A while back around 2012, we investigated a new breed of opportunists. See there is no two ways that the Arctic is melting, thinning and within 30 years, there could be no summer ice left. What does this mean? It means that GLOBAL WARMING is real, otherwise the Arctic would not be melting. The last summer saw the smallest extend of ice EVER in human memory and scientific analysis going back to the last ice age... 

I will come back to the Milankovitch cycles in a separate article. But these tend to dictate ice ages and warmer climes in recent times (about 3 million years). As well, they affect the CO2 concentration levels, due to the biomass response to these cycles. CO2 thus naturally fluctuate from about 180 to 300 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere between ice ages and warmer climes. 

Now to cut a long difficult story short, according to the Milankovitch cycles we should be going towards an ice age. The cycles are around 25,000 years and more or less repeat along this timeframe. Apart from volcanic activity, asteroid impacts and other vagaries, these cycles influence the weather and the displacement of seasons. According to our position in relation to the Milankovitch cycles, we should be going towards an ice age in about 15,000 years.

BUT WE ARE NOT. The planet's surface is warming. After taking into account all other factors, the CULPRIT  is CO2 plus methane and other gases, BUT CO2 is the major factor by 99 per cent. So what is upsetting this atmospheric "balance" between the biomass and the atmosphere? 

We know. No other factor than the human industrialisation has released and burned the EXTRA carbon that has been "naturally" sequestered for millions of years. So what do we do? WE BURN SOME MORE...  Idiots. 

So the greedy boofins (boofhead boffins) of the world want to bring more fossil fuel from the Arctic because as the ice is melting it is becoming easier to pump up... Idiots twice over...

So 1n 2012, there was an "American conference" designed to exploit the Arctic way before the other nations, especially the Russians who already were placing stakes underwater to lay claim on "their" continental shelves"...

So, as the Arctic is defrosting, sending chilly winds to Washington in winter, the American idiots were at it:

Join us for the Arctic Imperative Summit — two days of provocative discussions, investor roundtables and original research focusing on infrastructure development, policy needs and economic opportunities in the Alaskan Arctic. The summit will be hosted by Alaska Dispatch and will bring together leading voices in this conversation, including residents from the small villages that comprise Alaska's coastal communities, state, national and international leaders, the heads of shipping and industry, as well as international policymakers and the news media. The goal of the summit is to sharpen the focus on the policy and investment needs of Alaska's Arctic through a series of high level meetings, presentations, investor roundtables and original research.

2012 Program Topics include:
-Arctic Investment Opportunities
-Arctic International Affairs
-Emerging Industry Needs
-Arctic Science and Research for Development
-Investor and Business Roundtables
-Principals for Responsible Arctic Development
-Resources
-Fisheries
-Aviation

We know. The dynamics are changing... And these morons are going to exacerbate GLOBAL WARMING, making the Arctic melt faster, sending more chill winds to Washington in winter...

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle_(organization)

and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council

But with a plea deal with the US authorities finalised at the end of last month, Schlumberger set a corporate record it would probably prefer not to be noticed: receiving the largest corporate criminal fine for sanctions violations in US history.

Its crime, to which it pled guilty, was to involve its US staff in sanctions-busting transactions with both Iran and Sudan, and for its (unsuccessful) attempts to mask such transactions from the authorities.

Schlumberger is now required to pay $155m in criminal fines, forfeit $77.5m in earnings, and undergo three years of corporate probation, the business world’s answer to a yellow card. But for a $48bn-a-year business, which made $208m profit from Iran in 2012 alone, such a fine is just a drop in the oil well. The day the deal was struck, Schlumberger shares actually rose almost 2%, a visible sign investors saw the punishment as little more than a slap on the wrist.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/where-there-is-oil-and-gas-there-is-schlumberger

On the news today, a few banks got slapped on the fingers with a ruler for having rigged the price of currencies... I did mention this capers a few years ago when no one else was looking how currency trading was being savaged by those banks. I spoke at length, on how the caper was really organised, with a former trader a few years later. Apparently at a specific time, daily, the banks boffins would get together on a conference call and agree to buy and sell currencies in a way that would "fix" the prices for the day, then sell at a profit by day's end and repeat the process daily, year after year. All the other currency trader around the globe, kept out of the loop, were losing their pants or catching just a few crumbs. Thus somewhere on this YD site, lies the scam exposed for all to see... But guess what? No-one paid any attention to Old Gus... and guess what? No-one has gone to prison for the scam and the ordinary populace will end up paying for the $6 billion fines of the banks. That's the way it is and, as well, the share price over the next two days for those institutions will climb into the blue stratosphere to make up for the "loss". 

Note: during the high (or low which could be where your cash vanished into) of the GFC, Barclays which had a dear friend's superannuation in its books, was making profit and returning more than 15 per cent per annum to the "investment". While all the other banking institution were tanking, and being refloated by governments, one had to ask how they (Barclays) did it. Currency trading was one line of Gus' investigation, as well as the derivative market, in which if my memory is correct Barclays had made some nifty calls....

