A “school”? How do you know it’s not just one blogger with time on his hands? Most of the feedbacks he mentions are, of course, already well known. AFAICT his article should just be treated as gibberish.
A sudden 8°C rise in the next ten years would be hugely catastrophic, so it’s good that his blog is total fantasy. I wonder what the precise consequences of such a rise would be. Not immediate extinction, I think, but things would be very bleak.
BTW, “runaway greenhouse” seems to be a technical term applied to warmings much greater than 10°C. To qualify as “runaway,” temperatures must be high enough to cause the Earth’s oceans to all boil away! :eek:
90% of what we eat is a half-dozen staple crops and livestock that have been with us since the Stone Age - and which have had genetic diversity (and hence adaptability) bred out of them.
Global Warming is a real problem we have to deal with. But the odds of a runaway extinction event are so slim, we might as well be worried by getting hit by a mega solar flare instead.
Not really an accurate reflection of typical usage, although I do agree with the rest of your post that the OP scenario is unrealistic. “Runaway greenhouse” means just what it says – that temperature increase is running away out of control, meaning that it has become driven by new self-sustaining feedbacks that are independent of future emissions. Technically this means that the eventual equilibrium temperature will be much higher than that predicted by present estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the effects of GHGs plus the presently occurring feedbacks. The other term for a runaway greenhouse effect is a “tipping point”, and the fact is that climate tipping points are real things that have been extensively observed in the paleoclimate record. It was first brought to wide scientific attention by Hans Oeschger, a pioneer in ice core research, and drove him to spend the rest of his life dedicated to the cause of climate change mitigation.
Peak oil is absolutely inevitable, and may even have already happened. And the continual decline in oil production following peak oil is also inevitable. But what has often been overlooked is that peak oil and the subsequent decline will not inevitably be catastrophes. They could be catastrophes, but that doesn’t mean that they must be.
That just means that there will be less food for the next few millennia as we adapt a different pool of crops. Plus, some crops simply move north. Less food has interesting consequences - catastrophic but not extinction.
It suggests that the clouds currently cool but for some reason, without explaining, more cloud will have a warming effect - perhaps trapping more infrared. But, that infrared is due to heat from sunlight (that can’t escape). Less direct sunlight on the ground, less heat. It seems to me that areas predominantly under cloud cover, plus rain, have a much cooler environment than those with much sunlight. If more heat means more evaporation, more cloud cover, then I suspect the actual answer is more of sunlight is reflected into space, producing a negative factor to any otherwise-caused global warming. Clouds aren’t going to save us, but they will make it harder to cook us.
Peak Oil has been delayed a decade or three by fracking technology. The massive amount of shale oil on the northern plains has made the USA the world’s biggest producer of oil again.
This could give us the time to invest in Tesla cars and similar tech to avoid feeling the pinch when it does begin to become scarce. We won’t “run out of oil”. Simply, it will become scarcer and scarcer and so the price will go up, until only the rich can afford private vehicles that burn carbon.
I think projecting the runaway effects to their ultimate extreme is a more tentative part of our models since, from what I can gather, we don’t know what finally *stops *these runaway effects. Why isn’t the climate balanced on a knife-edge, threatening to become like either Venus or an ice-ball at any time?
That doesn’t mean though that we can’t project feedback events in the climate that will threaten hundreds of millions (but not extinction of course) of lives in the near future.
Only the US and parts of Canada have really developed shale gas/oil to any extent. The amount of shale gas/oil is relatively unknown in many other parts of the world (Russia/Latin/South America/Australia/Africa)
In those areas there is expected to be these shale plays but they have hardly been explored yet.
Take Russia/Siberia for an example. The geology there are somewhat similar to North America but they have concentrated on the easier (vertical) formations to go after and have barely touched shale production and the area of Russia is greater than North America. (There is one shale formation the size of France alone)
The reason why shale production took off in North America is that the wells drilled in the USA has exceeded 2.5 million and Canada is approaching the 500 000 mark.
Most of the easier to get to and get production out of vertical wells have been drilled and the subsurface formations are fairly well mapped.
In order to get these shale plays to produce economically, the driller has to go horizontal and stay in the formation (not easily done, as gravity is no longer helping)
If one can imagine drilling a vertical hole, the weight of the drill pipe is a major factor in allowing to drill deeper and deeper.
