More than 65 per cent of Canada abnormally parched or in drought at the end of March
An out-of-control wildfire, dubbed Wildfire MWF012, is seen burning west of Saprae Creek on April 21, 2024. PHOTO BY ALBERTA WILDFIRE
Wildfires erupted across Canada’s main oil producing province of Alberta and an evacuation order was issued as the region braces for a repeat of last year’s unprecedented season.
Members of the Indigenous first nation community of Cold Lake Number 149, northeast of Edmonton on the Saskatchewan border, were told to evacuate, according to a notice issued at 4:49 p.m. local time. Other regions west of the Cold Lake blaze were put on standby, with three wildfires in the province listed as out of control as of late Monday.
More than 65 per cent of Canada was abnormally parched or in drought at the end of March, leading the nation to brace for another smoke-filled summer. Unusually hot, dry weather contributed to the country’s worst-ever wildfire season last year, darkening skies over New York and other U.S. cities and prompting Alberta oil and gas drillers to shut as much as 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day of production.
An evacuation alert for residents of Saprae Creek, about 25 kilometres southeast of the oilsands capital of Fort McMurray, was cancelled. Massive forest fires burned down swathes of Fort McMurray eight years ago, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate and temporarily shutting more than one million barrels a day of oil production.
The Middle East seemed to be on the brink of war last week and oil prices fell. Was the market wrong?
Brent futures price closed at $90.45 per barrel on Friday, April 12 before Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel (Figure 1). When markets opened on Monday, April 15, prices rose less than $1 before ending lower and closing at $90.02 on Tuesday. After Israel’s counter-attack on Friday, April 19, Brent rose from $86.96 to almost $91 only to close at $87.29.
Figure 1. Brent futures price fell -$3.16 (-3%) from $90.45 to $87.29 for the week ending April 19. Source: CME & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Figure 2. Crude oil volumes that passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the first half of 2023. Source: Modified from @Nate Hagens with EIA data & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
There was a time when military outbreaks in the Middle East would have caused a sharp increase in world oil prices. Figure 3 shows a comparison of Brent price in the one hundred days following the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and after the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Figure 3. Comparison of Brent price in the one hundred days following the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and after the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Source: @johnauthers (Bloomberg) and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
It’s worth pointing out that there is no major oil production in Israel or in surrounding countries. The involvement of Iran in the recent conflict, however, makes these two events comparable at least in the last few weeks.
There are a slew of mainstream narratives for oil market’s phlegmatic reaction to recent attacks in the Middle East.
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The reasoning is so simple, a fifth grader could understand it – which is probably why the Biden administration doesn’t.
Having used up all of the rest of the batshit, insane, counterintuitive economic dirty tricks left in the “we’ll literally do anything but cut spending” bag, the Biden administration is pushing what could be the most destructive idea for our country since prohibition: taxing unrealized gains.
As part of its budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year, the Biden administration is trying to raise an addition $4.3 trillion over 10 years in the worst way possible: imposing a minimum tax equal to 25 percent of a taxpayer’s taxable income and unrealized capital gains less the sum of their regular tax, for taxpayers with wealth over $100 million.
Putting aside the fact that this high-risk idea only amounts to a pittance, $430 billion per year (25% of which we just sent to foreign nations over the weekend in one fell swoop of a pen and it’s only April), the introduction of taxing unrealized gains could be one of the worst slippery slopes we ever dare to roll our country’s economy down.
I mean, shit, we could save $1 trillion just by not sending $100 billion a year to other nations for starters. But I digress. For an outline of exactly what an unrealized gains tax is, here’s the American Institute on Economic Research:
A tax on unrealized capital gains means that individuals are penalized for owning appreciating assets, regardless of whether they have realized any actual income from selling them.
If you purchased a stock for $100 this year, for example, and it increased to $110 next year, you would pay the assigned tax rate on the $10 capital gain. You didn’t sell the asset, so you don’t realize the $10 appreciation, but must pay the tax regardless.
