Production of a critical component of computer hard drives has been severely affected by the recent severe flooding in Bangkok, Thailand, causing the price of the hard drives around the world to triple.
This is one example of the interconnectedness of the impacts of extreme weather events that are “really coming to the fore” because of global warming and associated climate change, says a visiting American expert.
Dr Kristie Ebi, a high-level technical expert at the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was speaking to staff and students at Stellenbosch University this week.
“Climatologists have predicted “for quite some time” that climate change would cause very high variability in short time-scale weather events, Ebi explained.”
Meteorologists have been doing that since weather forecasting began.
Climatologists reminds me of little kids that want to play a game, but make up the rules as they play.
Kenya’s Masai traditions threatened by climate change
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/nov/24/kenya-masai-climate-change
I think they should move to Norway, we have a lot of rain here…
New IPCC and Alarmist position. AGW while warming over the next 30 plus years will not be at all what we had HOPED. We now need to talk about how all the weird out of the ordinary never happend before (in 4.5 billion year) history of earth is affecting, Computer Chips, Coffee Prices, baby diaper production [insert your cause here].
Want to bet this is the next tactic in the scam. This is when you now find out how deep the Marist, Communist, solicialist, part elites roots are inter-twind in this scam.
US needs to a) replace Obummer ASAP, b) begin agressive oil, fas, coal, nuclear, all of the above energy plan and watch the world market oil and energy market collaspe to much more reasonable pricing (you know 30-40 dollars a barrel for oil). This in turn would have every other commodity producing country rethinking what team they are going to stay on. The Team that makes up artificial price increase justification or the team for a free and open society.
Come 2012 I will be betting on the latter particualry after Climate gate emails 2.0 and X.X, X.X, etc. unitl the shills Jones, Mann etc are brought down to the point of criminal intent in propogating their decent. And from any troll who want to talk about how these crooks have been exonerated by internal reviews over their involvlement in the first go around I have one word. Penn State saw no porblem when investigating “Jerry Sandusky’s”. Great work their. Or what about Obama best friend and former Economy Team memeber – MF Global and Mr Corzine out right theft of investors money. More Regulation(s)/Regulator(s) yeah right the ones we do have are in the pockets of the likes of Corzine and Obama team allies.
Green energy could trigger ‘catastrophic’ blackouts
‘Unstable’ renewable energy sources increase the risk of ‘supra-regional’ electricity blackouts with multi-billion pound consequences, insurance giant Allianz has warned.
Solar panels and wind turbines are a “volatile” source of power with fluctuations in the electricity supply risking “grid instabilities” and triggering wide-scale blackouts.
Ageing infrastructure and increasingly cross-border electricity networks have heightened the likelihood of a devastating collapse of power supplies lasting months and covering several continents, according to the joint report by Allianz and the Chief Risk Officer Forum.
In eastern Germany, turbines in strong wind can produce more than all German coal and gas plants put together, while the need to switch off turbines in high winds causes a drop-off in electricity of 12GW – equal to two nuclear power plants. Outages are likely if there is too little demand or storage capacity to accommodate the jumps in supply.
Leading risk analysts modelled a worst-case scenario in which transformers are knocked out in the United States, causing outages to cascade through the grid into Canada, Russia and Scandanavia.
Credit cards and cash machines would stop immediately, and petrol pumps and refineries would shut-down within six hours. Back-up generators powering hospitals, stock exchanges, emergency services and sewerage plants could run out of fuel within days.
Industry would grind to a halt, cooling equipment would fail and homes would go without food supplies, water or heating, leaving families spending winter around open fires. Allianz predict it would take a year to get the transformers back online. The cost to insurers would top one trillion dollars and chronic power shortages would continue for up to a decade.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/8909585/Green-energy-could-trigger-catastrophic-blackouts.html
Is the above reverse alarmism?
I recall pricing an eighty meg hard drive for the low price of $800.00. That was cheap because a 40 was $500.00.
My last computer purchase cost 400 and has a 1T hard drive.
“Climatologists have predicted “for quite some time” that climate change would cause very high variability in short time-scale weather events, Ebi explained.”
The high-level technical expert at IPCC is confused and should be fired from her position. Climate change cannot cause weather; it is smoothed weather. Weather changes over a long period are climate change.
High variability, short time-scale events we call ‘bad weather’.
The vendors wasted no time in Sweden. Last week I thought I would get around to purchasing the 2gb internal drive I wanted at 100 bucks only to find out that it was now over 200 bucks! I can wait the flooding out. Heard a Reuters report with one of the Thai officials stating they were focusing on the factories and wanted them all back online within 90 days.
Here in the states Office Depot has Internal SATA Seagate 2TB for $69 today.
They are not performance (5400rpm 3Gb/s) but I have a few of them and they are good. The density is so high that you do not need blazing specs for most ops. They are 512 byte sector (the traditional method, backward compatible to everything). 3TB and above (2TB for some Western Digital) use the new 4 KB scheme.
Might have to run down there this morning and grab a couple more.
Oh well, they were all gone when I got there.
I’m sort of kicking myself for not getting the drives when they were at a reasonable price(for Sweden/EU) and in supply. However, I am looking down the road at SSDs when the capacity goes up and the prices come down.
BTW I had meant 2TB SATA II internal drive earlier not 2GB.