In order to go horizontal, the well will start off vertical and then deviate around a bend to go horizontal (yes, drill pipe bends). Then once horizontal, the drilling needs to stay horizontal in this formation (not easily done) and then without the weight of the drill pipe (aside from the vertical section), there is a limit as to how far one can go horizontally.
That is just the drilling aspect. Add in the formation evaluation, perforations, casing, production, fracturing, remedial production (when the original production is reduced)
This all becomes a magnitude harder when horizontal.
Many companies such as Exxon Mobil or BP left these shale plays to other smaller companies while they concentrated on working overseas and off-shore for the somewhat easier mostly vertical plays in known formations although they go horizontal as well.
Another major aspect that has hardly been mentioned is that control of many of these oil and gas fields is from National Oil Companies (ie Gazprom in Russia). Working with them is a lot different politically than working in North America. (This where Exxon Mobil did really a good job partnering with them under Rex Tillerson as he tried to bring American technology and knowledge in the oilfield to Russia and other countries)
Locations such as Russia simply don’t have enough of the right equipment or enough individuals with the specialized knowledge to make these horizontal shale formations work. (Most of their drilling rigs are 20_ years old and can not operate horizontally) Nor is it economical to build them at the current price either.
Believe it or not, one of the biggest drilling rig builders in the world has operations Germany (KCA Deutag) that supply Russia and it is well known how the Russians and Germans get along:D
Actually, the new smart money is that peak oil doesn’t exist. I guess it never did. Technically, it does, but the world approaching peak oil would have drilled the oceans. (2/3 of the earth’s surface). All of Africa. All of China and Russia and the arctic. And fracked and drilled horizontally in all those places. Only then can you even begin to say you’ve gotten enough of the oil to actually start to be running out.
Anyways, the smart money is that we’d go extinct as a species if we tried. I’m not saying the Methane clathrate bomb is as dangerous as this thread is saying (though it is real, just hopefully it is harder to set off than we think). Just that we’d turn the whole planet so hot it would be physically impossible for humans to survive outside before we actually run out oil extractable hydrocarbons.
OK, leaving out the fact that we have drilled the oceans, that just proves that we’re not running out of oil. Who claimed that we were, and what does that have to do with peak oil?
As I understood it (IANAGeologist) - The shale oil of the central plains in North America exists because in dinosaur days, the area was a shallow ocean. In the days before grass, erosion was a large factor in landscaping; a lot of debris got washed to the ocean, covering up the organic matter and creating oil deposits. Many of the normal major oil deposits were also formed this way, They tend to be at the end of what were large rivers and watersheds of the time - the bigger the watershed, the bigger the oil deposits. The ocean bed geology of the plains turned into shale. In Fort McMurray, th oil oozed out into the sand deposits, giving us the tar sands.
I’m not familiar with the geology of Siberia - but much of northern Canada is covered by the Canadian Shield or Pre-Cambrian Shield - which as the name implies, is far too old to be oil-bearing. Anything above that was scoured off by the ice ages.
I’m sure the same conditions that gave us the plains shale oil could have happened all over the world. However, I haven’t heard off-hand of any similar and extensive deposits. There are certainly trapped methane deposits deep in the ocean, but the current deep sea bed I the result of continental drift, too new and never geologically situated to create oil deposits. Most oceanic oil is just slightly off-shore where those alluvial deposits covered oil-forming life in the coastal areas of the time… and many of these have been found.
the short answer is - there is a finite amount of oil that we’ve been using at an accelerating pace, as the world develops. First the former soviet bloc is transitioning to a western lifestyle. Now developing countries like China and India are starting to join the ranks of developed countries, and their citizens want the same lifestyle - personal transport powered by petroleum, a plethora of manufactured goods (which need energy in the manufacturing) and energy-intensive lifestyles that use air conditioning, hot water, and other energy sinks. They are unlikely to listen to us fat-cats suggesting they hold back because we ruined the world already. The question is not if we run out, but when… followed by the more urgent question, can we switch to sustainable sources before we run out?