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With the AI boom and green energy push fueling fresh copper demand, and with copper mines aging and not enough projects to match demand with supply, the forecasted copper shortage has finally arrived in earnest. Coupled with persistently high inflation in the US, EU, and elsewhere, I predict the industrial metal will surpass its 2022 top to reach a new all-time high this year:
The AI boom is stoking the need for more data centers, which will require around a million metric tons of copper by 2030. Meanwhile, this year’s deficit of 35,000 tons is expected to rocket up to a staggering 100,000 tons in 2025.
Electric car batteries and EV charging stations also depend on copper, adding to the problem of there not being enough activity at existing mines, or the development of new ones, to satisfy the industrial need. Says Bank of America analyst Michael Widmer:
“The much-discussed lack of mine projects is becoming an increasing issue for copper.”
While many mainstream forecasts depend on a solid economic rebound to keep demand for copper up, inflation is here to stay, especially as the Fed is likely going to be forced to cut interest rates at some point this year. Even with just one 2024 rate cut instead of the three that markets originally expected, higher USD prices for copper and other commodities like gold are on the way. Out-of-control inflation will drive prices higher even if the oomph gets sucked out of the AI bubble, or we see other signs of an economic “hard landing.” As Peter Schiff said last month,
“I think we’re on the verge of the biggest bull market in commodities since the 1970s…They’re cutting rates because they have to avoid a financial crisis — a banking crisis.”
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The idea is to create mobile missile defense systems and resupply bases
The US Navy will convert surplus oil rigs in the western Pacific into mobile military bases as part of the US military buildup aimed at China, The Defense Post reported on Tuesday.
The naval engineering firm Gibbs & Cox developed the concept, known as the Mobile Defense/Depot Platform (MODEP), and presented it earlier this month at the Sea Air Space Expo. The idea is to convert oil rigs into mobile missile defense and resupply bases.
“Our target here is to find a solution to help the challenging problem of having capacity issues in the Western Pacific. For not enough cells, not enough missiles, not enough of being able to keep those ships in the forward station,” Dave Zook, an architect at Gibbs & Cox, told Naval News.
Gibbs & Cox claims that the floating bases would be able to hold 512 vertical launch system cells or 100 large missile launchers, which is five times the capacity of a US Navy destroyer. The idea is to counter China’s ballistic missiles that could take out US warships and bases in the region in the event of an open war.
US military officials have been explicit about the fact that they’re preparing for a direct war with China in the region despite the obvious risk of the conflict quickly turning nuclear. The US has been expanding its military footprint in the Philippines and in Pacific island nations to give China more targets that it will have to hit.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the former head of US Pacific Air Forces who is now the commander of Air Combat Command, made this clear in comments to Nikkei Asia last year.
“Obviously, we would like to disperse in as many places as we can to make the targeting problem for the Chinese as difficult as possible,” Wilsbach said. “A lot of those runways where we would operate from are in the Pacific Island nations.”
Whatever happened to the WEF? One minute they were everywhere in the media and now they have all but disappeared from public discourse. After the pandemic agenda was defeated and the plan to exploit public fear to create a perpetual medical autocracy was exposed, Klaus Schwab and his merry band of globalists slithered back into the woodwork. To be sure, we’ll be seeing them again one day, but for now the WEF has relegated itself away from the spotlight and into the dark recesses of the Davos echo chamber.
Much of their discussions now focus on issues like climate change or DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), but one vital subject continues to pop up in the white papers of global think tanks and it’s a program that was introduced very publicly during covid. Every person that cares about economic freedom should be wary of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as perhaps the biggest threat to human liberty since the attempted introduction of vaccine passports.
The WEF recently boasted in a new white paper that 98% of all central banks are now pursuing CBDC programs. The report, titled ‘Modernizing Financial Markets With Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency’, notes:
“CeBM is ideal for systemically important transactions despite the emergence of alternative payment instruments…Wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) is a form of CeBM that could unlock new economic models and integration points that are not possible today.”
The paper primarily focuses on the streamlining of crossborder transactions, an effort which the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been deeply involved in for the past few years…
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More than 100,000 people have been evacuated due to heavy rain and fatal floods in southern China, with the government issuing its highest-level rainstorm warning for the affected area on Tuesday.
Torrential rains have lashed Guangdong province in recent days, swelling rivers and raising fears of severe flooding that state media said could be of the sort only “seen around once a century”.
