year.

Exxon Mobil drilled 11 net exploration wells in Africa in 2007 and 2008, six of which turned up dry, according to a company filing. Even so, Africa is one of the cheapest places in the world for the company to pump oil. With an average production cost of $6.66 per barrel, Exxon Mobil’s African crude is less than half the cost of the company’s Canadian output.

Africa is also home to 21 percent of Exxon Mobil’s worldwide crude reserves. The continent accounts for 27 percent of the company’s global crude production.

 

[trysail]

A Cherry-Picker’s Guide to Temperature Trends
(down, flat–even up)
by Chip Knappenberger
October 12, 2009

Accusations of cherry-picking—that is, carefully choosing data to support a particular point—are constantly being hurled around by all sides of the climate change debate. Most recently, accusations of cherry-picking have been levied at analyses describing the recent behavior of global average temperature. Primarily, because claims about what the temperature record says run the gamut from accelerating warming to rapid cooling and everything in between—depending on who you ask and what point they are trying to make.

I am often asked as to what is the “right” answer is. What I can say for certain, is that the recent behavior of global temperatures demonstrates that global warming is occurring at a much slower rate than that projected by the ensemble of climate models, and that global warming is most definitely not accelerating.

Choice of Cherries

But as to questions concerning just how far beneath climate model predictions the rate of warming is, or for just how long the average temperature of the world has not warmed at all, the answers depend on several things, among them the dataset you want to use and the time period over which you examine—i.e., which cherries you wish to pick.

Figure 1 illustrates the various cherry varieties that you have to choose from. It shows the global temperature history during the past 20 years as compiled in five different datasets (three representing surface temperatures, and two representing the temperatures in the lower atmosphere as measured by satellites—the latter being relatively immune form the data handling issues which plague the surface records).

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/cherry-pick_fig1.jpg
Figure 1. Global temperature anomalies from September 1989 through August 2009 as contained in five different data compilations. The GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), NCDC (National Climate Data Center), and CRU (Climate Research Unit) data are all compiled from surface records, while the RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) and UAH (University of Alabama-Huntsville) data are compiled from satellite observations of the lower atmosphere.



To give you some guidance as to which cherries to use to make which ever point you want, I have constructed a Cherry-Pickers Guide to Global Temperature Trends (Figure 2).
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/cherry-pick_fig2.jpg
Figure 2. Cherry-Pickers Guide to Global Temperature Trends. Each point on the chart represents the trend beginning in September of the year indicated along the x-axis and ending in August 2009. The trends which are statistically significant (p<0.05) are indicated by filled circles. The zero line (no trend) is indicated by the thin black horizontal line, and the climate model average projected trend is indicated by the thick red horizontal line.


It shows the current value (though August 2009) of trends of various lengths from all of the five commonly used global temperature compilations. I compute the trends as simple linear least-squares fits through the monthly global average temperature anomalies for each dataset (from Figure 1). Each point in Figure 2 (for each dataset) represents the trend value for a different length period, beginning in September in the year indicated along the horizontal axis and ending in August 2009.

Starting in September of particular year and ending in August of this year produces a trend with a length expressed in units of whole years. For example, a trend starting in September 1999 and ending in August 2009 include 120 months, or 10 complete years. The values for the 10-yr trend for each dataset are plotted on the chart directly above the value on the horizontal axis labeled 1999. If the trend value is statistically significant at the 1 in 20 level (p<0.05), I indicate that by filling in the appropriate marker on the chart.

I also include several other items of potential interest to the cherry harvesters; first is the dotted horizontal line representing a trend of zero—i.e., no change in global temperature, and second, the thick red horizontal lines which generally indicates the average trend projected to be occurring by the ensemble of climate models. Bear in mind that red line only represents the average model expectation, not the range of model variability. So it shouldn’t be used to rule out whether or not a particular observed value is consistent with model expectations, but does give you some guidance as to just how far from the average model expectation the current trend lies (a cherry picker is not usually worried about the finer details of the former, but, instead, the coarser picture presented by the latter).

General Conclusions

Here are a few general statements that can be supported with using my Cherry-Pickers Guide:

• For the past 8 years (96 months), no global warming is indicated by any of the five datasets.

• For the past 5 years (60 months), there is a statistically significant global cooling in all datasets.

• For the past 15 years, global warming has been occurring at a rate that is below the average climate model expected warming

And here are a few more specific examples that the seasoned cherry-picker could tease out:

• There has been no (statistically significant) warming for the past 13 years. [Using the satellite records of the lower atmosphere].

• The globe has been cooling rapidly for the past 8 years. [Using the CRU and satellite records]

Or on the other side of the coin:

• Global warming did not ‘stop’ 10 years ago, in fact, it was pretty close to model projections. [Using the GISS and NCDC records beginning in 1998 and 1999]

• Global warming is proceeding faster than expected. [Using the GISS record staring in 1991 or 1992—the cool years just after the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo]

I am sure the more creative of you can probably think of many others.

Judging the Cherry Pickers

Another use of my Cherry-Pickers Guide besides choosing your own analysis, is to check and see what level of cherry-picking was required to support some statement of the behavior of global temperatures that you saw somewhere.

For instance, in a recent post over at RealClimate.org, Stefan Rahmstorf used about 10-yr to 11-yr trend in the GISS dataset to support the idea that global warming was proceeding pretty much according to plan, concluding “the observed warming over the last decade is 100% consistent with the expected anthropogenic warming trend of 0.2 ºC per decade, superimposed with short-term natural variability.”

