By Robert Chris & Hugh Hunt*
Getting to net zero emissions by mid-century is conventionally understood as humanity’s best hope for keeping Earth’s surface temperature (already 1.2°C above its pre-industrial level) from increasing well beyond 1.5°C – potentially reaching a point at which it could cause widespread societal breakdown.
At least one prominent climate scientist, however, disagrees.
James Hansen of Columbia University in the US published a paper with colleagues in November which claims temperatures are set to rise further and faster than the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In his view, the 1.5°C target is dead.
He also claims net zero is no longer sufficient to prevent warming of more than 2°C. To regain some control over Earth’s rising temperature, Hansen supports accelerating the retirement of fossil fuels, greater cooperation between major polluters that accommodates the needs of the developing world and, controversially, intervening in Earth’s “radiation balance” (the difference between incoming and outgoing light and heat) to cool the planet’s surface.
There would probably be wide support for the first two prescriptions. But Hansen’s support for what amounts to the deliberate reduction of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface has brought into the open an idea that makes many uncomfortable.
Michael Mann from the University of Pennsylvania in the US and another titan of climate science, spoke for many when he dismissed solar radiation management as “potentially very dangerous” and a “desperate action” motivated by the “fallacy … that large-scale warming will be substantially greater than current-generation models project”.
Their positions are irreconcilable. So who is right – Hansen or Mann?
Earth’s radiation balance
First, an explanation.
There are only two ways to reduce global warming. One is to increase the amount of heat radiated from Earth’s surface that escapes to space. The other is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back to space before it lands on something – whether a particle in the atmosphere or something on Earth’s surface – and is converted to heat.
There are many ways to do both. Anything that reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will let more heat escape to space (replacing fossil fuels with renewables, eating less meat and tilling the soil less for example). Anything that makes the planet brighter will reflect more sunlight to space (such as refreezing the Arctic, making clouds whiter or putting more reflective particles in the atmosphere).
But the key difference between the two, in terms of their impact on global warming, is their response time. That is, the time it takes for a change in the factors that allow more heat to escape or sunlight to be reflected to appear as a change in Earth’s surface temperature.
Intervening to speed up the loss of heat from Earth’s surface cools the planet slowly, over decades and longer. Intervening to increase the sunlight Earth reflects back to space cools the planet more or less immediately.
The essence of the dispute between Mann and Hansen is whether reducing greenhouse gases, by a combination of reducing new emissions and permanently removing past emissions from the atmosphere, is now enough on its own to prevent warming from reaching levels that threaten economic and social stability.
Mann says it is. Hansen says that, while doing these things remains essential, it is no longer sufficient and we must also make Earth more reflective.
When will warming end?
Mann aligns with IPCC orthodoxy when he says that emissions reaching net zero will result, within a decade or two, in Earth’s surface temperature stabilising at the level it has then reached.
In effect, there is no significant warming in the pipeline from past emissions. All future warming will be due to future emissions. This is the basis for the global policy imperative to get to net zero.
In his new paper, Hansen argues that if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases remains close to its current level, the surface temperature will stabilise after several hundred years between 8°C and 10°C above the pre-industrial level.
Of this, at least 2°C will emerge by mid-century, and probably a further 3°C a century from now. A temperature increase of this magnitude would be catastrophic for life on Earth. Hansen adds that to avoid such an outcome, brightening Earth is now necessary to halt the warming in the pipeline from past emissions.
But at the same time, we must also largely eliminate emissions if we are to stop recreating this problem in the future.
Still getting hotter…
We are scientists who study the feasibility and effectiveness of alternative responses to climate change, addressing both the engineering and political realities of enabling change at the scale and speed necessary.
We find Mann’s rebuttal of Hansen’s claims unconvincing. Crucially, Mann does not engage directly with Hansen’s analysis of new data covering the last 65 million years.
Hansen explains how the models used by IPCC scientists to assess future climate scenarios have significantly underestimated the warming effect of increased greenhouse gas emissions, the cooling effect of aerosols and how long the climate takes to respond to these changes.
Besides greenhouse gases, humanity also emits aerosols. These are tiny particles comprising a wide range of chemicals. Some, such as the sulphur dioxide emitted when coal and oil are burned, offset the warming from greenhouse gases by reflecting sunlight back to space.
