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239 comments on Climate Change – an alternative approach
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239 comments on Climate Change – an alternative approach
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It would be comforting to accept your arguement, Louise, to feel that our no-flying and transitioning are doing good, are keeping fossil fuels in the ground. However, the difference between the oil price and the production cost demonstrates that Chris's pessimism is justified. Fuels that you and I don't burn will be burnt by others entering the market.
Nobody is suggesting that empowering the leaders of fossil fuel rich nations to forego production is going to be easy but it is the only way to stop the carbon being burnt.
To reduce supply in the current situation without placing into effect a demand side plan that replaces fossil fuels with alternative energy sources is to beg for disaster on a massive scale. The above paper overlooks entirely the deep dependency that all current human socio-economic structures have upon fossil fuels. The author is in reality proposing that we accomplish by directive precisely what Mother Nature will require through the natural terminal decline of productivity inherent in the concept of Peak Oil. Soon global production of oil will begin its steady terminal decline, providing the restriction upon supply that the Vernons propose. Why take years convincing 30 nations to cut back on production when Nature will do that anyway? And who would enforce this? No one would have the incentive, neither producers, nor consumers.
The article reveals a shocking lack of perception of the catastrophic effects that would ensue upon the heels of such a decision. The global economy would suffer greatly, critical services and food supplies would be at risk, transport upon which 90% of global commerce and we all now depend so heavily upon would be negatively affected and immense pressure would be brought to bear upon the producing countries to increase production. The stronger nations might well say, "Sod it. We'll just take what we need with our military". Weaker nations would likely get very little and people will starve. To the rather naive suggestion that producing countries be compensated for cutting back, just how will that be done when the economy is going to hell in a basket?
Bottom line. It's just not that simple. The things that will help the most to cushion us against the approaching disaster via peak oil are (1) conservation and (2) heavy investments in alternative energy.
We don't have much time. Climate change is no longer humankind's most immediate problem.
Victor, the questions are:
Is natural decline in fossil fuel production fast enough to prevent dangerous climate change?
Is the damage to society by a faster reduction in fossil fuel use worse than the resulting climate change?
I would suggest that we can’t rely on natural depletion alone – Hansen’s business as usual scenario of just burning conventional oil, gas and coal takes us to 580ppm, that’s before looking at unconventionals or any positive feedbacks.
click to enlarge
Regarding the relative damage of rapid fossil fuel loss or climate change, who can tell? What do you think about TEQs as a response to rapid fossil fuel loss?
Impossible is the word that comes to mind when considering any political leadership proposing either supply or demand restraint.
The reality is any political party that proposes that recession is the way forward will either not get voted into power or will be voted out of power. This means the FF will be burned, almost everybody wants growth and a better way of life if possible - get used to it, and plan accordingly. Sadly, it looks like we don't have enough resources or time to waste on unproductive sidetracks.
Nobody. This is the big problem - nobody knows what the future will be, and politicians won't do anything that adversely affects society unless you can tell them with precision.
The current statistical probabilities are a completely inadequate tool for anybody to decide which way to progress.
As has always happened in the past, it looks almost certain that nature will decide the way forward, not humans.
If you understand the political process you will realise the world's politicians don't have the solutions to the approaching cluster of problems - so, don't rely on them for you and your family's future well being as it's very probably not a viable plan.
Xeroid.
shouldn't it be to prevent MORE dangerous or ABRUPT CC?
how dangerous is dangerous? hasn't dangerous CC already occurred and is getting more dangerous everyday? it may indeed be politically "unwise" to state the truth in mass media, but is that so even in TOD?
You must first answer whether dangerous climate change is even on the horizon to begin with. How bad will it be? How much will be affected? Not the alarmist Goristic dire pridictions that even the IPCC contradicts, but the solidly understood scientific evidence.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
Richard,
I thought you were now persuaded. The IPCC synthesis report makes a big point that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. I think it is the economists rather than the scientists who are on squishy ground.
Chris
There is no increase in the over all rate of sea level. I noted before I would find refs and here are a few.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/12/04/decelerating-the-...
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/09/14/sea-level-slowdow...
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/02/09/shocking-facts-ab...
Also note that the amount of snow fall in the Antarctic is increasing, and together with the reduction in Arctic melting is a mere 5% over all reduction in ice between the 2.
I read as much as I can on both sides of the issue, as long as WorldClimateReport reviews PEER REVIEWED papers that contradict the premisses of AGW, I remain skeptical. Especially the hard core extreme alarmist Gorist dogma.
