Former President Bush’s library officially opened last week in Texas.

Last week saw the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum – the 21st such structure erected to the memory of a former president in this country. While the act of erecting what amounts to a shrine to one’s legacy is something one might expect to be relegated to historical dictatorships in Ancient Egypt, at least former Presidents aren’t looked to as gods in their own right – even if some politics find themselves deified for decades to come.

As one would expect, the library is not merely dedicated to Mr. Bush and the events of his eight years in office, but they are conveniently whitewashed for the sake of future generations – the only thing helping Mr. Bush’s poll numbers these days being the actual distance in time between him and January of 2009. You will find plenty of exploitation of the September 11th terrorist attacks, but you’ll also find that since that time Mr. Bush kept the country safe so net-net, that’s a good thing. You’ll find a large painting of he and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair – his #1 ally on the international scene when it came time for the Iraq invasion. Mr. Blair can probably not even count on similar admiration back home, the monarchy at least providing the one good service of preventing chief executives being anything more than the mere politicians they should be.

There is no wing of the library dedicated to his opposition for a woman’s right to choose. There’s no shrine to squeezing as much bigotry and hatred toward same-sex couples as he could from the countryside, riding that national tide of religious-based ignorance to a victory in 2004. Speaking of victories, there’s also nary a peep of the circumstances under which Mr. Bush first assumed office – complete with the legally mystifying ”this counts today and then it’ll never count again” ruling by the Supreme Court in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case.

There is a war room though!

9/11 happened. After that Mr. Bush’s record on terrorism was fantastic!

Titled the “Defending Freedom” room, Iraq and Afghanistan are all rolled up and packaged in the overarching Global War on Terror theme – just as it was presented by the Bush Administration throughout the 2000′s, with none of the picking apart that historians will assuredly be left doing for decades to come. In this room, in this former President’s world, Iraq was still involved in the War on Terror and is still in the same breath as Afghanistan. A lack of weapons of mass destruction, lack of any sort of alliance with the Taliban, and lack of any involvement with September 11th be damned – this gross miscalculation and expenditure of bodies, equipment, and dollars must be left intact for the sake of the message.

You’ll see a “threat assessment” on former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. You won’t see the presidential daily briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”.

You’ll see a mentioning of the Bush Tax Cuts, but likely no realistic charts of just how much that contributed to wiping out budget surpluses of the late 1990′s and, eventually, made the hole that needed to be dug to get out of The Great Recession just that much deeper.

“Free people will set the course of history”, but a politician can write his own version of it as well.

There’s interactivity to be had, when you the visitor are given real life scenarios from the Bush years and are subsequently asked how you would handle it – a veiled “you think you’re so good, you try being President” at the very least. The lead-up to the Iraq war, the decision for the surge, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 crash are your topics and after you enter in whatever you think the correct choice would be (it’s actually a multiple choice format) you’re responded to with a “that’s nice, here’s why we did this instead” recording from members of Mr. Bush’s staff. Would you have sent all the resources you could muster into New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall? Would you have put strings on the $700bn bailout of the banking industry? Would you have not invaded Iraq and wrap up Afghanistan in time for the 2004 elections? Thanks, and here is why you are wrong.

That’s not to say that previous presidents don’t or didn’t have their own egregious omissions of truth when their Presidential libraries opened. Mr. Reagan’s didn’t mention the Iran-Contra Affair. Mr. Nixon’s was originally whitewashed of Watergate. Time has fixed both of those omissions at each respective site, and perhaps time will have the same cure for this latest edifice to a former politician. Mr. Clinton’s library doesn’t touch the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, one would have to imagine that Mr. Obama’s library won’t make mention of the drone war policy, and other sins of the past will be tucked away for the sake of being able to write one’s legacy after one’s tenure has finally come to an end.

That, of course, brings one back to the problem with Presidential libraries to begin with. Whatever noble efforts they may make toward providing the American people with key insights into presidential history, the facts are not presented as black & white. They’re skewed, taught as the truth, and passed on that way for years to come. A presidential library is one last chance for a former president to exasperate the negatives that his critics hated, and give one more rallying point to supporters – Mr. Bush sadly not alone in this meddling with history.

