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Not the “Death of the Dollar” but “Death of the Euro?”
Not the “Death of the Dollar” but “Death of the Euro?”
The rise of the Chinese yuan as an international currency is not only unstoppable but is advancing in leaps and bounds, according to SWIFT. It comes at the expense of other currencies, though it’s not triggering the long-awaited “death of the dollar.” On the contrary. Yet the euro has stumbled into the line of fire.
SWIFT is in a position to know. The member-owned organization, based in Belgium, provides among other things a network that enables financial institutions around the globe to send and receive information about financial transactions in a standardized environment. It also cooperates with various intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world, including the US Treasury, the CIA, and others. The NSA is likely to get what it wants without asking.
In its latest RMB Tracker, SWIFT is relentlessly effusive about the rise of the yuan. In August, global payments in renminbi rose once again, achieving another milestone: it edged out the yen to become the fourth largest payments currency with a share of, well, 2.8% of global payments – “reflecting RMB’s huge potential and staggering momentum as a major currency,” the report gushes.
That’s not exactly a lot, compared to China’s economic power in the global markets. When China sneezes, as it just did, the world catches pneumonia. But it’s a big leap forward: In August 2012, the yuan was in 12th position, with a minuscule share of 0.8%.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the yuan is already the most actively used currency for intra-regional payments with China and Hong Kong, having edged out the yen this year.
Becoming a major global currency is one of the preconditions for becoming a reserve currency held by central banks as part of their foreign exchange reserves baskets. But the yuan isn’t in those baskets yet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The state of the climate movement
The state of the climate movement
This is the text of a talk I gave today at Save the Children as part of their #changehistory series, organised by Campaigns Director (and fellow GlobalDashboard contributor) Kirsty McNeill. Kirsty’s opening talk in the series is here; see also @changehistory on Twitter.
I.
It’s the afternoon of 28 June 1988. NASA scientist Jim Hansen is testifying on global warming to Congress. Outside, it’s an oven. Temperatures are sweltering to an unheard-of high of 38 degrees Celsius. The legislators and journalists in the room are close to fainting.
It’s one of those moments when it all comes together. Next day, climate leads the New York Times. By September, 58% of Americans have heard of the greenhouse effect. Two months after that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set up. Global climate policy is born.
Now it’s 1990. In Geneva, the Second World Climate Conference is taking place. Margaret Thatcher – herself a chemist – is lavishing praise on the IPCC, which has just published its First Assessment Report. And as if to anticipate the Stern Review 16 years later, she’s interpreting the IPCC’s findings very much through a rational lens of self-interest – telling leaders that “it may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.
Already, the terms on which climate policy will play out over the next two decades have been set. This is to be a technocratic agenda. Climate change will be owned by a ‘priesthood’ of experts, with its own language, rituals, gatherings, and assumptions. NGOs can be admitted as members, but only if they’re willing to adopt the priesthood’s worldview and profess its creed.
As for the public, their job is to listen to the experts and then remember to turn out the lights. It’s certainly not to participate, much less wield power.
California Drought and Strengthening El Nino Accelerate Statewide Water Transition
As perhaps the strongest El Nino on record forms in the eastern Pacific Ocean, public officials in California are preparing for a winter in which the state’s drought emergency might be interrupted by disastrous floods.
Yet even a “Godzilla” El Nino, as one NASA scientist dubbed the warming ocean waters, will not solve the state’s water supply imbalances that preceded the current drought and will persist long after, according to experts who spoke Tuesday at a virtual town hall, hosted by Circle of Blue and Maestro Conference.
–Kevin Klowden, managing director
Milken Institute’s California Center
“Godzilla can’t dig cisterns and build us water storage infrastructure, and Godzilla unfortunately doesn’t have freezing breath ensure that all the rain we get is going to restore the snowpack in our mountains,” said Kevin Klowden, managing director of the Milken Institute’s California Center in Santa Monica, at the Catalyst: California town hall.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Parts of California Have Sunk Over a Foot in Eight Months Due to Drought
Parts of California Have Sunk Over a Foot in Eight Months Due to Drought
California Dreamin’ this is not.