No don't give me the excuse that WCR is funded by Big Oil. A few months back Newsweek tried to do the same thing, but had to retract their own article when it was revealed that, yes, Big Oil in the past 20 years has put in some $18million into challenging AGW theory. But those who work in the theory in the same time frame were funded $50 BILLION. Thus who has money to loose at stake?
And no, the latest IPCC report is 7" to 23" in 100 years. The 7" is the current past average rise that has already been happening for the past 100 years of measurements. That rate has not yet been found to change and the IPCC report admits that.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
why haven't the investment bankers thought about creating yet another derivative that perhaps can make up some of the losses they are suffering from the subprime scandal - write up some put and call options on the coastal properties that have values directly linked to the sea level - the sea-level-rise believers can put their money in puts and doubters can put their money in calls? shouldn't the IPCC members get at least a meaningful percentage of their pay by the type of options according to their opinions?
Richard,
From the synthesis report:
You other points are not relevant since you set the criteria that you need to see a change in the rate of sea level rise. Now you've seen it.
Chris
As long as the 'business as usual' people control the media, all the global warming scientists don't matter. It takes waiting till it's too late, till the hurricane surge comes over the levee, the orchards and vinyards run out of irrigation water, the forests burn down and take exurbia with it, and the Arctic ice pack disappears completely, before it is no longer possible to deny global warming.
Which is about where we are right now.
OK, so we denied tenure to people that talked about global warming years ago, when it wasn't too late. So we defunded people by denying them grants to gather the data that tracked global warming years ago, when it wasn't too late. It doesn't matter any more.
The question that matters now is, what can we do. Note, I am not asking what should we do, I am asking what can we do.
If we shut down oil production six years in advance of running out anyway, all that does is piss off the gasoline buyers, the commuters, and make them blame the Liberal environmentalists.
The Conservative denialists get off scott free and walk away with the money, laughing.
And what does it get us?
Better to just let us hit the wall six years harder. What difference does it make? We are in an irreversible climate shift. Six less years of burning oil and we are not going to save Greenland. Those six years are going to increase greenhouse warming by what, six percent? It's a compound interest thing. The last six months of running up your credit cards are not nearly as ruinous as the first six years.
We are not just concerned about the present amount of CO2 in the air, we are concerned about the melted snow that is no longer reflecting sunlight, the treeline moving north across the taiga and higher along the mountain sides, absorbing sunlight as the snow lies below the branches, the CH4 desorbing from the muskeg as the permafrost melts, and bubbling up from the wave stirred hydrates of the Arctic as the wave damping ice pack melts in the summer sun of the Arctic ocean.
Greenhouse gases from oil and coal are no longer the most important part of the global warming problem. The compound interest on the old greenhouse gases are what is more important.
You know, we went through this before in California. The ecofreaks got the government to buy up the last of the old growth forest. We saved about five years worth of lumber industry, and spent the next forty years with the rural areas bitching about us denying them good jobs at good wages, and subsidizing them by supplementing their taxes to compensate them for losing the employment. We got to compensate them eight times for every lost dollar of wages.
Why go through that again?
Hit the wall six years early and destroy the Conservatives as a political philosophy. Works for me.
Example of unsubstantiated hype. Greenland isn't all going to melt. The last time it was ice free was 180,000 years ago. Other past warm spells did not melt it all, neither will this one. Besides, it would take THOUSANDS of years to melt all that ice even if it warmed with no winters. You can't get past physical laws.
GW is happening, we have to live with it. We should not be spending a dime on trying to stop it as that will use up valuble resources we soon won't have. As oil depletes more people are going to starve to death than people who drown from higher sea levels. Oops, but that isn't happening...
We need to funnel our resources to preparing for a society with dwindling FF supplies. This hype over GW is distracting everyone from that goal, making the time when that realization does happen way too late.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
It doesn't all have to melt to cause serious trouble. Total melting will raise sea levels ~21 feet, but 10% will flood cities, river deltas, etc.
Quite wrong. Many of the options for switching away from fossil fuels (esp. nuclear and some of the biofuels) also have a large impact on AGW emissions. Relatively minor changes to system designs and incentives can address both problems simultaneously.
I think you are correct that we are beginning to see feedbacks that could ultimately dwarf the effect we have had so far on the climate, but I think you are incorrect that how we behave now makes no difference. Only half of our emissions remain in the atmosphere so drastically reducing our emissions should lead to reduced forcing since the atmospheric concentration of CO2 should begin to come down. We will know if there are feedbacks than need to be handled once we have done this, that is we will see if the carbon dioxide concentration continues to decline or if it begins to rise again. If the latter occurs, we should have time to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere ourselves since any feedbacks happening now are still small compared to our emissions.