Others, such as soot, have the opposite effect and add to warming. The cooling aerosols dominate by a large margin.
Hansen projects that in coming months, lower levels of aerosol pollution from shipping will cause warming of as much as 0.5°C more than IPCC models have predicted. This will take global warming close to 2°C as early as next year, although it is likely then to fall slightly as the present El Niño wanes.
Underpinning Hansen’s argument is his conviction that the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously reported. The IPCC estimates that doubling atmospheric CO₂ raises Earth’s temperature by 3°C. Hansen calculates it to be 4.8°C.
This, and the much longer climate response time that Hansen calculates from the historical record, would have a significant impact on climate model projections.
Time for reflection
The differences between Mann and Hansen are significant for the global response to climate change.
Mann says that allowing emissions to reach net zero by mid-century is sufficient, while Hansen maintains that on its own it would be disastrous and that steps must now be taken in addition to brighten the planet.
Brightening Earth could also reverse the reductions in reflectivity already caused by climate change. Data indicates that from 1998 to 2017, Earth dimmed by about 0.5 watts per square metre, largely due to the loss of ice.
Given what’s at stake, we hope Mann and Hansen resolve these differences quickly to help the public and policymakers understand what it will take to minimise the likelihood of imminent massive and widespread ecosystem destruction and its disastrous effects on humanity.
While 1.5°C may be dead, there may still be time to prevent cascading system failures. But not if we continue to squabble over the nature and extent of the risks.
*Robert Chris, Honorary Associate, Geography, The Open University and Hugh Hunt, Professor of Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, University of Cambridge. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
109 Comments
Banning fossil fuels answers the Climate problem.
But it will kill off, in short order, 50% (or more) of humanity. We are carbon life-forms, and are a species in gross overshoot thanks to the one-off underground carbon bonanza we tapped into.
So damned if we do, damned if we don't. Overshoot is a bit like that...
Hansen's appraisal is correct - we are already into feed-back-loop territory, in fact the ice scientists are (they cover it publicly, as scientists do) terrified.
Yet there are an echelon who need to believe they aren't doing any damage, and that they can keep on keeping on - yes they are, and no, they can't.
My take is particulate solar management will reduce the productivity of photosynthesis and solar energy. We will use any management of temperature as an excuse to keep burning. CO2 uptake and subsequent acidification of oceans will continue. Should we become unable to continue solar management and we have kept filling the atmosphere with our waste, the global temperature could jump dramatically in geologically instantaineous fashion extincting complex life virtually immediately.
Agreed. Look at what happens when you take one animal out of an environment or introduce them into an area (e.g. bears, wolves, beavers). We aren't really capable of fully understanding what the cumulative effect of this is if we lose a lot of species, or how to 'fix' it. We know this instinctively as a country, otherwise the biosecurity parts of MPI wouldn't exist.
Cheers folks.
He's about the best on the planet at the moment
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
Was an investment advisor at Solomon Brothers, nothing under 100 mill. Then learned too much about energy... and realised where it was going. Tom Murphy has dropped out ditto; when you extrapolate the timelines there's not much point in pushing a narrow barrow.
Post growth economics is not as unpopular as people think
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001203
Agreed. I've been doing some reading (and practical application) in this area for about a decade, and it's really fantastic to see others starting to get their heads around it too. This is still challenging stuff because we're literally having to invent it right now. It'll be easier for others in the future because the case studies and examples will exist. :)
He just said he's not adverse to us leading the way.
Just that the problem with that, as much of our forward thinking policy, is that it comes at a penalty to our own competetiveness and prosperity.
People are already miffed about our lessening relative wealth, can't see them being super stoked at it be significantly worse again.
Having seen the difference in cost and complexity working across a range of environments, including the likes of a Greenstar build, yes, yes it will. You get more, for less, and the methods and solutions are of dubious net improvement. LOTS of new jobs designing and complying the stuff though.
Most people will say they want to reduce emissions, live more sustainably etc. But almost no one will want to wear actual serious solutions . It requires a fundamental shift in expectations, desires and mindsets, from what is observably tangible (i.e. I have all this stuff and live a life of certain convenience) to what is philosphically tangible (I will go without because it's going to make the future better).
Given so many individuals struggle with this concept looking after even themselves (refer how fat, drunk and sad society has become), I cannot see the same brains bending even further for the good of a wider world - unless they're forced to.