If my memory is still correct, despite my mind's fogginess due to last night's chardonnay, US$6 billion of the financial package to keep some US banks afloat (about to default) went directly to Barclays coffers... Don't quote the vino on this...  

Meanwhile, sleeping in the Seattle Times:

OMAHA, Neb. — Warren Buffett opened his shareholder meeting Saturday with a vigorous defense of the mobile-home business that he’s helped build into the industry’s most dominant player.

Clayton Homes was the subject of a recent investigation by The Seattle Times and The Center for Public Integrity (CPI), which documented how the company has used predatory sales practices, exorbitant fees and home-loan interest rates that can exceed 15 percent. Because Clayton’s mobile homes often dwindle in value, borrowers find themselves trapped, unable to sell or refinance due to the punishing lending terms.

The first question Buffett faced at his annual meeting came from a longtime shareholder in Texas who said he was having “heartburn” about issues raised in the story. The shareholder said he previously viewed Berkshire Hathaway as “an ethical company” but was concerned about Clayton and the company’s weak response to the Times/CPI story.

Buffett responded that the company has been exemplary in providing loans to people who often have poor credit. He said the company has no interest in providing loans that fail, since the company holds the loans on its books.

read more: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/buffett-sticks-up-for-mobile-home-business-at-shareholder-meeting/

plus some news on the TPP:

With Boeing’s 737 plant in Renton as a backdrop, Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday defended a Pacific Rim trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration against criticism from unions and prominent congressional Democrats.

Kerry said opponents of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a pending trade pact among 12 countries including the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and Canada — are wrong to blame international trade for ills such as income inequality or offshoring of U.S. jobs.

“The remedy is not to pull back from trade agreements themselves or attempt to stop globalization, because that’s not possible,” Kerry said during his 50-minute speech outside a massive Boeing hangar. “Globalization has no reverse gear, my friends.”

“We’re only interested in trade deals that work for working Americans, and we want his support for exporting our airplanes, not our jobs,” Jon Holden, president of Machinists Union District Lodge 751, said in a statement Tuesday.

The debate has split the Democratic Party, drawing heated opposition from some leaders in the progressive wing, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Kerry, a former U.S. senator and presidential candidate, confronted such objections as “empty protectionism” during his speech to a small audience of Boeing workers and pro-trade guests, including Gary Locke, the former governor and ambassador to China.

“There is nothing progressive about blaming trade or trade agreements for the inevitable economic shifts that are brought on by technology and time,” Kerry said.

The U.S. cannot grow its economy without selling to foreign markets that include most of the world’s consumers, he argued, saying the TPP agreement contains unprecedented provisions to lift standards for workers across the globe.

Kerry cited tariffs that currently limit Washington exports, including a 17 percent markup on Washington apples in Japan and tariffs on wine as high as 50 percent in Vietnam.

Jeff Johnson, president of the Washington State Labor Council, said Kerry and other TPP backers are misleading the public when they suggest the choice is between a secretly negotiated trade pact and no trade at all.

“We sell a lot of planes and apples. We are going to keep selling those planes and apples whether TPP passes or not,” Johnson said in an interview.

He blasted the Obama administration’s lobbying for fast-track authority, which has included personal appeals to Democrats in Washington state’s congressional delegation.

Johnson said he was personally insulted when White House officials recently suggested during a phone call that he and other critics stop dividing Democrats with opposition to the deal.

“If I was in the same room with them, I would have decked them,” he said. “We’re not pulling apart the Democratic Party. They are — by pushing it.”

read more: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/john-kerry-defends-tpp-during-controversial-boeing-visit/

 “Globalization has no reverse gear, my friends.” What does this mean? Well Gus believe and will make a toon to this effect that John Kerry meant: "The Empire has no reverse gear, you mugs..."

We already knew Alaska was having some crazy weather lately. That included a record 91 degrees in Eagle in May, the “hottest temperature ever recorded so early in the calendar year in our 49th state,” per our own Capital Weather Gang.

And now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the state as a whole experienced its warmest May in the weather books. As the agency puts it:

The Alaska statewide average temperature for May was the warmest on record in 91 years of record keeping at 44.9°F, 7.1°F above average. The warmth in Alaska was widespread with several cities were record warm, including Barrow and Juneau.

The consequences of this warmth were myriad, including much early year melting of snow.

As we have previously reported, North America saw its third lowest snow cover on record for May of 2015. And much of that was due to anomalously low snow cover across Alaska

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/09/alaska-just-had-its-hottest-may-in-91-years/

Following on a record hot May in which much snow cover melted off early, Alaska saw no less than 152 fires erupt over the weekend. The numbers have only grown further since then, and stood at 291 active fires Thursday, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center.