Instead of the seasonable cold weather being where it “should” be, such anomalies in temperature dictate that the cold needs to go somewhere else. The somewhere else is south. Graphically, that looks like this:

Temperature anomalies for first two weeks of April 2013

Arctic air was forced south, and while you see a large chunk of above average temperatures dominating the arctic region, you see another area of significantly cool readings stretching from central Alaska through a large portion of non-Arctic Canada, down into the central United States. Widespread readings of 5 – 8°C (9 – 14°F) below normal were seen during this time. Coincidentally enough, this is where there have been a series of major snowstorms as of late, including an April 8 – 10th blockbuster that shattered snowfall records in Rapid City, SD, by a full 10 inches. (28.2″ the new record, 18″ the old in 2001)

It is somewhat difficult to look at temperatures on any given day from different locations and spot just how out of whack readings were without the assistance of charts like the one above. For example: on one of the more extreme days of warmth in the Arctic regions and cold air much further south, April 7th, the high temperature in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada was -4°C (25°F). In Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the high was -3°C (26°F). Both may seem seasonably chilly at first glance. Here’s the problem: Iqaluit is at 63°N. Calgary is at 51°N. The average high on April 7th in Iqaluit is -14°C (6°F). In Calgary, it’s 6°C (42°F). On the same day and at the same time, Iqaluit was 10°C above normal, Calgary was 9°C below normal.

It would be one thing if it was a one day outlier or even a couple days of abnormal weather. These were readings and departures from normal seen across thousands of miles, for weeks at a time. That is a major pattern shift of note, and it is not a one-off pattern shift either. Keep in mind the general idea of a warmer North Pole and cooler inland regions across North America similar to the first chart posted. Now take a look at departures from normal for all of 2013 so far:

Year-to-date departure from normal temperatures

Note that this isn’t just a North American phenomenon. It’s duplicated across the entire northern hemisphere. And it’s not just this year, either. Here’s the same map for all of 2012:

2012 temperature departure from average

All of this fits right in with observations of record Arctic sea ice loss, and serves as a launching pad for ever more chaotic weather – as the further south that typically cold air is pushed, the more violent the reactions with warmer air that are seen. Again going back to the April 8 – 10 storm that buried portions of the Upper Midwest, extremely rare hail-producing thunder snow storms were seen in parts of Nebraska. While damage occurred due to 2″ diameter hail in Omaha in a more typical rain-producing thunderstorm, nickel-sized hail was observed at Grand Island, NE during a thunderstorm with a surface temperature of -3°C (27°F), with a nearby report of 1″ diameter hail with a surface temperature of -8°C (17°F). These are extremely rare weather events – it is rare enough to get thunder & lightning to occur even during the most violent of snowstorms, but to have significant hail fall as well truly takes some unprecedented weather setups.

Generally colder than average conditions are expected to continue across much of central North America for at least the next week, though with some moderation. A break in the polar heat wave would likely be needed to return conditions across the rest of North America to something more closely resembling familiar springtime weather, though as the above charts seem to indicate, what is “normal” isn’t so common anymore.

In late March, North Korea announced that it had officially scrapped the 1953 armistice agreement that ended open warfare between the North and South. It’s a card that the North has played multiple times since 1996 with no renewal of combat to follow on. The North has resorted to more provocative measures to earn a military response from the South and its western allies – more recently including the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. There have been three nuclear tests that have drawn international condemnation - in 2006, 2009, and February of this year – but again no military response.

The curious story of what a nation with military weaponry that has barely advanced beyond the best of what Communist countries had to offer in the 1960s and 70s really expects to gain from inviting some of the most advanced firepower on the planet to strike its territory continues to unfold – the current drama being latest chapter in a book that history has already written the ending for a few times: (probably) much ado about nothing.

In times with such heightened tensions though, there is always the quite rational fear that someone doing the wrong thing at the wrong time could provide the spark for something quite deadly and unwanted. Former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe Wesley Clark addressed this potential in a post on CNN:

Yes, it is always possible that Kim may doubt that the United States would act, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Or, perhaps he miscalculates how far he can push the South Koreans. It is possible that a North provocation could be so extreme that the South would be compelled by its own domestic politics to respond militarily — say a tit-for-tat ship-sinking. Or maybe such an incident occurs by accident, if overzealous commanders make a wrong move.

And then Kim, fearing that his own associates would mistake forbearance for weakness, would escalate in turn, thus initiating a cycle of intensifying moves that could spread conflict and turn into a war that neither side could back away from.

An accidental war is probably the most-likely catalyst for an actual conflict between the North and South – providing North Korea doesn’t become suicidal and tries to launch an all out attack on anything across the 38th parallel.

After weeks of high tension and drama, everyone’s on edge – the slightest incorrectly spoken words are good enough for a brand new news cycle of stoked fears, as a South Korean politician recently found out:

It started during a Monday South Korean parliamentary session when a lawmaker asked Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae whether intelligence officials have noted more personnel and vehicle traffic at North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility.

“There is such an indication,” Mr. Ryoo said, according to an Associated Press account.