Its not a cop out, just watch as some countries try to do something and high emitters just get worse. Unless the top three sort it out its a total waste of time us doing anything in New Zealand and its certainly not worth us crushing our standard of living while they keep pumping out crap into the atmosphere.
The world in 2023 increased its annual emissions by 398 million metric tons, but it was in three places: China, India and the skies. China’s fossil fuel emissions went up 458 million metric tons from last year, India’s went up 233 million metric tons and aviation emissions increased 145 million metric tons.
I'm sure we added in more than our share of aviation emissions, there was an article on the news last night celebrating the return of international flights to Christchurch.
Surprisingly, carbon embedded in trade only accounts for around 10% of China's total now. All that urbanisation has a huge carbon footprint. And of course they import embedded carbon, dairy from NZ being a prime example.
Agreed. One of the problem is assumption, and it often comes vis specilaisation; outside their specialty people know no more than the next person - perhaps less.
I think you might have done the 'assuming; thing yesterday, re housing. My SIP panels are 1.2m wide, tongue and grooved to each other, weatherproof, insulated and painted both sides. Walls of a 135 sq/m house went up in a day; t adults 2 teenagers (my family); roof went on in a day. In turnkey for 50k, 2005 $, ex labour. Not a stud (wooden, that is!) in the place, nor any Gib. Homestar 8. Not many think outside the square. A mate did the same 5 years ago 130 sq/m for 130k, 2 guys 6 weeks to turnkey.
Just sayin....
We need a volcano on tap so we can control the amount of SO2 entering the upper atmosphere to reflect solar radiation. Watching the massive resistance to using the term ‘fossil fuel’ in the final text at COP28 just reminds me as to the lack of real political desire to stop burning fossil fuels in the near future. By the time we end our squabbling and begin phase out in earnest we will be handing over an increasingly hot and politically unstable planet to our grandchildren.
Yes, one of the world's caldera might save us from hot house Earth - and little 'ol NZ has a chance to contribute to the effort;
Personally, I think nature is more in control than Hansen, Mann or the collective lot of us are.
Humans will run down the resources and watch the extinction of many species, but the one thing we can't do is reverse the effects of our extraction and burning to date. So, I'm in neither the Mann or Hansen camp. Forget mitigation - it's a huge waste of money and energy - e.g., there are 4,000 journalists at COP28 - unbelievable. Adaptation is the only way forward - them staying home would have served the planet far, far better.
there has been a argument that planting trees in a cold environment would reduce the amount of heat reflected back up by snow . but i thought the problem was greenhouse gases trapping the heat in , so it doesnt matter how much heat you reflect back up from ground level , it can't get back out anyway ???
the other option is to collect heat and store or use it .
If you want to put the planet ahead then may I suggest you forget the climate and start focusing on local issues where you can make a difference.
As one example, our Orca population have the highest level of toxins recorded in any animal in the Southern Hemisphere. This is because their diet is primarily the livers of rays and sharks who live and feed near estuaries and river mouths and are contaminated by agri run-off.
No hustle for investment bankers and kick-backs for politicians or junkets to COP though eh...
If you want to put the planet ahead then may I suggest you forget the climate and start focusing on local issues where you can make a difference.
Yep. Unless we're rich or famous, very few of us are going to make much bearing on these massive existential global issues. There's plenty of things need care and attention, usually footsteps from most of us.
Yep agree with you both. I am already personally working on this myself. Starting with our local communities and supporting people at the interpersonal level is where it's at, because everything shifts upwards from there. And for those of us privileged to work in Govt where we can shift things for many people over time, it means we need to be very mindful of the impact we have on the entire 'ecosystem' making up our shared life here. Individual consideration and kindness matters more at that level, because it's magnified. (The converse is sadly also true.)
We need everyone to work on different things at the same time to shift the system. It's a complex human system at heart. Given a metaphorical whack with a stick, the system re-forms back to the original shape or something very like it. So changes in 'wicked problems' (i.e. complex human systems) come from the ability to slowly shift systems over time by pushing multiple levers at once. Everyone picking one problem to work on individually is basically us collectively pushing multiple levers at once.
Thinking about this a lot today - the above paragraph is a basically direct transcript of a conversation I was having this morning with a client. Hopefully it's valuable for others too.
