November 2009 Archives

China's weather manipulation is the perfect set up for a special effects laden, all-star disaster movie

EARLY-NOVEMBER blizzards in and around Beijing caused roughly $650m (€434.7m) in damages, and have been called China's worst snowstorm in five decades. Snows essentially crippled the area, and even shut down the airports.

And China's recent activity in weather modification is being blamed for the storms.

Although the Chinese government has been proactive with its weather-changing program since 1995, the globe first took notice when China proclaimed that there would be no rain on the 2008 Summer Olympics.

And there wasn't, although who should take the credit for that has been up for debate.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office (love the name!) is in charge of these operations, employing 50,000, many in the field working at other jobs like farming, and when given the order, firing artillery shells loaded with silver iodide into the skies.

The Chinese method of cloud control is to essentially drain the clouds before the important ceremony. Not that the drought stricken areas of China, including those near the capital, don't need the water.

The Chinese government especially loves clear skies over Beijing on important days, whether historical or political.

And the weather in Beijing during President Obama's visit has been clear skies--although November cold, about 20º F/-5º C.

[So if someone really wanted to, they could even blame the early November Beijing snowstorms on Obama! (Cover mouth, and snicker like a little kid.)]

Residents of the blizzard-blighted areas of China are angry that they haven't been given enough warning, pointing to the snowstorms' destruction and disruptiveness, wondering about the wisdom of tinkering with nature.

While the US-based Weather Modification Association (an organization I simply must join!) tells The Wall Street Journal, "Chinese weather modification... is a really closed program." personally, though, I'm very disappointed that the Chinese are using tried-and-true methods like cloud seeding, as opposed to something out of the SPECTRE playbook:
a hypersonic beam fired from a satellite in orbit to vibrate the clouds,
or the Zen-like methodology of using a butterfly flapping its wings in, say, Montreal causing a thunderstorm in Xiajin?

Then there's the old fave, sharks with lasers on their heads.

Cloud seeding first came to my attention when I was a kid: it was July 5 (for our non-US readers, that is the day after Independence Day), and my stepfather (the same one that taught me how to make my own gunpowder) told me that there would be a huge rainstorm in a few days. "All the gunpowder from the fireworks will seed the clouds," he said.

And despite the propensity for at least the occasional summer shower, there usually was a huge rainstorm a few days after July 4th in the New York City region--at least until the city cracked down on the citizens' right to blow stuff up on The Fourth of July.

Another form of cloud control, I suppose.

So a gazillionaire fulfills a childhood dream and a railroad has a new owner; what does that really mean for the chemical industry?


ONE OF the best movies I've ever seen was out the window of the Tokyo to Kyoto shinkansen, the "bullet train," when I gazed out the window semi-exhausted after four days vacationing in Tokyo, with my iPod set on random. I like rail travel, when it's done right, much like the Japanese and much of Europe have achieved: not opulence, but decent service both on the train and in scheduling. I am one of many who heap scorn on Amtrak.

So when I heard that super-investor Warren Buffett was buying a railroad, I got really excited, thinking he was investing in commercial travel rather than freight hauling - but I was wrong:

Buffett's conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway (BH), is paying roughly $26bn (€17.3bn) for the 77.4% of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) it doesn't already own, says The New York Times.

But Fox Business Network says BH is paying a premium of 31.5% over BNSF's November 2 closing stock price, valuing the railroad at $34bn, 18 times estimated 2010 earnings.

Buffett says he's always wanted to have a railroad: "This is all happening because my father didn't buy me a train set as a kid," the billionaire told The New York Times.

While this means nothing, zilch, bupkiss, for my future travel and sightseeing plans, what will this mean for the chemical industry?

In 2008, rail moved roughly 170m tonnes of chemicals and chemical-related products, the second-largest railroad commodity in terms of volume after coal, says the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

BNSF is one of the handful of railroads that control about 90% of the freight shipped by rail in North America, and in November 2008, Chris Jahn, president of the National Association of Chemical Distributors (NACD), told ICIS Chemical Business: "Basically, two-thirds of the chemical industry is a captive shipper - when a chemical manufacturer or distributor has only one railroad serving its facility, that's a monopoly."