This led some Seoul-based journalists to write that another nuclear test might be imminent. Bloomberg News reported, for instance, that the detonation of a North Korean nuclear device and a missile test could occur as early as this week.

But Ryoo later said he was “startled” by the way his remarks had been interpreted, and other South Korean officials moved quickly to tamp down the test speculation. A Defense Ministry spokesman said that the North does not appear to be preparing for a detonation in the near future.

In the unlikely event that shots are actually fired in any direction, from all indications it appears the position of the United States – and hopefully the position that is imposed on South Korea to prevent things from getting out of control – will be one of proportional response:

American officials described the new “counterprovocation” plan as calling for an immediate but proportional “response in kind” — hitting the source of any North Korean attack with similar weapons. For example, if the North Koreans were to shell a South Korean island that had military installations, as has occurred in the past, the plan calls for the South to retaliate quickly with a barrage of artillery of similar intensity.

South Korea’s national security director said Sunday that the North this week might launch one of its new missiles. If so, Pentagon officials said they would be ready to calculate its trajectory within seconds and try to shoot it down if it appeared headed toward impact in South Korea, Japan or Guam, an American territory. But they planned to do nothing if it were headed toward open water, even if it went over Japan, as one previous North Korean test did.

Perhaps most importantly in the end will be the opinion and stance of China. The China of today is vastly different than the one that provided manpower and resources during the Korean war. They have a much larger stake in the game of world stability – the continued vibrancy of their economy depends upon it. Trouble on their borders of any sort, whether it be military skirmishes or an all out war that could potentially cause a refugee crisis, is not in their best interest. To that end, the new President of China, Xi Jinping, has issued thinly-veiled language to the North to tone it down:

No country “should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain”, President Xi Jinping told a forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. He did not name North Korea but he appeared to refer to Pyongyang.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman said Xi’s comments were unprecedented.

“It suggests to me, as I’ve watched the ratcheting up of frustration among Chinese leaders over the last many years, that they’ve probably hit the 212-degree boiling point as it relates to North Korea,” he told CNN on Sunday.

As has been the case during previous cries for attention by the North, an all out conflict is extremely unlikely. There are tell-tale signs of an impending conflict that are not happening: the mass movement of forces by the North toward the border, re-positioning of missile batteries, loading ballistic missiles and having them on launch pads. North Korea does not appear to want to put its money where its mouth is, as usual, which is fine as far as international stability is concerned. This is just another storm of shouting from the North that the international community will patiently wait to subside – probably to the sounds of a new package of humanitarian aid to help the impoverished North Korean citizenry.

Problems with radioactive water containment continue at Japan’s crippled Fukushima power plant.

This week marks one year and one month since the Tōhoku Earthquake, the resulting tsunami, and nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. It is a still ongoing disaster – setbacks making the road to full radioactive containment that much longer.

Questions have been raised about the effectiveness of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to handle the situation from day one, and the latest embarrassing setbacks have done nothing to reassure the outside world. Rats, of all things, are responsible for one of the more recent incidents at the plant:

A “rat-like animal” was the cause of a power supply problem that disabled cooling systems at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant last week. The rodent touched a switchboard and triggered a short circuit, Tepco Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said.

The 25-centimeter-long animal was found dead in the switchboard, a TEPCO official told Kyodo News.

The official said the company will take stronger measures to prevent small animals from entering the switchboard in the future.

The March 18 outage disabled nine facilities at the plant. TEPCO dispatched 25 specialists to deal with the problem, but it took 30 hours for technicians to repair the systems.

As for those “stronger measures to prevent small animals” from causing more power outages which could potentially release more radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean?

Workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant who were installing wire nets Friday to keep rats away from a vital cooling system instead tripped that system, causing it to fail for the second time in weeks.

The spent-fuel pool at the site’s No. 3 reactor went without fresh cooling water for almost three hours on Friday afternoon, said the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco.

While the New York Times article on Saturday suggested from sources that there wouldn’t be any risk of radioactive water release, it took barely 24 hours for those hopes to be freshly doused. That accidental Friday shutdown may be responsible for another two leaks of radioactive water:

The fresh leak on Sunday comes a day after Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said up to 120 tonnes of contaminated water may have escaped from another of the seven underground reservoir tanks at the tsunami-damaged plant.

TEPCO said radioactivity was detected in water outside a tank in the latest leak but that the contaminated water was unlikely to flow into the sea.

“We have determined that a minimal amount of water was feared to have leaked from the tank although there was no decline in the level of water inside the tank,” it said in a statement.

The tanks store water used to cool down the reactors after radioactive caesium is removed but other radioactive substances remain.