Thanks Agnostium. Wouldn't be the first time, sadly.
I'm starting to see a lot of the "new paradigm" of business coming through which is awesome after 10 years working in this space.
The "old way" is fear-based, capitalist and colonialist (sounds like the current govt!). We're building new and better ways of doing business collectively which respects others, the planet and is not fear-based. It still focuses on value and making money but not at the expense of humans. Instead, money (as a proxy for value) comes as an outcome rather than the only goal. I run multiple companies in this new way and know many others who do too.
There is so much hope, even though these new ways of being still are in their relative infancy.
These are actually old ways of being for many societies. There's nothing new or groundbreaking about conducting any facet of your life in a good and moral way - there's plenty of old maps followed by people for millennia suggesting how to do this.
But good on you for making conscious effort.
I do find though there's an increase in signalling about how unjust things are, coinciding with a highly diminished level of individual action in a way that's considerate and giving to others.
If we think we can outsource being good to others via a 3rd party central state, we have absolved ourselves of any of our own responsibility to make things happen. The absolute most generous people I've met in my life and travels, very rarely bitch about injustice.
Yes - these are a return in many ways to very old ways of being (and newer ones around things like food preservation I learnt off my mum and grandma). What's new is how we integrate the very old ways with what we know now.
I was thinking about your comment earlier; the whiners in my life don't stay. They tend to leave when asked what they're going to do about their problems and coached through potential solutions and the circle of control and influence once or twice... haha. (As you say... being asked to take responsibility for their part in how their life is and to consider their impact on others.) I know a lot of considerate people who take positive action though. They're the ones who stay. :)
Some people who talk to you about a problem genuinely want advice on what to do, but many want a shoulder to cry on. We can offer both, but you're right, if someone wants a shoulder to cry on again, and again, and again, without ever getting past that stage and having to make harder calls to improve their situation, there's a point where you're just enabling them instead of helping.
Kindness is great and I don't care about what someone's gender/identity is. But the last lot, while extremely well meaning, with accompanying rhetoric, categorically failed to address even the basics, and instead left the people they said they cared for the most, worse off.
So either the talk was fairly empty, or they lacked the ability to identify causality well enough in how they thought they'd deliver on their aspirations.
Having had to be someone on the ground enacting some of these changes, I can say that many of the priorities have been misplaced, with values and ideas taking precedence over making measurable binary results.
Culture takes time to change, but measurable results should show some form of linear improvement over time, not the reverse.
Agreed. I think it's fair to say there are capability gaps at many levels across NZ and that these gaps and system challenges were exacerbated during and post Covid.
I've noticed that learning a new idea is easier and quicker for the average person to grasp than the type of training which lifts their workforce performance widely enough to reform an entire system. Building a high performance culture takes a decent amount of time and leadership.
This doesn't discount the amazing work done by so many. It's just that the overall systems are broken and this is reflected in outcomes.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting convo. :)
Definitely hard forcing change on engrained systems.
And today we have some fairly complex problems, and a complex world in general.
But some of how we approach problems is often over thought.
If we take housing, in the early 19th century, the country took a fairly straightforward approach; build 10s of thousands of houses using uniform methods and components, using a handful of building firms deemed competent, at a set rate. Fast forward to the 2010s to today, and the government is building a handful of homes, of a much wider style and variety (because the thinking is we want the social housing to be as distinct as the private sector), using a tender process virtually every time (expensive to do in its own right), and inserting a couple of layers of their own oversight to enact state policy and compliance (adding cost and slowing down the process).
It has failed to deliver the core requirement of providing adequate housing for the populace, at the sake of non essential ideals and approach. And the ones it has built, are less efficient to maintain, because the diverse variety of them has no economy of scale.
Ditto certain aspects of healthcare, supposedly we need 3000 new nurses a year, but only train 1000 - just something as basic as that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
No worries, always good to talk about the core issues without getting lost in pointy finger and who's to blame for what.
I scared myself silly with this nonsense after 5th form geography in 1978 taught me we were doomed. I have been waiting a long time and not much has changed. According to the syllabys back then we should all be under water by now. I have given up waiting for this to happen. It got a bit warmer about 10 years ago, but the mean frosts are back. The water troughs are freezing over in winter again. Bugger it.
