The climate change story is true in some respects: The climate is indeed changing. And CO2 emissions do seem to affect climate. Burning fossil fuels does indeed make a difference in CO2 levels.
The problem I have with the climate change story is that it paints a totally inaccurate story of the predicament the world is facing. The world’s predicament arises primarily from too little affordable resources, especially energy resources; climate change models tend to give the illusion that our problem is one of a superabundance of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the world economy has no real option of using significantly less energy, because the economy tends to collapse when there is not enough energy. Economists have not studied the physics of how a networked economy really works; they rely on an overly simple supply and demand model that seems to suggest that prices can rise endlessly.
Figure 1. Supply and Demand model from Wikipedia.
Attribution: SilverStar at English Wikipedia CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
The quantity of energy supply affects both the supply and demand of finished goods and services. History shows that the result of inadequate energy supplies is often collapse or a resource war, in an attempt to obtain more of the necessary resources.
Climate scientists aren’t expected to be economists, but have inadvertently picked up the wrong views of economists and allowed them to affect the climate models they produce. This results in an over-focus on climate issues and an under-focus on the real issues at hand.
Let’s look at a few issues related to the climate change story.
[1] Growth in energy consumption and in world GDP are very closely linked. In fact, energy consumption seems to be the cause of GDP growth.
If we look at the relationship between World GDP and energy consumption growth, we see a close correlation, with energy consumption increases and decreases often preceding GDP growth changes. This implies a causal relationship.
Figure 2. World GDP Growth versus Energy Consumption Growth, based on data of 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy and GDP data in 2010$ amounts, from the World Bank.
The reason why this close relationship exists is because it takes the “magic” of energy consumption to make the physical changes we associate with GDP growth. It takes energy to transport goods. It takes energy to heat goods, whether to refine metals or to cook foods. Refrigeration is similar to heating, except that heat is moved out of the space that is to be cooled. Electricity, of course, depends on energy consumption.
We cannot expect the relationship to be as close at an individual country level as at the world level, because service economies tend to require less energy per capita than manufacturing economies. If a government sees that energy supplies are running short, it can direct the economy to become more services-oriented. This workaround can keep the local economy operating fairly close to normally, at least for a time.
Longer-term, an economy that has been hollowed out by a lack of energy supplies is likely to find that a substantial share of workers are earning only very low wages. With this reduced buying power, many citizens cannot afford to buy expensive goods like homes and cars. This lack of purchasing power tends to hold down commodity prices of all kinds, since finished goods are made with commodities. It is this lack of purchasing power that tends to hold down oil prices and other energy prices.
[2] There are two very different views of our energy future, depending upon whether an analyst believes that oil and other energy prices can rise endlessly, or not.
Figure 3. Two Views of Our Energy Future
There is substantial evidence that the second view is the correct view. Nearly every time the price of oil rises very much, the US economy has tended to head into recession. And forecasters tell us that while some countries (oil exporters) would be winners with higher prices, on average the world economy will tend to shrink. Oil importers, especially, would shrink back in recession. Figure 4 shows a recent chart by Oxford Economics with the conclusion that oil prices cannot rise very much without adversely affecting the world economy.
Figure 4. Chart by Oxford Economics on their view of the impact of oil prices reaching $100 per barrel. Chart shown on WSJ Daily Shot, April 25, 2019.
Climate change modeling has inadvertently incorporated the opposite view: the view that prices can be expected to rise endlessly, allowing a large quantity of fossil fuels to be extracted. Of course, if fossil fuel prices are expected to rise endlessly, then expensive renewables such as wind and solar can become competitive in the future.
[3] To date economists and their policies have had pretty close to zero success in reducing world CO2 fossil fuel emissions.
Figure 5. World Carbon Dioxide Emissions for selected groupings of countries, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data. Growing Asia is my grouping. It is BP’s Asia Pacific grouping, excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It includes China and India, among other countries.
A popular view of economists is, “If every country limits its own CO2 emissions, certainly world emissions will be reduced.” In practice, this does not work. It simply moves emissions around and, in the process, raises total world emissions. A carbon tax sends high-carbon industries to Emerging Market nations, helping ramp up their economies. The country with the carbon tax on its own citizens then imports manufactured items from the Emerging Market nations with no carbon tax, aiding the Emerging Market countries without a carbon tax at the expense of its own citizens. How reasonable is this approach?
When Advanced Economies transferred a significant share of their industrial production to the Growing Asian nations, the growth rate of industrial production soared in these countries, at the same time that it stagnated in Advanced Economies. (Sorry, data are not available before 2000.)
Figure 6. Percentage increase over prior year for Industrial Production, based on data of CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. Advanced Economies is as defined by CPB. My Growing Asia grouping seems to be very similar to what it shows as “Emerging Asia.”
This soaring production in the Growing Asian nations led to a need for new roads and new homes for workers, in addition to new factories and new means of transportation for workers. The net result was much more CO2 for the world as a whole–not considerably less.
If we calculate the savings in CO2 between the date of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and 2017 for the US, EU, and Japan (the bottom grouping on Figure 5), we find that there has indeed been a savings close to 1.0 billion tons of carbon dioxide over this 20-year period. Unfortunately, Figure 5 shows:
- Growing Asia added 9.0 billion tons of CO2 between 1997 and 2017
- Middle Eastern oil producing nations added 1.1 billion tons of CO2 in the same period, and
- The Rest of the World added 1.5 billion tons of CO2.
So, what little CO2 savings took place in the US, EU, and Japan during the 20 year period between 1997 and 2017 were dwarfed by the impact of the ramp up of industrial growth outside the US, EU, and Japan.
[4] Probably the single most stupid thing world leaders could have done, if they were at all concerned about CO2 emissions, was to add China to the World Trade Organization in December 2001.
In looking at world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, we can see a distinct bend occurring in 2002, the year after China was added to the World Trade Organization.
Figure 7. World CO2 Emissions with Trend Line fitted to 1990-2001 data, based on data from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
The fitted trend line shows that emissions were growing at about 1.1% per year in the 1990 to 2001 period. Once China, with its huge unused coal reserves, was added to the World Trade Organization, both China’s coal production (Figure 8) and its coal consumption (Figure 9) soared.
Figure 8. China energy production by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
Figure 9. China’s energy consumption by fuel, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
With the extra “demand” from China for roads, homes, airports, and new factories, oil and other energy prices soared in the 2002 to 2007 period. Energy prices were again high in the 2011 to 2014 period, after the Great Recession was over. These higher energy prices (see Figure 10 below) encouraged drilling for new oil and gas, such as that from shale formations in the United States. This further helped raise world fossil fuel consumption and thus world CO2 emissions.
Figure 10. Historical inflation-adjusted oil prices, based on inflation adjusted Brent-equivalent oil prices shown in BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
[5] One way of seeing the truth of the close tie between the growth in energy consumption and economic growth is to observe the dip in world CO2 emissions at the time of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
If a person looks at any of Figures 5, 6, 7, or 8, it is easy to see a clear dip in CO2 emissions at the time of the Great Recession. What seems to happen is that high prices lead to recessions in oil importing nations. These recessions lead to lower oil prices. (Note the dip in prices in Figure 10.) It is the fact that high prices lead to recessions in oil importing countries that makes the belief that energy prices can rise endlessly seem absurd.
[6] The European Union is an example of a major area that is fighting declines in nearly all of its major types of energy supplies. In practice, energy prices do not rise high enough, and technology does not help sufficiently to provide the energy supplies needed.
Figure 11. European Union energy production versus total energy consumption, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In the chart above, the colored amounts in the lower part are the amount of energy produced within the European Union, shown in layers, based on BP’s evaluation. The black line at the top is the amount of energy consumed by the European union. The difference between the black line and the colored part is the amount that must be imported from somewhere else.
