Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2118: Schrödinger’s Tariff.

 

Surely you can complete the joke yourself.

Photo Source, Nobel foundation – http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/schrodinger-bio.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6209244

 

Any given Trump tariff is neither alive nor dead …  until I open up the box each morning and look inside.

And, to take the analogy one step further, for the the un-predictable decay of an atomic nucleus, substitute the un-predictable flipping of some neuron or neurons, in Trump’s aging brain.

To be fair, maybe by flailing about, with this pain-inflicting flail marked “tariff”, he’s somehow making things better, by beating down the opposition.  Or beating “them” down, more than “us”.  Or something.

But then reality takes hold and you have to say, “Yeah, like beating the hell out of Canada for all the bad things they were doing to us.”  Didn’t we even have a free-trade agreement with those guys, going into this?  What dummy signed that?

And and and.  And what does fentanyl have to do with aluminum and steel in the first place.  And what does Canada have to do with our fentanyl problem?  The answers are nothing, and next to it, and plenty more where those came from..  Car industry integration.  Mexico.  And and and.

So, no, at best I’ll have to think of these as Schrödinger’s tariffs.  And as such, they are fundamentally different from the tariffs of the past.

Note that I do not say “better”.   But different, for sure.

Post #2117: Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

 

I stole that from Douglas Adams.  But this post sort of feels like that, because this post is about an issue with the Constitution.

Recall that, originally, the Constitution called for the winner of the presidential election to be President, and for the second-place finisher to be Vice-President.  Presumably, then, President and Vice-President were from different parties. 

As a consequence, under that original system, if you impeached (and convicted) a President, then you automatically ceded the Presidency to the opposite party.   For example, if the President did crazy stuff via Executive Order, you could impeach, convict, remove, and so stop that.

But now, if they impeach the President, all that does is put another guy in place, to implement the rest of Project 2025.  Under these conditions, you cannot use impeachment as a way to slow or halt the implementation of the polices that got the current President impeached.

(Impeach, say, if a great depression occurs, and the Trump tariffs get the blame for triggering it.)

Plausibly, that’s consistent with the “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause.  They were thinking of impeachment as a way to remove a single rotten apple, not as a way to implement or (in this case halt) policies.

Conclusion

I guess I keep looking for the off button.  The plug that may be pulled.  The glass, only to be broken in emergency.

Plausibly, under the original rules, impeachment was a tool that could have been used if the U.S. were headed off a cliff, on the path set by the current President.

But under current rules, that’s no longer true.  Impeachment is no longer a tool for getting the U.S. off this path, no matter what happens.

I wonder if the Founding Fathers had any notion of what our current situation would be?  Surely they didn’t foresee government by executive order, or the Congress abandoning its legal prerogatives over spending.

Basically, there is no off button.  Wherever this leads, we just have to deal with it.

So far, every time I think we’ve finally reached a high-water mark for crazy, the world proves me wrong.  Today, the U.S. tariff on all Chinese imported goods is 145%.  But the Chinese tariff on selected U.S. goods is only about 85%.  (Maybe they need another day to catch up.)

Against recent history of single-digit average tariff levels for most of the developed world. Economist Paul Krugman characterizes this as the largest international trade shock ever.

Gold is nearing $3200 an ounce, about $350 shy of its all-time peak, in real (CPI-adjusted) terms.  That’s never a good sign.

This is not going to end well.

At some point, in the not-too-distant future, I think the U.S.A. is going to be scrambling for the off button.  Only to realize there isn’t one.

Post G25-003: Some quick frost protection.

 

This post is about making some quick garden frost protection by lining a box with radiant barrier.

In my case, I’m using a plastic shoe box, lined with house radiant barrier cloth.  But a cardboard box and a cut-up space blanket would work just fine.

Based on prior tests, I’m betting these will provide about 5F of frost protection.  Good enough for the 29F predicted here for tonight.  (Edit:  Confirmed by actual test, see final section.)

A final plus is that I don’t have to store these.  That’s nice for an item that I might need once a year.  Once we’re clearly past last frost, the plastic shoe-box sized totes can go back to being plastic totes, the radiant barrier pieces can be rolled up and put away.

