Maybe I am just having a bout of pessimism, but reading more and more news stories about peak oil, the shutdown of the thermohaline system, the probability of experiencing a pandemic in our lifetime…I am worried. Even more worried by the fact that no one else seems to be worried. Even if one of these things happened life as we know it, would be hard. But it seems like all three might happen in the next 50 years.
Watching the breakdown of order in New Orleans. The flared tempers her in Jackson, because some idiot wanted gas and couldn’t get it conveniently. I can’t help shaking the feeling that I should be doing something to protect myself. I’m serious. I am a few step away from going survivalist like some 80’s nuclear war nut. “Build a bunker now! Ask me how!!”
I have that feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me to zag because too many of the herd is zigging. This instinct has served me well in the past.
So reassure me that I am wrong. Just like when I was a kid I was wrong about the inevitable nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Maybe we will go through hard times, but in the end have more. We as a world will overcome any obstacle
Maybe we will have a collaboration of great minds that will make the Manhattan Project look like an Village Idiots convention.
Maybe no oil will eventually mean better lifestyles for us.
Healthier lifestyles as we bike everywhere.
Savvy netizens like us Dopers, finally getting telecommuting jobs.
We wont have out-of-season fruit, but we’ll have ten different kinds of apples grown by local farmers instead of mass produced Red Delicious.
Maybe a world where no country has fuel to operate a mechanized division or bomber wing is a good thing.
Aah yes, the return of the sword. Then, our cunningly placed elite SCA units will rule the world! MwaaHaaHaa…
Seriously, though, while I believe it’s a good idea to be concerned about the environment, global warming, world health issues etc., living your life as if you were in the environmental/economic end times is no more constructive than living in the religious world of eschatology and millenarists.
The key question isn’t if these things will happen, it’s what you are going to do about it.
I notice you’re a member. DO a search for “peak oil” and you will get a very good overview. Basically it comes down to a handful of doomsayers claiming that it will all end within 5-30 years, and every major organisation form the WEO, WEC and USGS on down saying there is no immediate dilemma.
The whole concept behind ‘peak oil’ as a doomsday scenario based on an assumption that people are incredibly stupid. So stupid that they won’t think to use coal or nuclear power to run trucks and cars, so stupid that they resuse to use plant matter or coal hydrocarbon as chemical feedstock, so stupid they would rather die in their billions than increase greenhpouse gas production by tappinginto thousands of years worth of oil shale and tar oil.
Unless you really believe that people are universally that dumb then peka oil simply isn’t an issue. The world could become mildly uncomfortable but it won’t even cause any significant changes to the way people live. Even if th eworst of the ddomsayer s is right there are still millions of years worth of nuclear fuel, hundredsof years worth of coal and thousands of years worth of non-liquid oil avialble any time we choose to tap into them. This doesn’t require any great minds conference, we have that technology ready and waiting today, and in limited use. It’s simply a case of ramping up production.
There simply isn’t any shortage of energy or a shortage of fossil fuels, or even a shortage of oil. The only possible shortage is in liquid crude. Liquid crude isn;t magical, there are plenty of alternatives while crude prices remain as high as they are today, and if crude prices fall then that means there isn’t even any crude shortage.
So you can relax on the issue of crude oil at least. There will not be any shortage of fuel for bombers or energy to run your car at any time in the foreseeable future. Worst case scenartio is that you have to switch to an electirc car run on coal or nuclear electricty. Hardly a devestating change, now is it?
People have been invoking the ‘end of oil’ bogey man for many decades now. As a reality check, see if you can guess when this particular speech was delivered?
When you think you’ve worked out when that speech was delivered pertaining to repeated warnings of dire oil shortages within the next 30 years let us know. The warnings from the doomsayers certainaly have a familiar tone don’t they? And the argument from the optimists about technology and economics shifting the goalposts is also hauntingly familiar isn’t it? So it must be recent, right? After all this latest peak oil crusade is only about 5 years old? So we wouldn’t have had time to find out whether it was the optimists or the pessimists who were proved right on the 30 year shortage? Right?
If one group had regularly predicted the sky was falling based on the same ‘reasoning’, and their detractors had regularly pointed out that nobody could know when the sky might fall and used the same arguments every time, at what point would you conclude that it was pointless to worry about the Chicken Littles? How many decades and how many warnings would it take before you stopped worrying about an imminent falling sky and accepted that the opposition was right and that there argument had been falsified?
10 warnings over 30 years? 100 warnings over 70 years? How about if I could show that every year since 1920 someone has said that oil would peak within the next thirty years, and someone else has pointed out the flaw in confusing proven reserves with resources in that calculation? If you live another 70 years will you still worry that poil might peak within the next 30 years when someone says so?
