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103 comments on DrumBeat: January 17, 2008
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GAIA Host Collective
One point is that all coal consumption will raise the earth’s temperature by about .3 degrees centigrade. All fossil fuels raise it about 1.7 degrees C.
This can not be true. Even now coal accounts for about the same CO2 emissions as oil (and catching up) and roughly twice more than Natural Gas. Here is a nice graph illustrating this:

Coal price per BTU is many times lower than the other FFs and hence its usage rises much faster recently. What is more worrisome are the ultimate coal reserves:
1 trillion tonnes of coal will emit 7-800bln.tonnes of carbon, or more than 100 years worth of carbon emissions at current emission levels. A rough calculation: if 50 years of burning FFs at about half current emission levels on average brought us 0.6C temperature rise, 100 years, twice that emissions should bring 4 times, or 2.4 degrees C temperature rise (forgetting about feedback loops etc.).
Even if we are pessimistic and half of that coal turns out unrecoverable, this is still 1.2 degrees or 4 times what your source suggests.
Hi LevinK,
For coal, everyone use the World Energy Council surveys. They are at
http://www.worldenergy.org/
They were 847Gt in the 2007 survey. These have been reduced repeatedly since the 1992 Survey, when they were 1,039Gt. These have been dropping, as countries become more realistic about how much coal they will mine, like Germany, and switch from quoting coal in place to recoverable coal, like India. In the simulations I have run, which do include climate feedback to the carbon cycle, the contribution to the peak temperature rise from coal burning is roughly linear, with a proportionality constant of 0.0007 degrees C/Gt. Multiplying this by half the coal reserves, which is probably reasonable for mined coal, gives 0.3 degrees C rise.
There are slides and spreadsheets at
http://rutledge.caltech.edu/
Historically coal reserves have not been a good estimate of future production, just as oil and gas reserves have not been a good estimate of future production. However, while oil and gas reserves have been lower than future production, coal reserves have been higher than future production.
Dave