Any tin-foil hat will do:  Radiant barrier, or a space blanket.  Or even tin foil.

Post G22-005: Frost planning. Dodging the last breaths of Old Man Winter

The post linked just above summarizes some of the tests I did on frost protection methods, a few years back.

I scienced it.  I used a pair of temperature data loggers — little recording-thermometer gizmos that can dump their data into a USB port — to record the difference in temperature between protected and unprotected plants.

Glass (e.g., mason) jars work exceptionally well, as does radiant barrier material (e.g., space blanket).  And, both work by stopping the radiant heat (long-wave infrared) that radiates up from the (relatively warm) ground.

By contrast, floating row cover and polyethylene sheet do nothing.  The latter seems like it ought to work, but polyethylene is transparent in the far-infrared (long-wave infrared) region.  It doesn’t trap the heat radiating up out of the ground.

This year’s problem is the rhubarb

This year, I’m stuck with some early-sprouting rhubarb, and a prediction for 29F tonight. Not an ideal combination, as rhubarb leaves are not frost-tolerant.  Mason jars would be the easy solution, but the leaves are already too big.

So I did a little freeze-protection improv, and came up with using plastic shoe-box-sized containers lined with pieces of house radiant barrier (aluminized plastic cloth of some sort.)

As is my habit, I’m going to test these.  In this case, I’m testing against a “control” of just a plain plastic container without radiant barrier.

I’m betting that the radiant-barrier-lined plastic shoe boxes are good for 5F of frost protection.

I’ll post the results tomorrow, after the temperature data loggers have run all night.

Tested and proven, good for 4F of frost protection

 

Nature cooperated with the experiment by providing frost inside the “control” enclosure this AM.  This, on a night with a predicted low of 29F.  With underlying ground temperature (4″ down) of about 49F.

That’s nice, because Jack Frost left me a benchmark.  I’d better see “the data”, out of the little USB gizmo, at 32F or nearly, for the control (clear plastic box).  So that the results are all about how much warmer the ground is, under the tin-foil hat (the radiant barrier lined shoe box) and not about how much instrument error there might be.

And, as shown in the graph above, that’s what I got.  The ground under the clear-plastic cover froze.  It got down to 32F, according to the recording thermometer.  All quibbling over the accuracy and resolution of my recorder-gizmos aside, literal frost on the polypropylene tells me it froze last night, inside the clear-plastic enclosure.

Just a clear-plastic cover — in this case, a polypropylene storage container — sealed reasonably tightly over a plant, so as to provide a pocket of “still air” during the night — did essentially squat.  For sure, did not do enough to provide frost protection during a predicted 29F overnight.

But it was maybe 5F warmer in the radiant-barrier enclosure.  The same box, lined with a piece of radiant barrier.  In this case, house radiant barrier.  But a cheap space blanket would have worked just fine.

Note that this is about what I expected, based on past use of radiant barrier in my garden.  I fudge on the exact amount of warming because, if nothing else, the data loggers only record to the nearest 2F.  The resulting temperature difference looks five-ish to me.  Plus, it’ll depend on how warm your soil is (mine is currently 49F 4″ down.)

A nice thing about these old-school USB data loggers is the simplicity of use.   For an old-school user.  This device plugs into the USB port of my laptop, and, using very simple software, spits out a text file which, when copied into Excel, requires but a single chain of clicks to become data in a spreadsheet.

Otherwise, near as I can tell, the devices I’m using are obsolete by at least a couple of decades.  You can buy updated, modern (and of course, made-in-China) versions of these data loggers that are superior to what I’m using, in every way.

But 1) they still work, 2) they are good enough for my use, and 3) I already own them.

The trifecta of my material existence.

An addendum on “convection”.

I associate the word “convection” with “heat rises”.  Convection, in my mind, is about the natural circulation of heat in (e.g.) the atmosphere, or a cup of coffee, by the physical transfer of the heated gas or fluid.

But that’s NOT only one way in which heat can be transferred by the bulk movement of gas or fluid.  Which is what convect (from “convey”) means.  Any transfer of heat, by gross movement of a material medium, will do.  (To complete the trinity of conduction, convection, and radiation as the ways by which an object may lose heat.)