I gues the question is, is your fear well founded or just caused by accepting the argumentsof the doomsayers without considering whether that argument has been falsified multiple times.
I am surprised it hasn’t turned into a debate on peak oil. All the threads that I had come across had been contentious. Doing a search, I see that a lot of them are one sided.
My pessimism hasn’t come about because of increased faith in the prophets of doom, but that my faith in the powers that be has declined.
Stuff like Katrina. Seems like many people knew the possibilities of what might happen if the levees didn’t hold up. Logic would say that they would take care of it before it becme a problem, yet they did not.
Makes you wonder what other things that people are confident will ‘just work out’, really wont.
Look, things don’t just “work out”, we MAKE them work out. Switching fuel sources won’t happen by magic, it will require a lot of new investment and expense. The levies in New Orleans didn’t go up by magic, people built them, and they failed because we didn’t build them well enough.
It’s certainly possible for political and social problems to prevent us from applying solutions that would work. If everyone refuses to allow nuclear reactors to be built, despite sky-high electricity prices, if we continue to give tax breaks for SUVs, if we decided to impose price controls on energy prices, all those things could make the problem worse.
But there’s absolutely no technological breakthrough needed to replace our gasoline infrastructure with hydrogen produced by new nuclear power plants, we could start doing this tomorrow…except that even with gasoline near $3.00/gallon it’s STILL cheaper to fill up with gasoline than it would be to switch to hydrogen.
I’m no expert on “peak oil” but the last review I read on it (NY Time Sunday Magazine) was quoting a lot more than a few doomsayers. The logic is straightforward, not stupid. China is coming on board in a big way. There is only so fast you can pump oil out of the ground with the current infrastructure and reasons to believe that pumping it out too much faster with more infrastructure may lead more to be trapped behind, unrecoverable. No dire emergency, just increasing prices for now. But if we do not started planning ahead we’ll be in deep doodoo. Could be ten years, could be twenty. But we need to have our contingency plans ready to roll out. And it would be nice if those plans didn’t end up adding to other problems … like global warming.
Global warming. There is no reasoned scientific debate about global warming (any more than there is about evolution, anyway). Just debate about if it is going to be very bad fast or extremely bad faster. Get used to Katrina intensity storms. Surface water temperatures drive hurricane intensity. Ignore it further at significant consequences to ecosystems and their deppendent economies.
Flu pandemic. We are overdue by reasonable historical measures. The difference is that we have a chance to be ready for the next one, whether it be from an avian-human flu reassortment, or otherwise. WHO has been given 3 million course of Tamiflu by Roche for a first response to slow it down when it first hits, and we can begin vaccine development now.
No need for panic, unless we see that our elected representatives are wanting to ignore all these issues as they are unlikely to cause problems on their watch.
Deseid, I generally agree with what you say, with a few clarifications.
The first is that reasoning can be both straightforward and stupid. It doesn’t need to be one or the other. “God created animals of all kinds therefore animals always existed as they do now” is pretty straightforward reasoning, but it’s stupid. “We have X trillion tonnes of liquid crude in reserve, we use Y billions tonnes a years, therefore we have Z years before we run into an oil shortage” is also straightforward reasoning, and it’s also stupid for the reasons I outlined. The problem is that the entire argument as you presented it relies an on assumption that infrastructure will remain as it is now. Of course that’s not a very sensible assumption if there is money to be made investing in new infrastructure.
I couldn’t agree more that this is a serious issue, and investigation and planning is required. I’m not suggesting that anyone bury their head in the sand and pretend it can never happen. The real issue is how much of a threat it is and how much we should be spending planning for it. This is, in your own words “no dire emergency, just increasing prices” even if it does occur, and the probability of any occurrence in the next 30 years is slim to nonexistent. People have been expounding on the imminent oil crisis since the 1920s, and always within 30 years. (The passage I quoted above was from 1975 BTW). This time is no different. It never happened the last hundred times it was predicted, there’s no reason to assume it will be any different this time. The reason I can confidently say that is that exactly the same mistakes are being made that were being discussed in 1975.
People take the current estimates of proved reserves of oil around the world and divide them by present and projected production and consumption. The fact that this time China has been factored heavily into the projected consumption doesn’t change the fact that exactly the same error is being made, yet again. The fact is that the best science says that we haven’t tapped into even a quarter of the oil we have potential access to at today’s technology. And of course it’s impossible to even guess what technology in 30 years time will be capable of.
So it could be ten years, could be twenty, but the WEC, WEO, USGS and every other major player says that there will be no shortage of supply in the next 30 years, and that’s as far as any oil forecast has any accuracy. In short investigation has been done and this simply isn’t an imminent threat based on the best science and economics available. The arguments that are used to suggest an imminent threat are the exact same ones that have been falsified multiple times in the past, while the arguments suggesting no imminent threat are the ones that have been verified numerous times in the past.