Chris
Chris, to make the 23" in 100 years the rate must go up THREE TIMES! (for Gore ridiculous 20 feet it would have to rise 10x more than that. Gee, that is a MAGNATUDE more!)
But that rate change is not happening. In the World Climate Report summaries of REFEREED PAPERS is it quite clear that to establish the actual rate of increase is very hard. It goes through cycles of faster rates and slower rates, that at 7" per year has been going on for more than 100 years, long before we came along with FF buring.
If you read the summary in WCR you will note that the rate DROPPED between 1940 and 1993. And the quote you note is very clear that the current increase CANNOT WITH CERTAINTY be because of GW, it might, and most likley is, due to these small fluctations. Besides, this rate change is VERY small, just a few percent change.
Bottom line is the scare mongering of FEET or METERS increase in the next 50 years is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
So if all this melting is going and, and reviews in WCR dispute there is wide scale increases, where is all the water going? This is a serious, and theory breaking, problem. Theories stay or fall on their predictions. If the predictions of feet increases in sea level in the next 100 years does not pan out, the theory is in serious trouble. If there is no change in the rate over the next ten years, the theory is in trouble.
Please, don't just take the IPCC and the Gorites hook line and sinker, read papers that do not support the AGW dogma, there's lots of it. Hence I remain SKEPTICAL (not a denier) that we are contributing 100% to GW and hence can change the current trend.
And BTW, there is an astrophysis, who just died recently, who noted that the changes in the planets around the sun causes the solar system center of gravity to wobble, and with it the sun wobbles causing more or less activity, which affects our climate.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
"...the changes in the planets around the sun causes the solar system center of gravity to wobble, and with it the sun wobbles causing more or less activity, which affects our climate."
Total Crapola! (no surprise you don't understand AGW)
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=b...
And you know this for a fact? Where have you published refuting this? And I do understand AGW, that's why I reject it.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
No, you don't understand it. If you did, you'd understand that the glacial cycles correspond to Earth's orbital eccentricity and axial tilt/precession. Jupiter influences Earth's orbital eccentricity IIRC, but that's already accounted for.
Could it be that one aging scientist could be right, and the entire IPCC is wrong? Far more likely that the aging scientist is getting senile, and you're latching onto his claims because they align with what you want to believe.
These are different issues entirely. You were concerned with observed changes. Those are observed. How well projections work is another matter. It is not too hard to say that with the present trend of the rate of sea level rise doubling every decade we would see 3 meters a year in 100 years. Or we might project a linear rate of increase so that the rate is 3 cm/year in 100 years and it takes 30 years to get one meter. As the IPCC points out, the current rate of sea level rise is consistent with model expectations as is the observed increase in the rate. What we do know is that thermal expansion alone gives a couple of meters once the oceans have fully mixed so you'd need quite a lot of snow piling up somewhere to counter that. We also know that just a couple of degrees or so more warming gives us about 25 meters of sea level rise from melting which could come fast or slow. The science is beginning to favor fast. The reason we know about the 25 meters is because that is what it did last time. The maxium observed rate of increase for sea level is about 5 meters per century but that is likely a lower limit since decade level rates can't be discerned, so five meters in a decade could have happened. Some evidence of destructive flooding suggest pulses are involved in these kinds of things. At least meters in a half a century have been observed so this is not physically impossible. In our present situation of very rapid climate change, it might be more likely to be expected than not.
For those who like more direct evidence than the rate of sea level rise I think this link demostrates our situation very clearly. In another 40 years, the Mountain Ash that used to range down to West Virginia won't have a habitat in the lower 48. That is much less time than the life of a tree. You can see why mass extinction is expected from the climate change we are causing.
Chris
That is NOT what the IPCC says. It clearly notes that the current (small) rate change cannot with certainty be known to be by anything other than normal variations. You even posted that quote.
Unsubstantiated speculation. The oceans will never "fully mix" it will always have warm sections, and deep cold sections, and have currents that circulate. It's gone on like that for 4 billion years.
When and where did this happen? Post a link to the reference to support this. There is nothing in the past 100 year measurements that shows this. Go to the Tide and Currents website and give me the link of the place where that happened.
The graphs I've seen published shows that at the end of the last ice age the rate of sea level was much faster than today, but has since dramatically slowed down (to the current 7"/Cy on average) looking like the left half of a bell curve.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
Richard,
You need to read the synthesis report. Clearly, the increased rate of sea level rise is taken as supportive evidence. It is important to caution that past performance may not be inticative of future results. We don't know if we are settling into 3 mm/yr of if the trend will change in the near future, perhaps to 6 mm/year.