Was just thinking this the other day, a drive across the Hauraki plains at night, your car would be plastered with insects. You could smell it when you got out of the car. Hardly any now. Yet if I go out into the paddock with a head torch I'm mobbed by insects.
I wonder if light pollution near roads is a factor?
Agnostium yes I do recall the bugs of course. We are drenching the world in pesticides. Its freaky. Up until mebe 10 to 15 years ago, chuck some meat on to cook through the day in october and boom....blowies would decend in force. People in town would be horrified. Huge big blowies. Hundreds. Now Zip. Nada. I use a spray on the sheep that stops flies from developing/maturing...one would wonder if its that. Yet dead sheep still disappear with millions of maggots. I dont get excited on Puriri moth night anymore. What used to be 100s banging on the windows on a wet night one night of the year. Is now 3 if you are lucky. There are plenty of grass grub beetles around though. They still love nothing better than stripping my plum trees of foliage. In short...much more crop in the ground. Much more horticulture. Insects are the enemy. So they are gone. As an aside I am trialling Wilties. Self shedders. No wool ..no flystrike no pesticide. Its not quite that simple, but the breeding will get us there eventually. But no wool means wearing or standing on plastic. Cant win.
Belle - you're smart, but you don't think correctly (as in logically/sequentially/Systemically.
Download this, and take the time to do it justice (it will reward you for life):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems
Then put yourself through this (I'm betting no 'N' :)
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2015/04/programmed-to-ignore/
It's an eye-opener...
Hi PDK...(I believe Chris Martensen has moved to the country and is working on a self sustained future).
You know my beliefs are similar to yours as to where this world is going in growth etc. I bailed from society around the age of 20 to do my thing in the country away from the madness of civilisation. My differential perhaps is realising we are but fleas on the back of this rock and she is gona shake rattle and roll to get us off at some point. The best I could do was raise my kids to be self sufficient. Install in them a deep mistrust of society. Which worked out well when nobody got the clotshot and paid little attention to those crazy rules about chucking material on ones face and going nowhere.
Society is going to break ...Rome didnt last. Just prepare your children for change.
And the 4 billion we've added to the 4 billion who were here, then.
How folk can reference a timeframe during which the human population DOUBLED, as if it was a linear thing, always has me scratching my head. I the main good, intelligent, articulate people - hard to understand.
There were little to no toheroa back in the day when we were kids in Northland Kate. I can still swim in my river. But I would not swim at an Auckland beach. Plenty of trout in Lake Taupo. I hear it takes hours to launch a boat anywhere near Auckland. Its people. Too many. Weather aint much different.
"I have given up waiting for this to happen"
I'm the same age, and what I've given up on is hope of politically driven change. In the early 90s I just went out and bought a farm and planted it in trees (anything but pine), then sold that and bought another and did the same (still have it, now harvesting sustainably). That was what I could do.
I expect our collective efforts will fail and some horrific tipping point (thawing methane or ocean meltdown or something) will seriously hammer us. But I carry on fixing carbon and giving birds and insects places to live in case I'm wrong.
I bought land and farmed cattle and sheep Rob...mostly sustainably. I chuck some fert on. But no cropping...no silage...just farm grass. I have beef cows and a few ewes. Fatten some lambs. So I too trap the wonderful C02...make meat for people to eat. Which is full of nutrients and vitamins for the brain and muscle. The top soil here is now so much better than when we came. Thats a lot of carbon stored. If thats what is important to society. Personally I dont see CO2 as an enemy. It feeds my farm. Which feeds people.
Well it had to happen, didn't it?
There is always only room for one person at a time at the top of everything, whether it be Everest, a dung heap, or the Egos how bad climate change is going to be.
Meanwhile, most of the world is wondering how they are going to feed themselves and their family today, pay the mortgage/rent this week, or if they are really lucky and will have enough to retire on.
Meanwhile, most of the world is wondering how they are going to feed themselves and their family today, pay the mortgage/rent this week, or if they are really lucky and will have enough to retire on.
This is exactly why the Greens have social justice and redistributive policies alongside their environmental policies. You can't care about the environment if you're living in poverty and don't know how you'll pay the rent next week.
They figured this out in West Africa when I was visiting in the 90s. ( Overland, no flights before some start). Spending millions on protecting wildlife and getting nowhere, then someone clicked on to feeding the locals, employ some of them as rangers, and saved more wildlife at a fraction of the cost.