The problem that the European Union has had is that nearly all of the energy types that the EU has been producing have been declining in spite of higher prices and improving technology. Coal is the EU’s largest source of energy, but it has been declining since before 1965. Oil, natural gas, and nuclear are also declining. Hydroelectric isn’t very significant, but its supply is staying more or less level.
The only category that is rising is “Other Renewables.” This category includes biofuels, wind and solar, and wood and trash burned for fuel. Except for the wood burned as fuel, these are what I would call “fossil fuel extenders.” They are only possible because we have fossil fuels. They help reduce the size of the gap between what is produced and what is required by the economy, but they come nowhere close to filling the gap.
There is controversy regarding how wind and solar should be counted in equivalence to fossil fuels. BP data treats the output of wind and solar as if they replace somewhat less than the price of wholesale electricity (worth about 3 to 5 cents per kWh). The International Energy Agency treats wind and solar as if they only replace the fuel that operates power plants (worth about 2 to 3 cents per kWh).* In practice, the IEA gives less than half as much credit for wind and solar as does BP. In exceptionally sunny places, solar auction prices can be low enough to match its value to grids.
It would make sense to treat wind and solar as replacing electricity, if the systems were set up to include substantial storage capacity. Without at least several days of storage capacity (the situation today), the BP method of counting wind and solar overstates the benefit of wind and solar. Thus, the value of Other Renewables to the EU tends to be overstated by the BP methodology used in Figure 11.
[7] There are huge differences in CO2 growth patterns between (a) countries whose governments have recently collapsed and (b) countries that are growing rapidly.
Government Collapse Related Countries. Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine are all countries whose central government (the Soviet Union) collapsed in 1991. Romania was “only” a country that was dependent on the Soviet Union for imported oil and other trade. These countries all saw a major fall in industrialization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine has been especially hard hit because it has never been able to replace the industry it lost with new industry.
Figure 12. Selected countries with falling CO2 emissions since 1990, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
As I see the situation, the Central Government of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 because the Soviet Union was an oil exporter, and the price of oil had fallen too low for an extended period of time, leaving inadequate funding for investment in new productive capacity. Russia was able to recover better than the other countries shown because once the price of oil rose again, it was able to again ramp up its oil production and exports, supporting its economy.
Examples of Rapidly Growing Countries. If we consider the CO2 patterns of a few growing Asian nations, we see very different patterns than those of the countries attempting to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union’s central government. The CO2 emissions of the Growing Asian Countries have been rising rapidly, relative to 1990 levels.
Figure 13. CO2 Emissions of Selected Asian Countries, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
China’s flattening CO2 emissions since 2013 are an indication that much of its cheap-to-extract coal has been mined out. It has been difficult for China to maintain its level of coal production (see Figure 8, above), given the low level of coal prices in recent years. This problem of low coal prices seems to be parallel to the problem of inadequate prices for oil producers.
[8] Unfortunately, the real story about economies is that they are governed by the laws of physics. Like plants and animals, and like hurricanes, they are dissipative structures that grow for a time and eventually come to an end.
We know that over the ages, many, many economies have grown for a time and then collapsed. But the study of how and why this has happened has been divided among many fields of study, including physicists and historians. Economists, who tend to be hired by politicians, seem to be among the last to understand collapse. They simply model the future as if it will reflect a continuation of past patterns. With such models, economic growth will continue forever.
But growth forever isn’t what really happens. Eventually, growth in population outstrips growth in resources. Various workarounds are tried, often requiring growing specialization, bigger businesses and governments, improved technology and more international trade. This additional complexity tends to lead to too much wage disparity. The problem with wage disparity is that it tends to lead to a large number of workers with very low wages.
The low wages caused by increased wage disparity tend to harm the economy. These low-paid workers cut back on their purchases of discretionary goods–for example, they delay buying a new car or visiting restaurants. These cutbacks lead to what look like “gluts” of commodities such as oil and metals used in making finished goods. Commodity prices tend to fall instead of rise, in order to clear the gluts.
As wage disparity grows, low-wage workers become very unhappy. They may elect radical leaders, or they may try to overthrow a king. With the many low-wage workers, it becomes difficult to collect enough tax revenue. Governments may collapse for lack of tax revenue. Sometimes, governments will attack other economies to try to solve their low-resource problem in this way.
[9] Climate change modelers have not understood that one of the things that they should be concerned about is near-term collapse. The rising wealth disparity in recent years is a major indicator that the world economy may be headed toward collapse.
Economists and politicians model the world as if business as usual will continue forever, but this is not the way the real situation works.
Meteorologists and other climate scientists have closely examined historical climate situations, but when it comes to future patterns of energy consumption, they are far outside of their field. They miss the likelihood of near-term collapse. With the assumption of economic growth forever, it is easy to arrive at projections of growth in fossil fuel consumption almost forever. This, of course, leads to growth in CO2 pollution and a very concerning rise in temperature.
In fact, with the story of economic growth forever, climate change becomes the most serious problem the world is facing. People believe that 100 or 500 years from now, the economy can be expected to operate as in the past. One of our biggest problems will be rising oceans and the need to move our cities back from them. Also, weather changes will be of huge concern.
[10] If the world economy is headed toward near-term collapse, climate change shrinks back in the list of things we should be worried about.
Most of us remember what happened in the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Collapse of the world economy would likely be far, far worse than this recession. It would involve debt defaults as the economy stops growing fast enough to repay debt with interest. It could perhaps involve collapses of governments, similar to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. If low oil prices are again a problem, collapses could especially affect oil exporting nations. In some cases, the use of fossil fuels could fall as quickly as the decline in CO2 emissions for Ukraine (Figure 12).
I often think that the concern about climate change comes from the fact that it can be modeled as if nothing else changes in the future. Surely, if researchers were modeling the overfishing in the sea, they would come to a correspondingly bleak view of how the sea might operate 50 to 100 or 1000 years from now. Similarly, if researchers were modeling our problems with soil erosion, they would come to a correspondingly bleak view about soil conditions, 50 or 100 or 1000 years from now.
One of the problems with the climate change model is that it overlooks the huge number of limits we are reaching simultaneously. These issues will surely change how the economy functions in the future, in ways that are not reflected in today’s climate models.
[11] The great draw of wind and solar is that they seem to solve problems of any type: either too much fossil fuels or too little.
Very few dare talk about the real problem we are facing–a huge number of limits coming at us from many directions at once. World population has risen too much relative to resources. Wage disparity is too great. Aquifer levels are being drawn down, far more quickly than they are being replaced. Pollution of many types (not just CO2) is becoming a problem. Microbes are mutating more quickly than we can find new antibiotics to fight them.
There seem to be plenty of fossil fuels in the ground, but there is a mismatch between the prices consumers can afford and the prices producers need in order to be profitable. It is not just the price of gasoline used at the pump that is important; the prices of finished goods made with energy products (such as homes and automobiles) are just as important. Young people are especially being squeezed with all of their educational loans.
If our problem can be framed as a problem of “too much,” rather than “too little,” we have a situation that is much more salable to the average consumer. People can easily believe that prices will rise endlessly, and that the economy will continue to grow forever. If economists have faith that this can happen, why not believe them? In this context, potential solutions such as wind and solar seem to make sense, even though, with adequate storage, they tend to be high-cost.
[12] Wind and solar, when analyzed without the need for energy storage, seem to help reduce CO2 emissions. But if substantial electricity storage needs to be included, this CO2 benefit tends to disappear.
Most analysts (such as those doing Energy Returned on Energy Investments calculations) have overlooked the need for electricity storage, if penetration is to ramp up. If the direct and indirect energy costs of storage are considered, the expected climate benefit of wind and solar tends to disappear.
