- The above graphic of recent former Soviet Union oil production comes from an excellent post at TOD by Rembrandt Koppelaar.
- Another triumph for the Onion (and I claim this is on-topic for the blog as Kim Jong-Un is at least a minor threat to civilization - that's my story and I'm sticking to it).
- Flood insurance premium increases will make it harder to live near the coast following Hurricane Sandy.
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Ok, I'm going to again point out the risk of a solar CME messing with civilization, and let me point out that I'm not at all talking about some Mayan calendar nonsense. A new paper in Nature suggests that a 774 CE spike in 14C concentrations in tree rings is best explained by a very large CME (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7426/full/nature11695.html). They point out that such a CME is on the low end of super flares that have been observed with other sun-type stars. They calculate the probability of such an event happening in the next decade at around .8%, but that would be about 20 times the strength of a Carrington-level event that was recently estimated at about an 18% chance in the next decade.
Still a fairly low-probability risk to civilization, but this study suggests that the super flares we've now observed on other sun-type stars may be more than just an interesting possibility here.
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