A quick check of my Guide would show how carefully Rahmsdorf’s selection was made. Trends a few years longer or a few years shorter that the period selected by Rahmstorf would not have borne out his conclusion with as much conviction.

Another example of careful data selection can be found in recent claims made by Richard Lindzen who is fond of stating that “there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years.” A quick check of my Cherry-Pickers Guide shows Lindzen to be particularly crafty because there is no support for such a statement in any of the five datasets. So how did he arrive at that conclusion? By using annual data values instead of monthly data. Using fewer data points (14 annual values instead of 168 monthly ones) doesn’t affect the actual trend value so much, but it does affect the statistical significance of the trend. The fewer data points you use, the less significant the trend is. So by using annual data (from the CRU or satellite datasets), Lindzen is able to cite a 14-yr temperature trend that is not statistically significant.

The statements by Rahmstorf and Lindzen are not wrong, per se, but neither are they particularly robust.

So next time you encounter some claims about what recent temperatures tell us about global warming, or want to make one yourself, check my Cherry-Pickers Guide to get a full appreciation for the degree of grounding that such statements enjoy. And for those folks who want to push the envelope a bit, you’ve got to hope that your audience doesn’t have access to my Guide—otherwise, someone, somewhere, is sure to call you on it!



http://masterresource.org/?p=5240

 

[trysail]

Calpers Launches Review of Placement Agents’ Fees
By Michael B. Marois

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest U.S. defined-benefit public pension fund, said it began a special review of fees investment managers paid to placement agents to win state business.

Calpers, which oversees $200 billion, said the assessment was prompted by disclosures from investment managers that they paid $50 million over five years to a placement firm run by former board member Alfred Villalobos. The fund said it informed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the California Attorney General of the review.

The scrutiny comes after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the SEC in April began investigating money managers and placement agents who used ties to public officials and kickbacks to buy and sell access to the $2 trillion in U.S. public pension systems. Pensions in New York and New Mexico banned the agents after the inquiry was announced.

“The placement agent industry has been the focus of state authorities and the Securities and Exchange Commission over the last year, and we believe it is prudent to conduct a full review of the matters related to these recent disclosures,” Anne Stausboll, the fund’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Private-equity funds run by Apollo Management LP, Ares Capital Corp. and Aurora Capital Group paid fees to Villalobos’s company, Arvco Financial Ventures, which he runs with his daughter Carissa, according to more than 200 pages of documents obtained through a public records request.

New Rules
Villalobos, a one-time Los Angeles deputy mayor, was a Calpers board member from 1992 to 1995. His firm’s letterhead says it is based in Zephyer Cove, Nevada, which is on Lake Tahoe.

“I welcome the internal review ordered by Calpers and will cooperate with Calpers,” Villalobos said as he read a statement to reporters during a conference call. “I’m confident that the review will report that the staff, advisers and board members of Calpers have acted properly and followed the stated objectives of the fund as well as their standard operating procedures for making decisions on investments.”

Calpers approved new rules in May requiring investment firms to disclose when they hire placement agents, how much those agents are paid and the services they perform. Firm managers are required to repay any fees from the state, or an amount equal to what they gave the placement agents, if they fail to reveal the relationships. Their firms would be banned from doing business with that pension for two years.

Due Diligence
The policy says middlemen should be registered with the SEC. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the second-largest public fund in the U.S., already has similar policies.

The new information about Villalobos was a result of those new rules, said Calpers spokesman Brad Pacheco.

“For the record, Arvco does not make recommendations to Calpers or any other investors,” Villalobos said. “We introduce and present investment opportunities to them. The staff, consultants and advisers are the ones who make the recommendations on investment opportunities after completing their due-diligence process.”

Villalobos declined to answer when asked if he has been subpoenaed by the SEC.

Cuomo
In March, Cuomo obtained an indictment against Hank Morris, one-time adviser to former New York state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and David Loglisci, the state’s former deputy comptroller, on charges related to an alleged kickback plan.

Saul Meyer, founder of Dallas-based pension consultant Aldus Equity, also pleaded guilty to fraud charges and admitted he paid $300,000 to secure money from the New York pension fund. Cuomo said has won four guilty pleas related to pension fund corruption probe. At least seven companies have settled civil charges related to the probe, he said.

In July, the SEC proposed barring managers of hedge funds and private-equity firms from paying placement agents who solicit state and local pension funds. The agency is collecting comments on the measure.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Oct. 11 signed into law a bill requiring more disclosure by placement agents seeking state and local government pension fund business and lengthening so-called revolving door prohibitions.

That law followed the resignation of two members of the Los Angeles Department of Fire and Police Pensions’ oversight commission, Sean Harrigan and Elliott Broidy, after the SEC questioned them about ties to firms under scrutiny in New York. Neither has been accused of a crime; both denied wrongdoing. Harrigan was a member of the Calpers board until 2004.

The new Calpers review was reported in the Wall Street Journal.

 

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This is the guy who— more than any— contributed to the coarsening of the U.S. and the cutthroat culture of Wall Street. How someone in this business could simultaneously embrace Ralph Nader and Democratic Party liberalism is beyond my comprehension. You did not want to get between Bruce Wasserstein and a dollar anymore than you'd want to get between a mother grizzly bear and her cub. Neither he nor his type were ever in any danger of becoming my favorite kind of people.




Bruce Wasserstein, Innovator in Takeovers, Dies at 61
By Laurence Arnold and Joshua Fineman

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Bruce Wasserstein, whose more than 30 years of dealmaking earned him wealth, the envy of his peers and ultimately the top job at Lazard Ltd., has died. He was 61.