The megacity of Shenzhen was among the areas experiencing “heavy to very heavy downpours” on Tuesday, the city’s meteorological observatory said, adding the risk of flash floods was “very high”.
It later downgraded its weather warning as the storms weakened, but urged residents to remain vigilant against disasters.
Images from Qingyuan — a city in northern Guangdong that is part of the low-lying Pearl River Delta — showed a building almost completely submerged in a flooded park next to a river.
Official media reported Sunday that more than 45,000 people had been evacuated from Qingyuan, which straddles the Bei River tributary.
State news agency Xinhua said 110,000 residents across Guangdong had been relocated since the downpours started over the weekend.
The floods have claimed the lives of four people, according to state media.
Engulfed lampposts
An AFP team in Qingyuan saw the Bei River running much higher than its usual level on Tuesday evening, with the water almost completely engulfing lampposts on a pedestrianised bank that had been closed to the public.
The rain stopped in the afternoon and the flood water fell slightly, allowing curious onlookers to come and look over the swollen banks.
Li Yan, 52, said he was more concerned about people living down the river than about the continued rainfall forecast for the next few days.
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The heat index was expected to reach the ‘danger’ level of 42 degrees Celsius or higher in at least 30 cities and municipalities of the Philippines.
Extreme heat scorched the Philippines on Wednesday, forcing thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes and prompting warnings for people to limit the amount of time spent outdoors.
The months of March, April and May are typically the hottest and driest in the archipelago nation, but conditions this year have been exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon.
“It’s so hot you can’t breathe,” said Erlin Tumaron, 60, who works at a seaside resort in Cavite province, south of Manila, where the heat index reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday.
“It’s surprising our pools are still empty. You would expect people to come and take a swim, but it seems they’re reluctant to leave their homes because of the heat.”
The heat index was expected to reach the “danger” level of 42C or higher in at least 30 cities and municipalities on Wednesday, the state weather forecaster said.
The heat index measures what a temperature feels like, taking into account humidity.
The Department of Education, which oversees more than 47,600 schools, said nearly 6,700 schools suspended in-person classes on Wednesday.
There was a 50 percent chance of the heat intensifying in the coming days, said Ana Solis, chief climatologist at the state weather forecaster.
“We need to limit the time we spend outdoors, drink plenty of water, bring umbrellas and hats when going outdoors,” Solis told AFP.
Solis said El Niño was the reason for the “extreme heat” affecting swaths of the country.
Around half the country’s provinces are officially in drought.
‘It’s really hot here’
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When Mount Ruang in Indonesia underwent multiple explosive eruptions last week, volcanic gases were flung so high they reached the atmosphere’s second layer, tens of thousands of feet above ground.
Ruang’s eruptions ejected a massive ash plume and sent some volcanic gases more than 65,000 feet into the air, according to satellite estimates – about 25,000 feet higher than a commercial airplane will typically fly.
The eruption’s potential impacts to weather and climate are starting to come into focus, even as the danger posed by the volcano persists and evacuations continue.
It’s possible for volcanoes to have a short-term impact on the climate – including global temperature cooling – due to the gases they inject high into the upper atmosphere. But Mount Ruang’s influence on the climate will likely be minimal, according to Greg Huey, the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
And the day-to-day weather conditions near Mount Ruang – things like temperature, clouds and rain – probably won’t be influenced by the volcano for long, Huey told CNN.
Mount Ruang, a 2,400-foot (725-meter) stratovolcano on Ruang Island in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province, has erupted at least seven times since Tuesday night, the country’s volcanology agency said. Stratovolcanoes can produce explosive eruptions because their cone shape allows gas to build up, according to volcanologists.
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PFAS, or forever chemicals, are ubiquitous in our environment. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 57,000 sites contaminated with these chemicals. They’re in our drinking water, our soil, our products—and our ocean. And according to new research, when waves crash onto shores around the world, they spray hundreds of thousands of PFAS particles into the air, creating a cycle in which these chemicals go from land to sea and back again.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of synthetic chemicals largely used to make products stain-, grease-, and water-resistant. They’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t easily break down and so stay in our environments for thousands of years. They’re linked to harmful effects to health, including cancer, decreased fertility, developmental delays, and more.