Sounds pretty freakin’ terrifying actually. From Bloomberg:
Land in California’s central valley agricultural region sank more than a foot in just eight months in some places as residents and farmers pump more and more groundwater amid a record drought.
The ground near Corcoran, 173 miles (278 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, dropped about 1.6 inches every 30 days. One area in the Sacramento Valley was descending about half-an-inch per month, faster than previous measurements, according to a report released Wednesday by the Department of Water Resources. NASA completed the study by comparing satellite images of Earth’s surface over time.
“Groundwater levels are reaching record lows — up to 100 feet lower than previous records,” Mark Cowin, the department’s director, said in a statement. “As extensive groundwater pumping continues, the land is sinking more rapidly and this puts nearby infrastructure at greater risk of costly damage.”
Areas along the California Aqueduct — a system of canals and tunnels that ships water from the north to the south –– sank as much as 12.5 inches, with eight inches of that occurring in just four months of 2014, researchers found.
Get to work Dr. Bernanke.
For related articles, see:
Wal-Mart Exposed Bottling Water from Sacramento Municipal Supply in the Middle of a Drought
Video of the Day – Stunning Scenes from California’s Central Valley Drought
‘Biggest El Niño of our generation’ may be tempered by The Blob
Climatologists unsure of outcome of battle of ‘Godzilla’ El Niño vs. the Pacific Blob
For many drought-weary Californians, it has become the ‘Great Wet Hope.’ Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has given it a less enthusiastic nickname.
“This is the Godzilla El Niño,” Patzert says. “This potentially could be the El Niño of our generation.”
El Niño is the term for a massive patch of warm water that appears in the the Equatorial Pacific every few years, affecting weather patterns across the world. Typically, its appearance means more rain on the Pacific coast and a milder winter west of the Rockies.
- El Nino this year could be a record-breaker
- El Nino will be a hurricane slayer, forecasters predict
- Ocean ‘blob’ could be responsible for warmer temperatures
“Places that are normally dry get extremely wet, and of course that would include the American west,” Patzert says. “So we’re kayaking down the street in Los Angeles, and they’re playing golf in February in Minneapolis.”
Climatologists suspected El Niño was coming. Now they’re predicting it’ll be even bigger than they thought.
Sea surface temperature anomalies for May 2014. Warmer colours indicate warm temperatures. (NOAA)
Sea surface temperature anomalies for May 2015. Warmer colours indicate warm temperatures, and are particularly noticeable around the equator and South America. (NOAA)
“A large El Niño like we saw in 1997 and 1982 has a big impact not only on the U.S. and Canada, but (also) all over the planet,” Patzert says. “The signal that we see in the Pacific from space is actually larger than it was in August of 1997.”
In 1997, a massive El Niño brought floods, mudslides and hurricanes. In California it killed 17 people and caused half a billion dollars of damage.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Disappearing Lake Shows Drought’s Extent in New Space Image
Disappearing Lake Shows Drought’s Extent in New Space Image
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| Aerial view of Goose Lake on the border between California and Oregon taken June 25, 2015, NASA Earth Observatory Landsat 8 – OLI. Credit: Jesse Allen |
A lake straddling the California-Oregon border looks like an empty swimming pool in new photos taken from space.
The water levels of Goose Lake and its several neighboring lakes depend on the season’s rain and snow amounts, and California has been in a drought. A camera onboard NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite captured the lake’s current dry spell on June 25, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
The photo of the parched lake is a stark contrast to a photo taken by NASA when the lake was hydrated two years prior, on June 3, 2013.
Goose Lake State Park has a “dry lake” advisory on its website as of May 13: “The Lake is dry and not available for boating or fishing from the park.”
When Goose Lake brims with water, it spans about 145 square miles (375 square kilometers), with a depth of about 24 feet (7 meters). There are eight fish species native to the Goose Lake basin, including the redband trout, suckerfish, tui chub, lamprey, Pit-Klamath brook lamprey, speckled dace, Pit roach, and Pit sculpin.