Wasserstein was hospitalized on Oct. 11 with an irregular heartbeat. Lazard said in a statement that the exact cause of death hasn’t yet been determined. Steven J. Golub, vice chairman of the firm, was named interim chief executive officer, effective immediately, the statement said.

A onetime corporate lawyer, Wasserstein rose to the top of the ranks of merger advisers during the 1980s and won a well- publicized battle with Michel David-Weill to take Lazard Freres & Co. public. He became chairman and chief executive officer in May 2005.

“He made more from investment banking than any man on the planet,” said William Cohan, author of the 2007 book “The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.”

Wasserstein used his wealth to become a media owner, buying New York magazine for $55 million in 2003. He paid $63 million for American Lawyer and $200 million for National Law Publishing Co. in 1997 and sold those publications to Incisive Media of the U.K. for $630 million.

Wasserstein worked on some of the biggest deals in the last 30 years. Most recently, he was personally leading the team advising Kraft Foods Inc. CEO Irene Rosenfeld on her $16 billion takeover for British chocolate maker Cadbury PLC.

He helped guide transactions including Philip Morris Cos.’ $13 billion purchase of Kraft Inc. in 1988, KKR& Co.’s $31.4 billion offer for RJR Nabisco Inc. in 1989 and the $15.7 billion merger of Time Inc. and Warner Bros. in 1990.

“Bruce brought with him this combination of very, very complete technical knowledge of the law, and at the same time he was very imaginative in the kinds of deals and takeovers that he advised clients on,” Felix Rohatyn, a former managing director of Lazard, told Bloomberg Televison today. “It’s a big loss.”

In the RJR Nabisco deal, Henry Kravis made sure he had Wasserstein on his side “so that he couldn’t represent somebody else,” Cohan said.

‘Psychological Bullying’

Wasserstein brought to a deal a “brand of psychological bullying” that could influence his own clients to stay in the bidding and not give up, Forbes said in a 1989 profile. That trait prompted his critics to call him “Bid-’Em-Up Bruce.”

His ability to devise new tactics, such as “locking up” rights to the most coveted piece of a takeover target, earned him the reputation as “someone who more often than not will pull a rabbit out of the hat,” Robert Slater wrote in his 1999 book, “The Titans of Takeover.”

“I like strategy,” Wasserstein told the New York Times in December 2003. “That happens to be my particular strength and what I do for a living, but it’s also what I enjoy doing.”

In a January 2008 Portfolio magazine profile, Wasserstein dismissed the notion that his skills were more appropriate for boardroom fights in the 1980s. “That’s wishful thinking by my competitors. All that signifies is that people don’t understand what is going on,” he said. “That’s more sour-grapy.”

Joins First Boston
The New York native learned mergers and acquisitions at First Boston Corp., now part of Credit Suisse AG, and left with Joseph Perella in 1988 to found Wasserstein, Perella & Co.

Germany’s Dresdner Bank AG bought Wasserstein, Perella for $1.56 billion in 2001, moving Wasserstein into the ranks of the wealthiest people in the U.S. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be $2.3 billion in September 2009, tied for 190th on its annual list of 400 richest Americans.

Bruce Jay Wasserstein was born on Dec. 25, 1947, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. His mother thought his birth date gave him “Messiah potential,” Wendy Wasserstein told New York magazine in 2002, a year before her brother bought it. She also said that her brother as a child claimed his own “new world,” which he called “Bruceania.”

His father, Morris, was an immigrant from Poland who had started a ribbon company with his brothers.

Harvard Law School
After the death of his oldest brother, Morris married his widowed sister-in-law, Lola, and became father to their two children, according to Cohan’s book. Together, Morris and Lola had three more children -- Georgette, Bruce and Wendy, the playwright whose works included “The Heidi Chronicles,” which won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She died in 2006, at 55, from complications of lymphoma.

The family moved to Manhattan while Bruce Wasserstein was in high school, and he graduated from the McBurney School. He entered the University of Michigan at 16, majoring in political science and ascending to executive editor of the student newspaper. He weighed becoming a journalist.

At Harvard University Law School, he entered a dual-degree program in law and business and graduated in 1971 with a law degree, cum laude, and a master’s in business administration, with high distinction.

Nader Summer Job
Through a summer job at Ralph Nader’s consumer-advocacy organization Public Citizen, Wasserstein met Mark Green, later to become New York City’s public advocate. They co-edited “With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates” and co-wrote “The Closed Enterprise System,” which argued that lax antitrust enforcement led to monopolies and inflated prices.

Wasserstein “apparently learned some unexpected lessons from the project,” says a history featured on Nader’s Web site, since “he would go on to become a major figure on Wall Street as a corporate merger and acquisitions specialist.”

A 1972 research project on British mergers, which he undertook while studying at Cambridge University, stoked Wasserstein’s interest in business. Back in the U.S. he joined the New York-based law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, then moved in 1977 to First Boston to join the mergers and acquisitions group led by Perella. In 1979 he became Perella’s partner at the helm of M&A.

First Boston earned $75 million in fees from mergers and acquisitions in 1981, triple those of a year before and then considered a Wall Street record, according to Slater.

‘Wasserella’
Wasserstein and Perella left First Boston in 1988 to form the firm that became known as “Wasserella.” Perella left in 1993. He and other partners had grown frustrated that Wasserstein was running the company as a one-man show, people who worked for them told Bloomberg News in 2004.

Dresdner Bank’s $1.56 billion purchase of the firm was a windfall for Wasserstein, who owned more than half of it. He continued to run the renamed firm, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, until its parent, Allianz AG, abandoned plans to spin it off in a public offering.