In a survey of 2003-2007, the ACC found that several of the largest railroads overcharged chemical industry customers by $6.4bn (€5.12bn).

The Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009 is supposed to help change that, by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and engage in rail antitrust enforcement regarding collective rate agreements.

But as of the first week in November, the website govtrack.us says, "sometimes the text of one bill is incorporated into another bill, and in those cases the original bill, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned."

Will Buffett's ownership change things? Probably not, but with this very well known, quite public figure as the face of a railroad, it may become easier to bring grievances to BNSF that it was before.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the times, but it seems like nobody tries to save their cash anymore

THE KINGDOM of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly made statements to the effect that the nation should be financially compensated if it loses oil revenues because of reduced petroleum consumption that results from climate-change programs.

Some experts believe that this is a stalling tactic by the Saudis, in an effort to confound the upcoming December climate talks in Copenhagen.

"Oil exporters have always, in my view, far overblown the near-term effects of carbon limits on demand for their products," David Victor, professor, School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times in early October.

"For the Saudis this may be a deal-breaker, but the Saudis are not essential players [in the upcoming climate summit]... One sign that a climate agreement is effective is that big hydrocarbon exporters hate it," Victor said.

Be that as it may, most entries in the media have been covering this story as if they had trouble deciding whether to file it in the business section of the newspaper or the "Weird But True" column.
Not that you can really blame them - it is a story that leads to a level of outrageousness.

The introductory paragraph from this Associated Content item certainly sets a tone:
"If the world community actually comes to a climate change agreement that involves cutting dependence on oil, one country intends to demand a bailout. That country is not an impoverished, third world nation."

Then, the author editorializes in a way that would make most journalists jealous:
"The idea of the Saudis demanding a financial bailout seems to be brazen beyond belief."

Stories from Reuters and The New York Times were more sober in tone - no editorializing, plenty of quotes - and that's when a lot of this story sounds bonkers:

"We are among the most vulnerable countries, economically," Saudi negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban told Reuters in April.

In October, he said in The New York Times, "Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us."

In 2008, Saudi oil revenue increased by 37% from 2007 to $281bn, (€189bn) says Saudi Arabia-based Jadwa Investment.

Without a "Vroom," will those new silent electric cars still make drivers want to "Zoom"?

WHETHER THEY wind up powered by lithium - but not necessarily Bolivian lithium - or by some small lizards running on gerbil wheels hooked up to dynamos, or by some new, as yet uncommercialized method of generating electricity, like by siphoning the glowing fluids from fireflies, electric vehicles (EV) will be upon us soon enough.

EVs are nearly silent when compared to the average car's internal combustion engine. A 2008 study by the University of California, Riverside, showed that test subjects could hear a gasoline-powered auto when it was 28 feet away, but that EVs were only heard by the time they were seven feet away.

In an effort to prevent a person in the near-future from become a statistic, safety experts are encouraging manufacturers of EVs and hybrid EVs (HEV) to install speakers in the bumpers to emit a sound to warn pedestrians.

This is supported the US Congress' introduction of the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, which requires a federal standard to protect pedestrians from super-quiet cars.

It would be great to say that this is a silly idea - enough people use their car's horn as it is, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to use it more - although a good way to add on to an EV's price tag,
and while I agree with advocacy groups like Plug In America that say drivers be more responsible with their new vehicles, I think these bumper-speakers might be a fairly good idea.

Because in the world where these bumper-speakers do not exist, the first person to get hit by an EV will probably some adult moron who didn't "cross at the green/not in between," as the public service announcement jingle from the 1970s warned children at the time.

And then, that same knucklehead will go and sue everybody he and his ambulance-chasing lawyer could sue but most assuredly the automaker, and any of their suppliers.

So while initially developed to prevent accidents with children, animals and the vision-impaired, these front-attached noisemakers may wind up preventing lawsuits, as well.

Of course, there are those who say that the problem isn't that the new cars are too quiet, it's that we have gotten used to having our ears routinely overwhelmed with the sounds of autos.

By the way, these new bumper-speakers are going to need some sort of cute nickname: BS'ers? Hmmm... That may become a very popular nomenclature for these devices, but not one that any corporate entity would respond to, I think - but what do I know? I thought the term "Hummer" would never make it as a name for the SUV.