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49 comments on Arctic Oil and Gas Ultimates
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49 comments on Arctic Oil and Gas Ultimates
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One thing the article did not seem to address is development times for the Arctic resource much less cost. I'd have to think even with the ice melting its going to be very hard to develop these resources. So development time lines would I think be decades into the future at best.
When the Arctic summer sea ice disappears in the next years
Lessons from the Arctic summer 2007
www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf
this will screw up the whole climate on the Northern hemisphere and beyond. Salinity, ocean currents, winds, temperatures, everything will change. And we have basically no idea how that will impact on us.
Extracting more oil from the Arctic will be the least of our problems then. The only useful thing we could do with any oil coming from there would be to grease the generators of millions of windfarms or to use diesel to transport solar panels and mirrors to their desert locations.
Our job will soon be to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. NASA climatologist James Hansen has moved the goal posts from 450 ppm CO2 concentration to 350 ppm, a limit we have exceeded already 20 years ago.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/RoyalCollPhyscns_Jan08.pdf
And if you think recent cold weather allows you to call off global warming, read here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080303_ColdWeather.pdf
A good summary of our predicament is here
Climate Code Red
http://www.carbonequity.info/climatecodered/5keys.html
Hmmm... not so much, perhaps. Most people don't seem to be aware that 80% of the ice is already gone. It's been thinned out to a huge degree in the last decade. While the extent seen this last summer was astounding, it had already dropped in total mass by a huge amount due to losses in thickness. Where it will make a big impact is the albedo.
Then again, who knows where the tipping points are? At any rate, strange days ahead.
Cheers
The link to the Lessons from the Arctic paper doesn't work, it gives me a 404. I was able to get it by going to the main page, where it's linked, but I was asked for my name and email before I could access it.
At any rate, interesting stuff. Thanks for the pointers.
You offer this as proof?
Just look at the second and third charts. They are both flat from 1980 to today, down from 1998 (a big El Nino year) to today, down from 1980 to 1997 and flat from 1999 to today even ignoring the 2008 winter.
Then I ask why there is only one straight line through the first chart? That looks down from 1980 to 1994 and flat from 1990 to today.
The correlation between the temperatures in these charts and CO2 (up) is non existent. Even then correlation is not causation.
The CO2 'case' is predicated on delta(T) = K delta(CO2) but there is no such link shown in these charts and the noise looks bigger than any trend. The CO2 advocates pick their starting date at will and only ever draw a straight line - no curve fitting, no removal of outliers, no statistical analysis at all. Just start these charts 1 year later and see what happens to the slope on the flat line - by eye it halves. Read this to see how the past climate and CO2 has been fiddled:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
If you have a copy take a look at Patrick J. Michaels' book 'Meltdown' figure 3.8. The chart is titled 'North Polar Region (60N to 90N) Winter Temperature Anomalies'. The chart shows the usual rising straight line from 1955 to 2000, but if you remove the single cold outlier in 1966 then the line goes flat. The 'Summer Temperature Anomaly' chart is flat all the way. Even the author didn't pick up on that. If a trend is dependent on a single data point then it's not a trend.
I've also read 'The Chilling Stars' by Svensmark and Calder. The cosmic ray/sun climatologists have a better fit with climate than the CO2 climatologists.
What I see is a political bandwagon with an agenda as long as your arm. It works for so many people at so many levels. Am I supposed to believe 'climatologist' Gore?
I won't even start on the IPCC's development scenarios - all based upon exponential growth. This is TOD. We do peak oil, peak gas, peak coal, peak food and the finite nature of resources. We don't do exponential.
Alan - thanks very much for these links. I just spent the last couple of hours reading this stuff.
For those interested in following the expansion and contraction of ice sheets The Cryosphere today is an excellent resource:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Charts here show that the Arctic ice sheets are still growing in area (just) this Spring:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
While the Antarctic ice area has already started to grow in area this Fall:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
Not surprising then that the global sea ice anomaly has turned positive:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.wit...
Note that all these are measuring sea ice area and not volume. The GW debate will most likely be interesting this year.
According to the link you posted, http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
the ice anomaly is at it's lowest area when the sun is high in the sky during the summer, and at it's lowest when the sun is low in the sky in winter. If the ice pack was actually greater than it's average in the winter instead of smaller than it's average, it still would be bad. The warming effect of less ice is far greater in the summer than in the winter.
I wonder if you can parse the paragraph above or if you will say something like "Of course the ice pack is smaller in the summer!". Responding to what I did not say is so much easier and less psychologically threatening.
I would like data for Arctic Ocean salinity. It's easy to say that ice is forming earlier because the salinity is lower, but is that true? Is melting permafrost really making the ice form faster in the winter?
Hi Euan,
If you come back here, thanks for your consideration and all the great work you do on TOD. I don't think the global warming issue is settled yet. There is a serious noise problem in the data, and the nature of TOD is to test assumptions. If the climate models are correct then they would work over any time period - which they don't. It's a really interesting science but really too really to say either way.
And there is an interview about these serious developments on the Reality Report by Jason Bradford with Philip Sutton of Climate Code Red. The talk is titled: The case for a Sustainable Emergency
The MP3 is here: http://media.globalpublicmedia.com/RM/2008/02/SuttonBradford.20080218.mp3
and a transcript here: http://globalpublicmedia.com/sustainability_emergency
I think they are relevant to this discussion, because it is clear that we cannot afford to tap any of the oil or gas in the Arctic no matter how much there is and the less of it there is, then the less likely it will happen.
Given the way things tend to be in nature, I am quite sure it will turn out there will be sufficient remaining reserves of oil and gas about to dangle the carrot in front of humanity with the choice to take the easy option to burn the rest or the much harder but correct voluntary decision to refrain and begin the process of climate repair. In other words a global test of whether we are capable of making the right decision. It is better it is done this way, than if natural limits (to reserves & resources) do it for us.