In 2001, David-Weill, chairman of Lazard Freres, named Wasserstein to run the firm founded by his ancestors in 1848 in New Orleans. Wasserstein persuaded David-Weill to take Lazard public, and the initial offering in May 2005 raised $854.6 million.

“He took power very well,” David-Weill said in a Vanity Fair interview published in April 2005. “He was afraid of sharing power and tried his very best -- and succeeded -- in expelling me. That is his nature. He is a man of solitary power.”

In 2007, Wasserstein donated $25 million to Harvard Law School for construction of a new academic center. It was the second-largest gift in the history of the law school. Wasserstein also was a major donor to the Democratic Party.

His first three marriages ended in divorce. He had three children with his second wife, Chris, and two with his third wife, Claude. His fourth marriage, to Angela Chao, took place early in 2009.


Full article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZHleKb8HeVk

 

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It’s been more than 20 years since James Hansen first warned America of impending doom. On a hot summer day in June 1988, Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced before a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.”

The greenhouse effect would have looked obvious enough to anyone watching on television. The senators conducting the hearing, including Al Gore, had turned the committee room into an oven. That day it was a balmy 98 degrees, and as former Colorado Sen. Timothy Wirth later revealed, the committee members “went in the night before and opened all the windows. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and [high ratings], but it was really hot.”

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Hansen20Year.jpg

Holocaust Accusations
Hansen has been a star ever since. On the twentieth anniversary of his testimony to Congress, and still serving in the same role at NASA, Hansen was invited back for an encore performance where he warned that time was running out. He also conducted a media tour that included calling for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”

If you hear the echo of Nuremberg in those trials, it’s because Hansen doesn’t shy away from Holocaust metaphors to make his point. In 2007, Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but “as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species.” Hansen told the board, “if we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains - no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”

More recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as “factories of death.” This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England.

The Greenpeace activists had offered climate change as a “lawful excuse” for their actions, and with Hansen’s helpful testimony they were acquitted of all charges. Less than six months later, Hansen - a federal employee - would call for “the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in U.S. history” as part of a protest at the Capitol power plant in Washington.

Prolific Alarmism
Hansen, by his own count, has conducted more than 1,400 interviews in recent years. Yet Hansen also would insist, in a speech just days before the 2004 presidential election, that the Bush administration had “muzzled” him because of his global warming activism.

When asked about this contradiction in 2007, Hansen told Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), “for the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn’t be required to parrot some company line.”

But Hansen has never parroted the company line. As the head of NASA’s Weather and Climate Research Program from 1982 to 1994, John Theon was James Hansen’s supervisor. Theon says Hansen’s testimony in 1988 was “a huge embarrassment” to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen’s predictions. “I don’t have much faith in the models,” Theon says, pointing to the “huge uncertainty in the role clouds play.”

Theon describes Hansen as a “nice, likeable fellow,” but worries, “he’s been overcome by his belief - almost religious - that he’s going to save the world.”
Indeed, Roy Spencer, who served as the senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Center, puts Hansen “at the extreme end of global warming alarmism.” Spencer doesn’t know of anyone “who thinks it’s a bigger problem than [Hansen] does.”

Skeptic Muzzled
Spencer, a meteorologist by training and a skeptic of man-made global warming, was genuinely muzzled during the Clinton administration. “I would get the message down through the NASA chain [of command] of what I could and couldn’t say in testimony,” he says. Spencer left NASA with little fuss for a job at the University of Alabama in 2001, but he still seems in awe of Hansen’s ability to do as he pleases. “For many years Hansen got away with going around NASA rules, and they looked the other way because it helped sell Mission to Planet Earth,” the NASA research program studying human effects on climate. Spencer figures that “at some point, someone in the Bush administration said ‘why don’t you start enforcing your rules?’”

Theon says the same kind of models that now predict runaway warming were predicting runaway cooling prior to 1975, when the popular fear was not melting ice caps but a new ice age, and “not one model predicted the cooling we’ve had since 1998.” Spencer insists “it’s all make believe - if you took one look at the assumptions that go into this, you’d laugh.” But none of that seems to matter too much.

Temperatures globally were nearly 1F colder at the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s 1988 testimony.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=auYQC1wtFO5Q

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php

Twenty-Year Wait for Earthquake Fixes Keeps San Francisco Wary
By Jeran Wittenstein and Ryan Flinn

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Jason Henderson keeps a hatchet and crowbar stashed in a closet of his sixth-floor apartment in San Francisco, so he can pry his way out if an earthquake topples the building.

“It will definitely slump, or cave in on the ground floor,” said Henderson, 37, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University. “If it’s an 8, we’re all doomed.”

Two decades after the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people and caused $7.8 billion in damage, San Francisco still has thousands of buildings that aren’t properly fortified, according to a draft of the city’s Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety released earlier this year.

Infrastructure also is vulnerable: It will take about four more years to complete the $5.49 billion replacement of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the reinforcement of miles of aerial track carrying hundreds of thousands of Bay Area Rapid Transit District train commuters.

“If the earthquake happened today, we would have problems,” said Tom Brocher, 55, chief scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake hazards team. “We still need to do a lot of work for mitigating earthquakes, making our homes and businesses stronger.”

The approaching Loma Prieta anniversary and natural disasters around the world are triggering concern about another earthquake in the San Francisco area, said Laura Adleman, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Emergency Management.

Web Site Traffic
Traffic on San Francisco’s earthquake-preparedness Web site, www.72hours.org, rose to 11,200 visits in the week ended Oct. 6, a 45 percent increase from the previous week, she said.

