[a dense loner]

Cheers pete I thought i might be missing something like that

[slackline]

[Sloper]

So folks, what's the view about putting some fine particulant pollution in the upper atmosphere to bring the temperature down a bit? We know it works so why not?

[Stu Littlefair]

Non linear feedback

[Johnny Brown]

We know it works so why not?

I suspect most scientists that it's this kind of arrogance that has got us in this mess. Our history of attempting to engineer ecosystems by introducing new elements would suggest caution, the climate is no less complex.

Plus you'd have the lawsuits from the fact that even if successful, almost everybody would be affected negatively in the short term.

[bendavison]

We also can't predict how much (SO2?) we'd need to pump into the atmosphere to bring about the required cooling - models seem to greatly overestimate cooling from past eruptions compared to observations. Plus it would require frequent 'top ups' to keep up with continued greenhouse gas emissions.

[i.munro]

Feedback systems are tricky even when there are only a few degrees of freedom. The climate is horribly complicated.

If we (as a species) get desperate enough to try something like this I hope it'd be something that we could at least switch off. Orbiting mirrors have been discussed. Trouble is, by the time we get that desparate, we will probably have lost the capability as this sort of thing requires huge amounts of energy.

[Oldmanmatt]

This got me thinking, brief though it is; don't we have a "Reporter on scene"? Sasquatch, how does this stack against your experience?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/seven-ways-alaska-seeing-climate-change-action-180956479/

I spent several months in Greenland in 2000 and saw first hand the glacial retreat; which can only have worsened in the intervening decade and a half.


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[Sasquatch]

This got me thinking, brief though it is; don't we have a "Reporter on scene"? Sasquatch, how does this stack against your experience?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/seven-ways-alaska-seeing-climate-change-action-180956479/

I spent several months in Greenland in 2000 and saw first hand the glacial retreat; which can only have worsened in the intervening decade and a half.


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A few red herrings there, but also some truth to it. 

#1 - Rampant Wildfires.  I haven't looked into the acreage in the last few years, but i wouldn't be surprised if they've been above average.   If i had to guess, i'd say they're above average as a result of the warm summers we've had the last three years.  we also had a spell like this around 2003-2005 with high temps and lots of fires.  Directly related to climate change - highly debateable IMO. 

#2 - Glaciers are melting.  This is pretty bad and is quite obvious if you've been here for any length of time and spent time in these areas.  Directly related to climate change - Yes IMO.

#3 - Permafrost less permanent.  Don't know about this one.  There's no permafrost in the Anchorage area.  Directly related to climate change - don't know enough to answer.

#4 - Weather Has Gotten Weird.  Yes. One example- we have had thunderstorms each of the last three years, and i've never seen one here before, and my wife grew up here and had never seen one. The stuff they talk about is not really that odd though, except the nome thundersnow.  Directly related to climate change - I think it's likely. 

#5 - The Coastline Is Eroding.  Yes it's happening.  I don't know enough about whether its a new thing or not.  I do know that starting about 100 years ago, villages become more fixed in locations, and many of those locations were very poorly chosen.  In addition to ocean erosion, we have may river erosion issues with villages.

#6 - Villages Are Relocating. See above.

#7 - Traditional Food Sources Are Vanishing.  How much of this is due to climate change is highly debated. 

[petejh]

Well, that's the climate problem solved. (flippancy, before anyone says)


Now what about rogue asteroids/nuclear states/grey goo?

[shark]

Those finte resources are going historically (hysterically?) cheap at the moment with oil, iron ore and other useful commodities typically half the price they were a year ago due to oversupply for current level of global demand. Bad news for Miners and Oil companies (larger ones forming a disproportionate part of the FTSE100) but good news for consumers and manufacturers. This should keep inflation low in the medium which in turn will help keep interest rates rock bottom. Employment in the UK is unusually high but despite this increase in real wages is lowish which in turn is another reason interest rates will stay low. Beggars belief really.

Any guesses for how things will play out for the UK and rest of World (particularly China) this year ?






 

[petejh]

Those finte resources are going historically (hysterically?) cheap at the moment with oil, iron ore and other useful commodities typically half the price they were a year ago due to oversupply for current level of global demand. Bad news for Miners and Oil companies (larger ones forming a disproportionate part of the FTSE100) but good news for consumers and manufacturers. This should keep inflation low in the medium which in turn will help keep interest rates rock bottom. Employment in the UK is unusually high but despite this increase in real wages is lowish which in turn is another reason interest rates will stay low. Beggars belief really.

Any guesses for how things will play out for the UK and rest of World (particularly China) this year ?