Concerning global warming, it is simply untrue to say there is “no reasoned scientific debate about global warming”. There is considerable debate in this issue, probably more than in any other field of science. Numerous papers are published each month, and several books are published each year devoted exclusively to this topic. The debate is vigorous to say the least. There are highly reputable scientists who debate whether global warming is occurring, even more who debate whether it is anthoropogenic and all of them are debating what the effects might be if it is occurring and is anthropogenic.
This is not just a debate about whether it will be very bad or extremely bad. Many scientists doubt the phenomenon even exists and many more doubt that it will have any overall negative effects at all. I can only assume that you didn’t bother to do a journal search or visit a bookshop before making that statement.
Since this is GD I’ll draw your attention to an article published last year which states outright
Loehle, C. 2004; “Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data.” Ecological Modelling, 171:4
To suggest that there is no scientific debate on the issue of anthropogenic global warming when articles disputing the very existence of data needed conclude whether it even occurs were published in the last 18 months is clearly a gross overstatement (to say the least). Even the most ardent supporter of the hypothesis will only conclude the evidence strongly supports such a conclusion. You are the only person I have ever heard who has suggested this is a settled matter in the scientific community. Nothing could be further form the truth.
Your claims that there will inevitably be more hurricanes are of course even more spurious because the issue of whether the phenomenon even exists is debatable. Personally I’m convinced that global warming exists and is at least in part anthropogenic, but there are plenty of actual climatologists out there who disagree with me. The issue is far from settled whatever you may have been told.
I don’t know much about the Oceanic Conveyor Belt, the Gulf Stream, why ice ages happen or don’t happen, or diseases. I know even less about peak oil (it would make a cool brand name though). But, from history, I can confidently say, it’s always been the End Times. Early Christians looked at Nero, saw the Beast, and declared the end of the world. Europe saw Attila and decalred the end of the world. The Black Plague was the end of the world. Some thought World War 2 would be the end of the world. Some saw the Cuban missile crisis and thought it meant Mass Extinction. It’s always doom doom doom.
None of which has any bearing on whether the OP’s concerns are well founded or not. Lots of poor predictions are no guide to the accuracy of current unrelated ones, they have to be evaluated on their own merits. I might note that, for instance, the Cuban crisis might well have triggered a nuclear war which, while not Mass Extinction (did anyone really think that at the time?) would have definitely been an End Of Civilisation As We Know It situation. Hardy in the same category as Nero.
As the speech I quoted above demonstrates so well the current oil shortage prediction is exactly the same as all the previous oil shortage predictions and based on excatly the same reasoning. If those predictions were proven wrong and that reasoning shown to be flawed then it does indeed have a bearing in this latest crop of people using exactly the same argument. They can be evaluated on the merits of those past arguments because they are substantially the same arguments.
How many times does Chicken Little have to say that the sky is falling before we can conclude that here argument is wrong? Do we always have to conclude she might be right this time?
Peak Oil: The Y2K promoters are gonna have their Mad-Max fantasy world, dagnabbit!! Just you wait! This time for sure!
Google for a pdf document called “The New Pessimism”. It fires a few torpedoes into the Peak oil nonsense.
Keep in mind that I am car free. Peak oil (in its benign form) would have some benefit for me. But I am actually getting fed up with some of my fellow bike commuters who drool over Peak Oil.
Well about the peak oil theory, I see that as flawed, unless you limit yourselves to the easially pumped oil. But this is not the real world. As demand for oil outstrips the ability to pump it out easially, we will be exploiting other oil sources,deep reserves, tar sands and shale, to name a few. I’ve heard that the Alberta tar sands have more oil then all of Saudi Arabia.
I’m not worried about the End Times. I’m worried about a situation so bad that Christians pray for the End Time to hurry up and get here.
I guess it’s similar to worrying about a fatal car accident or skin cancer. I worry about skin cancer. I know that there is always some possibility that I might get some sort of skin cancer in my lifetime. I worry about it enough to stop doing stupid things like lying out in the sun to get a tan, limiting my time out in the sun when I can, and do the chore of putting on good sunscreen. I feel that there are more things I can do about it.
I don’t worry about car accidents. I know that any time, a car can cross that center line and plow into me. I don’t like the idea, but I understand that there is nothing really to do. But I still do what I can. I put on my seatbelt and drive defensively.
I guess I’m asking how real the threats are, so I can do some sort of reasonable preparation for it.
Maybe we will never have any shortage of gasoline, but it would still be a smart choice to not live in a nice subdivision forty miles from the center of the city. Maybe it is just a smarter decision to live in a smaller house closer to the center of the city, where even if there is no gas, I can bicycle to work?