Figure 14. Slide by author referencing Graham Palmer’s chart of Dynamic Energy Returned on Energy Invested from “Energy in Australia.”
This is only one estimate. More extensive calculations are needed, but the indications of this example are concerning.
Conclusion: Ultimately, the climate story, as it tends to be quoted in the news media, is misleading.
The climate story we hear tends to give the impression that climate change is a huge problem compared to all the other resource and environmental problems we are encountering. Furthermore, a person gets the impression that simple solutions, such as wind, solar, carbon taxes and voluntary cutbacks in fossil fuel use, are available.
This is a false picture of the situation at hand. Climate change is one of many problems the world economy is facing, and the solutions we have for climate change at this time are totally inadequate. Because an increase in energy consumption is required for GDP growth worldwide, even voluntary cutbacks in fossil fuel usage tend to harm the economies making the reductions. If climate change is to be addressed, totally different approaches are needed. We may even need to talk about adapting to climate change that is largely out of our ability to control.
The benefits of wind and solar have been greatly exaggerated. Partly, this may be because politicians have needed a solution to the energy and climate problems. It may also be partly because “renewable” sounds like it is a synonym for “sustainable,” even though it is not. Adding electricity storage looks like it would be a solution to the intermittency of wind and solar, but it tends to add costs and to defeat the CO2 benefit of these devices.
Finally, IPCC modelers need to develop their models more in the context of the wider range of limits that the world is facing. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to model the expected impact of all limits combined, rather than limiting the analysis to climate change. In particular, there is a need to consider the physics of how an economy really operates: Energy consumption cannot be reduced significantly at the world level without increasing the probability of collapse or a major war.
Footnote:
*Island economies and other remote economies sometimes burn oil to produce electricity. In this case, the cost of fuel consumption for electricity generation will be much higher than the $0.02 to $.03 cents per kWh quoted in the text, so the economics will be different. For example, if diesel is selling for $3.00 per gallon, the cost per kWh of fuel for electricity from diesel will be $0.24 per kWh, based on EIA efficiency estimates. With this high cost of fuel, substituting wind or solar for part of the diesel generally makes economic sense.
The “catch” is that whether the remote economy powers its electricity with oil or with oil plus wind/solar, the price of electricity will remain high. If the remote economy is primarily operating a tourist trade, high electricity prices may not be a major issue. But if the remote economy wants to sell goods in the world economy, its cost of finished goods can be expected to be high compared to the cost of goods made elsewhere, because of its high electricity cost. The high cost of electricity is one of the reasons for the economic problems of Puerto Rico, for example.
Thanks for this thoughtful and balanced essay. You say in the comments that you would not trust the climate scientist and conservation biology emeritus professor Guy McPherson. This is very important to me because I do trust him. If you’re right I need to rethink a lot (even though your practical conclusion I think is similar to his regarding imminent collapse). Is this because you have examined his analysis of the scientific literature and conclude: 1. He misrepresents the science; 2. He does not take into account what I think is your conclusion that collapse of industrial civilisation is going to happen in the very near future not due to climate change but due to lack of affordable resources; 3. Something else? If something else what is it?
He made some unwarrantedly pessimistic and time-specific predictions about human extinction that have torpedoed his own credibility.
This was a shame, as he was using multiple studies to try to build up an understanding of the entire climate system and its ability to support human life. This sort of holistic analysis is not being done enough – most climate scientists (which Guy M is not, although I do not necessarily regard this as a shortcoming) are stuck in their relatively narrow silos – glaciology, oceanography, atmospheric science etc.
“This is very important to me because I do trust him”
Really? Maybe it’s just me (and my paranoia), but I don’t think I’d trust ANYONE to tell me when the world is going to end.
Do your own research. Think for yourself. Come to your own conclusions. But trust no one, particularly opinionated people you encounter on the Internet (It’s my opinion that you trust me on this one) 🙂
http://66.media.tumblr.com/5ee4f531778bf555b4198b47c1464c58/tumblr_nsrlq4fby21upv6a6o1_500.jpg
Cheers,
-GBV
Guy McPherson is indeed listed on the Website of the University of Arizona. https://snre.arizona.edu/people/guy-mcpherson In fact, he is listed on the list of Emeritus Faculty.
https://snre.arizona.edu/people/emeritus
This has always struck me as a little odd, because I think of emeritus faculty as being of retirement age. Guy is 59 now; he couldn’t have been much more than 50 when he retired/left the university. I always wonder what the real story is. How did he get to be an emeritus faculty member at such a young age? Did the school really want to kick him out because it disagreed with what he was teaching (but couldn’t) and the emeritus faculty member designation was a compromise, or what? And why does Guy always bring up his emeritus faculty member status? I suppose that this is really neither here nor there, but it is one of many things that come across as a little odd with Guy.
Guy may try to cross fields, but I wonder about his attention to details. This is hard, when a person crosses fields. One time, Guy interviewed me on a some sort of radio show. He introduced me as being from “Our Finite Planet.” Most interviewers at least try to get the affiliation of their interviewee correct. In general, his questions did not strike me as if he had done quite enough homework ahead of time.
My impression of Guy is that he is impulsive and he doesn’t necessarily think things through sufficiently. An example of this would be his New Mexico homestead, which didn’t work out. When a person puts that with his history of wrong forecasts, I am afraid I don’t have much confidence in his ability to make a correct forecast in an field with as many feedback loops as climate change.
Guy McPherson says he left the University of Arizona voluntarily because of the blatant un-sustainability of living in a large city in the desert and to establish a sustainable homestead in rural New Mexico with another couple. That as you said didn’t work out. He moved to Belize for a few years and now resides in upstate New York. Guy is not alone in predicted imminent human extinction due to climate change. There are a whole list of climate scientists, some of whom are well known, who post on the Arctic News web site who agree with Guy. One guy named Malcolm Light recently predicted humans gone 18 months from now! They all extrapolate from current trends, which are indeed worrying, and assume positive feedback loops will kick in and cause the warming to go exponential. To me it seems quite plausible but I don’t know how you can put a time frame on it.
Tom, you really can’t at this point, especially as there are a few negative feedbacks muddying the waters.
Negative feedbacks?
Like the fact that the warmer the world gets the more assiduously it must radiate its heat into the cold blackness of space?
Or the warmer it gets the more energetic the convection currents wafting the heat from the surface up high to the top of the troposphere become?
Or the warmer it gets the more vigorously water evaporates from the oceans forming thicker low-altitude clouds that reflect and block sunlight and reduce the amount of heating of the oceans and the land?
These are observable facts completely in line with the laws of physics that help explain why the earth is not going to bake like a pizza in an oven or boil like a kettle and turn into another Venus due to the effect of greenhouse gases.
We live in hope, Tim. I was really thinking more specifically of the poles, where there are some nf’s, albeit not enough.
“One guy named Malcolm Light recently predicted humans gone 18 months from now!”
I think this is what turns/turned me off about Guy and those who make claims like he does. I’m really not concerned with accurately predicting the extinction of the human species, and don’t see what purpose it serves (“Yay! I was right about when we all die!”).
If people like Guy and this Malcolm fellow have that much belief in their convictions about the end of humanity, I wish they’d spend more time helping to ease the suffering everyone is facing now (and will face in the future) rather than throwing up their hands and saying, “we’re all dead anyway”.
Seems to me like human extinction is a hopeful dream in their mind so they can wash their hands clean of the travesty our species is perceived to be (I say perceived because I think people often forget about the beautiful, wonderful things individuals sometimes do when they’re not overwhelmed by their greed, egos, or collectivism).
Cheers,
-GBV
Perhaps what I should say is that I do not claim that climate change or climate change modeling is my area of expertise. I do know a little about what IPCC models seems to have left out, however, namely other close by limits that we seem to be facing.
