 | Oilwatch Monthly - November 2008 | The Oil Drum: Europe | IEA WEO 2008 - Fossil Fuel Ultimates and CO2 Emissions Scenarios |  |
76 comments on The IEA WEO 2008: Will coal usage be phased out?
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76 comments on The IEA WEO 2008: Will coal usage be phased out?
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As petroleum resources become depleted and economies collapse, investment in massive nuclear & alt. energy projects becomes untenable. Nations burn what they have domestically available in order to buttress BAU and stave off the social unrest sequent to food & energy shortages. In a climate of diminished revenues, environmental protections are cast aside as CO2 & other greenhouse gasses accumulate in the atmosphere & surface ocean unabated. Lowered ocean pH causes marine ecosystem collapse, along with the fisheries dependent on their integrity. Range shifts and selection can't keep pace with climatic warming, especially not in habitat patches fragmented by human activity, as terrestrial ecosystems - including agro-ecosystems - increasingly unravel. Deprived of the biotic resource bases upon which human society depends, war breaks out in the desperate attempt to deal with famine of unpresidented scale. Strategic pathogens are unleashed against staple grain crops & legumes, along with regional nuclear exchanges. Ecosystem support services spiral dowward under a set of positive feedbacks, resulting in the depopulation of the northern hemisphere within the lifetimes of those already born. Relict human populations in the southern hemisphere wink out over the course of the next couple centuries.
In the absence of human perturbation, climate and ocean chemistry slowly begins to recover. On the even slower scale of evolutionary time, biodiversity begins to reestablish likewise. Over the span of 10 mys, diversity is fully recovered and little trace of the ecocidal ape's wanton legacy remains.
The suits & bean counters at the IEA present their technocopian scenarios, I present mine.
DD, I always appreciate it when you take the long view. You might like my new blog: Desdemona Despair: Blogging the End of the World™.
One thing both of you are completely missing in the "long view":
GEA's Revenge.
Now, you'll probably think I'm referring to GEA(Lovin's presentation of Earth as a closed/Feedback system) as revenging itself from the "scurge" that humanity has caused the planet.
No, it's actually the reverse.
Plant life has become increasingly efficient at scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2 [see Wiki: C4 carbon fixation - "C4 plants arose around 25 to 32 million years ago[2] during the Oligocene (precisely when is difficult to determine) and did not become ecologically significant until around 6 to 7 million years ago .. Today they represent about 5% of Earth's plant biomass but account for around 30% of terrestrial carbon fixation"], so that before the Anthropocene levels were even below 300ppm. Well, the results were an unstable climate which oscillated from deep freeze to extended polar ice and back.
GEA, on the other hand, would "prefer" a warmer climate and needed an agent/catalyst which finally released some of the carbon which had been increasingly sequestered over the last half a billion years.
The last 3 million years have been increasingly colder. The last 3 million years, man has evolved from it's position as just another ape (right, Lucy?). Coincidence?
Now, finally, man has been burning coal and become advanced enough to drill for deposits of oil and gas in the technological age. FINALLY, GEA has been able to steer back to being a warm weather planet, despite sub-optimal plate techtonics and the conjunction of N. and S. America.
Will Homo Sapiens continue to serve GEA's purpose or will it be put asside as it's task has been accomplished? Stay tuned til next week to find out in "As the GEA turns"...
Cheers, Dom
Ummm..
The truely long term situation is that the Sun is gradually getting hotter (on the timescale of 10s+ million years). Since geochemical drawdown of CO2 by silicate chemical erosion is broardly temperature-dependant, there is a feedback effect - hotter sun = lower CO2 levels (For same climate).
This very-long term effect has made life harder and harder for C3 plants; these originally evolved in a high-CO2/zero Oxygen atmosphere about 3.5 billion years ago - oxygen poisions the process of photosynthesis. The evolution of C4 plants is a reaction to this.
Eventually - about 500 million to 1 billion years hence - CO2 levels will fall to near-zero but the sun will still be getting hotter, leading to final runaway warming and the Earth 'going-Venus'. THAT is the end of the world..
:-)
Well, I must admit that I'm quite antropocentric in my views and time frames..
BUT as I pointed out, GEA might just be that too - at least at the moment. Maybe GEA is also using Homo Egocentris to begin exercising Geo-Engineering. You know, shock the species a bit (maybe a partial extinction) so that it begins dealing with GW.
The bit of extra radiation that the sun will be sending us in millions of years would be easy enough to reflect, once the mirrors have been put in orbit...
One minor flaw in your argument: If the growing sun is supposed to fix away more C02, why is Venus's atmosphere almost only CO2?
Greetings from Munich, Dom
Because there's very little water on Venus?
Hi,
Basically the 'venus effect' is what happens when the feedback system breaks down.
Once CO2 is practically zero but the sun is so hot that temperatures are higher than today, you reach the point that water vapour feedback dominates. Essentially, once the oceans reach an average temperature of about 28 Degrees C (about 13 degrees higher than today), you get the situation that evaporation exceeds precipitation in an ongoing cycle (Higher evaporation = higher temperatures = more evaporation, where it cannot rain out fast enough to stop). Very, very quickly (perhaps a century), surface temperatures exceed the boiling point of water; the oceans boil into the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect even more.