Outdoors, a breeze results in horizontal convection, for want of an easier term.

When you read about plant frost protection, you need be aware that when air conveys heat away from an object simply by blowing past it, that also counts as convection.   Anything other than “still air” provides convective transfer of heat energy.  Which is why creating a sealed enclosure to provide “still air” is the first step in many frost-protection methods.  It doesn’t much matter how much you an heat up a small area, if all the heat blows away.

More confusingly, preventing convection in the outdoor setting isn’t about “heat rises” much, if at all.  It’s about sealing the plant in some sort of breeze-proof enclosure.  It’s about providing a pocket of still air around the plant.

That’s because heat-driven convection in air only needs an inch or so of air space to get going.  (This, per experts in storm windows and such.)  Within these little shoe-box enclosures, for example, I’d expect cold air to be sheeting down the inside of the box walls, resulting in an internal air temperature that fairly uniformly reflects the temperature of those box walls, throughout the enclosure.

Which, in turn, is going to reflect the outside air temperature, less any small effects for insulation.

The upshot is that these plastic containers provide a pocket of still air around a plant.  They do not prevent thermal convection within that pocket of air.  (But the same uninsulated plastic box, if “powered” by infrared-reflecting radiant barrier, runs about 5F warmer.

But how, exactly, radiant barrier works, is not easy to explain.)

And now that I get well into the weeds, I realize I should have lined the clear plastic box with a piece of polyethylene sheet, to rule out that the insulative properties of the second sheet of plastic as the cause of the warmer temperatures under the radiant-barrier-lined plastic shoe boxes.  If I ever redo this, I’ll try to remember to test that.  But based on other attempts with radiant barrier, I’m sure it’s the IR-reflecting property of the radiant barrier material.

Further confusing the issue, you see discussions of providing “a pocket of still air” around a plant that focus on the insulating properties of that air.  But as this and my prior experiments have shown, the main effect of the “pocket of still air” is the prevention of convection, in the important sense of preventing your warmed air from being swept away by the breeze.  (And, noting that thermally-driven convection will continue freely within the enclosure, helping force the inside air temperature down to the outside temperature, less any insulating effect of the thin plastic wall of the container).

In any case, the practical upshot is that if you block both radiation and convection, you can get about 5F of frost protection.  Here in Virginia Zone 7A, with typical ground temperature at this time of say 49F or so).

But if all you do is provide “still air” around the plant — the plastic shoe box alone — you get next-to-no frost protection.

A good thing to keep in mind as the spring progresses.

Post 2116: Weight loss, meet Trump-o-nomics.

 

Suddenly, it seems to me that I haven’t saved enough for my retirement.

Which is a pity, as I am already retired, and have been for some years.

What changed?

First, realize that a good chunk of my wealth is tied up in my house.  It’s in Vienna, VA, in a Northern Virginia economy strongly dependent on federal employees and federal spending.

Ah.  At this point, I think there should be an expectation of falling real estate values around here.  But who knows.  Flat-at-best, say.  That, versus prior thinking that real estate always appreciates, right?

Next, by dropping (now) 95 pounds of weight, my (subjective) life expectancy should be … longer.  That’s a good thing.   But it does have a downside, which is more years of life over which to spread out the available money.

And, now, third, the rest of Trump-o-nomics.  The tariffs alone pretty much guarantee poor returns to a financial portfolio in the short run, and who knows how much lost productivity in the long run.  The significantly-heightened threat of a global recession just adds to portfolio-return angst.

Conclusion:

The world has changed since I set aside funds for my retirement.

What seemed like a slam-dunk, asset-wise, now no longer looks quite so bulletproof.  My house probably should lose value, in response to the throttling of Federal employment and spending.  Surely, tariffs and whatnot will do the same for the value of my 401K (equivalent).

Simultaneously, a consequence of weight loss is that I should plan to need money  longer.

Weight loss plus Trump-o-nomics.  A double whammy.

I never planned for either of them.

Post #2115: Some round number estimates of tariff impact

 

Source for image:  The Far Side.