A tsunami hit South Pacific’s Samoan region Sept. 29, and the next day a 7.6-magitude temblor off Indonesia’s Sumatra island leveled homes, mosques and hotels in the coastal city of Padang. It killed 1,100 people, Indonesia’s disaster management agency estimated. Eight days later, a 6.8 earthquake occurred off the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. Seismologists say that activity doesn’t signal an increased risk in California.

“We really don’t think what’s going on over there will be able to trigger anything on this side of the world,” said John Parrish, a state geologist in Sacramento. Most earthquakes occur along the boundaries of tectonic plates, when tension along the fault lines causes a sudden shift, he said.

Some people living in the city that has been hit by six earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or more since 1812 aren’t reassured.

“Seeing any natural disaster on the news makes me nervous,” said Eileen O’Malley, 35, a resident of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood.

Ready for Disaster
She keeps an earthquake preparedness kit in her apartment like the ones sold by Chris McCloy, owner of Disaster Survival Solutions LLC in South San Francisco. Traffic on its Web site has more than doubled this month, he said.

“As soon as an event like that happens, we get a flood of visitors,” McCloy said. “Let’s face it, that event 20 years ago was unbelievably traumatic for many bay area residents, and I think people want to get prepared.”

Loma Prieta struck Oct. 17, 1989, minutes before the scheduled start of the third game of baseball’s World Series at Candlestick Park in San Francisco between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics. Its epicenter was near Loma Prieta mountain, about 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of San Francisco.

Damage Estimate
The quake caused about $6 billion of property damage and about $1.8 billion in damage to the area’s transportation system, according to the geological survey’s Earthquake Center Web site.

“By the time those shock waves arrived in the bay area, they had attenuated somewhat,” said Molly McArthur, division manager for BART capital projects. “If that same shock wave occurred in our own backyard, there could be a tragically different result.”

The transit agency began work in 2005 on an earthquake safety program scheduled to finish in 2013 that is reinforcing 22 miles of aerial tracks and 18 stations and making improvements to the Transbay Tube that carries trains under the bay, connecting San Francisco to Oakland, McArthur said. Some tube improvements are complete and seven construction projects are under way, she said. BART’s weekday ridership averaged 332,000 people in July, said Luna Salaver, a spokeswoman.

The San Francisco Bay area sits over the San Andreas and Hayward fault lines, according to the U.S. geological agency’s web site.

Hayward’s Danger
The Hayward, stretching south from San Pablo to Fremont, is the most dangerous fault in the region because it’s closer to densely populated areas and hasn’t had a major quake in more than 140 years, said Peggy Hellweg, a research geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory. It runs under Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and Richmond.

In San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, Henderson lives in what’s called a soft-story structure, meaning it has large openings on the first floor. Henderson’s has a parking garage, while others house shops or restaurants on ground level. Soft-story structures typically are wood-framed, have no partitioning walls and are more than 35 years old.

During a strong quake, the lower floor may not be able to support the stiff, heavier floors above, leading the building to shift sideways or collapse, according to the draft report. It says 4,400 soft-story buildings in the city would be at risk in a strong quake.

Retrofit Law
Mayor Gavin Newsom directed the city’s Building Inspection Department to craft a law requiring owners to retrofit soft- story properties. The measure is under consideration by the Board of Supervisors.

Fixes are necessary to prevent $1.5 billion in damage after a temblor of magnitude of 7.2 or more on the San Andreas fault, according to the city report. Such destruction could leave tens of thousands of people homeless for years, it said.

“While the 20th anniversary of Loma Prieta serves as a stark reminder of our region’s vulnerability to earthquakes, it also provides an opportunity to encourage our residents to make emergency preparedness a part of their everyday lives,” Newsom wrote in an e-mail.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium also faces earthquake-proofing. The Hayward fault runs directly under the 86-year-old football stadium, which holds 72,000 spectators. A $300 million renovation is proposed for completion in 2012.

“The odds of being in Memorial Stadium on one of the five home games when an earthquake hits is slim,” said Greg Glass, a 46-year-old Burbank resident, at a game this month. “If I had to live in Memorial Stadium, I’d be very concerned.”

 

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I lived a block and a half downhill from the Hayward fault when I was going to Grad school. It's easy to spot. Just look for the jog in the curb along Ridge Road in Berkeley.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601079&sid=awWIGFZZzYlo

Schoolgirl Sets Sail in Attempt to Break Round-the-World Record
By Nichola Saminather and Shani Raja

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- An Australian schoolgirl has begun her quest to become the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world.

Jessica Watson, 16, who set sail from Sydney today, expects to spend about 240 days at sea on a 23,000-nautical mile (42,596-kilometer) journey that will take her past Fiji, up to the equator, then on to Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope before she heads back to Australia.

“It’s a bit scary and possibly a dangerous thing,” said Watson, who began sailing at the age of eight. “But I’m not here without confidence.” The trip has sparked a debate about the wisdom of her undertaking such a dangerous voyage.

Her record attempt, backed by more than 30 sponsors and suppliers including skincare brand Ella Bache and Panasonic, has prompted warnings that she is too young and inexperienced to take on such a challenge. Watson’s collision last month with a 63,000-ton Chinese bulk carrier as she sailed to Sydney from the northeastern state of Queensland where she lives handed ammunition to those urging her to reconsider the trip.

Taking on the winds and waves of the Southern Ocean is like scaling Mount Everest “on your first climbing adventure,” Andrew Cape, who has sailed around Cape Horn seven times, wrote to Watson, the Australian newspaper reported. “I do not want to shatter your dreams but to undertake such a voyage requires more experience than you currently have.”