All I know is my timing is terrible. I lived hand-to-mouth for years during boom times when interest and stock returns were high. Now I have a large surplus, and I've been hit with an investment triple whammy of poor returns on UK market; Canadian and US mining shares nosediving; and poor interest rates on cash in savings.

(Should have bought a BTL instead.)

It's all cyclical though... right?

[petejh]

Isn't the number one rule:

'Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes.'


Not that I'm anyone to listen to when it comes to investing. I'll almost certainly be trying to sell in the forthcoming buying opportunity.

[tomtom]

Are we allowed to talk about investing in this thread? I thought it was strictly for Ehrlich'ian-style predictions of imminent apocalypse? 

If we are, my prediction is that 2016 will prove to have been a buy-the-dip year for equities much like 1994 or 1998. There was major fretting in both those years that debt crises in emerging economies (mexico in 1994, south-east asia and russia in 1998) would break the financial system; all of which proved wrong. There are also interesting similarities between the current slowdown in China's economy and the stagnation in Japan that began in the early 1990s. Japan was about as large within the global economy then as China is now, and in many ways had built its economy in a similar way: a vigorous free-market export sector coupled with a heavily-managed domestic economy built on unsustainably loose credit. In the late 1980s it is seemed to be an universally-held truth that Japan was about to take over the world (much as people have been talking of China in recent years) and then a period in the early 1990s when it was common to hear economists explain that Japan's debt implosion was an unmanageable problem for the global economy. All of that worry was wrong too.

This might come acrross as being a bit 'all economists are cunts' - but...

Why is economics so fascinated with what has happened in the past? - In the last 150 years the world has changed monumentally - several times. We've never had a strong China, a shale gas situation, Iran coming back into the market, a .net based economy, widespread gambling on gambling (thats Hedging right...) - so why on earth are economists so obsessed with applying what has happened in the past? We are not in that situation - in fact we're pretty far removed from how things were 10 years ago.. let alone 20 or 30 or 40 etc...

Cycles? F**********load********hite. Google apophenia - and read the wikipedia page.
 
I deleted my rant about archaeologists and economists...

[petejh]

Undelete it, you should rant more TT!

I don't think I'm wrong to say that various different parts of the global economy could be described as cyclical - am I? (I'm open to being told 'you are wrong').

[tomtom]

Undelete it, you should rant more TT!

I don't think I'm wrong to say that various different parts of the global economy could be described as cyclical - am I? (I'm open to being told 'you are wrong').

A chunk of my job is looking for cycles in natural systems - 90% of the time people think there is some pattern or other behind something - and its bollocks. The human mind LOVES to link cause and effect - for there to be a reason for something happening.

Global economics is a large, distributed, highly interconnected non linear (chaotic) system with constantly changing boundary conditions. And its run by bellends.

[tomtom]

This might come across as being a bit 'all financial analysts are cunts' - but...

Well I used to be a financial analyst, not an economist, so on the assumption that was directed at me, I have taken the liberty of editing your post.

Nope - wasn't aimed at you at all.

T'was at economics in general. Soooo much arm waiving... cults of personality.... (all the worst facets of some qualitative disciplines whilst pretending to be quantative)... Anyway, it was a bit like prefacing a conversation by saying "no offence but..."

Why is economics so fascinated with what has happened in the past?

Because experience shows there is reliable mean reversion within a variety of economic indicators. For example, in the long term stock prices revert to certain valuation norms, currencies revert to PPP values ...even aggregate world economic growth just oscillates around a fairly steady trend. Actually, faith in mean reversion (plus some modest risk tolerance) is the main reason why I have been able to stop work and climb full-time. But, hey, what do I know?

I'll come to that later - do you REALLY thing the past is a good predictor?

The problem with that (and its one relavent to my work - where people often use past 'events' to model what will happen in the future) is that something different can always happen in the future that we may or may not know about (lets go Rumsfeld here!). It strikes me - that there is an incredibly huge scope (or degrees of freedom in systems parlance) for known and unknown unknowns to happen in economics!

30 years ago, who would have foreseen the death plunge demise of the printed word?
What about:
The Arab Spring?
The collapse of communism/Russia/Iron Curtain.
Brexit??
A fuck of huge asteroid wiping out the UK etc...

To me the biggest indicator that stock markets are deterministic non-linear systems (like a horse race..) is that people make so much money from betting on it! Sometimes more money is bet than is traded non?

Reversion is an interesting term. How things get dragged back to a mean I guess is what you mean by this. Well, thats not uncommon in many natural systems - to have fluctuation (often wild!) around a mean - which does mean that if you take a long term view then it will return to some normality at some point. That all depends how long the long term is (fluctuations within fluctuations!) of course. So I take your point about that - which I guess means if you play the long game then its not so bad.. Well, the world economy as a whole has grown over the last 20 years, so if you had enough to start investing with with - then 'investing' or following/tracking etc.. the S&P or FTSE would and has made people a pretty income over the last 20 years..