Guy McPherson is simply someone who makes climate forecasts who happens to hang out in “Peak Oil” circles, so I have run into him. I have no reason to believe that Guy’s forecasts would be any better than the forecasts of the IPCC. Guy doesn’t have to be doing anything “wrong” for me not to believe him.
Gail, the IPCC is not doing what most people assume it is doing. It isn’t looking at research examining natural climate variability, just the anthropogenic impacts.
Moreover, Dr. TIm Ball (a kind of Canadian climate Yoda) is adamant that the “Climate Change of the IPCC is Daylight Robbery.”
“[Daylight Robbery] is a figurative phrase that associates an instance of unfair trading with actual robbery. Not just any old robbery, but one so unashamed and obvious that it is committed in broad daylight.”
It fits the actions and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The first robbery was with the definition of climate change. Most believe they examine all causes of climate change, but they use Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
“a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”
You cannot determine human effects unless you understand natural climate change and we don’t.
The second robbery involved admitting the severe limitations of their science, but convincing the public it was settled. They produce “The Physical Science Basis” that they know few read or understand. It’s completed and set aside while a Synthesis Report or Summary for Policymakers is written and released at an orchestrated press conference months before the Science Report. The two are markedly different.
The third robbery involves Summary claims that computer models are scientifically sound. Media focus on temperature projections invariably putting the highest increase in the headlines. These projections are predetermined, and always wrong. The Science Report explains why they cannot be correct. Here are 17 quotes from Chapter 8 of the 2007 Science Report.
Nevertheless, models still show significant errors. Although these are generally greater at smaller scales, important large-scale problems also remain.
Due to the limited resolutions of the models, many of these processes are not resolved adequately by the model grid and must therefore be parametrized. The differences between parameterizations are an important reason why climate model results differ.
Since the TAR, there have been few assessments of the capacity of climate models to simulate observed soil moisture. Despite the tremendous effort to collect and homogenize soil moisture measurements at global scales (Robock et al., 2000), discrepancies between large-scale estimates of observed soil moisture remain.
The global Aerosol Model Intercomparison project, AeroCom, has also been initiated in order to improve understanding of uncertainties of model estimates, and to reduce them (Kinne et al., 2003).
Our assessment is that although problems remain, climate models are improving in their simulation of extratropical cyclones.
Unfortunately, the total surface heat and water fluxes (see Supplementary Material, Figure S8.14) are not well observed.
These errors in oceanic heat uptake will also have a large impact on the reliability of the sea level rise projections.
Evaluation of the land surface component in coupled models is severely limited by the lack of suitable observations. Large discrepancies remain in albedo for forested areas under snowy conditions, due to difficulties in determining the extent of masking of snow by vegetation (Roesch, 2006).
The evaluation of the hydrological component of climate models has mainly been conducted uncoupled from AOGCMs (Bowling et al., 2003; Nijssen et al., 2003; Boone et al., 2004). This is due in part to the difficulties of evaluating runoff simulations across a range of climate models due to variations in rainfall, snowmelt and net radiation.
Despite considerable effort since the TAR, uncertainties remain in the representation of solar radiation in climate models (Potter and Cess, 2004). Several other groups have evaluated the impact of coupling specific models of carbon to climate models but clear results are difficult to obtain because of inevitable biases in both the terrestrial and atmospheric modules (e.g., Delire et al., 2003).
Blocking events are an important class of sectoral weather regimes (see Chapter 3), associated with local reversals of the mid-latitude westerlies. There is also evidence of connections between North and South Pacific blocking and ENSO variability…but these connections have not been systematically explored in AOGCMs.
Despite this progress, serious systematic errors in both the simulated mean climate and the natural variability persist.
Due to the computational cost associated with the requirement of a well-resolved stratosphere, the models employed for the current assessment do not generally include the QBO.
In short, most AOGCMs do not simulate the spatial or intra-seasonal variation of monsoon precipitation accurately.
For models to simulate accurately the seasonally varying pattern of precipitation, they must correctly simulate a number of processes (e.g., evapotranspiration, condensation, transport) that are difficult to evaluate at a global scale.
This suggests that ongoing improvements in model formulation driven primarily by the needs of weather forecasting may lead also to more reliable climate predictions.
The spatial resolution of the coupled ocean-atmosphere models used in the IPCC assessment is generally not high enough to resolve tropical cyclones, and especially to simulate their intensity.
Many won’t understand the comments, which is exactly the point. Some of these alone are sufficient to invalidate the models. Collectively they’re a disaster, but illustrate the charge of Daylight Robbery. IPCC can say we told you about the problems; it isn’t our fault you don’t understand.
https://drtimball.ca/2012/climate-change-of-the-ipcc-is-daylight-robberyclimate-change-of-the-ipcc-is-daylight-robbery/
The fearsome power of the exponential function, http://bit.ly/2LjzJxv
https://youtu.be/pFptt7Cargc
Gail, thank you for this excellent synthesis of ‘doomer’ topics. There is now so much interplay between our converging crises – climate change, environmental degradation, resource depletion, debt saturation etc. – that it makes less and less sense to look at any one of them in isolation.
The most recent IPCC report, alarming though it is, is not cutting edge, as it consists of scientific studies that have taken several years to work their way through the peer-review process. It ignores a whole array of self-amplifying feedbacks, like diminishing albedo from loss of sea-ice and dwindling snow-cover in the Arctic. And it works from a pre-industrial baseline that has been moved surreptitiously forwards from 1750, as it was in previous reports, to 1850, thus airbrushing out perhaps 0.25c of warming.
In other words, the IPCC is, at least in my opinion, understating the gravity of the situation. We are already transitioning irretrievably to a new climate regime.
You may be aware that the UK government has just yesterday announced a climate emergency and is the first national government to do so. This decision and the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ campaign that preceded it are unfortunately rooted in a simplistic, moralistic and wrongheaded worldview that paints energy companies as planet-wrecking villains, while positing this fantasy alternate reality of a prosperous green utopia. A drive to achieve the latter, if we can pull of the financial sleight of hand to pay for it, could only mean a ramping up of fossil fuel use, at least in the short term, as homes and offices are retrofitted to make them more eco-friendly, transport and infrastructure are overhauled, and China rubs its hands and gets to work churning out huge orders of insulation materials, wind turbines and solar panels.
Also widely ignored is the phenomenon of global dimming, primarily from sulfate aerosols, which has been masking at least 0.5c warming, perhaps considerably more. A ramping down of industrial activity, even if that were possible, does nothing to cool the planet. So, we are stuck between one of the many rocks and hard places that characterise this era. And it seems that it is our destiny as a species to flame out, possibly entirely, in paroxysms of confused moral outrage.
If there is essentially nothing we can do about global warming (except perhaps, move out of its way a bit), it doesn’t really make any difference whether the expected warming is 0 degrees or 2 degrees or 8.5 degrees.
What I object to more than anything is the belief that global warming is something that we humans have the power to change. I was perhaps too generous in this article with respect to my evaluation of unbuffered wind and solar being helpful in preventing global warming. They tend not to pay back quickly enough, as we saw in the Turkey example. Also, the way they are added to the electric grid, they tend to artificially lower wholesale prices paid for electricity received by fossil fuel and nuclear providers, driving them out of business, and thus pushing the whole system toward collapse. Furthermore, wind and solar tend to help pump up energy consumption in Emerging Economies. This is not something that EROEI modelers ever considered.
We also know that electric cars (mostly from China) are not a solution either.
Other than hand wringing, I don’t see what the point of all the high temperature forecasts is. It simply makes the United Nations come up with absurd goals that the world cannot possibly meet, without collapsing the world economy.