Age No Barrier
Jon Sanders, who single-handedly sailed three times around the globe non-stop in the 1980s, spending more than 650 days at sea, said age shouldn’t be viewed as a barrier.

“I have found that if something goes wrong then it is usually a teenager who is first to go up the mast,” the 70- year-old yachtsman said in a telephone interview from the western Australian city of Perth, which lies on the Indian Ocean. “I have no worry about a 16-year-old taking that voyage.”

Watson’s yacht -- a 34-foot (10-meter) Sparkman and Stephens design -- also stands in her favor, Sanders said.

“If you close that boat up in heavy water, it is like a cork in a bottle,” Sanders said. “It is hard to sink. The boat will look after itself.”

Dream of Adventure
Watson says she has dreamed of a sailing adventure since her mother read her the book “Lionheart” by fellow Australian Jesse Martin, who set the solo, non-stop and unassisted sailing record she is trying to beat at the age of 18 in 1999.

“I just kept putting myself in that position,” said Watson, who has chalked up more than 5,000 nautical offshore miles. “I kept asking myself the question ‘What would you be like in that situation?’ And I guess I just wanted to give it a go.”

The teenager, who lists her interests as reading, cooking and chocolate, says on her Web site she hopes to “inspire young sailors, adventurers and everyone with a dream in their heart.”

So far, headlines on the trip have been dominated by last month’s collision, which damaged the hull of her pink and white yacht, and broke the mast and rigging.

Maritime Safety Queensland found she had no fatigue management plan in place and an anti-collision warning device on her boat hadn’t been switched on, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported at the time.

‘Scary and Dangerous’
“It was a scary and dangerous incident,” Watson wrote on her blog on Sept. 11. “The sound of Ella’s Pink Lady being scraped along the hull of a 63,000 ton ship isn’t something that I’m likely to ever forget,” she wrote. “Has it put me off? Well no, I’m as determined as ever.”

Facing the media in Sydney two weeks ago, Watson said she’s had a “really big alarm” installed on her yacht and has discussed what went wrong with her team.

“We’ve talked about sleeping, we’ve talked about the alarm system, we’ve talked about why it happened, why the equipment didn’t warn me of the boat,” she told reporters Oct. 7.

The deaths of veteran sailor Andrew Short, 48, and his navigator Sally Gordon, 47, during a 170-kilometer race off the coast of New South Wales state on Oct. 10 highlighted the dangers of sailing. The 80-foot yacht ran into rocks in the early hours of the morning and 16 crew members were winched to safety.

Extreme Conditions
Long solo voyages and short races are both susceptible to the two most common causes of accidents while at sea: equipment failure and extreme conditions, said Phil Jones, chief executive officer of Sydney-based governing body Yachting Australia.

Watson’s bid “raises the broader issue of whether records such as the youngest should be recognized at all,” Jones said. “If you have a record for the youngest, inevitably younger and younger people are going to do this.”

Unlike Dutch authorities, who ruled 13-year-old Laura Dekker couldn’t embark on a solo round-the-world sailing voyage, officials in Australia say the issue is for Watson and her family to decide.

“Governments cannot legislate to stop everything, governments cannot legislate for common sense,” Queensland Deputy Premier Paul Lucas told reporters last month. “All I say is, this is a very serious matter and I appeal to Jessica and her parents as to whether she is in fact ready to do this.”

 

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Atomic Power Revival for GE, Areva Leaves Waste Puzzle Unsolved
By Jeremy van Loon

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- When 65 scientists met at Princeton University in 1955 to decide where to permanently store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, their conclusion was simple: Bury it deep underground, far from earthquakes.

Since then, reactors worldwide have produced 270,000 tons of spent fuel, storing most of it in canisters above ground. U.S. regulators, reviewing 18 applications to build new atomic plants, said last month they may approve such temporary storage for as long as 40 years, double the current allowable time.

Governments across the globe are endorsing similar plans to temporarily warehouse their carcinogenic waste, helping clear the way for a revival in nuclear-plant construction that has given about $115 billion in contracts to General Electric Co., Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse unit and Paris-based Areva SA.

“New plants will continue to be built with no concern for where to put the spent fuel,” said Georgui Kastchiev, senior scientist for nuclear safety at the University of Vienna’s Institute of Risk Research. “A solution to the problem is constantly being moved to some point further in the future.”

The new reactors will pile up radioactive waste, which already grows by 12,000 tons a year, the International Energy Agency in Paris estimated. That has prompted scientists to call again for the world to start building permanent dump sites, a request made periodically ever since the first commercial atomic plant began generating power in Sellafield, England, in 1956.

“Storing waste underground is the only solution,” said Hans Forsstroem, a nuclear physicist who directs the International Atomic Energy Agency’s fuel-cycle unit in Vienna. “You need to take care of your radioactive waste, and do so in such a way as to not put a burden on future generations.”

Cask-Makers
Makers of casks that hold atomic waste from the world’s 436 operating reactors say they weren’t designed to be hermetic cemeteries for the million years the substance may be harmful.

GNS of Essen, Germany, supplied more than 1,000 canisters to Germany, Lithuania, Switzerland and the U.S. that will hold radioactive waste for 40 years, said spokesman Michael Kubl. Each canister cost at least 1.5 million euros ($2.2 million).

Enresa, Spain’s atomic-waste manager, uses metal and concrete containers made by Holtec International of New Jersey and Madrid-based Ensa built to last about 100 years, an Enresa spokesman said. GNS and Enresa said the canisters may last longer than their ratings.