Google Maps recently provided a street-level view of areas near the plant nearly frozen in time, too radioactive to resettle.

Radioactive waste water is spread among seven underground pools at the site. The pools are lined with three layers of waterproof lining and thick clay, so the revelation that radioactive water is still leaking is disconcerting to say the very least. Pool #2 – where the significant link was reported – is in the process of being emptied into other pools so repairs can be made, but smaller leaks in pool #3 are calling into question the structural integrity of the entire operation which, when you get down to it, was badly rattled by an original a 9.0 magnitude earthquake.

The nuclear industry in Japan remains barely existent in the wake of the 2011 calamity. Of the 50 reactors around the country (providing 30% of the country’s power), all but two remain closed for safety inspections - with a populace largely supportive of any resumption of services from those reactors to be temporary at most. Alternative energy of any sort is being sought after – from importing more fossil fuels to considering tapping into geothermal energy. Japan will likely remain in a scramble for these new sources of power for the foreseeable future as the credibility of nuclear power has been decimated in that nation.

Pointing out that this oil is of the tar sands variety is an important distinction when it comes to the toxicity and impact. The oil that comes from deposits in North Dakota and Alberta is in the ground in a much more near-solid state, closer to quicksand than a free flowing liquid. To liquefy the oil for extraction and export, chemicals are injected into the sandy mixture. Chief among these chemicals are Benzene, Toluene (think paint thinner), and Xylene – though with any given tar sands operation you can get a wide variety of extra additives.

Cleanup is expected to last weeks and, as these events tend to play out, will be starting with the ugly stuff that can be photographed:

“There are workers with steam cleaners dealing with much of the oil on the streets,” [Faulkner County Judge Allen] Dodson said. “Hopefully that will help eliminate the main bulk of the smell, which has been overpowering these past few days. The air quality is getting better.”

The smell from the oil could be detected from areas of Conway [10 miles north] and as far south as Maumelle [8 miles].

The cleanup is expected to be long and expensive, and there is as yet no word on what will happen to the families whose lawns, streets, and in some cases foundations, have suddenly been turned into a toxic mess.

Extensive sea-ice fracturing in the Arctic Ocean – February, 2013

The boxed off area points to a close-up that you can view here. The mass fracturing was caused by warmer temperatures being pushed into the Arctic by a high pressure system in January and was made worse by a series of strong storms that moved across the region in the first couple weeks of February. A similar pattern of intense storms helped drive total ice coverage in the Arctic to brand new record lows this past summer. The cracks above are up to 600 miles long.

There are two ways to view the amount of ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean. The first, posted a number of times before here, is the total square kilometer coverage area. Right now, that’s in the middle of the pack compared to past observations:

Sea ice coverage

This indicates that a rather normal-to-slightly-below-normal looking section of the Arctic Ocean is covered by ice. The red line from 2012 shows how that dramatically shrunk during the late summer days – smashing the previous record low. The problem with coming off a year where ice coverage shrunk to a record low, and probably the reason behind why the ice could start to break up so quickly this year, is that the new ice that formed over the winter is just that – new ice. It’s not as thick as sea ice would be that has remained for years, let alone decades. The thinner ice is much more vulnerable to quickly changing weather patterns and is much easier for ocean currents and strong storms to break.

To visualize the total ice volume, and not just its surface coverage area, we wind up with a chart like this:

Sea ice volume since 1979

While the amount of surface area covered by the ice cap is close to the middle of the pack, the total amount of ice beneath the surface – the cubic volume – is not only below normal, it’s trending toward and flirting with record lows already. With unrelenting melt seasons pushing ice retreat toward and past new records almost on an annual basis, the Arctic ice has little if any chance to recover, which just sets the stage for a repeat performance the following year. This has been the story of the rapidly receding Arctic ice cap, and this will likely continue to be the story in 2013.

Visually, the continued improvement looks as follows:

Monthly Job Data Since The Great Recession

Of course, there’s still a very long road to go until a full recovery.

The current job recovery vs. previous post-WWII recoveries

While it is true that more than half of the job percentage lost from the depths of The Great Recession have been recovered, the obvious problem is that we are moving into the second quarter of 2013 and there is still a long way to go before a full recovery. At the present job creation rate, the full recovery may not happen until the 2016 time-frame. By definition, that time frame could not experience any new recessions or setbacks of any sort, less the ultimate recovery date be pushed even further out.

That the U.S. economy will likely see its 37th month in a row of job growth as of March 2013 is quite a remarkable feat. To hope or expect this streak to run past 60 months just to get back where we were in 2007 is dangerous and foolish hoping.