Edit:  Skip this, just read the “days and weeks” quote that came out Sunday evening 4/6/2025, from Commerce Secretary Lutnik, shown at the end of the post.  Looks like somebody in the administration has finally figured out that this is a terrible idea, and they are now looking for a way to declare victory and call the whole thing off.

At least, that’s what I hope the quote from Lutnik means.

Don’t focus on the microeconomic effects.

I could recite the Econ 101 of Why Tariffs are Bad.  But the picture to the left illustrates the gist.

The popular press tends to focus on the “microeconomics” of the situation.  That is, the impact on a single product or industry, alone.  E.g., here’s what this will do to the price of a car, and so on.  Here’s why a steel tariff is good for steel makers, but not for industries that build things out of steel.

To be clear, real (that is, mainstream, having-a-degree-in-the-subject) economists hate tariffs.  Boiled down, from an industry-level perspective, tariffs are not merely a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, they ensure that both Peter and Paul work less efficiently than they could, thus making everybody worse off, on average.  It’s one of those things about which there is widespread agreement among mainstream economists, backed up by decades of evidence.

Except in a handful of cases, in the modern economy, tariffs are little more than a seductive way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Simply put, any amount of money you think you can raise with tariffs, you can raise that more efficiently, resulting in higher GDP and higher employment, if you raise that with an income tax.  But, as I have previously noted, since the whole point of the Trump tariff is to substitute sales (consumption) taxes on the middle class, for income taxes on the wealthy, that point is not salient to the current administration’s thinking.

Focus on some round-number macroeconomics instead.

In round numbers, I’m guessing that the first-year revenues from the Trump tariff will be roughly the size of the U.S. budget for the Department of Defense.  (I’ll present the estimate below, such as it is.)

What would you expect to happen to the economy if the Feds shut down the Department of Defense, all at once, on some random Wednesday? Forever.   And then simply pocketed what used to be spent, thus removing that from aggregate demand for U.S. goods and services?  (Though, in reality, simply borrowing less to make up for the remaining annual budget deficit.)

My best guess is that the amount of money collected by the Trump tariff will be about the size of U.S. Defense spending.

So withdrawing that money, out of U.S. aggregate demand, via tariffs, ought to have about the same impact as closing the DoD and not increasing Federal spending.

Best guess, this should roughly double unemployment, as it works its way through economy in the short run.  Call that year.

So, my prediction, FWIW, is that U.S. unemployment will 7.9%, in April 2026.

Like so:

The only sleight-of-hand above is the “fiscal multiplier”, for which you are invited to take your own guess, if you don’t like mine.  That’s to capture the immediate follow-on effects of the initial drop in U.S. aggregate demand caused by the tax increase (the tariff) assuming no offsetting federal spending increase.  The Fiscal Multiplier is an abstract notion, meant to capture the diffusion of spending across the economy, but in concept it’s no different from when the the local factory shuts down, and the local bars and restaurants soon follow suit.  The actual reduction in economic activity, from the original shuttering of the factory, is somewhat larger than the loss of the factory jobs alone.  How much larger, on average, that’s subject to debate.  And, given that we don’t even know what the fallout of this is going to be, on consumer prices, it’s a bit early to have that debate.  So 1.5 is a nice round number, and frequently appears within the range of what sane people, those more learn-ed than I in this matter, find plausible.

What about the long run?

An eight-percent unemployment rate is a recession, for sure, but hardly the end of the world as we know it.  To get to the real potential for calamity, we need to speculate on what happens in the long run.

First, elasticity of demand — the reaction to the price changes — should be very nearly a wash.  And that’s because it applies to both our imports of foreign goods, and to foreigners’ imports of our goods.  Surely, we will use less of the now-pricier imports, all other things equal.  But so will foreigners, of our goods.

As predicted (and sometimes pre-announced), our trading partners have wasted no time imposing tariffs on their imports of American goods.  And so, if the average price elasticity of imports and exports is about the same, and if foreigners impose tariffs on our goods equal to our tariffs on theirs, then the net moderating effect of price elasticity should be a wash.  Our demand for foreign goods will decline, reducing the size of this new tax.  But at the same time, foreign demand for U.S. goods will decline, as they impose their retaliatory tariffs.  The dollar value of our goods imports and exports are not hugely different ($3.3T vs $2.1T).  As long as demand elasticities for imports and exports are about the same, these effects should roughly cancel.