Temporary casks are used because engineers are still puzzled over how to avoid shifts in the earth that may crack open an underground dump thought to be secure, scientists say.

“You can’t predict for a million years,” Frank von Hippel, a researcher on nuclear power at Princeton University in New Jersey, said in an interview.

Building Revival
Nuclear power, which already produces 14 percent of the world’s electricity, is undergoing a revival after a drop-off in development. Fifty plants are being built worldwide, almost double the number under construction in 2004, the World Nuclear Association in London said.

Demonized for decades by environmental groups as the most dangerous energy form, splitting atoms to produce electricity has gained favor among governments partly because it releases far fewer greenhouse gases than burning coal or natural gas.

China is erecting 16 reactors with 90 more proposed, data from the nuclear association shows. In the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it has 18 applications. The two nations emit 40 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, the main gas that nations are trying to limit in global climate talks.

To reduce greenhouse-gas output from conventional power plants, Japan may need more nuclear power, a trade ministry official said on Sept. 24. Five days later, India´s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at a conference his nation may seek a 100-fold increase in atomic capacity in 40 years.

Chinese Dump
China, which lists its reactors under construction at 24, plans no permanent atomic-waste dump before 2040, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The atomic industry says new projects shouldn’t be held up until permanent waste storage is first built.

The “small” amount of waste generated by reactors should not stand in the way of building more, Vaughn Gilbert, a spokesman for Monroeville, Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse, said in an interview.

Spent fuel is an “opportunity” because it contains un- used energy, said Lisa Price, vice president for the fuel business of Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE.

Reprocessing waste into new fuel is done in a few nations such as France. It’s one solution for the “final storage” of radioactive material, said a spokeswoman at Areva, the biggest reactor builder, who asked not to be named.

Deadly Within Hours
“You can store it above ground forever if you want to,” said Ian Hore-Lacy, a World Nuclear Association spokesman. “But the industry would like to see a disposal solution. Otherwise you have people saying waste is an unsolved issue.”

Spent fuel from a reactor contains 20 times the amount of radiation considered fatal for a human if exposed for one hour, according to U.S. atomic-energy regulators.

The material, which can be sought for bombs by terrorists, is generally guarded in casks on site at the power plants or in state-supervised storage facilities. The risks are corrosion and damage to drums, which may leak and contaminate soil or water, said Jan Beranek, who coordinates atomic energy-related projects at Greenpeace, the Amsterdam-based environmental group.

In Germany, atomic-energy policy has left the country with a nuclear clean-up instead of a functioning repository, prompting Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel to ridicule proponents of nuclear power for claiming it’s “clean” energy. “If it’s clean, then the waste is merely compost,” he said.

German Lesson
Germany has learned the hard way that trying to seal off waste forever can come back to haunt.

Half a kilometer (1,600 feet) beneath a wooded hill in central Germany, in a former salt mine once billed as leak- proof, a buckled steel beam shows how shifting geology can play havoc with burial plans. The buttress is part of a system to keep walls from collapsing after the earth began moving in the repository housing 126,000 barrels of low and medium-level irradiated material, such as clothing, from nuclear businesses.

At the site 19 miles south of Volkswagen AG’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, nuclear-safety researchers and mine workers race to stem a total collapse of the shifting mine. The uncertainty they face is reflected when greeting each other on trips to the pit. “Glueckauf!” they say, in the traditional miners’ salute meaning “if we’re lucky,” we’ll meet again above ground.

13 Stories Inverted
The dump is much like an inverted 13-story office tower. Its 131 chambers are submerged in stygian darkness and connected by 10 kilometers of roads. Without pumps from the surface, the air would be unhealthy to breathe. Everything used in the mine was dismantled, including dump trucks, sent down an elevator that accommodates six people, and reassembled.

Storing waste in the mine had to be stopped because scientists didn’t understand how water flows in and out of the space, putting the structure and nearby water resources at risk, Wolfram Koenig, president of the German nuclear safety regulator, said in an interview on a train to the site.

The U.S. dropped plans in February to develop a permanent dump at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain over safety and geological concerns. The investigation used $9 billion of the funds that utilities paid to cover atomic-waste storage since 1983. The U.S. Department of Energy now faces legal action from power companies that want their storage costs reimbursed.

The Yucca Mountain flop helped lead the nuclear regulator on Sept. 15 to propose doubling the period for on-site storage from the current 20 years, benefiting utilities that own plants such as Dominion Resources Inc. and Progress Energy Inc.

$2.6 Billion Annual Cost
“I feel comfortable with onsite storage for decades,” Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the commission, said in a July interview, two months before the policy shift.

The annual costs for permanent disposal may be about $2.6 billion a year, based on the IEA’s estimate of $0.001 per kilowatt-hour and global nuclear-energy output data from the World Nuclear Association.

“As a percentage of the energy costs, this is very little,” said the IAEA’s Forsstroem. “The question is, will the money be there when it’s needed?”

Most nations neither set aside money for burial nor pass the costs on to today’s electricity consumers. There are a few exceptions, such as Sweden, Finland and the U.S., which raise money for permanent dumps yet to be built.

Sweden, which alerted the world to radioactive particles from the 1986 Chernobyl atomic plant explosion, which in turn led to a drop-off in new plant construction, has set out to become the first to construct a long-term repository for its life-threatening garbage. It’s due in 12 years at the earliest. Finland said it has similar plans and also expects to complete a repository around the same time.