When the lake is dry, the fish head over to the tributary streams connected to Goose Lake. Redband trout used to be commercially fished, but its populations have not been consistent from year to year.
Most of Goose Lake’s water flows in during the spring and early summer and comes from snowmelt that accumulates in its eastern streams. Goose Lake also receives water from groundwater basins.
Goose Lake overflowed in 1881, but dried up in the summers of 1851, 1852, 1926, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1992.
Dryness in the 1920s shriveled the lake to the point where wagon tracks left by gold miners of the mid-1800s appeared on the exposed lakebed, according to the Earth Observatory.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater
With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater
Imagine if your bank statement arrived each month and told you how much money you had withdrawn and deposited, but told you nothing about how much money you had at the beginning or end of the month.
You’d know whether your balance had grown or shrunk, but you’d have no idea whether you could afford to buy a new house, take a vacation, or make it through that last year of college without bussing tables on the weekends.
This is pretty much the state we’re in with the world’s groundwater accounts, which supply 2 billion people with drinking water and irrigate a large share of the world’s food.
“[I]n most cases, we do not know how much groundwater exists in storage,” write the authors of a study published last month in Water Resources Research (WRR), a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
As a result, we’re clueless about how long we can keep drawing down these water reserves before they run out.
And we are indeed drawing many of them down.
One-third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are highly stressed to over-stressed, according to a companion study published in the same issue of WRR. The eight most highly stressed aquifers receive almost no natural recharge to offset human use – including aquifers in Saudi Arabia, northwestern India and Pakistan.
Scientists at the University of California at Irvine led both studies, with doctoral student Alexandra Richey serving as lead author. Other team members came from NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Taiwan University and UC Santa Barbara.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Despite drought, California is still bottling water for export
Despite drought, California is still bottling water for export
There is an old saying “as goes California, so goes the Nation.” If that is true, I would say that the nation had best strap on its seat-belt for some hard-times ahead — and some battles over resources between ordinary citizens and big corporations.
California is currently four years into the worst drought in recorded history. While the word “drought” gives the impression that this is a short-lived, inconvenient condition with which we have to live for a little while, things are actually far more serious.
NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti recently warned that California’s water reservoirs have just one year remaining before a catastrophic collapse. In his own words, as published in the LA Times:
The state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought…[groundwater] pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable…Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.
It isn’t just that no fresh water, via rain or snow, is coming into California, but that underground aquifers and other former backup sources are also running dry. According to research published in the journal Science, the entire Western United states has lost an astounding 240 gigatons of water since 2013, an amount equivalent to 1 billion tons.
UC Santa Cruz Professor Lisa Sloan co-authored a 2004 report in which she and her colleague Jacob Sewall predicted that the melting of the Arctic ice shelf would cause a decrease in precipitation in California and hence a severe drought. The Arctic melting, they claimed, would warp the offshore jet stream in the Pacific Ocean.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/05/despite-drought-california-is-still-bottling-water-for-export/#sthash.F1cocoPm.dpuf
California Is Turning Back Into A Desert And There Are No Contingency Plans
California Is Turning Back Into A Desert And There Are No Contingency Plans
Once upon a time, much of the state of California was a barren desert. And now, thanks to the worst drought in modern American history, much of the state is turning back into one. Scientists tell us that the 20th century was the wettest century that the state of California had seen in 1000 years. But now weather patterns are reverting back to historical norms, and California is rapidly running out of water. It is being reported that the state only has approximately a one year supply of water left in the reservoirs, and when the water is all gone there are no contingency plans. Back in early 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency for the entire state, but since that time water usage has only dropped by 9 percent. That is not nearly enough. The state of California has been losing more than 12 million acre-feet of total water a year since 2011, and we are quickly heading toward an extremely painful water crisis unlike anything that any of us have ever seen before.
But don’t take my word for it. According to the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti “is the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine”. What he has to say about the horrific drought in California is extremely sobering…
As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions.January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California’s winter was as well.
As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.
Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir.
Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Republicans To Investigate NASA Over Climate Data Tampering
Republicans To Investigate NASA Over Climate Data Tampering
With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to ‘prove’ global warming’s trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called “the most extraordinary scandal of our times” – that of the “seasonally-adjusted” seasonal raw global temperature data – is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed “expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise.”
