Time Crunch II
It’s clear now that if temperatures do rise an appreciably, by more than 2∞ say, it becomes very likely the planet will experience disastrous climate destabilization. We will need to change infrastructure, power generation, agriculture and transportation within 20 years to have any realistic chance of avoiding runaway climate change. We will need to use fossil fuels to make those changes. So how accurate are the estimates of those who claim we are already at the peak?
In 2000, Colin Campbell, a well respected oil exploration geologist with a lifetime’s experience in evaluating oil reserves, began the Association for the Study of Peak Oil[1]. He had become convinced that, contrary to numerous claims by oil companies and oil producing countries, we were very nearly at the peak of worldwide oil production – named Hubbert’s Peak after King Hubbert, the pioneering American oil researcher who first predicted the US oil production peak in 1971. Realizing the potentially catastrophic effect an imminent worldwide peak would have, Dr. Campbell founded ASPO with a group of scientists to research and publicize the facts. Over the last 7 years ASPO has moved from being dismissed as group of eco Cassandras, to being understood for what they are: a dedicated group of serious professional scientists with an urgent case.
Despite this, there is still disagreement within the oil industry as to accuracy of their analysis, most notably from Exxon, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA)[2], and the International Energy Agency[3]. These organizations claim there is no foreseeable decline in Oil and Gas production. But what’s disquieting about these counterclaims is that none of them, nor any of the other organizations who oppose the idea of imminent Peak Oil, has been willing (or able?) to dispute the work of the ASPO scientists’ statistical analyses of recoverable reserves. The entire issue of estimating reserves is fraught with technical difficulties, but the main point is that discovery of so called “elephant” or giant fields – those with reserves of more than 500 million barrels (0.5 Gb) – peaked 40 years ago. And production typically peaks 40 years after discovery. We now use 30 Mbd for every 6 Mbd that are discovered. So if there’s no problem, where are the new elephants and why is that they aren’t being discovered?
Suppose that the scientists at ASPO are wrong, and that peak oil is far away. We still have the problem of climate change accelerating as we use the remaining fuel which will require global civilization to adapt to an enormous degree. That would be a better outcome because it would give us more time to adapt.
But suppose that they are right and that the Peak was reached last year. This means that the only fuels we have available to manage global adaptation to climate change will go into steep production decline within a couple of years. If this is true, we are in a brutal time crunch as we may lose the ability to make the changes and build the new infrastructures. Simple risk assessment argues that we lose nothing by assuming they are right.
For myself, I’ve been studying this issue for the past 6 years and I’ve met and interviewed some of ASPO’s members. I’m assuming that we are at the Peak and that in a very short time we’ll see production declines. So now what? Intelligent Design, Fashion and Comics, that’s what.
[1]http://www.peakoil.net
[2]http://www.cera.com/
[3]http://www.iea.org/
Time Crunch 1
When industrialization really got underway around 1850 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was 280 ppm, as it had been for most of human history. Today it stands at 380 ppm. It’s simple arithmetic to see that by burning, at $100 or whatever price, another trillion barrels of oil – roughly what we’ve burnt so far – plus the rest of the recoverable gas and coal we will add at least another 100ppm to the atmosphere. Given that these gasses tend to stay in the atmosphere for as long as 200 years, we should expect to see 480ppm GHG concentration at least, and perhaps far earlier than imagined . At these levels the evidence is strong that the climate will radically destabilize, possibly outside the range of temperatures at which civilization, or humans, can exist. However, despite the obvious danger and 30 years of action by ecologists and climate scientists there has been no reduction in the increase of fossil fuel use, so it seems probable that a good quantity of the remaining oil, gas and coal will be extracted and burned. We are then faced with trying to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with increasingly expensive fuels and other resources. Can we at least get a good idea of the trajectory of these changes?
Aye, there’s the rub. The climate of earth is inarguably a Complex System. Complexity as a new branch of mathematics developed in the last 25 years gives us some interesting ways of looking at natural phenomenon like forest growth, cloud shapes, epidemiology, the branched shape of river systems or the coast of Brittany: – stuff with fuzzy edges. But one of the problems is that Complex Systems are inherently non deterministic, which means that making precise predictions about climate is virtually impossible[1]. So there is a fundamental problem in trying to get a grasp of where CO2 concentrations are likely to take us in temperature terms. So while the IPCC report[2]gives us a general view of the range of temperature increase, we have no way of knowing what real outcomes will be.
However, while the actual temperature rise may be impossible to predict, the probable effects of each degree of increase has been researched by Mark Lynas [3]in “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” – which makes for devastating reading. What comes out of it is that at temperatures within the IPCC predicted ranges, not to mention above them, we will be faced with the greatest adaptational challenge our species has faced. What makes this more difficult is that fossil fuels and the technologies they make possible are vital to our adaptational ability in the short term: building windfarms, solar panels, CO2 scrubbers or for that matter, fusion reactors all require sophisticated tooling and materials. This is what makes it imperative that we begin to adapt infrastructure, transport, and agriculture immediately. We are in a time crunch, with maybe 20 years at most (being wildly optimistic for once), before we begin to lose the ability to adapt our technology. As unfortunate civilizations before us have discovered, once a critical technology or resource is lost it may be irrecoverable.
That’s the proposition for climate, so now we need to look at how accurate estimates are for the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels….
[1]For a technical discussion of this topic see the new Roe & Baker paper in Science.
[2]Available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[3]Available here: http://www.marklynas.org/
In the Beginning…
I’m initiating this blog primarily as a platform to develop new projects and collaborate with others. Secondarily, it’s a convenient place for people to find me.
For the last few years working on various films, the background of virtually all the stories about diasporas, collapsing cultures, and individual tales of displacement seems to be rooted in Ecology – using the term in the broadest sense as a way of talking about all the complex systems that make up our world, including government and economics etc. – and Energy, which is the fundamental flow that supports the entire system. In a very real sense Ecology is the study of Energetic Complex Systems. That’s my working perspective.
The most immediate Project I’m working on is Peak Oil. The arguments are over, Peak Oil is upon us and despite the efforts of a host of “Cassandras”, including some of the most respected names in the oil industry, and the efforts of some in media, including myself, precious little of this debate was ever allowed onto mainstream news or factual programming. I’m working with Richard Hind to produce a “graphic novel” style series on this site, about Peak Oil – how we got here, and what the likely scenarios are as we go into production decline.
The most recent estimates are that we just passed the peak in 2006. We won’t know for sure until perhaps 2009, but we are clearly on the last plateau. So it appears that our use of fossil fuels for the last 150 years has placed us in a potentially difficult position. One the one hand the years of increasing energy supply allowed the population to expand by a factor of 6, unprecedented in human history, and at the same time the burning of the fuels sent the CO2 concentration from 280 ppm prior to industrialization to the current level of 381ppm, which is also unprecedented in human history. Whether our species has the time or ability to adapt to these new environmental and energy constraints is the question.
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