As a reminder, the sluggishness of the economy is a self-inflicted wound. Government is the problem. Of course, that phrase means something entirely different in reality than it would in the pipe dreams of small-government conservative minded people. Self-imposed austerity measurements, pounded through by the Tea Party-led Republicans in the House of Representatives, have continued to create a serious drag on the job market. That is seen below:

Total employment change vs. government

Both of the lines are indexed to the end of the statistical recession, which was in June of 2009. Disregarding the spike in early 2010 because of temporary workers hired for the census, the private sector has been recovering nicely, while the public sector has continued to shrink – now by more than 3% and counting.

What is the public sector? While loosely defined in talking points as moochers on the government rolls –  faceless bureaucrats pushing paper around desks – in actuality they are the police, fire fighters, teachers, postal workers, and administrative personnel in various government agencies that are needed to keep the gears of government turning. They are the ones being hacked off left and right, and the effects of their disappearance have very real impacts in daily life.

Has a school closed in your district recently? Have the response times of emergency responders increased? Have firehouses been shuttered? Do you know a returning war veteran who can’t get any assistance from the VA in anything remotely close to a timely fashion? The above chart is why. Funding continues to be stripped (austerity), cuts follow, and society suffers.

Again disregarding the spike for the census, the peak government employment number was 22.679m in March of 2009. Since then 836,000 jobs have been lost – which still doesn’t count the jobs that are currently being impacted by mandatory furlough days as a result of the sequester. Today when you hear politicians speak of lofty goals about  doing things that would increase the number of teachers or fire fighters, that would improve public safety and strengthen neighborhoods, just keep in mind that there’s an 836,000-person gap (and growing) that needs to be over come just to where things were in 2009. Then you can talk about improvement.

As near political gridlock continues to be the dominant mindset in Washington, both of these trends look primed to continue – that is until the business cycle plays out as it always naturally does and another recession hits. Whether or not it happens before all the jobs lost since 2007 are restored is more of an academic debate. In that future recession, when calls for government stimulus will once again be loud, just remember that it will take that much more just to dig ourselves out of our own freely chosen and dug hole before any real stimulus could be applied.

At present rate, by the next recession the goals of stimulus won’t even be to put a band-aid on an economic wound: it will be calls from the populace to the government to please, please stop splaying the same wound open again and again and again.

The nighttime satellite view traces the economical and technological output of humanity across the planet. Many of the world’s coastlines are clearly outlined thanks to the bright lights of cities. Road networks and inland metropolises show up clearly, as do large-scale economic activities. Fishing fleets can be seen off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, and even larger ones dotting the western Pacific Rim. One of the odder sightings, however, came from the middle of the North American continent. When comparing with nighttime photos from ten years ago, new and vast stretches of light were suddenly visible over otherwise uninhabited stretches of prairie lands.

The oil boom in North Dakota is clearly visible by night.

Centered on the state of North Dakota, we see a stretch of light that rivals much larger cities to the south and east like Minneapolis and Chicago. What we have here isn’t a new megaopolis that grew from the grassland in the last ten years. Instead, we have clear evidence of the explosive growth of the oil industry in its 21st century form – dirty, deep under ground, full of fracking, and profitable.

The differences between 2003 and late 2013 are quite remarkable. Take a look at the side-by-side comparison:

The change in North Dakota from 2003 to 2013 shows the rise of the oil industry there.

From what was next to nothing has become a boom of economic activity of one of the most environmentally destructive kinds. It’s been great for workers though – the boom that began in late 2008 spared the region the huge spike in unemployment that the rest of the United States saw, North Dakota topping out at 4.2% unemployment in May of 2009. That rate has been as low as 2.8% as recently as last June – about as close to full employment as you can get.

The source of this oil has been known about for quite some time. The Bakken formation, which covers eastern Montana and western North Dakota, contains some amount of oil. The exact amount depends on when you ask and how optimistic you feel. In 1974 the estimate for the region was 10 billion barrels of oil (BBbls). In 1983 that was revised to 132 BBbls. By 1999 that became 413 BBbls. In 2006 that came down to 300 BBbls.

The oil locked in the formation is shale oil – not the nice liquid stuff that one gets from the Middle East. As a result the production method is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. That involves injecting every toxic liquid you could think of and then some down in order to liquefy the oil enough to make recovery easier. The true productive capability of the Bakken formation rests with how effective fracking can be over the long term. Estimates of however much of the oil is ultimately recoverable also very wildly – from as little as 1% to as much as 50.