Except Donald Trump - who great business man that he is, has made less..

However, systems that tend to revert to a mean - or oscilate around a mean in a form of dynamic equilibrium - can at times be 'shocked' or jolted into another state - into another (higher or lower) mean.

Nuclear power - and mining around that is a great example. If you look at Uranium prices then with the growth of nuclear power (70's) they were high and peaked. Then a gentle decline as it became less popular - with a big drop following CHernobyl. Then c. 2003 starts to rise again due to oil prices/carbon/global warming making Nuclear more popular - then Tsunami, Fukashima - big drop again. So you could argue that the 'market' has fluctuated around a few states where nuclear power is popular or not.

Ach, I'm rambling and I'd better post as theeres probably three been written whilst writing this

[tomtom]

Arguably is not really "run" by anyone.

If the wealthiest 50 people in the world have more money than 50% of the global population I would suggest that is not necessarily correct! Whether the 'running' is deliberate or not - they will to a degree be controlling things.

(I may have the 50 and 50% wrong - its something like that I read earlier in the week)

PS - did you see the articles about the possible semi floatation of the Saudi Oil state oil company? Would value the company at 10 Apples etc..! bonkers.

[lagerstarfish]

Why is economics so fascinated with what has happened in the past?

because it's really difficult to gather evidence from the future

[tomtom]

Why is economics so fascinated with what has happened in the past?

because it's really difficult to gather evidence from the future

Is this another shallow attempt to get me to invest in your time machine idea?

[lagerstarfish]

you're in for £50k right?

you'll get special privileges if you do some product placement for me in a few journals, local TV, House if Commons etc.

[Oldmanmatt]

Arguably is not really "run" by anyone.

PS - did you see the articles about the possible semi floatation of the Saudi Oil state oil company? Would value the company at 10 Apples etc..! bonkers.

In context, it is sensible enough estimation. Though Apple is very profitable at the moment, the recent history of consumer electronics is that few firms hold a dominant position for long, and the falls from grace can be abrupt and ugly (take a look at Sony). On the other hand, a humungous hydrocarbon reserve, with very low extraction costs, is a pretty nice long-term asset to have (unless those pesky climate change activists force you to leave it underground).

Funny you should say that....



Having just got home from a particularly crap day, thought I'd read the news, saw this front page and wondered if this thread might have woken up...

We're all doomed.

But then, I said that in 1990, 2008 and every day since.

Mostly though, it seems to be me who's doomed.


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[tomtom]

you're in for £50k right?

you'll get special privileges if you do some product placement for me in a few journals, local TV, House if Commons etc.

50 krona more like... My services don't come cheap. Who's going to pay for the LagerTimeTravel (tm) t shirt and logo'd fleece I'd wear?

[petejh]

Yep peak oil - at least the doomsday version of it - is beginning to look like the millennium bug. I love how wrong we usually are. Just wish that talking heads were routinely accompanied by their past incorrect projections whenever they comment in the media, it would make the whole show so much more balanced (and un-newsworthy).


Lager's time machine didn't work.

[Oldmanmatt]

I resigned (burnt out) from Romeo Marine in July 2008, sold my Hummer and the Mrs' Merc and cashed in all my investments (nothing exotic) and was seriously pissed at all members of the financial community because I lost $30K from what I'd paid in. I get the whole "Long term" thing but I was desperate to move on and dreamed of my own Consulting and Surveying practice (and semi retirement) back in the old country.
I went on holiday to stay with friends in Como, climb mountains and sail boats on the lakes and ignore the world for all of August.
Launched myself back into professional life in September by taking the train down to the Monaco Boat Show and that was when I found out how bad things had got.

My industry took a huge hit and mainly at the top end, it really did seem like the end of the world and work was like Rockinghorse shit for the next 12 months.

By the end of 2009, the rich were spending again in Europe.  The "Middle class" (those buying yachts in the 24-50mtr (200-600GT) range) were seriously depleted (think Princess yachts, through Azimut, to Moonen).
And that trend continues (both Sunseeker and Princess are struggling for orders), so those with £10-£15M to spend on a yacht are, well, not.

There seems to be an awful lot less of them.

On the other hand, at the top end £100M-£younameitonebillionormorehasbeenmooted the big yachts get bigger every few months.

I surveyed the "Dubai" before her completion, when she was the largest in the world (as part of a team) to value her. To put it in professional parlance, Fuck shit buggery Christ on a bike, you would not believe what Mo spent on that damn thing (think 20mtr by 4 deep seawater swimming pool with glass walls (all the better to ogle the young ladies) and live coral reef etc etc etc...


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