I only really bring up the details of the warming to suggest that we have, in terms, already exceeded the IPCC’s own 1.5c guard-rail. You won’t get any argument from me vis a vis our collective impotence.
It amazes me that folks can get so alarmed about something that is only vaguely understood and decades – if not centuries away. There is currently an ongoing global financial catastrophe unfolding. On top of that, we were already notified of it’s presence and potential severity back in 2008. Yet very few are paying attention to the elephant in the room. It just mystifies me beyond belief.
Somebody posted this interesting rationale by David Korowicz the other day:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A4nAL4HHloA
I saw that video before. It is a good one!
Greg I completely agree with the finances being the elephant in the room. Having lived in Alaska and aware of glaciers rapidly retreating (breath takingly) along with literally millions of acres of foreest dying off due to insect infestations and drought – You should go see – It is at a scale that is beyond deniability.
That being said we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Dang.
I just posted that a few moments ago as a response to a new comment, only to find it here.
You stole my thunder, Harry…
Cheers,
-GBV
Great minds, GBV…
A bit off-topic: was anybody else on the Energy Resources board that preceded TOD and other sites? I know Jay Hanson has passed away, but it seems that a frequent poster (he generally posted news headlines) named Mark Graffis died as well, although it was in 2018.
http://vifreepress.com/2018/11/little-la-grange-man-was-killed-tuesday-neighbors-waited-two-days-to-call-police/
There have been a lot of deaths of the PO aware folk. I think most posters on ER were boomers or even older. Death sucks,RIP
I am afraid I don’t know. I didn’t get involved until after TOD was formed.
I was on ER since its inception in early 2000. I remember Mark Graffis many posts. He thought he would hole up in the Virgin Islands for the inevitable collapse. I really miss Jay.
Do you remember who else was?
Thanks again Gail.
Something that might interest you and others.
“Not only had securitisation required the raping of the planet that we depend upon for life support; it had eventually consumed itself; and in its current form it is rapidly destroying the nation states that so foolishly removed the stake from its heart.”
“The damage done to the planet is so great that massive changes are required if humans are to survive at all.”
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/03/31/the-idea-that-broke-the-world/
“The trouble is, climate scientists don’t understand economic policy.” — Judith Sloan (Economist), ABC’s Q&A 2017/11/13
Cheers.
Thanks! That is a very interesting article. I agree that inflation plays a very important role. Securitization seems like it is just another layer of promises on top of other promises, with no real funding for contingencies.
You can’t really grow the system forever, for a lot of reasons.
Meanwhile…
“Investors are flocking back to a complex debt-derivatives product blamed for amplifying losses in the financial crisis, reckoning that the securities are safer now that they are no longer backed by subprime mortgages.”
https://www.ft.com/content/9c33cea0-6ceb-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
“Money managers are resurrecting collateralized debt obligations that bundle risky bonds and loans into new, higher-rated securities. Issuers such as Anchorage Capital Group and Fortress Investment Group are betting tweaks to the products will allow them to keep enough cash on the sidelines that, when the next slowdown hits, they’ll be able to swoop in and buy the most beaten-down debt on the cheap.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-02/hedge-funds-resurrect-cdo-trade-this-time-they-say-it-will-work
“The years since the financial crisis have been peppered with warnings about history repeating itself. Investors have sounded an alarm about the return of highly leveraged corporate buyouts by aggressive private equity firms.”
https://www.ft.com/content/34d7564e-6cd9-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
https://tenor.com/pjr3.gif
According to Guy McPherson the horse has left the barn and there is no putting it back in again.
Even if we were to stop using all fossil fuels instantly we will continue an upward trajectory in CO2 levels due to feedback loops in effect (melting permafrost releasing methane, melting ice sheets that will continue to melt, etc..). Somewhere there is a tipping point that the whole thing goes in to hyper drive. As McPherson points out we very well be there now losing 200 species per day everyday. It is going to snap and it’s going to take us with it. If that doesn’t kill us we have set in motion the debt bomb that will take us down, and if that doesn’t kill us we’ll nuke ourselves, and if that doesn’t kill us we’ll run out of freshwater to farm and sustain 8 billion people, and if you survive all that the melting fuel rods from nuclear reactors will kill you.
I no longer worry about it though. There is the belief that hope can carry you forward and help one to hold out during adversity. I have found that the loss of hope was the most freeing experience. There is only now.
“McPherson, author of Going Dark, has even predicted the near-term extinction of many species, including human beings, by the middle of 2026.
It’s because of something called abrupt climate change, also known as nonlinear climate change.
This results when feedback loops caused by rising atmospheric greenhouse gas levels cause the climate system to rapidly transition to a different mode, occurring on a scale that human or natural systems cannot adapt to.
In the first two decades after methane is released into the atmosphere, it’s about 85 times more powerful as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide.
Large amounts of methane are stored in “clathrates”, which are chemical substances along the Arctic continental shelves storing methane molecules.
McPherson and coauthor Carolyn Baker addressed this in their 2014 book, Extinction Dialogs: How to Live with Death in Mind”.
https://www.straight.com/news/868051/could-abrupt-climate-change-lead-human-extinction-within-10-20-years
I would not believe McPherson.
Good decision. McPherson has misrepresented most of the science for at least the last decade.
https://www.therightinsight.org/media/EndisNearHomerSimpson-800×600.jpg
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/social-issues-alarm_clocks-alarms-clock-alarm_clock-watch-mlyn504_low.jpg
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LfepB7fYwN8/Wkx_7ILPYzI/AAAAAAAAal0/bYyvVQKj1bs5HIg9KWWlgVVQy69UlUITwCLcBGAs/s1600/Guy_McPherson_Near_Term_Human_Extinction.JPG
Lol.
I don’t even think of myself as an alarmist anymore.
Simply I don’t see any reasonable peaceful outcome given all the issues we face.
Just enjoying the show before the curtain closes.
++++++++++++
I don’t know what our biggest danger is that we as a society face. My guess is that the global financial system (that is based on debt) will be the first thing that fails. If that does happen, things would unwind really quickly for billions of people. No gas, electricity, food or medical care virtually overnight. Would be much worse than any climate change short of a super-volcano. Of course, that could happen too.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/550/714/8ae.gif
2026? That’s nuts! Total doom is coming, just not THAT soon.
https://media.tenor.com/images/da0571514be37f40db78044fc7350cdf/tenor.gif
There is definitely something going on, especially in the arctic regions. But first of all we have no idea if things will slip in to only positive feedback loops, there might be negative feedback loops as well that we can’t observe or measure yet that will kick in at certain thresholds. And second there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, and even if we did we would have no way of knowing if it worked.
Personally I believe collapse comes to one person at a time through the increasing unaffordability of goods. As a civilization we have been collapsing for decades, and will keep on collapsing for many decades unless great natural disasters hastens the inevitable.
Roger Bezdek, who is President of the consulting firm Management Information Services, Inc. sent me a link to a report that his firm did with respect to “Economic and Social Implications of Potential UN Paris 2015 Global Green House Gas Reduction Mandates.” http://misi-net.com/publications/UNParis-0715.pdf
Bezdek’s firm also believes that there is a close correlation between energy consumption and GDP. This is the image from the abstract to the report.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/per-capita-gdp-implications-of-un-2050-ghg-emission-reduction-goal.png
With the 2050 United Nations’ mandated Green House Gas goals, we would all need to look up to Haiti and Bangledesh, in terms of GDP per capita. This cannot happen without collapse, in my opinion.
The story I am talking about is really the story that the United Nations has put forth regarding mandated actions by 2050.
Collapse will have happened by 2050, 2070 at the latest, because we will need to have doubled our energy usage by then, just to stay square.
This is great news! I’ll be dead by 2070.