The real uncertainty is in what else might happen.

Once these tariffs take this chunk of spending out of U.S. aggregate demand, then the economy is, for want of a better term, biased toward recession.  Like a rock on a slope.  Nudge it hard, and it now has a tendency to roll further downhill.  Anything from general loss of confidence, to a world-wide economic downturn — will feed into the unemployment increase created by the tariffs.

Nobody has a clue how that will work out.  But for sure, all of those factors are more of a worry in the context of an U.S. economy that is already surely headed for recession.

On account of the trade war we started.

Conclusion

A major recession is already baked in.

That’s purely from withdrawing 2.5% of U.S. aggregate demand, via these new taxes on imports, and not spending it.

Maybe the Republicans will succeed in giving that money to the wealthy, in the form of further tax cuts.  But the wealthy have a low “marginal propensity to consume out of current income”, meaning that they save most of their income, rather than spend it.  In an ugly business climate, where nobody is willing to take that (now-)excess savings and invest it, that still creates the conditions for recession.  Softens the blow to aggregate demand a bit, to take those sales taxes an, in effect, shovel them into the pockets of the  wealthy.  But you can’t make the wealthy spend their additional income.  As economic policy, this is classic “you can’t push on a string”.

At this point, the question isn’t whether jerking the U.S. economy around like this is a good idea.  It’s not.  We’re going to get at least a major recession out of it, in short order, just from the sheer size and abruptness of it.  That part has nothing to do with imports and exports per se.  Any tax hike amounting to 2.5% of GDP, with no offsetting increase in Federal spending, would do the same.

The only question is, how bad is this going to get?

At this point, we’ve all-but-destroyed NATO, abandoned an ally in the middle of a war (to the point of withholding intelligence information, which shows the treatment of Ukraine isn’t about the money), torn up all of our international trade agreements, … .   And we’re not three months into it yet.

Putin could not have asked for a better return on investment.  Pardon me while I go buy some shares in Deutsche Bank now.

Addendum:  Emily Litella lives!

I read this quote below, and just about lost it.  Here’s the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, just up on the CNBC website, emphasis mine:

 

 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday ... 

“There is no postponing. They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks,” Lutnick said. ...

All this chaos, with literal trillions of stock-market losses, making enemies of former friends like Canada, killing consumer and business confidence, likely tipping the U.S. in recession, but the plan is now to keep those tariffs in place for days.  Maybe even for whole entire weeks, if need be.  All that, so that Trump can have foreign governments kiss his ring, and cut side-deals to have their tariffs lowered?

And then say “never mind”?

There’s stupid, and then there’s crazy stupid.

That’s so stupid, it’s not credible.  There’s no way that “days” of tariffs was the original plan.

The only thing that makes sense is that the Trump administration is (finally!) seeing what a bad idea this is.  They of course will never admit to making a mistake.  So this has the look of a trial balloon, for ending this trade war by declaring victory and going home.

So they can save face, declare this a huge win instead of the huge blunder that it was, blame the liberal media, or maybe Biden, and move on.

If so, you really have to wonder what’s next.

Maybe they’ll pretend to launch some nukes, just to see what happens.

Post #2114: Wherein I ‘splain the Trump tariff formula.

 

That economy/tariff formula thingy.

People are completely misinterpreting that Trump tariff formula.

Allow me to ‘splain it to you.

Source:  Snopes.

 

What is that thing:

Legal issues aside — and I sure as hell hope there are some — this is a tariff formula that can be made permanent.  It can be updated periodically without requiring additional intervention by The President.  He can just state that (e.g.) this levy will be updated annually, or every N years.

It’s not a description of reality.  It’s not intended to be.

It is not a prediction of what will happen if such a tariff were imposed.  Or a realistic model of any import-export market or market for such goods in general.

Again, it’s not intended to be.

What is that formula is, is, it’s a proposed policy going forward:   If I’ve read it all correctly it says you propose to:

Raise (your citizens’s) prices for foreign goods (from a country) in proportion to (half) that country’s goods-trade surplus with the U.S.