Yes - which is why some of us are starting to think about this for our communities now. We need to share and set up the community-led systems now so that they're ready to go, despite what happens in the wider world. Because many of these already exist or have precedent.
I know. For some of us this is not new. :) (Thanks for sharing that link.) More like it's stepped up a notch recently as the old systems break further and continue to break. Honestly PDK, I can feel the collective anxiety for the past few months and it's... not great. Next year's going to be... challenging.
Its about time people realised that climate change is a positive feedback loop. Modelling is really going to struggle and the results will be worse than calculated. We must be pretty close to the tipping point if we are not there already. Reality is its not worth worrying about it now, should have been sorted decades ago.
Ahh ten years on from this article and you have finally reached stage 5 of climate change denial. Maybe next year, you'll be knocking on PDK's door asking what you can do.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2…
The battle between two top climate alarmists / pseudo scientists in the world. Michael Mann and Hansen vying for the top spot.
As soon as I saw Michael Mann's name mentioned then basically switched off knowing the article is by a climate alarmists choosing between die sooner or a bit later.
It's hard to take scientists seriously when they're often wrong, then fly to COP28 in hundreds of private jets into a country that's made trillions out of oil.
Scientists have made plenty of outrageous claims over the years. In the 1960's the 'experts' said oil would run out in 10 years, in the 1990's the ozone layer would disappear in 10 years apparently, and then there's the spurious 'acid rain' predictions.
And of course, running out of water...have we?
No, they effing well did not!
You need to stick to facts, do some real research. Hubbert's 1956 projection - that the US would peak it's SUPPLY Rate of conventional oil in 1970 - turned out true. Extrapolated, Deffeyes tongue-in cheek predicted global light-sweet-crude would peak by Thanksgiving 2005 (he got that to less than a year. Globally, we're down to tar-sand goop, fracturing rocks, drilling deep offshore. The energy required to obtain the energy, has climbed from 5% share in 1999 (the bottom of the trough) past 10%, and is heading for 15 - trending exponentially. All-sources volumes seem to have peaked in 2018, so we're subtracting an exponentially-increasing energy-production demand, from a lessening energy supply.
Doesn't matter whether you need to cranially hide, or not - finite resources, when chewed into at exponentially-increasing rates, best-options-first, peak then deplete. Assuming smooth demand (unlikely considering the absolute necessity of fossil energy to our social construct) that last half of a resource gets depleted in the last doubling-time - at 3% that's 24 years from peak.
This man introduced nuclear energy to the US Navy - with zero accidents ever. Smart cookie - right up there. Here's what he had to say:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/klein1/docs/rickover.pdf
"For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically."
1957. You were saying? The difference between us is that I do research.
Go well...
There's plenty of oil, even NZ has shtloads of the stuff. There's more than enough for everyone, the world has never run out of anything, and that's a fact.
I used to debate with the peak oilers. There was a book published called "Twilight in the Desert" by Matthew Simmons which was their bible, but it turned out to be a load of BS.
Directional drilling, new technology makes oil, gas and other natural resources easier to locate and exploit than ever. This is not the 1950's, hard to understand for a lot of people, but technology is exponential.
2050's pretty close, and oil doesn't look like running out.
I read a book in the early 2000s that said peak oil was about 5 years from time of writing. Took it semi-seriously.
In 2023, a barrel of oil is cheaper in non inflated dollars than it was 10 years ago.
Maybe no one really knows, but a lot of people seem to definitely not know, despite claiming otherwise.
Why did you pick 10 years ago?
And why didn't you factor in debt? Because the (sick) joke is that we are printing debt faster than the planet can supply underwrite. Meaning valuing energy in keystroked digits is hokum.
And you conflated - volumetric rate at first, then dollars. Stop and think - apples with apples. We are burning 100 million barrels a day. FACT. Add up the days....
I thought you thunk more than that?
All oil fields are on a depletion track. Mostly they're 4-5%, some claim 2%, fracking falls off a cliff. Every Nation starts out as an exporter, then they ramp up internal use, then the extraction drops past the climbing internal demand, and they turn into importers. Which they all can't be. I've tracked that for years; Indonesia, Egypt, UK.... SA is about the only swing producer, but Ghawar peaked in 1980; an aging lady herself.