SKB AB, Sweden’s nuclear waste manager, in April chose a site in Forsmark, north of Stockholm, after three decades of vetting, and the work is “just beginning,” Claes Thegerstroem, Stockholm-based SKB’s chief executive, said in an interview.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aQZtg3hJdMYA

 

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Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Says Inequality Helps All
By Caroline Binham

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion hosted by St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally in New York declined to comment.

Banks in the U.K. and U.S. have been pressured by lawmakers to contain compensation amid bailouts of financial firms by national governments. Goldman Sachs repaid $10 billion plus dividends to the U.S. government this year, and resumed allocating billions of dollars for year-end bonuses after slashing compensation last year when the firm reported its first quarterly loss.

Griffiths, 67, called on bankers to boost their charitable giving to help polish the financial industry’s reputation following a worldwide crisis.

‘Much Is Expected’
“To whom much is given much is expected,” he said. “There is a sense that if you make money you are expected to give.”

Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner, speaking at the same event, repeated his call for a global tax on financial transactions, a so-called Tobin Tax. He said a tax could redistribute bank profits to the world’s poor and to causes like fighting climate change.

“The role of regulation is to bring a concordance between private actions and beneficial results,” Turner, 54, said yesterday. Central bankers, lawmakers and regulators bear the greatest blame for the seeds of the financial crisis, not traders or their senior executives, he said.

James Tobin proposed a tax in 1971 on currency trading to deter speculation in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegging currencies. Tobin, who died in 2002, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work on financial markets.

Turner told U.K. banks last month that they should place “social usefulness” above profits. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leader of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, have previously warned against banks returning to “business as usual” amid concerns that momentum for policy changes in the wake of the financial crisis will subside.

Turner and Griffiths spoke at London’s 300-year-old landmark church where Winston Churchill’s funeral was held. The event was organized by the St Paul’s Institute, a group that “seeks to recapture the cathedral’s ancient role as a center of education or public debate.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=adpR6SEZyBa4

 

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The Natural Law of Supply and Demand

Scientist Monkeys Around With The Economy
by Alex Blumberg
October 23, 2009

A primate ethologist asked what would happen when a low-ranking monkey is trained to do things high-ranking monkeys can't do? The answer in human economic terms: The new skills translated into a much bigger income.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

... Most groundbreaking experiments in economics are performed by economists, as you would expect. But a scientist called a primate ethologist has added to the sum total of economic knowledge, at least as it applies to monkeys and maybe to us. Alex Blumberg of our Planet Money team has the story.

ALEX BLUMBERG: You're on the low end of the social order. You toil and toil, yet make hardly any money for your efforts. Is there a way for you to improve your lot, bump up your earning potential, if you're monkey?

Dr. RONALD NOE (Primate Ethologist, University of Strasbourg): We were trying to answer questions about whether monkeys are able to behave in an economic way.

BLUMBERG: This is Dr. Ronald Noe, a primate ethologist at the University of Strasbourg. His question specifically was what would happen if you trained a low-ranking vervet monkey to do things that other vervet monkeys, even high-ranking monkeys, couldn't do.

Now, a vervet monkey society is pretty hierarchical: high-ranking monkeys get groomed a lot, but hardly ever have to groom other monkeys. Low-ranking monkeys groom others, but never get groomed themselves. Dr. Noe's team trained a low-ranker to open a container with bits of apples in it, a skill that no other monkey had. Would it be worth anything, he wondered, in monkey money -otherwise known as grooming.

Dr. NOE: It has some aspects of money. The higher-rankers can give other services that low-rankers can't give, such as support in a fight or a tolerance around a food site or something like that. And they get rewarded for that by grooming of them.

BLUMBERG: I see, okay. Tolerance around the food site, in other words, they let - they can…

Dr. NOE: They can decide whether or not the low-ranker is allowed to feed next to them or not. If they don't like it, they hit them over the head. If they like it they…

BLUMBERG: So it's a protection racquet in a certain way.

Dr. NOE: We see it in a slightly more positive way. They are nice to each other and groom each other. But of course, they also hit each other over the head once in a while, that's for sure.

BLUMBERG: Sure enough, when they trained a low-ranking monkey to open the container, just as any technical college advertisement will tell you, the new skills translated into a higher income. Roughly an hour after she'd open the container for everyone, she was getting groomed a lot more, as much as a high-ranking monkey, and she no longer had to do hardly any grooming herself. But that was not the most spectacular finding.

Dr. NOE: So what then did, is we got a second low-ranking female, trained her to open a second container with apples in it, and then we saw that the value of the first provider dropped, more or less, to the half of what she had before. So now we had a competition between two animals. Both of them could provide this good, so these apples, and so the value of the first one dropped down again. And of the second one who was very low at the beginning of the experiment, she went up and they ended up both in the middle so to speak.

BLUMBERG: So when there was a monkey monopoly on the skill, the monkeys paid one price. But when it became a duopoly, the price fell to an equilibrium point, about half of what it had been. And this all happened despite the fact that we're talking about monkeys here. Monkeys can't do math.

Dr. NOE: Animals that cannot form binding contracts, animals that cannot talk about what they want to do or cannot offer verbally or anything; they, nevertheless, are quite accurate in adapting their behavior to what the market gives them.

BLUMBERG: Dr. Noe says that monkeys arrive at these economic outcomes not through sitting down and negotiation, but through feeling and emotion. Monkeys develop positive associations toward a container-opening member of the society and they just want to groom her. But once another monkey can open the container, the skill isn't as unique, the positive feelings diminish, and grooming goes down. It's the law of supply and demand played out along the neuro-hormonal pathways that deal with emotion in the monkey brain...


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114068638


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