(Half is not shown above, but was deduced — see Snopes for attribution (reference Snopes).  (Plus  some minimum of base rate of, I think, 10%.  Or something.  Everybody pays the vigorish, some pay more.)

We can debate the many, many drawbacks of tariffs set in this fashion.  And should.

Particularly because the penguins have revealed to me how they can update this from year to year with little effort.

Penguins mean permanence, you fools!

 

Here’s how I can see how Norfolk Island got into this. I’m making all this up, yet I’ve been there, data-wise, myself.

The Trump administration likely inherited the Norfolk Island error from whatever actual Federal Government accounting data source they used.  The explanation I heard is that this is most likely keyboard input error driven by drop-down lists.  They thought they clicked one of the many Norfolks that have ports, but (say once per 10K clicks) mistakenly hit Norfolk Island instead.  (Though, why that would be a choice on the menu, I do not know.)

The Liberal Media seem to be laughing at this (totally harmless) error in the tariffs as-published.

Nobody seems to realize that, once you adopt that formula as the basis, then as long as those underlying government accounts get updated over time (and they do), then you can automatically update your tariffs.

You can now easily make this permanent, with no additional effort on the part of The President.

(Except in times of Additional Emergency, as-declared by said President.)

So this becomes the baseline tariff.

For-ev-er.

The hhhpt test, or check now for a sharp inhation of breath.

Arguably the best piece of advice I got, starting out as an independent consultant, was couresy of Jon Gabel, who gave me the following advice on setting your hourly rate.  What he termed the hhhpt test.  If you mention your hour rate to a prospective client, and you do not hear a sharp intake of breath, then you have set it too low.

Permanent, large, arbitrary tariffs on goods, that only go away if the U.S. balances its trade separately with each and every country, individually.

Phhht.

The added policy wrinkle of feasible permanence.

My unfortunate task is to point out what this policy does.

If you can argue that the tariffs are permanent, then you can use that money to make your tax cuts for the wealthy permanent.

And if you succeed in doing that, then you effectively substitute sales tax for income tax.

And that, my friends, is a long-cherished policy goal of the American right.

I don’t agree with it.  I think it’s a pity they have to burn down the economy trying to achieve it this way.

But the bottom line, if successful, will be a partial substitution of sales taxes for income taxes.  Compared to an alternative world where enough Republican members of the Congress can’t stomach increasing the national debt in order to extend the Trump tax cuts, this allows them to get closer to the goal of eliminating income tax entirely, by using taxes on goods to offset the lost taxes on income.

Lipstick on a pig, or have you noticed the global trade war that hasn’t broke out?

At the end of the day, those Greek letters are just lipstick on a pig.  Meaning, I’m not even going to get into all the reasons economists and business people think this is bad, bad policy.  Zero doubt that this is a pig of a policy.  I mean, WSJ, “dumbest trade war in history” and all that.

But have you noticed the global trade war that hasn’t broken out?  How nobody is copying us, in the sense of enacting tariffs against all of their neighbors.  You can easily miss that through US-centric reporting.  But, e.g., the Chinese have not imposed additional tariffs on Canadian goods.  Nor vice versa.

Instead, all the tariff action has been countries reacting (appropriately) to U.S. tariffs.  What you have not seen is countries then going off to have their own tariff wars against their own neighbors.

So, if you want a quick reality test on how smart this tariff policy is?

Look at how many countries are following in our footsteps.

Nobody.  This is so insanely stupid that nobody is following our lead.

Let’s hope we eventually take a clue from that.

Post G25-002: Bee emergence.

 

A few days of warm weather, and my mason bees are emerging.

You have to read between the lines on various internet write-ups of bee emergence, but I’m pretty sure what you see above is a crowd of young male bees, doing what young males do best.  That is, hanging out, accomplishing nothing, and hoping to get laid.

The male bees emerge first.  And I guess they look forward with glad anticipation to the emergence of the female mason bees.

I’m still not entirely sure what the emergence box is for.  And I’m not sufficiently interested to stick a camera inside to see what’s going on.