Peak oil was calculated based on known and suspected reserves. The original concept overlooked fracking. That has flooded the market and dropped the price to the point where developing further fracking - for now - is uneconomical. But, even at accelerating use, there could be decades of fracked oil available. As SSgenius points out, the technology is difficult (and so, expensive). Fracking supplies will probably continue, once the currently drilled supply is exhausted, only if the price goes back up.
it doesn’t matter. The real problem is that no matter where it comes from, accelerating use only adds to the amount of atmospheric CO2. It may be that the effect is nowhere near what the mainstream doom predictors say. Or… the concept from the OP may be correct, and we are already irreversibly screwed. there’s only one way to find out, and we’re so far doing it.
Then we’ll breed it back in, or modify their genes directly. The advantage we have over evolution is that we can direct change; we’re unnatural selection at its best. We’re not going to be able to rebuild all of agricultural DNA in nine years, probably, but we’re currently outpacing the rate of natural change by several orders of magnitude, and I anticipate we’ll keep doing so.
a. It ignores that hydrocarbons are interconvertible. If it came down to it, you can convert methane to any oil product, and you can convert coal to methane or to various synthetic hydrocarbons.
b. It ignores that we have known about nuclear breeders for years. If an unlikely crisis of un-affordable energy were to occur, we could suspend most regulations and time wasting reviews and rush build a bunch of nuclear breeder reactors in remote locations.
c. It ignores that costs for things like Fracking, offshore extraction, etc, follow any technology development cycle, and these things become dramatically cheaper and more efficient when done on a larger scale.
d. It ignores the fact that nearly all of the planet simply hasn’t really been thoroughly checked for underground oil. No-one is going to explore an area for oil if they don’t have a business case for it. It’s now feasible to drill deep underwater wells in the ocean itself, and there’s ways to go into siberia or even the arctic, there just isn’t enough demand.
So the smart money is that in fact we can access enough hydrocarbons to eventually extinct humanity as a species. That is, before we ran out of oil, the planet would be so hot that humans couldn’t live on it.
We can’t genetically modify crops to live in arbitrarily hostile conditions. We can’t modify them to survive flooded croplands, or to grow without water, or necessarily any other weather extremes, nor is their any guarantee we can adapt them to resist any arbitrary new migratory pests or new diseases. Many organizations including the IPCC Working Group II have done extensive studies of adaptation potentials, and that kind of magical thinking has never entered the picture. It conjures up an image of a modern-day King Canute standing on the Florida shoreline and commanding a hurricane to go away, or Texas fundamentalists trying to end wildfires through prayer. Baseless blind faith in the ability of technology to work miracles is no better than blind faith in any other kind of miracle.
This is in no way said in support of the OP’s doomsday scenario. We need to chart a scientifically sound path that endorses neither unjustified alarmism nor unjustified optimism in hypothetical technological miracles.
Ok, I have to be a little irked by the blithe ignorance and (evident) lack of engineering ability demonstrated by these statements.
Strictly speaking, by the artificial parameters you have outlined, yeah, we can’t make crops grow without water or survive outdoors extreme winds or work if the fields are flooded.
But straightforward, totally achievable technological solutions to every possible extreme weather event do exist, and with any level of ability you should be able to come up with viable solutions.
For instance, one of the more straightforward ones is to take algae, with a doubling time of a little over 24 hours, and genetically modify to meet the needs of human nutrition. This is trivially straightforward, albeit a bit expensive, you mere insert the sequence of base pairs for essential (to human) amino acids behind a promoter the algae species you are looking at uses. Yes, it will still take years and a lot of experiments, for a number of reasons that won’t fit in the text of this post, but you can pretty much bank on it working.
That would allow us to feed first world residents completely independent of farmland at all, making everything you said above moot.
And there are less extreme solutions. Indoor, robotic greenhouses. Mass scale desalination combined with desert farming (Israel has managed to get the prices and energy consumption down to barely more than water costs normally).
Hell, just switching everyone from beef to chicken gives you double the meat for the same grain instantly.
No, all these problems have solutions achievable with well known, reliable technology we have today. Even in an extreme case where the only inhabitable continent were Antarctica, it would be possible to have all 1 billion or so residents of the first world live there, with current technology with some additional engineering work, and survive indefinitely. I guess if you think machinery is “magic” or you don’t think organized groups of intelligent people can design new things in a hurry, all evidence to the contrary, your post would make sense.