Today’s Alberta, tomorrow’s North Dakota.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil producer, currently claims 260 BBbls in the ground. Taking the most optimistic Bakken estimate (503 BBbls from the 1999 estimate) and the most optimistic estimate on what can be extracted – 50% – there’s 96.7% of Saudi Arabia sitting underneath the ground in North Dakota and Montana, just waiting to be set free: with the small side effect of producing mile after mile after mile of hellish moonscape.

So why the lights from space, again?

Six years ago, this region was close to empty. The few ranchers who lived here produced wheat, alfalfa, oats and corn. The U.S. Geological Survey knew there were oil deposits underground, but deep down, 2 miles below the surface. It wasn’t till this century that the industry developed a way to pull that oil to the surface at a cost that made it practical. Fracking, as you probably know, means pumping water and chemicals down pipes, fracturing the rock, releasing the oil. The technology is hugely controversial, in part because of those lights.

When oil comes to the surface, it often brings natural gas with it, and according to North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources, 29 percent of the natural gas now extracted in North Dakota is flared off. Gas isn’t as profitable as oil, and the energy companies don’t always build the pipes or systems to carry it away. For a year (with extensions), North Dakota allows drillers to burn gas, just let it flare. There are now so many gas wells burning fires in the North Dakota night, the fracking fields can be seen from deep space.

…

This oil rush is so sudden, so enormous, North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. More than 41,000 workers got jobs there between 2008 and 2012. Only seven years ago, the U.S. was importing 60 percent of its oil. Now imports are down to 42 percent. The Bakken fields are helping to improve energy security.

On the other hand, says Peter Lehner, blogger for the Natural Resources Defense Council, every day drillers in North Dakota “burn off enough gas to heat half a million homes.” North Dakota law says that flares are subject to taxes and royalties after one year, even if the gas isn’t being sold. But critics suspect that the state keeps granting exceptions. And state regulators seem less than energetic when farmers call to complain about poisons in the air and water. Many farmers in North Dakota can’t prevent drillers from drilling — even if they’d like to. Decades ago, the rights to the minerals below those farms were separated from the rights to the land itself — which is why today, energy companies can move in, create drilling pads where they please, move in trucks and workers, without the farmers’ consent. In some places, North Dakota feels like Texas in the early 20th century, when cattlemen fought the oil men. This time it’s corn folks versus oil folks. Tempers are rising. Gas is burning. Drillers are drilling.

Why go through all the trouble? It’s economical, and it’s only going to become moreso. When oil prices were $50 and below in the decades before today, shale oil and fracking were not profitable in the least bit. No matter what the estimates were for the oil down there, if the recovery rate was close to 1%, it really wasn’t worth it. Somewhere between $70 and $80 per barrel it becomes much more profitable, so a better explanation of “why now?” is perhaps best laid out by this chart:

Twenty years of oil prices.

Buoyed by demand from Asia, the price of oil has risen to a new normal well above the levels needed to make shale oil profitable, and so the march to drill more continues. The bright lights emanating from North Dakota merely outline the latest puncture wounds into the planet – wounds that continue to be struck in the name of a ravenous appetite for relatively cheap energy.

As of last week, 58.87% of the continental United States is experiencing at least a “moderate” drought – 40.29% seeing a “severe” drought, 19.39% “extreme”, and 6.31% “exceptional”. Graphically speaking:

Drought coverage as of January 15, 2013

A look at drought conditions over the High Plains states.

The location of “extreme” and “exceptional” drought conditions are of the most concern, as they continue to remain over some of the most fertile regions on the continent, and are up stream of the great waterways that drive commerce and transportation across a large portion of the United States.

Portions of nine states in the central United States – South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas are experiencing ”exceptional” drought conditions, which carry broad-based impacts such as exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies.

As 2012 was one of the driest years on record in these regions since the Dust Bowl years since the 1930s, a continuation of these conditions into the latter winter and spring months of 2013 all but guarantee heavy crop losses for a second year in a row, if not total crop failures that were seen in numerous corn producing states toward late summer of 2012.

Nationally, the outlook does not look that good for most areas still caught up in the drought:

Drought outlook through spring 2013

While there is some relief possible for the upper Midwest, it is likely that the drought will continue in many of these areas, both because so much precipitation is needed to make up for the current deficit and because  longer term forecasts tend to rely on past observations of weather patterns. The general thinking is “if global patterns look like x, then the given impacts for a region should be y and z.” That sort of thinking gets muddled in well-established droughts.

Drought conditions in the Midwest states.

As you move into the spring and summer months and chances for rain start to include things like thunderstorms and other weather that we commonly associate with the warmer times, it is worth noting that one of the key ingredients for thunderstorms to form is a moist air mass. A moist air mass is helped along by water evaporating from the ground. If the ground is already bone dry, or at least much drier than it should be, there will be less moisture from evaporation and as a result, less rainfall. This is why longer term droughts have such staying power once they are established – and why longer term outlooks have e tendency to skew toward the optimistic when it comes to droughts finally breaking.