Anyway, we got down to 5F this winter, and it doesn’t seem to have done these over-wintering bees any harm.

My next-most-recent post on bees is here.  It’s pretty much a summary of everything I think I know about attracting mason bees.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

Post #2112: Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight

 

Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight
And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight
What the dollar used to get us now won’t buy a head of lettuce
No the economic forecast isn’t right
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray
I can even glimpse a new and better way
And I’ve devised a plan of action worked it down to the last fraction
And I’m going into action here today.

From:  I’m changing my name to Chrysler, recorded by Arlo Guthrie.

Gold blew through $3100 an ounce this morning.

When the stock market is making new highs, everybody steps up to take credit for it.

But gold?  Nope. Nobody ever takes credit for a rising price of gold.  Given the cheapness and ubiquity of public lies these days, you’d think some prominent braggart would try.  But nobody ever tries to own a rise in the price of gold.   That’s because a rapidly rising price of gold is never good news.  And peaks in the price of gold tend to occur when the 💩 is in the process of hitting the 🚁.

What caught my eye about $3100 is that this has to be getting close to setting a new record for the price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.  (In the modern era, where the dollar price of gold has been allowed to float.  Post-1970, say.)

If I take the prior price peaks (red arrows I added to the chart above) and use the BLS inflation calculator to express them in 2025 dollars, I find that we’re now just 14% below the all-time high price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.

So, when Guthrie sang about the rising price of gold, in the context of the 1979 bail-out of Chrysler, following two Arab oil embargoes, the resulting energy crises, two long, deep U.S. recessions, and the near-destruction of the U.S. auto industry with its lack of energy-efficient cars, in a context of persistent double-digit rates of inflation … the price of gold, in real terms, was somewhat higher than it is today.

I’m trying to take some comfort in that.  Either things aren’t as bad now, as they were then.  Or they aren’t as bad, yet.

Either way: Eat, drink and be merry.

My most recent prior post on this topic was from half a year ago:

Post #2017: The price of gold is up. That’s never good.

Post #2111: Of arctic ice and rosemary.

 

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

This saying is attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

This post is just a reminder that, in addition, you cannot fool the laws of physics any of the time.

Stuff’s melting.  Is anyone surprised?  Is anybody paying attention?

The full article is on the National Snow and Ice Data Center website:

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-low-maximum-2025

I don’t normally repeat the news, but I only just stumbled across the fact that Arctic sea ice hit a new low this year.  It peaks right about this time every year, and this year’s peak extent is the lowest in the roughly 50-year record.

No surprise, given the underlying trend.  The north polar ice cap has been shrinking slowly for about as long as there has been a satellite record of it.

The loss of reflective polar sea ice is an important positive feedback serving to accelerate the pace of global warming/climate change.  It lowers Earth’s albedo.  Dark open ocean absorbs more light energy than reflective white ice does.

If you don’t quite grasp why anyone should care about climate change, focus on a large net loss of arable North American land over the next century, as the climate changes.  Less food.  But with a growing world population.  And while that’s happening here, that’ll be happening across the world, as the (soil of the) the continental interiors warms and dries in response to climate change.

People also lose track of how long additional C02 emissions affect the climate.  The stuff coming out of your tailpipe will still be warming the earth centuries to millenia from now.

People forget about the two or three decade time lag in the global warming “pipeline”, due to the mass of the earth, relative to the small top-of-the-atmosphere energy imbalance.  Even if a miracle were to happen today, and atmospheric C02 were to stabilize, we’ve got three decades of warming “in the pipeline” as the earth’s surface temperate slowly adjusts to the energy imbalance that today’s level of C02 is creating.  That temperature increase is how nature restores the planet’s top-of-atmosphere energy balance.

And people forget how long energy-using devices last.  The majority of today’s new cars will still be on the road 15 years from now.  A new furnace?  Maybe 20 years.  A new house?  Maybe a century.  And for that entire century, a new house with natural gas heat will be pumping out tons of C02 per year.  Year in, year out.