Now, of course, the temperature gets so extreme that carbonates start breaking down, so all exposed Carbonates release CO2 back into the atmsophere. Volcanic CO2 will also build up. Even more greenhouse effect.
The huge increase in atmospheric water means that more will br broken down by UV light into oxygen and hydrogen, with the hydrogen escaping. Several hundred million years hence, the water will mostly be gone and the oxygen gradually removed by reaction with lava. We will now have a massive CO2 atmosphere and a searing desert of a surface, much like Venus today.
The implication is, of course, that Venus was once like Earth, although this is uncertain - it may never have been cold enough to keep the ocean/CO2 equlibrium. It is also interesting that sea temperatures in the late creatceous super-greenhouse may have averaged 25 degrees C or higher.. placing us a couple of big volcanic eruptions away from the runaway greenhouse.
Something to think about next time you start your car up..
If I recall correctly, Venus has an extremely weak magnetic field, so without such a shield there's a lot more radiation and the water was broken down relatively quickly and the hydrogen escaped into space.
The earth's magnetic field is very strong, making it unlikely that most of our water will disappear, and the sequence you discribe will likely be different on our planet.
Yes, it will take longer (might take longer than the sun will last..) - but that's not a great comfort if you happen to be on the surface.. Indeed the additional effect could see temperatures high enough to melt wet granite.
how much different?
In my college courses it was called Gaia, but no matter. The notion that nature has an intentionality seems a little far fetched to me, but to be intellectually consistent, it must hold that h.sapiens has no intentionality either.
PeakPlus' comment does get at the serious difficulty of attempting to hold the earth in a steady state, just the way we like it. Our complex social and economic systems demand that stability. In the medium and long run, it's probably not possible.
Sorry, Gea is an engineering group in Germany..
And Sorry: was proposed by Lovelock, not Lovins..
Exactly: I'm pointing to a philisophical question that is skipped by many a die-off expert.
Cheers, Dom
The Gaia theory is an interesting thought experiment, to understand the concept of bio albedo feedback, but because of it's gross oversimplification it has rather limited practical value.
Eloquent and succinct.
Thank you.
Its difficult to take issue with your statement. Anything which takes such an extremely long view is ultimately wrong, despite being correct, because of the law of unintended consequences.
I can't take your 10my scenario seriously.
If you take the extreme long view, anything over 10,000 years, human beings are all extinct because they will have died off (pick your poison, there are lots of possible causes, [from biotic to viral to social to religious to ecological/environmental,]) or because they will have evolved into something better, or worse.
Maybe we need to kill off all the bean-counters who think that bean-counting is all there is to life.
(The suits are going to kill themselves off as this economy goes into the crapper.)
There was a joke during the late 60's or early 70's: "a true environmentalist is one who is willing to freeze to death while sitting on a coal mine". Using this definition I doubt that there are many true environmentalists.
Agree completely.
There does seem to be a vocal set of Environmentalists who really do think things would be better without modern industry. I doubt they'd last a week if they really got what they wanted..
"As petroleum resources become depleted and economies collapse, investment in massive nuclear & alt. energy projects becomes untenable"
What do you mean by "collapse" if you mean a depression similar to 1930's this is just the environment for a massive build of wind and solar, lots of unemployed, excess industrial capacity.
"Range shifts and selection can't keep pace with climatic warming"
As far as agriculture is concerned seeds are available for a wide range of climates, for example wheat adapted to Mexico or adapted to Canada, some varieties adapted to low rainfall some to high rainfall. Similarly for maize and rice. Frosts are often the biggest threats to plantation crops such as rubber or coffee.
"Relict human populations in the southern hemisphere wink out over the course of the next couple centuries."
Why would relic human populations "wink out"? Australia, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand all have low population densities covering a wide range of latitudes. Would they not move south? Why would Tasmania or the S Island of NZ cease to be habitable ?
DD,
>As petroleum resources become depleted and economies collapse, investment in massive nuclear & alt. energy projects becomes untenable.
Even if currencies and government collapse.... the people, equipment, knowledge and the desire to fix the problem will remain.
I believe you underestimate the ability of new currencies and governments to rise up. Then the people and resource will then be diverted to fix the energy problem.
Your scenario is plausible but I think your timeframe might be too long. I specialize in writing, speaking and publishing about issues of energy, water and terrorism. It is my opinion that as fresh clean water becomes more scarce, along with energy, the impact of scarcity is compounded significantly.
Discussions of these issues demand an informed and focused leadership. Since we have a relatively uninformed public about energy, water and terrorism issues, they don't demand this type of informed leadership. We can not even discuss these issues in depth as a country let alone come up with rational solutions.
I think a bioterrorist attack on the water or food supplies (or both) is very possible in the near distant future. This is especially true as populations and countries struggle to maintain minimal living standards in the face of massive scarcity.
Part of the solution is to continue to write, blog and discuss these issues. It is imperiative that more people become aware and informed, as it seems our leadership refuses to do so.
Sincerely
H. Court Young
Author, speaker, publisher & geologist
Promoting awareness through the written word
http://www.hcourtyoung.com
*Visit my website or email illume@aweber.com to subscribe to my free ILLUME newsletter and get my free How to Prepare for the Coming Energy Crisis 3-part mini-course*