Severe drought in northern China

full story @ The New York Times:

A severe drought in northern China has badly damaged the winter wheat crop and left the ground very dry for the spring planting, fueling inflation and alarming China’s leaders.
Rising food prices were a problem last autumn even before the drought began, prompting the government to impose a wide range of price controls in mid-November. The winter wheat crop has been parched since then in northern China while unusually widespread frost has hurt the vegetable crop in southern China, and state media began warning a week ago that price controls on food might not be effective.
Some of the driest areas are close to Beijing, which has had no appreciable precipitation since Oct. 23, although there were brief snow flurries on Dec. 29. If the drought lasts another 11 days it will match one in the winter of 1970-71 as the longest since modern record keeping started in 1951, according to government meteorologists quoted by state media..
Particularly hard hit have been Hebei Province, which is next to Beijing and which President Hu visited from Tuesday to Thursday, and southern Shandong Province to the east, which Mr. Wen visited on Wednesday and Thursday. The dirt in farmers’ fields has become bone dry and is easily lifted by breezes, coating trees and houses in fine dust.
Food prices have been rising around the world, a result of weather problems in many countries like the unusual heat wave in Russia last summer. High food prices have been among the many reasons for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

Go North, Young, er, Person

Reuters story:

"The scramble is on to mine the rare earth metals in other parts of the world, particularly in the US, Australia, Canada and now .. Greenland? It's true. According to the Sunday Times UK, it's thought that Greenland is home to the largest deposit of rare earth metals in the world. Beneath the ice and rocks of the Ilimaussaq Intrustion on the southwestern shore may lie the answer to China's rare earth dominance. It's estimated that the deposit could supply 25 percent of world demand for fifty years."

The Great Dust Bowl of China

     The Great Wall isn't the only (at least partially man-made) thing in China visible from space. Here's another thing in China that one can view from a comfortable orbit. The above photo is one of Benoit Aquin's award-winning (Prix Pictet 2008) photos of the Dust Bowl in western China. This has been an ongoing situation there, and one should note that it is partially explainable by geo-hydrological factors. After all, this region is one of the earth's land regions furthest from any ocean, and is hemmed in, to a large extent, by mountains that cut it off from rain-bearing clouds. But it seems that the situation has been exacerbated by overfarming, or at least, non-ecological farming strategies. Patrick Alleyn's great article (with pictures by Aquin) in The Walrus can be found here and in beautiful pdf format here.
     The dust clouds blow out of the west periodically and affect China's cities, and even the US. There have been recent attempts to block the dust walls by, for example, installing banks of wind turbines along the edges of the affected areas, admirable from a multitasking perspective, but its hard to see how that could be very effective in blocking tsunamis of blowing topsoil. I would imagine this is probably an area of some concern to the authorities in China, but no apparent solution has yet been arrived at. I put this little aggregate together so that I could learn a bit more about this potentially macro-significant subject, hope it helps.

Peak Oil: Underlying Cause of the Gulf Spill

The insatiable drive to extract ever more oil from ever more unproductive sources is what ultimately led to the rush, the inattentivenes, that triggered the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. This article from The Guardian treats the subject well. BTW, 2011 could be interesting if OPEC tries to keep oil price under $100, but finds it difficult to effectively ramp up production in order to achieve that end. It's not in the oil-producing countries' interest to cripple the industrialized world with high energy prices, but the (potential?) spectre of peak oil may get in their way.

Copper and the single trader

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A single trader holds up to 90% of the copper in London Metal Exchange warehouses, the Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday.

The news came after copper prices hit a record and other commodities surged. Read about metal gains here.

The London Metal Exchange reported Tuesday that the trader holds 80% to 90% of the copper in its stockpiles, which is equal to about half of all the exchange-registered supply of the metal in the world, the Journal said. The position is worth about $3 billion, it added.

full story

Sourcemap: where stuff is sourced from

From MIT's Media Lab come Sourcemap, a site that creates maps showing where materials used in a wide variety of products comes from.

Get Ready: rare earth prices set to rise

"A Chinese embargo on rare earth elements is causing a dramatic spike in the price of materials, which is expected to lead to a jump in high-tech product prices before settling back down in a few years, according to report released today.
Prices will increase rapidly until "non-Chinese rare earth mines are up and running, increasing product availability and thereby decreasing prices," wrote Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network, in a research note today."