As was seen at the start of last year’s hurricane season, the further south one gets the more the need is for some sort of tropical system to bust the drought rather than counting on the west-to-east moving storm fronts of more northern latitudes. Tropical storms Beryl and Debby put significant dents in a smaller, yet very persistent, drought that is lingering over portions of the southeastern United States – even ending it for a time across most of northern Florida. That drought, much like the larger one across the central plains, is once again growing in coverage.

Economic impacts will be seen most visibly at the grocery store, as the continued dry conditions in key food producing regions are expected to drive meat prices up by at least 3 – 4% more than last year:

From ground beef to bacon, many red meat products are expected to cost between three and four percent more this year, according to a December 2012 forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Central Michigan University economics professor Jason Taylor said food makes up about 13 percent of a family’s budget, and, for lower income families, the figure is even higher.

“Rising food prices are never a good thing. This will eat away at Americans’ standards of living,” he said. “The public will make a lot of noise about how unhappy they are.”

The January 2013 yearly projected beef production is 24.805 million pounds, down 1.390 million pounds from 2011′s 26.195 million pounds. Red meat is down 875,000 pounds from 2011.

Corn prices could see even higher rises – topping out at nearly triple what they were in 2010 and 2011. “Topping out” assumes that the drought eventually does break at some point in 2013. If we are really in the middle of another drought that is on par with the Dust Bowl drought, then this pattern may not begin to break until 2014 (the height of the Dust Bowl drought lasted from 1934 – 1936, though in some areas began in 1933).

Another place to watch for severe economic impact is the Mississippi River. In December there were serious concerns that the Mississippi River north of the confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, IL, would be shut down to barge traffic this month as the river has continued to fall from the lack of precipitation this winter. Thanks to an effort by the Army Corps of Engineers which included blasting rock formations away from the bottom of the river to deepen the navigation channel by as much as two feet, the river was not shut down to traffic.

The worst is not over for the region, though. Just upstream from Cairo, the Mississippi River at Thebes, IL, is expected to fall by nearly nine feet in the next month:

Forecast for the Mississippi River at Thebes, IL.

The next choke point where shipping could be brought to a halt, though, is at St. Louis, MO. There, the Mississippi River is forecast to take a run at its all time lowest observed level, indicated on the following chart by “low flow”. The record has stood since 1940.

Forecast for the Mississippi River at St. Louis, MO.

A closing of the Mississippi River to barge navigation would sharply increase the costs of shipping goods through the central United States, as the burden to move goods would transfer off barges and onto trucks – at which point factors like freeway congestion and the cost of fuel could likely drive up prices for consumer goods even more than already forecast.

The lingering questions: will there be lessons learned. Will there be change?

It’s far too early into the aftermath of the Newtown shootings to sit back and honestly believe that real tangible good things will come from this – things beyond well wishes, prayers, donations, hugs, and hope. Proclamations of this being a matter of chance and therefore unpreventable notwithstanding, it is possible to lower the chance and frequency of not just major acts of unspeakable violence but of the everyday substandards that we as a society either accept or feel powerless to stop.

Societal change isn’t nearly as scary, draconian, or dystopian as it can sound if left to the voices of the afraid and ill-informed. A crime as horrific as a mass shooting – whether the number of causalities numbers 2, 27, or 100, is still the end-result of a long game of cause and effect. It would be foolish to suggest that the government – or anyone, really – could possibly control every aspect of every cause to completely prevent the deranged from becoming so, but there are areas that can be positively influenced.

The culture of accepting arming oneself with military weapons to guard against no foreseeable threat must be questioned.

Working backwards along a line from the shooting we find the prevalence of military-style weaponry among citizenry. Whether or not the access for this individual should have been there or not, it was. It was because the purchaser of the guns was able to make that transaction. That transaction was enabled by a culture and a legal system that accepts or settles for such widespread firepower to be readily available even though it has been nearly 200 years since the last time a ground army closed in on any city, town, or village anywhere in this country.

The shooter wasn’t stable, as any armchair psychiatrist will tell you, but in a more specific way he was believed to have Asperger syndrome – one of the myriad of conditions that falls under the far-too-large umbrella of autism. The quick and dirty Wikipedia definition:

Asperger syndrome, also known as Asperger’s syndrome or Asperger disorder, is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported.

