Video from the THUMS Islands in Long Beach Harbor

by Little Miss Attila on August 4, 2010

A little more about how to make energy production less stressful to the populations who have to live close to it. Keep in mind that the THUMS Islands enhance Long Beach Harbor (excuse me: “Rainbow Harbor,” after the colored lights on the petro-islands), and provide a huge chunk of change to the California State budget, as well as the City of Long Beach—not to mention the residents who live over the spots in the city where the drilling occurs. (It helps to think of an oil well as looking like high-tech octopus: the rigs are on the islands, but the endpoints on the pipes are in many cases under land. Under Long Beach and its harbor, water has to be pumped into the soil to replace all the volume that’s removed as oil. This is a technique that they developed decades ago to keep the earth in the area from “settling” as the oil is extracted.)

(Yeah, I’m in there. Brown overshirt, shoes with slight heels that I had no business wearing on a walking tour.)

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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

CGHill August 4, 2010 at 5:17 pm

Seriously neat stuff. I live in what used to be an oil patch, so I know most of the terminology, but I’ve always been fascinated by the way they did things out in the harbor. (And, for that matter, up on Signal Hill, which I visited way back when.)

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ponce August 5, 2010 at 12:47 am

I can’t find any mention of July being the hottest month ever recorded in the U.S. on any right-wing blogs for some reason.

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Darrell August 5, 2010 at 11:11 am

And June of 2009 was the coldest on record in Arizona since 1913.
So what? You display your ignorance and the political agenda behind your words by trying to make either event significant. Especially when the guys behind the numbers were caught red-handed frequently emailing themselves about faking the data and destroying centuries-worth of raw data. Phony panels clearing the suspects of wrong doing behind closed doors without any record of what was considered doesn’t restore anyone’s confidence in the process or diminish the fraud and the loss of confidence in the past, present, and future work of these same people or their unmonitored agencies.

Earlier this same year, the same record warmth claims were being laughed at as much of the world experienced record snow falls and cold temperatures…all this prior to the Copenhagen dog-and-pony show.
The Brits were pelting their clowns with snowballs, and so many people grumbled that even the BBC moderated its position and toned down its advocacy. Satellite images, at one point, showed a greater percentage of the Earth’s surface covered in snow that had ever been seen or measured.

Cap’N’Trade going to reduce those temperatures even 0.00001 degrees?
Should we even be talking about this now that we are confident that CO2 is a lagging, rather than, leading indicator of warming? That runaway temperatures/ “multiplier effects” are extremely unlikely?

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ponce August 5, 2010 at 11:18 am

Darrell,

I love how I can post a simple fact and you reply with a pathetic wingnut crazy man screed.

Every.single.time.

Without fail.

Now that’s science!

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nicholas August 5, 2010 at 11:55 am

Darrell’s on the money.

His point that the Climategate scandle has undermined the credibility of science in general is real, and has a great many people who work in the field of science extremely irritated. Judith Curry is one climate scientist that has been willing to address the issue the climate scientists are facing, which is that they have been caught cooking the books and being the schills of a larger political movement. Her interview with Keith Kloor was revealing, and it displayed Dr. Curry’s ability to look at the issue in an objective fashion.

Mr. Kloor drew her out with challenges to the necessity of the discussion:

“I question if there is really this breach of trust between the climate science community and the general public. Again, the average person is probably not paying much attention to these fractious debates between skeptics and a subset of the climate science community. I mean, every profession gets dinged by its share of controversies.”</i

Which is the common repose of the AGW proponents. Move along. These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.

And Dr. Curry:

“The significance of the hockey stick debate is the highlighting of shoddy science and efforts to squash opposing viewpoints, something that doesn’t play well with other scientists.”

Damn straight.

“Most importantly we need to stop playing the power politics of climate science by saying “Here is what science says we must do” and start saying “Here is our best understanding, and here is where our uncertainties are . . .”

Exactly.

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ponce August 5, 2010 at 1:17 pm

Actually, a scientific review of “climategate” proved nothing of the kind, nicky.

I love it when the characters who claim a single snowflake is enough to refudiate Climate Change start spouting pseudo-science when their supporters down south start baking in the non-existent heat.

Do y’all think they believe your nonsense down there today?

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Little Miss Attila August 5, 2010 at 2:35 pm

This has nothing to do with global warming. This has to do with the fact that we need oil and natural gas for the next few decades, and must continue to use them if we want to feed and clothe the people of the world, irrespective of whether we’re able to come up with good replacements for them.

I’m pro-conservation, and as an allergic person I’m really, really against air pollution. I think we need to build more nuclear power plants and continue to figure out which of the renewables can be made to work (so far each of them brings environmental hazards of its own).

But if we want people to work and eat and live in habitable dwellings, we need to figure out ways to extract oil and natural gas that don’t mess up our coastlines, but rather add to them. The THUMS model wouldn’t work in a lot of contexts, because they required a huge investment in building islands. But this is what we should have off the coast of Santa Barbara, instead of those ugy rigs that mar the coastline. And on most coasts–especially along beaches and other tourist-dependent areas–the first resort is probably to get the rigs out beyond the 11-mile mark so they don’t mess up the view.

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Darrell August 5, 2010 at 4:50 pm

I didn’t claim that a snowflake refuted Global Warming. I implied the guys crying “all-time-hottest” January were full of shit. So did everyone but the Kool Aid drinkers. The guys faking data aren’t generally the one’s to back in scientific matters. Or is this an “up is down” issue like all your others?

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nicholas August 5, 2010 at 6:44 pm

“Actually, a scientific review of “climategate” proved nothing of the kind”

Nope.

You had access to the information yourself. There was no need for someone else to review it for you. Those professed to find nothing were the same ones invested in the ongoing ruse. The effort to whitewash the event was handled in much the same manner as the rest of the science being discussed. The events simply further undermined the validity of the ‘science’ of the global warming community. Try reading through the article linked.

A scientific review, forsooth.

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Darrell August 5, 2010 at 8:21 pm

Of course you are debating in good faith, Nicholas. ponce is not.
His role here is a skunk saturating the comments with mercaptan-like compounds that send readers scurrying. The Left attempts to stifle all contrary opinion. I suspect he knows that warming isn’t unexpected in the interglacial periods. He doesn’t care because the acquisition of power is at stake.

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