Of course, collapse could happen tomorrow, and this is what we’ve been talking about for a long time now on OFW. It’s just that, by 2070, it’s a cert.
Also, consider that conventional oil production has plateaued and is in decline. Peak oil! Volumes have been filled by unconventional supply, which is difficult and expensive to produce.
At some stage there will be a situation, perhaps brought on by a financial crisis, war, or something else, which will constrain supply by just enough to bring about the collapse of the world as we know it.
Some would say that this point has already reached (GFC 2008 due to peak oil), and that the day of reckoning has been temporarily delayed only by massive amounts of money printing, euphemistically know as QE.
Oh well, at least I get to watch it all burn.
(Bangs head, makes sign of devil)
Do you have children?
nope
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UOY5OzdXU18
Give me a bowl of rice with some beans and greens, a pray wheel and lion cloth!
Which reminds me….
Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and often slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace.[4] He became notorious for his philosophical stunts, such as carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He criticized Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates, and sabotaged his lectures, sometimes distracting listeners by bringing food and eating during the discussions. Diogenes was also noted for having mocked Alexander the Great, both in public and to his face when he visited Corinth in 336.[5][6][7]
It was in Corinth that a meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes is supposed to have taken place.[34] These stories may be apocryphal. The accounts of Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius recount that they exchanged only a few words: while Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunlight.” Alexander then declared, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” “If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes,” Diogenes replied.[5][6][7] In another account of the conversation, Alexander found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.
Suppose we need a new mindset for the new age coming!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
I don’t think directly linking GHG emissions to GDP growth is totally genuine. We need to link energy consumption to GDP growth. I do agree that replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources will be difficult, but already in the UK over 50% of electricity production is non-fossil fuel related http://grid.iamkate.com
Not according to the link you posted!
I suspect that link is real-time, and at the moment you looked at it, your statement was true, but it shows about 54% fossil fuel at this moment.
Also, some of the other categories are a bit dicey. “Renewable” is only listed at 19% (about the same as nuclear), whereas some items (like the 1% “pumped storage”) are not really an energy source at all, but rather a sophisticated battery.
If you look at the pie chart on the bottom right hand of the page (annual average) as of 7/5/2019, just over 50% of primary electricity generation is from non-fossil fuels- and I say non-fossil fuels, NOT renewables. This includes nuclear, biomass, solar, wind, hydro.
“The UK over 50% of electricity production is non-fossil fuel related“. …not even close to being true. The article shows solar at 10%….not even close to realistic…this is laughable propaganda by the greenies to convince the UK sheeple they are making progress.
I agree laughable propaganda at best. Even if it were true that 50% of electricity production is non fossil fuels, what builds and maintains the “non fossil fuel” infrastructure?
Well I think this is one of the few things the UK governments seems to be getting right. There’s potential 30GW of offshore capacity by 2030
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/786278/BEIS_Offshore_Wind_Single_Pages_web_optimised.pdf
Will this happen? Uncertain, but you can see that the technology is progressing well https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/8/17084158/wind-turbine-power-energy-blades
“In 2017…… US wind turbines had an average rotor diameter of 367 feet. The Haliade-X will have a rotor diameter of 722 feet, roughly double the average. The blades will be gargantuan, 351 feet long each, longer than a football field and longer, GE says, than any other offshore blade to date.”
The catch is the battery backup that these devices need. When the total cost is put together, the overall system cost becomes unaffordable.
I love how folks say stuff like this: “over 50% of electricity production is non-fossil fuel related”. That is just propaganda galore. Even if it were “sort of true” – that would still mean fossil fuels are building and maintaining that “non-fossil fuel” based infrastructure. So, it cannot be called “non-fossil fuel related” unless solar panes and wind turbines are building themselves with resources they are mining completely without fossil fuels. The roads and all related transport is also built by and maintained by wind and solar. It is just ludicrous to say something like “non-fossil fuel related” in a society powered by fossil fuels.
Half Truth?
LOL, did you know that some guy wrote a book entitled Climate Change the Work of God? Name Gerry Fox. Had to read it and it is well utterly stunning. His arguments for it is incredible arguing that practically every book in the Old Testament and a number of the New mentions it. Next to this he even shows that there exists within the biblical scriptures a solution to Climate Change? Now could there indeed be a theological aspect to what is occurring? Why if this is the case has no one looked into it or considered it except that is for this one unknown guy? Is there another story to global warming that we have not been told? If so why are we only being told one side of the story?
Regardless of what Gerry Fox said, it is clear from the Bible that the climate has changed, since it was written. The Garden of Eden seems to have been set in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, for example. Today, that area is not a lush wet area with plentiful vegetation. There are at least some differences in the crops grown in Israel as well.
I think that some of the confusion about climate change occurs because the implicit assumption of a lot of people seem to have that the climate will never change. With such an assumption, the average rainfall over one 100 year period for the area drained by the Colorado River can be expected to be a good predictor of the expected average rainfall over the next 100 year period. Except now we know that in the particular example of the area drained by the Colorado River, it is possible to set up a model assuming that there is quite a bit more water available for future irrigation than there really is. https://www.nap.edu/read/11857/chapter/5
Ecosystems in general are dissipative structures. The climate is constantly changing. Modeling it is an extraordinarily difficult task. Humans have been affecting climate since hunter-gatherer days, by burning down forests. We cannot really expect it to be stable.
Ecologists will tell you the Tigris-Euphrates basin was destroyed by humans, through excessive irrigation, which resulted in salination of the soil.
Continuous irrigation always results in soil salination, and eventual desertification.
Bingo!
We have a winner.
The draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes occurred in Iraq and to a smaller degree in Iran between the 1950s and 1990s to clear large areas of the marshes in the Tigris-Euphrates river system. Formerly covering an area of around 20,000 km2 (7,700 sq mi), the main sub-marshes, the Hawizeh, Central, and Hammar marshes and all three were drained at different times for different reasons.
The draining of the marshes was undertaken primarily for political ends, namely to force the Ma’dan people, or Marsh Arabs, out of the area through water diversion tactics and to punish them for their role in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein’s government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_Marshes
There is a history of climate change in the bible and even archeology is seeing this same thing. I mean really here a small taste from Fox’s chapter THE PALEO-ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD:
“In the Middle East, a ~200-year drought forced the abandonment of agricultural settlements in the Levant and northern Mesopotamia. The subsequent return to moister conditions in Mesopotamia promoted settlement of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial plain and delta, where breachable river levees and seasonal basins may have encouraged early Mesopotamia irrigation agriculture. By 3500 B.C. urban Late Urak society flourished in southern Mesopotamia, sustained by a system of high yield cereal irrigation agriculture with efficient canal transport. Late Urak “colony” settlements were founded across the dry-farming portions of the Near East. But these colonies and the expansion of Late Urak society collapsed suddenly at about 3200 to 3500 B.C. Archaeologists have puzzled over this collapse for the past 30 years. Now there are hints in the paleoclimatic record that it may be related to a short (less than 200 years) but severe drought… Following the return to wetter conditions politically centralized and class-based urban societies emerged and expanded across the riverine and dry-farming landscapes of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and West Africa. The Akkadian empire of Mesopotamia, the pyramid constructing Old Kingdom civilization of Egypt, the Harrapan C3 civilization of the Indus valley, and the Early Bronze III civilization of Palestine, Greece, and Crete all reached their economic peak at about 2300 B.C. This period was abruptly terminated before 2200 B.C. by catastrophic drought and cooling that generated regional abandonment, collapse, and habitat-tracking. Paleo-climatic data from numerous sites document changes in the Mediterranean westerlies and monsoon rainfall during this event, with precipitation reductions of up to 30% that diminished agricultural production from the Aegean to the Indus.” Science pg. (January 26, 2001): 609–610.