This began, as The Telegraph previously noted, with claims that the underlying data used to justify practically every study p[roving global warming has, in fact, been manipulated…
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Was 2014 the hottest year after all?
Was 2014 the hottest year after all?
World media rushed to report that “2014 was the warmest year on record”, but it seems no one bothered to look at the fine print and the fact scientists can’t be sure the claim is true, writes Samantha Walker.
Was 2014 really the hottest year on record? The headlines across the world’s media last month – including these pieces from the BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Age certainly claimed that it was.
The media chorus last month followed a joint announcement by two US scientific organisations: NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre. On January 16, they released a categorical statement to the press that “2014 was the warmest year in modern record”.
Yet 10 days later, the UK’s Met Office (its national weather service) stated that while 2014 was indeed very warm, it wasn’t actually the single hottest on record. So the first question is – was 2014 the hottest year or not?
A quick bit of critical analysis explains where the confusion lies.
Director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt, and his colleagues published a paper moderately asserting that 2014 was hotter than the second hottest year – 2010 – by just 0.02°C. That number is five times less than the 0.1°C of uncertainty in their measurements. They stated that 2014, 2010 and 2005 were “in a statistical tie because of several sources of uncertainty, the largest source being incomplete spatial coverage of the data”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’
US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’
The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years.
Places like California are already facing very dry conditions, but these are quite gentle compared with some periods in the 12th and 13th Centuries.
Scientists have now compared these earlier droughts with climate simulations for the coming decades.
The study suggests events unprecedented in the last millennium may lie ahead.
“These mega-droughts during the 1100s and 1200s persisted for 20, 30, 40, 50 years at a time, and they were droughts that no-one in the history of the United States has ever experienced,” said Ben Cook from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“The droughts that people do know about like the 1930s ‘dustbowl’ or the 1950s drought or even the ongoing drought in California and the Southwest today – these are all naturally occurring droughts that are expected to last only a few years or perhaps a decade. Imagine instead the current California drought going on for another 20 years.”
Dr Cook’s new study is published in the journal Science Advances, and it has been discussed also at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Panel Urges Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate Change
Panel Urges Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate Change
With the planet facing potentially severe impacts from global warming in coming decades, a government-sponsored scientific panel on Tuesday called for more research on geoengineering — technologies to deliberately intervene in nature to counterclimate change.
The panel said the research could include small-scale outdoor experiments, which many scientists say are necessary to better understand whether and how geoengineering would work.
Some environmental groups and others say that such projects could have unintended damaging effects, and could set society on an unstoppable path to full-scale deployment of the technologies.
But the National Academy of Sciences panel said that with proper governance, which it said needed to be developed, and other safeguards, such experiments should pose no significant risk.
In two widely anticipated reports, the panel — which was supported by NASA and other federal agencies, including what the reports described as the “U.S. intelligence community” — noted that drastically reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases was by far the best way to mitigate the effects of a warming planet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
NASA detects enormous ‘coronal hole’ on Sun’s South Pole (PHOTO) — RT News
NASA detects enormous ‘coronal hole’ on Sun’s South Pole (PHOTO) — RT News.
A giant dark hole has appeared on the sun’s flaming surface, a recently-taken NASA picture has revealed. So far, scientists are stumped by why this spectacular phenomenon, known as a “coronal hole,” occurs.
“The Sun starts 2015 with an enormous coronal hole near the South Pole,” scientists of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory wrote in their blog, having posted a picture of the flaming sun with a gaping dark space in its lower part.
READ MORE: Spectacular space: The most stunning, mind-boggling photos & videos of 2014!
What modern science knows is that “coronal holes” are places where particles leave the sun’s surface at huge speeds – of up to 500 miles per hour (800 kilometers per hour). What’s still unclear is why this is happening.
The sun’s glowing comes from the “trapped” particles. The coronal holes “contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker.”
The first pictures of the phenomenon were taken by NASA astronauts in the early 1970s.