There is no “oh and by the way, it turns people into murderers”. The line is not that straight and defined. This was merely another factor. Was he getting the proper care? Was he getting medicine if he needed it? Counseling? If he shied away from friends and family did anyone try to pursue what could be wrong? Did they try, get frustrated, and give up? What things could have been changed weeks, months, years before this shooting that would have lessened if not eliminated the chances of this happening? Was more vigilance needed on the parents part? Better doctor suggestions? More help for his mental health?

“Today a small town remained quiet and shooting free, due to actions taken years ago” grabs no headlines.

It is impossible to prove a negative. If you could affect something significant enough in his past, there is no way you could gather news cameras on Friday afternoon and announce today 28 people did not die, because 7 years ago a boy received helpful care for his mental problems. If you perfect the system and defeat the odds of violence and death, there is no scoreboard to erect and point at to count all your victories. Thus, efforts into the arena of prevention – whether it be gun control to mental health to medical diagnosis and any number of variables in-between - must be a steady, consistent, and thankless business.

Maybe, just maybe, we are in the early stages of something along those lines.

Starting at the “access to guns” end of the line we find Senator Mark Warner (D-VA):

“I believe every American has Second Amendment rights, the ability to hunt is part of our culture. I’ve had a NRA (National Rifle Association) rating of an “A” but, you know, enough is enough,” Mr Warner said on CBS News.

“It is time for this kind of senseless violence to end. There won’t be one perfect law to stop a crazy person from doing evil things. But when we have close to 30,000 killings a year from all types of gun violence, even if we save a few lives, we make progress.”

The important part is that last sentence: if we save a few lives, we make progress – that right there is the exact sentiment that is needed. The knowledge that there is no one sure fix to the myriad of problems, and that each solution is merely a factor in a greater whole for a better society – that is what is needed and that is what needs to be sustained.

Mr. Warner was joined by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV):

“Never before have we seen our babies slaughtered. It’s never happened in America that I can recall, seeing this carnage,” said Senator Joe Manchin, who in 2010 released a political advert touting his NRA endorsement and showing him with a hunting rifle ‘taking aim’ at a piece of climate change legislation.

“Anybody that’s a proud gun owner, a proud member of the NRA, they’re also proud parents, they’re proud grandparents. They understand this has changed where we go from here,” the West Virginia senator said on MSNBC.

In Michigan, relentlessly conservative governor Rick Snyder stopped a bill dead in its tracks that would have allowed people to carry weapons into schools, day care centers, churches and stadiums, among other presently gun-free locations. The bill was passed through the state legislature that his party currently runs roughshod over:

In his veto letter sent to the Legislature shortly before 4 p.m., Snyder said the bill had a fatal loophole that didn’t allow for those institutions to opt out of the new legislation and prohibit weapons from their buildings.

“I believe that it is important that these public institutions have clear legal authority to ban weapons from their premises,” he said. “Each is entrusted with the care of a vulnerable population and should have the authority to determine whether its mission would be enhanced by the addition of concealed weapons.”

…

Snyder’s office wasn’t immediately available to comment on his actions with the bill, but he came under intense pressure in recent days from religious, medical and education groups to veto the bill. President Barack Obama called on the nation to take definitive action to ensure that no such tragedy happens again.

Moving further back down the line of causality: Democratic Governor of Colorado John Hickenlooper seeks a major overhaul of the state’s mental health treatment system:

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper will ask the state general assembly Tuesday for $18.5 million to help “redesign and strengthen” the state’s mental health services and support system.

…

A Hickenlooper aide, however, tells ABC News the Colorado reforms have been in the works ever since a mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater in July. Twelve people were killed and 58 wounded when police say James Holmes opened fire during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

…

Hickenlooper’s plan would include changes to state law allowing the judicial system to instantly transmit mental health commitment records to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation so the information would be immediately available for firearm background checks. The plan would also establish a statewide mental health crisis hotline and would open five 24/7 walk-in mental health crisis centers. Services for “seriously mentally ill” people would be expanded, including help with housing as patients transition from mental health hospitals back into the community.

When the cameras go away, will the commitment to change follow?

Keep in mind that everything above in Colorado is being done for $18.5 million – not billion. The minuscule financial investment has untold potential for return on investment – it saves the incalculable value of lives.

Before raising hands and accepting a more intelligent and preventive society that needs to ask “why?” less, keep in mind that this is the first full week since the shooting. The cameras are still rolling, the attention is still high, the positive press to be gained is still overflowing. Where will we be by this time in January? June? 2015? Beyond? Do we have it in us to sustain positive efforts and positive policy changes to truly affect change on a society-wide level? Was this the event the real tipping point? History is overwhelmingly negative on hope, but the strength of a society can be seen in just how fervently it buys into rumors of its own demise.