When forever chemicals contaminate land, they get into waterways and eventually into the ocean. Scientists used to think that once there, the particles would sink and dilute in the ocean depths. But researchers have found that isn’t true. Instead, a recent study from Stockholm University, published in Science Advances, details a boomerang effect in which sea spray spreads forever chemicals back into the air and onto land.
“It’s a concerning cycle from land to the sea and back to land,” said Ian Cousins, the study’s lead author and an environmental science professor at Stockholm University, over email. “The PFAS were emitted on land and then washed into the sea. They then cycle back to land with sea spray aerosols, and so the cycle continues. It puts a new dimension to the term ‘forever chemicals.’”
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With severe climate impacts becoming more and more apparent, many scientists think we should explore ways to block out solar radiation, but doing so would be risky.
Earlier this month, on the deck of a second world war aircraft carrier docked in San Francisco, a giant fan began spraying sea salt particles into the air.
A machine sprays sea salt particles from the flight deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in California to test a technique to make clouds brighter
New York Times/Redux/eyevine
Few people, beyond those on the ship and bystanders on the nearby dock, would have taken much notice of the resulting plume of salt spray drifting upwards.
But this fan, and the spray it pumps out, has global significance. It marks one of the first real-world trials of a climate intervention known as marine cloud brightening – essentially an attempt to cool the planet by making clouds more reflective, so that they bounce more of the sun’s energy back into space.
Our chances of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels are rapidly slipping away, with a recent analysis suggesting the world will burn through the remaining carbon budget for this temperature goal by 2029 or earlier.
Meanwhile, global temperatures rose to record levels in 2023. And that extreme heat has brought extreme impacts, with widespread coral reef bleaching, severe marine heatwaves and rapid glacier loss just some of the consequences. Time is running out, scientists agree, to avert disaster.
Could geoengineering buy us time to get our house in order?
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a type of geoengineering that involves modifying the atmosphere to tweak how much of the sun’s radiation makes it to Earth. Essentially, it would involve pumping tiny reflective particles into the atmosphere to bounce more solar radiation back into space.
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Smoke billows from a fire that broke out at the Ghazipur landfill in New Delhi on April 22, 2024.
Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
New DelhiCNN —
India’s capital choked on toxic fumes Tuesday, as a thick and pungent haze spread from a fire at a towering trash dump, the latest in a series of landfill blazes that authorities have struggled for years to bring under control.
Sections of the Ghazipur landfill in New Delhi burst into flames on Sunday, causing dangerous heat and methane emissions and adding to India’s growing climate challenges. By Tuesday, the blaze at the capital’s largest landfill had largely been put out, but people living nearby complained of throat and eye irritation due to lingering acrid air, according to local media reports.
The cause of the fire remains unknown; landfill blazes are often triggered by combustible gases from disintegrating garbage.
Smoke rises on April 23, following a fire that broke out at the Ghazipur landfill in New Delhi, India.
Noemi Cassanelli/CNN
Fires burning at Ghazipur landfill site in New Delhi, India, April 22, 2024.
Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Every year, as mercury levels soar during New Delhi’s scorching summers, the city’s landfills burst into flames, with rotting waste adding to India’s climate-heating methane gas emissions.
Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide but is a more potent contributor to the climate crisis because it traps more heat. India creates more methane from landfill sites than any other country, according to GHGSat, which monitors emissions via satellites.
The trash mountain at Ghazipur is just one of some 3,000 Indian landfills overflowing with decaying waste and emitting hazardous gases, according to a 2023 report from the Center for Science and Environment, a nonprofit research agency in New Delhi…
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Despite the beauty of the orange hue over Athens, the clouds of dust left many Greeks suffering from respiratory problems
A dramatic orange haze has descended over Athens as clouds of dust have blown in from the Sahara desert.
It is one of the worst such episodes to hit Greece since 2018, according to officials.
Greece had already been struck by similar clouds in late March and early April, which also covered areas of Switzerland and southern France.
The skies are predicted to clear on Wednesday, says Greece’s weather service.
