The Oil Drum

I thought I would share a personal anecdote and see who else is experiencing this strange phenomenon.

Almost 3 years ago I started seriously preparing for Peak Oil. I installed water tanks, planted 30 fruit trees in our back yard, tore up a lot of lawn, planted a permaculture garden, installed two giant fish tanks, started breeding edible fish in an aquaponic set-up.... and, well, did everything else I could think of, regardless of cost.

I wanted to move quickly, so I didn’t economize, I spent whatever it took to get quick results. I spent more that $10,000 a year - sometimes a great deal more, I didn't stop to count the dollars.

Ah! Do we really need six pages of comment? Thank you at the back, we'll gladly cut it short. Suffice it to say I had the chance to split part of a bottle of wine with Ken Deffeyes (we talked a little about Abu Sa'fah the first indication of Saudi depletion, since the combined 800 kbd from it and Qatif were designated purely to match declines in existing fields at the time they came on stream.) There were a couple of short chats with Governor Schweitzer of Montana about 5-micron coal and a recognition, as the talks went on through the afternoon, that maybe the ground is changing.

But first an admission - they caught me out. Since Dr James Hansen had to be recognized as one of the Time 100 Folk of the Year, later this afternoon, they moved his talk up, and so sadly I missed the first bit. So this is where I put in another plug for the web site (URL corrected here and earlier), to get the Powerpoints. His message, as I caught it, was largely that we can only afford to raise the temperature of the planet one single degree Centigrade, and beyond that the historic record suggests catastrophe. One part of this is the melting of the polar ice caps, and, in this regard he showed the melt pictures and the latest measurements of the weight of Greenland (from one of the satellites). What is interesting in that, is that the last couple of years seemed to have created more of a trend out of the data. He commented (perhaps in response to Dr Crichton) that this may provided more reliable data than models.