But the point is that you can't value energy in keystroke-issued, bubble-partaking digits.
Why did you pick 10 years ago?
Cause that's when the book I said reckoned the oil supply would start diminishing above demand level - so prices now should be significantly more.
And why didn't you factor in debt?
Because the book was talking about available oil, not debt. If I were factoring in debt, then I'd expect a barrel cost to be higher again still.
We are burning 100 million barrels a day. FACT. Add up the days....
Which means nothing without someone being able to accurately establish the total volume of oil on the planet. As I said, so far the vast majority of people thinking they can define that, have been catastrophically wrong.
It's clearly a finite resource, can't really argue that. But how finite, you can't really say.
Put it this way, if the fossil fuel industry is trying to lobby against banning it, they clearly think they have access to more than what the planet will consume in the next 5-10 years.
They have no choice; boardrooms are legally required to turn a profit. Neither does human society have a choice, as constructed. Keep buying more widgets - faster now...
Nothing comes close to the compact usefulness of fossil energy (did you read that Rickover piece?) and we know we're down to fracturing rock, slopping around in tar-sands, and drilling deep offshore - all signs that the easiest is behind us. I think what amazes me more than anything, is that folk can see the signs if they bothered to look - Concorde and the Shuttles grounded, haven't been back to the moon or 50 years; systems breaking, narratives disintegrating, populations declining, sperm counts ditto (a direct result of our messing with what we eat, for sure) - yet most folk seem to think it's all onwards and upwards; most conflate technology with energy, dahdahdah...
Gonna be an interesting few years...
Concorde and the Shuttles grounded
What's that evidence of? A fleet of only 14 aging supersonic passenger planes is a tenuous business model, and the shuttles were a flawed concept given the issues of repeatedly launching them and having them travel multiple times through Earth's atmosphere
haven't been back to the moon or 50 years;
Because the space race got won and there's no political will to keep going back
populations declining
Because the nature of female existence fundamentally changed in a very short timeframe
If onwards and upwards is change, then yes, humanity is going to keep changing.
The Concorde was grounded after a crash. It was uneconomic anyway. The Shuttle's old technology, SpaceX and other private companies will be the future.
The USA's going back to the moon in a few years, technology's going exponential. American and Japanese spacecraft have been to asteroids billions of miles away, drilled into the surface and returned with rocks for analysis.
Hayabusa 2, the Japanese craft, returned samples in a capsule from space and then headed off on its next mission.
There's still plenty of oil, Guyana's just discovered it's got billions of barrels, and oil isn't expensive, right now it's getting cheaper.
I cant help you with your cognitive issues.
The planet burns its way through a billion barrels every 10 days. You add up the days that has added - 100? Three months? Brilliant. A total game-changer - not.
And we can't burn what we ALREADY know of, without cooking the planet via entropy/thermodynamics.
But I guess you don't think (I should stop this sentence there) the climate is being human-forced either...
They might agree - but it won't happen until depletion forces it.
We made the mistake of multiplying atop a brief pulse of energy - and those currently present but not consuming, want to consume. And those raising their status via the consuming system, aren't about to back off voluntarily. This will/can only end in collapse (via war(s), financial collapse - or maybe a combo. The trick is to imagine a satisfying life beyond that collapse, and establish it. The Degrowthers are absolutely on the right track right; but it won't happen. And most of them have worked that out.
The shift from mysticism to object materialism has proven great for scientific advancements, but terrible as a mental construct of value. On a mass level we have the assumption that human happiness is tied to material acquisition, whether it's a new boat, a bach, of even the next techno doodad. But all of these things are traps and weights, all with cost and liability, that usually far exceed their measurable improvement in the life of the possessor.
A brief pulse in energy is a relative term. In the context of existence, even the shark, an animal hundreds of millions of years old, is a recent arrival.
Yes, but species survival requires 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1...
Put one 0 in there, and it's game over. Reproduction isn't an average. And what our species is doing, is so big in planetary terms, that we and our attendant animals now account for 97% of animal biomass (and we've increased that mass as well; thus the load); we've displaced just about everything else.
Those sharks should have pro-bono legal representation...
It's not really 1,1,1,1 for most species, the number is generally 2 or above given the nature of reproduction, and higher again due to mortality rates of offspring. So if the average drops below 2, it just indicates a reducing population, instead of extinction - that requires a 0.
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