This bears an astounding resemblance, providing corroboration and substantiation, to what happened to such nations as the Hittites, Amorites, Edomites, Assyrians, Philistines, Israelites, and Egyptians. The biblical accounts of these nations’ weather-related demises are quite graphic. We clearly saw this in our last chapter. If perchance one needs more from the Bible, consider again these words in relation to the house of Israel from the sixth-century B.C. prophets:
“When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I the Lord have spoken.” (Ezekiel 5:16)
“I also withheld rain from you when the harvest was still three months away. I sent rain on one town, but withheld it from another. One field had rain; another had none and dried up. People staggered from town to town for water but did not get enough to drink, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord.
“Many times I struck your gardens and vineyards, destroying them with blight and mildew. Locusts devoured your fig and olive trees, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord.
“I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt. I killed your young men with the sword, along with your captured horses. I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camps, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord.
“I overthrew some of you as I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. You were like a burning stick snatched from the fire, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord. (Amos 4:7–11)
The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, if a country sins against me by being unfaithful and I stretch out my hand against it to cut off its food supply and send famine upon it and kill its people and their animals, even if these three men—Noah, Daniel and Job—were in it, they could save only themselves by their righteousness, declares the Sovereign Lord.” (Ezekiel 14:12–14)
Rain will come in torrents, and I will send hailstones hurtling down, and violent winds will burst forth. When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, “Where is the whitewash you covered it with?”
“Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury. (Ezekiel 13:11–13)
The Lord will cause people to hear his majestic voice and will make them see his arm coming down with raging anger and consuming fire, with cloudburst, thunderstorm and hail.” (Isaiah 30:30)
Here we find the explanation of what our scientists don’t understand. As we saw earlier, there is one truth above all regarding life on this planet: we need to be hydrated. Water is the lifeblood of literally everything on this planet, whether human, plant, or animal.
As vital as rainwater is to life, though, the more important and significant matter here is of course the issue of sin, that invariable poison of human character that manifests itself by way of cursing, lying, stealing, adultery, greed, pride, and murder, or as our Saviour Christ Jesus said:
“Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?
There’s industrial pollution and then there’s the pollution of sin.
Fox fully chronicles and shows/argues there is a pattern unfolding. It’s not running totally amok.
I got to tell you read the book and you will never be the same nor will anyone look at weather in the same way again.
But that has not been the AG area.
They were decimated thousands of years ago.
But that was a real bummer, I agree.
Okay Duncan lets go here then the 1930’s dust bowl in the US.
Fox argues that there was no way that the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s in the very heart of the nation’s Bread Basket was just a coincidence or a matter of AG alone. There is a pattern to it.
Here…
“To read and study the events of the years 1934 – 1939 and one is or should be struck immediately by the rather odd events. The dust storms came in three waves beginning in 1934, 1936 and finally 1939. What is especially astounding though is the year 1935, which witnessed seven and I repeat 7 dust storms in the first four months alone culminating on Black Friday, April 14, Easter of all things, of a storm that was the most severe of any. A dust storm which occurred just after 12 noon and this after an especially beautiful day but turned the sky pitch black and was over 200 hundred miles long. Do you see a pattern? This is utterly astounding and of enormous significance which brings up again the issue of Divine Communication and the many references in the Old Testament about reaping the whirlwind.”
“They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind. The stalks of grain wither and produce nothing to eat. And even if there is any grain, foreigners will eat it.” {Hosea 8:7}
“Is this just a coincidence? Not by a long shot but why? If this was truly an act of God, why? Well, politically speaking there was a tremendous amount going on, just these words alone by Louis T. McFadden tells us something was amiss in the halls of power:”
“We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks…Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are not Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers… The Federal Reserve Banks are the agents of the foreign central banks…In that dark crew of financial pirates, there are those who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket.” Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board to conceal its power, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here {in Congress} and controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will…When the Fed was passed, the people of the United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers, and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.” Louis T. McFadden June 10, 1932
Something diabolical was at work and not just in America but throughout the entire world. Consider WW1 was a mere …”
the way this guy looks at climate change is by looking at what is occurring SIN WISE and he notices a connection.
What really blows my mind however, is the events of 9/11 and what he says about it is mindblowing! That Icestorm of the Century was not just AG gone nuts! Further get this three days before 9/11 guess what. Over Boston there was in the news during some sporting event an unbelievable thunder rain / hailstorm hitting the city. People watching some game had to literally flee for their lives ducking for cover etc. This occurred three days before 9/11 really? Just another coincidence? Or as is taught Divine Communication?
God is not an absentee landlord! The problem as usual is our blindness to everything called religion and God! This is a story need telling. We need to seriously start asking different questions and the right kind of questions. If we do well then maybe we will find the solution and salvation we all need.
I have an original theory that I would like to formally publish someday.
Gail (et. al.) often cite that most recessions and depressions correlate strongly with energy crisis events. One exception that always stands out is the Great Depression in the years following the 1929 stock market crash. The classical explanations for what caused the Great Depression never really sat well with me.
What I’ve discovered is that some 20 to 50 million people living in Appalachia, from Northern Pennsylvania to Georgia, suffered an energy crisis in roughly the decade leading up to the Great Depression, an energy crisis that saw three out of every four trees in many areas of the mountain range die over a 20 year period, an energy crisis that saw most of those people move to cities, where there were no jobs for them.
The fungus Cryphonectria parasitica was unknowingly introduced to North America via imported Chinese Chestnut trees in 1904. Over the next couple decades, it essentially wiped an estimated six billion American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) trees off the map.
The people of Appalachia were heavily dependent on the American Chestnut — for their food, for livestock food, for firewood for heating, for the strong, easily-split and easily-worked wood for fencing, barns, houses, and other structures, for charcoal that powered iron production, for the tannins that the entire leather industry was dependent upon, for wind and weather shelter, and many other aspects.
As the chestnuts died, Appalachian people moved to the big Eastern US cities, seeking employment. There was none. (I’ve gone so far as to research Appalachia and metropolitan census records of the day.) The leather industry was devastated. And when you take away six billion huge living organisms from a region, you even change the climate.
“Ekman Spirals” create turbulence on either side of forested mountain ranges. This turbulence disrupts the drying prevailing westerly winds, and mixes cool and warm air, creating precipitation fronts. These effects continue for thousands of kilometres. When forests are devastated, lands on either side tend to dry out and desertify. When the loss of billions of tonnes of forest dried out the land, farmers gave up and moved to cities, further pressuring the job markets.
My premise is that the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica caused both the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, which was indeed an “energy-deficit” depression.
Now to find a nice little grant for further research and to write it up all properly… 🙂
what a great story—thanks Jan
It has parallels with the Syrian problem in 2010 where drought had the same effect and caused civil war
one wonders if the USA wouldn’t have gone the same way in the 40s, had not Germany/Japan done it for them
it also bears out my theory that ”bugs rule”
Unfortunately for the fungus theory, the “dustbowl” drought affected most of the continental US to some extent during the 1930s, and there were some areas of the midwest that didn’t record a drop of rain for six years.
In 2004, Nature covered the following theory by a team from NASA:
The devastating US drought of the 1930s was caused by unusual sea surface temperatures, according to new climate research. The work could help predict future dry spells, and demonstrates that tiny changes in ocean temperature can have a massive impact on the land.
The researchers fed sea surface temperature data from the tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans into a computer model, which accurately predicted the drought that affected three-quarters of the United States between 1931 and 1939.
The Pacific was on average a few tenths of a degree cooler than normal during the thirties, while the Atlantic was slightly warmer. This combination was apparently enough to turn the Southern Plains, including parts of Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, into a giant ‘dust bowl’.