You clearly don't understand thermal expansion. There are temperature variations in the oceans. But those deltas are not what mixing is about. The deltas may remain the same (or get back to what they were) but the deep water is warmer with mixing. The whole scale shifts preserving the deltas. So, there are portions of the oceans now that have yet to warm, but very predictably will which leads to more thermal expansion.
It is during periods of catastrophic deglaciation that the highest rates of sea level rise are measured. You might want to read Hansen et al. in Philispohical Transactions this year for a masterful treatment. Read it carefully, and you'll be well repayed for the effort.
Chris
The pace of melting of the Greenland ice cap has tripled in just the last 5 years. It is a fait accompli.
Chris,
The presentation at the Houston ASPO meeting from NASA GISS pretty much said that peak oil as typically portrayed here together with peak coal, similar to the way Dave Rutledge or the Energy Watch Group look at that, together look like Hansen's alternative scenario (which is lower than any scenario considered by the IPCC) rather than his BAU scenarios. However, NASA GISS is moving to the view that the level of dangerous climate change lies below 450 ppm CO2. You can understand why if you read Hansen et al.'s treatment of slow feedbacks in their recent Phliosophical Transactions publication linked here.
I feel that you are correct to point out unconventional oil, and I hope Dave will look at "acts of desperation" coal since that seems to be the basic model for coal in any case, but some depletion models look a lot different from the Hansen or other BAU models.
Chris
Hi mdsolar,
What are "acts of desperation" coal?
Thanks,
Dave
Hi Dave,
I'm thinking of very thin or very deep coal seams that we would not consider economical but which exist. The effort in Utah seems to me to be an act of desperation, but one could imagine even greater brazenness. I'm wondering if desperation could be quantified in mining deaths per ton? If so, then we have a long way to go to match early 20th centrury desperation levels in the US while deperation tolerance may be higher elsewhere.
Chris
Chris,
Due to depletion of reserves the peak of CO2 emissions might happen 60 years sooner than Hansen projects. The CEO of ConocoPhilips is on record claiming that oil production will never go above 100 million barrels a day. World oil production has declined in the last 2 years. Why keep treating the conventional nightmare CO2 scenarios seriously?
Not necessarily. Economies react sensibly to slow changes, catastrophic change comes only from catastrophic changes.
For example, we can say that a depletion in supply of 0.01% a year could definitely be compensated for without any significant trouble at all by efficiency gains, putting alternate means of energy generation, and so on; a depletion of 50% a year would definitely make a mess. So, somewhere between 0.01% and 50% depletion is a level which will allow for useful change but cause no economic disaster.
You also neglect to recall that the essence of the idea of peak oil is that a big drop in supply is inevitable. Whether peak oil is today or in 100 years, at some point there'll be a dramatic drop in supply - and we'll have to adjust then. Do you imagine that change forced upon us by physical limits is somehow less painful than change we choose to go through by treaty and law?
We're climbing down a cliff, and the rope is unravelling. So, we can either try to climb down before it breaks, or we can just hang around waiting until it breaks and drops us.
Hi Biff,
We haven't been introduced, but Chris has mentioned fondly the Lincolnshire life.
I believe empowering the leaders of fossil fuel nations to forgo production is not just 'not easy' but impossible without the backing of the majority of the global community.
While I suppose one could imagine circumstances in which people are aware of the problem, insist on the capping of production in oil-rich countries, and yet decide not to change their own behaviour, I struggle to think of an individual example where someone who fully understands the gravity of this issue has not changed their behaviour where they felt able. It seems that if you are convinced that individual action / government action on the demand-side does nothing, you lose the platfrom from which you could insist suppliers cut their production.
On discussing this further with Chris, I better understand that there are grounds on which to say that right now, the choice not to fly (etc.) does not directly stop any particular quantity of oil being extracted owing to the divergence of the cost of extraction and price of oil as you say, however the direct effect is inconsequential if it builds on the culture that is necessary to make direct caps and reductions. On both demand-side and supply side, attitude change is the most crucial factor, but I adamantly believe that if an attitude change can be achieved, the demand-side changes will happen as a consequence. If an attitude change cannot be achieved, attempts by a few enlightened individuals to try to cap supply will be either short-lived or have adverse consequences.
Hi Louse
Yes life's grand in Lincolnshire. I've just been watching the 20 new turbines being erected by Ecotricity at the end of my road. :)
There's no belittleing of demand side action intended. It is vital, just not sufficient. So far all the talk is about the demand side and supply side has been ignored.
You're quite right, culture is important.
Anyone who has studied the history of movements of social liberation will understand the importance of individuals and groups as examples. The Suffragettes in the UK, a tired black woman who wouldn't move from her bus seat in the US South, a skinny old Indian guy who went for a walk to make salt - individual change can have impressive effects in changing the culture as a whole.