Air quality has deteriorated in many areas of the country and on Wednesday morning the Acropolis in Athens was no longer visible because of the dust. The cloud has reached as far north as Thessaloniki.
Greeks with respiratory conditions have been urged to limit the time they spend outdoors, wear protective masks and avoid taking physical exercise until the dust clouds clear.
EPA
Greek skies were expected to clear on Wednesday
The Sahara releases 60 to 200 million tonnes of mineral dust per year.
Most of the dust quickly descends to Earth, but some of the small particles can travel huge distances, sometimes reaching Europe.
The atmosphere especially in southern Greece has become stifling because of the combination of dust and high temperatures.
Meteorologist Kostas Lagouvardos compared the view from one weather station to the planet Mars.
The fire service on Tuesday reported 25 wildfires in the past 24 hours. One fire broke out near a naval base on the island of Crete – where temperatures soared above 30C (86F) – and homes and a kindergarten had to be evacuated, according to local reports.
AFP via Getty Images
Dust plumes from the Sahara are not uncommon across Europe and can vary in intensity, however, they tend to occur most often during the spring and autumn.
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Inflation could see a resurgence in 2025, BlackRock strategists warned.Jonathan Kitchen/Getty Images
“I think what’s difficult for the Fed currently is actually the part of CPI that is being driven by demand, rather than the supply issues or the energy issues, which are perhaps easier to deal with,” Samy Chaar, the chief economist of Lombard Odier, told Bloomberg TV. The Swiss private bank managed 193 billion Swiss francs, or $212.8 billion, in assets at the end of December.
A key inflation metric for the Fed, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, was little changed in March over its 2.8% reading in February. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell highlighted the index earlier this week as he signaled that interest rate cuts may come later, rather than sooner.
The US economy has been strong, with job growth and retail sales also rising more than expected for the month of March.
“The problem with the US is the sticky part that comes from services. Services is demand, and that demand needs to come from somewhere — and that’s a robust economy,” Chaar told Bloomberg. A gauge from the Institute for Supply Management showed the US service sector expanded moderately in March.
“Consumers are consuming because they have jobs, because they have rising incomes,” Chaar said.
This means inflation is fueled by demand rather than oil supply, even if a rise in energy prices complicates the Fed’s job, he said.
The Fed is now trying to engineer a soft landing for the hot US economy without causing it to tip into a recession.
“I would say the biggest challenge here for the Fed is to manage the demand of the US economy,” Chaar said. “It comes from domestic America, not from the Middle East.”
A new temperature and precipitation proxy record shows that periods of rapid cooling align with the civilization’s three worst disease outbreaks.
Physics Today77 (4), 17–18 (2024);
Plankton living in the Mediterranean Sea some 2000 years ago have helped researchers to uncover a correlation between climate change and the spread of disease in ancient Roman Italy and into the early Middle Ages.
Using a sediment core recovered from the Gulf of Taranto, in the arch of Italy’s boot, Karin Zonneveld of the University of Bremen in Germany and colleagues reconstructed the regional climate from 200 BCE to 600 CE. The sediment record reveals that periods of rapid cooling and drying in the heart of the Roman Empire align with documented major disease outbreaks, the researchers report in a new study.
The core’s plankton fossils are from dinoflagellate cysts, also known as dinocysts. Dinoflagellates bloom in late summer and early fall, with thousands of species that thrive under varying surface temperatures and nutrient levels. By comparing the ratios of dinocyst species that flourish in warmer waters with those that flourish in cooler waters, researchers can precisely estimate historical temperatures. Dinocysts also respond to the water’s changing nutrient levels, which are controlled by precipitation. Rain and snowfall over the Italian Peninsula are channeled by rivers into the Adriatic Sea, where currents carry the nutrient-enhanced water southward around Italy’s heel and into the gulf.
Gerard Versteegh and Karin Zonneveld, coauthors of the new study on climate change and pandemics, process a sediment core from the Gulf of Taranto. (Courtesy of Karin Zonneveld.)
The core was recovered from a location with a rather high deposition rate, with 1 cm of sediment deposited roughly every 10 years (compared with about 1 cm/1000 yr in the open Mediterranean Sea)…
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