“Given the high number of fires and the personnel assigned to those fires, the state’s firefighting resources are becoming very limited, forcing fire managers to prioritize resources,” noted the state’s Department of Natural Resources Tuesday. The preparedness level at the moment for the state is 5, meaning that “resistance to control is high to extreme and resistance to extinguishment is high.”

[Alaska just had its hottest May in 91 years]

This stunning tweet from the Alaska Division of Forestry sort of says it all:

This map from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center helps put Alaska’s wildland fire situation in perspective. pic.twitter.com/gQx8g2wkNs

— AK Forestry (@AK_Forestry) June 24, 2015

Granted, according to reporting by the Alaska News Dispatch, while this year’s fire numbers are high total acreage burned so far hasn’t been that huge. Nonetheless, it’s quite a busy start to the summer — and there’s a lot of fire season left to go.

All of which is troubling for multiple reasons: (1) Recent research suggests that more Alaskan wildfires, and more large Alaskan fires in particular, are a trend; (2) In some cases, wildfires in Alaska don’t just consume trees, grasses or tundra. They can burn away soils as well and threaten permafrost, frozen soil beneath the ground, and so potentially help to trigger additional release of carbon to the atmosphere.

“One major concern about wildfires becoming more frequent in permafrost areas is the potential to put the vast amounts of carbon stored there at increased risk of being emitted and further amplify warming,” said Todd Sanford, a climate scientist at Climate Central and lead author of the group’s newly released report on Alaskan wildfires, by e-mail.

[Why you should be worried about declining snow cover across North America]

Sanford’s new report shows that this year is not an anomaly — it is part of a trend. The report found that there has been an upswing in large Alaskan fires,

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/24/more-than-200-fires-are-burning-in-alaska-right-now-heres-why-thats-a-big-deal/ 

If Greenland goes, it is becoming clear that it won’t go quietly.

Scientists have already documented entire meltwater lakes vanishing in a matter of hours atop the vast Greenland ice sheet, as huge crevasses open beneath them. And now, they’ve cast light on the mechanisms behind another dramatic geophysical effect brought on by the rumbling and melting of this mass of often mile-thick ice: earthquakes.

In a new paper in the journal Science, a team of researchers from Swansea University in the UK, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and several other institutions explain how the loss of Greenland’s ice can generate glacial earthquakes. In brief: When vast icebergs break off at the end of tidal glaciers, they tumble in the water and jam the glaciers themselves backwards. The result is a seismic event detectable across the Earth.

[Scientists finally have an explanation for why huge lakes atop Greenland are vanishing]

“These are all around magnitude 4.6 to 5.2, they’re all pretty close to magnitude 5,” says Meredith Nettles of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “Which is a pretty big earthquake.”

Granted, these earthquakes aren’t caused by faults – they’re caused by massive movements of ice and how those impact the ground beneath. Compared with the early 1990s, Nettles says, scientists are now measuring seven times as many of these glacial earthquakes coming from Greenland — the rate has shot up as the ice sheet has begun to lose more mass from the calving of icebergs at the front end of glaciers.

To understand the dynamics behind how these glacial earthquakes are happening, the researchers put GPS instruments atop Greenland’s fast moving Helheim Glacier, which is located in the southeast part of Greenland, across the Denmark strait from Iceland. They also monitored the glacier’s calving front, where it meets the water, by camera, and used global seismic data to track earthquake occurrences.

To get a better sense of what they discovered, you first have to wrap your mind around how big these calving icebergs actually are. The amount of ice mass that breaks off in large iceberg calvings from Helheim Glacier, explains Nettles, is around a gigaton, or a billion metric tons. “If you took the whole National Mall, and covered it up with ice, to a height about four times as high as the [Washington] monument,” says Nettles, you’d have about a gigaton of ice. “All the way down from the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial.”

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/25/giant-earthquakes-are-shaking-greenland-and-scientists-just-figured-out-the-disturbing-reason-why/?tid=pm_pop_b

One theory also brought forward by some astute tectonic scientists is that as the weight of the ice, lessened by melting, leads to a lighter weight of this entire continental shelf. For some people this could be insignificant. But this can lead to "Greenland sitting higher" (floating higher) on the magma below. Of course these changes over millennium can "upset" the magma flow and create "real" earthquakes further on. One needs to be aware, as changes can happen suddenly without warning, like an iceberg tipping over.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at reducing restrictions on oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic in order to "unleash American energy".

The US president said it would create "thousands and thousands" of jobs, despite a downturn in the oil market.

It could undo a ban put in place by Barack Obama in order to protect swathes of the ocean from development.

But Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the decision was better than being held hostage by "foreign entities".

Getting rid of Mr Obama's environmental protections was one of Mr Trump's promises to voters while on the campaign trail.

As he signed the order, called the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy, Mr Trump said: "Our country's blessed with incredible natural resources, including abundant offshore oil and natural gas reserves, but the federal government has kept 94% of these offshore areas closed for exploration and production.

read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39753223

How do you spell Trump?: i - d - i- o - t....