The Surveillance Catalog - The Wall Street Journal As the Internet has grown to handle more data, monitoring companies have had to keep up. Interception now can mean taking all the traffic from the Internet backbone and funneling it through devices that inspect the packets of data, determine what is inside them, and make decisions about whether to copy them for law enforcement. The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia 5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Why Arctic sea ice shouldn't leave anyone cold - Arctic Sea Ice The sea ice is leaving us a bit more every year. It's time to start contemplating its absence, which is why I teamed up with Kevin McKinney to write an extended version of the shorter piece you might see pop up here and there. Because you know, disappearing sea ice isn't without consequences. The first world in ancient Norse mythology, Niflheim, sounds just like the Arctic ice. …sea ice became a feature of the Arctic by 47 [million years before the present], following a pronounced decline [in carbon dioxide concentrations]… Ice was apparently most widespread during the last 2–3 million years, in accordance with Earth's overall cooler climate. Since modern humans are just 200,000 years old, the ice might as well be eternal. But not unchanging. Polyak et al. continues: Nevertheless, episodes of considerably reduced sea ice or even seasonally ice-free conditions occurred... But that has changed. And if it does? But what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. Images used:
Can we expect the economy to keep growing? If we read the financial pages, economic growth seems to be viewed as the “normal” situation to which economies inevitably return. But is it really? If we look back over the past 50 years, or even over the past 100 years, economic growth has predominated. Over the longer term, we know that people have become more prosperous, and that world population has grown. Let’s think about this a little further. The question is really where we are now, relative to the hard limits that we know must exist. What is needed to produce goods and services? If we are going to have an economy, we will need goods and services. 1. 2. 4. Once we start moving to larger numbers of people, some type of financial system is needed. Has Economic Growth Always Been Possible? If we look back through history and pre-history, what we see is a long struggle against limits of various kinds. Many societies have collapsed, as documented by Jared Diamond and by Joseph Tainter. Forces that Have Enabled Economic Growth to Date
Solve For X - George Washington Carver - R. Buckminster Fuller - Arthur C. - Marie Curie - Albert Einstein Peak oil is real and will stunt any economic recovery During the last century, society squandered 500 million years of captured sunlight on drag races, traffic jams, private jets and overheated office buildings - warns campaign group Oil company cheerleaders proclaiming huge supplies of oil are dead wrong. Peak oil is as real as rain, and it is here now. Not 2050. Not 2020. (The oil plateau: The calm before the decline. When you read or hear about "10 billion barrels" of oil discovered somewhere, here is how to think about that - a third of that is probably not recoverable or entirely illusory. But that is not all, the volume decline includes a decline in quality and net energy. (Peak discoveries occurred 50 years ago. United States oil production peaked in 1970, exactly as Hubbert predicted. In 2010, the US Military Joint Forces Command predicted the end of "surplus oil production capacity" - their way of saying "peak oil" - and warned "the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10-million barrels per day". Dead on. Jon. Clearly true.
IEA's "Golden Age of Gas Scenario" Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change By Joe Romm on June 7, 2011 at 12:50 pm "IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change" The International Energy Agency has just issued a special report titled, “Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?” The answer to that question is “yes” only if you are a natural gas producer who doesn’t care much about humanity. For the rest of us, the report makes clear natural gas by itself does nothing to avert catastrophic climate change. Quite the reverse. The UK Guardian‘s story put it well: Natural gas is not the “panacea” to solve climate change that fossil fuel industry lobbyists have been claiming, according to new research from the International Energy Agency.Reliance on gas would lead the world to a 3.5C temperature rise, according to the IEA. Not exactly a champagne moment. UPDATE: I’ve added a featured comment (and link) by Tyler Hamilton, business columnist at The Toronto Star. The reason is clear. So much for a Golden Age. Absolutely
Japan heading for energy death spiral? Japan's only energy source: oil? (credit: Mohan R/Wikimedia Commons) Post-Fukushima Japan may be approaching an energy death spiral, says Nobuo Tanaka, past executive director of the International Energy Agency. He argues that if Japan does not find a way to “turn on” its now shuttered nuclear energy reactors, not only will Japan’s already sluggish economic condition be crushed with much larger oil and gas imports from Russia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East — but because of the costs and risk uncertainty — Japan’s powerful manufacturing base may begin pulling out of the world’s third largest economy. Tanaka explained that at current levels, Japan consumes about 5 million barrels of oil a day. Japan has 54 nuclear energy reactors — only two of which are running at the moment and both of which are scheduled for regular check ups and will be shut down by early May 2012.
The narrowing window for a transition to a sustainable industrial society The viability of modern civilization depends on two important dimensions: 1) the continuous availability and deployment of essential resources and 2) the long-term productivity and habitability of our environment. Acquiring and deploying the necessary resources tends to be a short-term goal. We may have stockpiles of ready food, fuel and other nondurable goods, but they are not typically meant to last for years. Our long-term goal ought to be maintaining the productivity and habitability of our environment. It is, after all, the only environment we have. All of this has implications for the amount of time we have to transition to a sustainable industrial society. Even if we discounted climate change (which we shouldn't), increased cultivation using industrial farm methods will tend to degrade the soil and eventually bring down agricultural productivity. So, it turns out that we have several additional causes for the shrinking of the transition window.
Energy Scenarios Millennium Project 2020 Global Energy Scenarios Introduction Abstract of the Scenarios Scenario 1. Business as Usual – The Skeptic Scenario 2. Scenario 3. Scenario 4. Comparative Analysis of the Scenarios Introduction The world is increasingly aware that fundamental changes will be necessary to meet the growing demand for energy. These scenarios describe how alternative global energy conditions could emerge. The four axes for the scenarios were: rate of technological breakthroughs, strength of environmental movement impacts, status of economic growth, and conditions of geopolitics, including war, peace, and terrorism. Abstract of the Scenarios: Scenario 1. This scenario assumes that the global dynamics of change continue without great surprises or much change in energy sources and consumption patterns other than those that might be expected as a result of the change dynamics and trends already in place. Click here or on the title of the scenario to get to the full text of this scenario. Box 1.