Did the Biden Administration push the electrification of transport?  Sure did.  That’s because a world in which we drive gas vehicles, as we do now, but that still looks like our current world, is a pipe dream.  It’s not a feasible outcome.  The only way to hold onto a world whose climate is as benign as the climate in which civilization has flourished is to halt the buildup of C02 in the atmosphere.  Did the Biden administration push for more electrical transport than we seem to need right now?  Sure did.  Because “right now” isn’t the right time frame.  Twenty years down the road, as today’s new cars are finally heading off to the scrap yard  — twenty years of global warming in the future — look back and see how that modest push toward electrification looks then.

Global warming in your back yard:  The northward migration of the USDA plant hardiness zones.

Source:  Maps are from USDA.  I added the line marking the boundary between hardiness zones 5 and 6.

Maybe the easiest way to see climate change happening in your lifetime is to pay attention the good old USDA plant hardiness zones.  Every home gardener is at least passingly familiar with these, because these are a guide to what will and won’t overwinter in your climate.   The zones represent 10-degree-F increments in the coldest likely wintertime temperature, and are simply based on the coldest observed temperature in an area over the previous 30 years of weather data.  They get split into -a and -b halves, based on a 5F difference in coldest expected temperature.

In Zone 7b, for example, I should expect temperatures to go no lower than 5F.  This past winter it hit 5F here, and that killed a rosemary bush that I’d been growing for the better part of a decade.  Rosemary, I now find, is only hardy to USDA Zone 8.  Which I have now proven the hard way.

Turns out, these every-day use USDA plant hardiness zones are extremely sensitive to global warming.  I think that’s because they reflect the coldest wintertime temperature you should expect in an area.  That coldest temperature will occur in winter, at night.  And global warming has its strongest effects at night, and in winter.

So, even though global warming has done almost nothing to the U.S. so far, and certainly not much in terms of average US land temperature, the impact on minimum annual temperature — what determines the USDA hardiness zones — has been large enough to be easily visible.

On the maps above, the Zone 6 boundary moved north about 200 miles, in 33 years.  That’s ballpark for all of the zones, on average, over this period, but the movement north is fastest in the center of the continent, away from the coasts.

In Northern Virginia, over the same period, Vienna moved from just inside Zone 6, to just inside Zone 7.  Or, rather, the zones slid far enough north over three decades that one full zone slid past Vienna, VA in 33 years.

Same phenomenon.

But 6 miles a year is 600 miles a century.  Project that out, and a century from now, Iowa ends up with the climate that west Texas has now.  Just from that slow, 6-miles-a-year, northward migration of the climate zones under global warming.

Without too much exaggeration, let this continue, and today’s children will get to see the sagebrush desert of the U.S. Southwest take over the U.S. Midwest.  Let it go two centuries, and the current climate of Mexico will occur at the Canadian border.

With everything you think that would imply for U.S. food production.  Amber waves of grain?  That’ll be just another obsolete concept.

Merely from allowing the current observed rate of change to go unchecked.

As a society, we seem to have become too stupid to survive.

Conclusion

If civilization survives, the Republican Party’s head-in-the-sand policy toward climate change will go down as the stupidest, most costly, and most damaging thing ever done by a political party.  Wars included.

Except possibly for encouraging increased use of fossil fuels.  That would be even stupider than doing nothing, at this time.  But that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Republican agenda.

I can only hope that they are as effective at that as they were at helping U.S. coal miners.  The promise to do that being central to Trump’s prior win.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

On global warming, I’ll have to listen to the Republican party parroting Russian disinformation for the rest of my life.  Fact-free spin and bullshit seems to be their preferred fuel these days.

But I will die with the certain knowledge that if civilization survives, the stupidity of encouraging faster global warming will be universally recognized.  By whatever portion of the population manages to survive the mass die-offs that will result from a world-wide reduction in arable land.

(As an afterthought, will the Arctic save us?  No.  Only if you live on a Mercator Projection.  And only if you think you can grow crops without topsoil, as the last ice age scraped most of Arctic North America down to bedrock, and deposited that topsoil in the U.S. Midwest.  (See Canadian Shield).  Some fraction of the population will likely survive there under even the most extreme warming scenarios.  But most citizens of the U.S., and the world, will have starved long before there’s any Arctic dividend to share.)