“The Dust Bowl is unique in the last 100 years, and that is because of the unusual combination of Pacific and Atlantic effects,” says Siegfried Schubert of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the research team.
I don’t need no stinking ecologists, but I will say that the Tigris-Euphrates basin still exists. It hasn’t been destroyed. Much of the land can’t be used to produce bumper crops any more, but the basin is still there.
The region has been semi-arid (averaging around 250-300mm of rain per year) since the end of the last interglacial and it was probably totally arid up to that time, so in order to farm it successfully people had to irrigate using the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.
This resulted in progressive salination of agricultural soil, which ultimately lowered yields, required changes of crops and forced the main areas of cultivation to move up stream over the millennia. But your point about continuous irrigation resulting in desertification notwithstanding, without irrigation, Mesopotamia would be semi-desert in any case. California’s San Joaquin Valley is currently in a similar bind.
Now, where was the original Garden of Eden and how was that watered?
God is a plumber.
Exactly. The same think happened in North Africa, thanks to Roman irrigation schemes. Remember that Hannibal’s elephants came from North Africa: how many are there now?
This is a classic “technology trap”: good in the short term, disastrous in the longer term, and essentially irreversible. But we are currently sleepwalking into a far worse trap: the overuse of antibiotics is breeding resistant diseases, and sooner or later we’ll have a pandemic. And thanks to modern air travel, it will indeed be worldwide.
I remember that David Montgomery, in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations makes the point that irrigation is an unsustainable technology. The one exception he seemed to make was when irrigation came rom natural overflow of rivers that came from areas that provided additional fertile topsoil.
When I see a large expanse of flattish land near me that doesn’t flood, I notice that it undulated. (Would they call this rolling plains?) So water is always collecting in slight valleys, and staying in the ground instead of running off. (Then builders come and level the whole thing, ensuring the need for expensive flood systems…another subject.) One of your former posters called Garand (also living in my state) mentioned the need to “sculpt” the yard. I’ve started doing that, and wherever rain water can hang on in a scooped-out incline, grass and wild plants grow. Some of the wild plants are edible, but domesticated plants will do better there as well. Wherever you can combine that system with gray water watering, you have a fairly effortless and inexpensive watering system.
And the most obvious exception is Ancient Egypt. Too bad the modern Egyptians built the Aswan High Dam, another technology trap in spades.
The text mentions *four* rivers, two of which no longer exist and have dried up. I suppose that would place the location of Eden just off the coast of Kuwait! (Sorry, it’s now underwater.) Of course we are speaking of a myth which would have meant different things to different people at different phases of its transmission.
I think the issues today and going forward are the frequency, magnitude and duration of extreme weather events.
Exponential Growth in Impacts from Abrupt Climate Change
…climate change which has occurred thus far has already rapidly changed the state of the extremes of weather; it has “loaded the gun”, adding a much greater number of events to what would’ve already occurred naturally.
This meme is addressed to all of you who are trying to scare us.
And you know who you are, don’t you?
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQNv02VY5SHZ8AJ8-0bjjTuI8QWCSGs1lZy6qnSOH-4COxohcqijQ
Don’t you remember those Russian oil drillers who lowered a microphone deep into the earth, from which they heard the screams of the damned?
Gail, I believe this is your most important piece of work. Great work!
Thanks! It didn’t feel like it was an important piece of work when I was trying to write it. At first, it looked like a disjointed group of pieces, in the wrong order, with the summary statements not really right for what I was saying. Some rearrangement and rewriting helped. Surprisingly, so did some feedback from an editor who was convinced that I was all wrong and that climate change was the worst problem we were facing. I figured out that I needed to “sharpen” some statements and tie the conclusions back better to what I was saying elsewhere. I also ended up adding a little more that I had left out previously, so that it covered more bases. I had other feedback as well, but in this case, feedback from a critic was the most helpful.
The problem is that even with the limited amount of affordable fossils at hand, we might go past the point where feedback loops kick in and push the climate into a new stable state, like the hot state periods of prehistory.
Which makes for the nice double whammy of available energy going down while problems requiring energy to fix go up.
And the US GDP numbers are now as reliable than the Soviet numbers back in the days. Massaged and tweaked to look good, and then used to pilot the decision making.
Flying on defective instruments always en up badly.
“The problem is that even with the limited amount of affordable fossils at hand, we might go past the point where feedback loops kick in and push the climate into a new stable state, like the hot state periods of prehistory.”
And how do we know when none of us were present when the dinosaurs were roaming the Earth? Because we don’t, it’s just a wild claim. Like this dude, Dahr Jamail who’s a climate activist who jet-sets around the world to callout the deniers and state with infallible truth that it’s because of us humans we are headed for disaster. And yet he has no problem about adding to the fossil fuel use by hoping on a jet airliner which burns FF’s.
But here’s the headline of his most recent article: “The Last Time There Was This Much CO2, Trees Grew at the South Pole”. Does the South Pole now have a rain forest that I may have missed because of all the CO2? We were told that the last time there was 350ppm CO2 in the air, few humans were alive. Now we’re at 410ppm and we still have 7.8B roaming the Earth. It’s all alarmists stuff. These people make these wild claims and we are supposed to believe them just because they say it?
AGW is a large cottage industry, so promoting it and its villains along with possibility of solutions can yield big bucks for some. I think it’s a giant joke and that most of the people in the AGW ‘industry’ are making things worse by misdirecting money and attention away from practical considerations that can actually be helpful right now instead of the mythical 100 years from now.
+1 Like, instead of the alarmist AGW stuff. How about we start not dumping garbage or plastics in the ocean or how about we send some of our best and brightest to assist the Japanese so they can get a handle on Fukushima instead of them dumping radioactive water in the Pacific Ocean.
Guy McPherson has to be the King of Alarmist. That guy has been saying we are all dead in 2-3 yrs which at one point he was looking at the year 2032. So he’s pushed the date up and last year he even made a wilder came by saying we wouldn’t see the end of 2018 and ‘here we are’.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/566/702/3f2.jpeg
Feels like a meme kinda day…
Cheers,
-GBV
We won’t really know what we should be alarmed about until the alarm clock rings. Until then we have no idea what kind of troubles lie ahead. We can only guess. We know there are a lot of problems and head winds ahead.
Not creating excess plastic would curtail consumerism. Can’t have that.
The scientist who could have saved mankind is now a hedge fund manager.
If you think US GDP numbers are unreliable, think about those of China and of other countries feeling a real need to report favorable numbers.
One issue is how to report all of the government spending that really has little value other than to provide jobs for workers doing the jobs. The tendency is to report it as an investment, even if the workers are doing nothing other than digging holes in the ground and refilling them with dirt.
Therefor is important to also watch what they actually do on the ground (or what can be inferred from black box projects by us armchair spectators) – not so much what they only talk about in terms of policy, massaged GDP/gov numbers etc..
“[US Growth in the first quarter was pumped up by a large gain in business inventories, which have been ballooning since last summer. This means that businesses are producing more than they are selling, and that’s not sustainable. Businesses soon will have no choice but to cut back on their output, and because GDP measures the value of all of the goods and services we produce, growth will slow… The trade deficit also narrowed unusually sharply as imports plunged.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/01/perspectives/us-gdp-first-quarter-economy/index.html
“The U.S. government will have to stop borrowing money between July and December if Washington doesn’t agree to raise a legal restriction on public debt, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday. Hitting that so-called “debt ceiling” could trigger a U.S. default on its debt and an immediate recession, a risk that has become a regular facet of U.S. politics over the last decade.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-refunding/u-s-may-have-to-stop-borrowing-later-this-year-treasury-idUKKCN1S73U4
“Ultra-loose monetary policies keep the cost of credit exceptionally low for an extended period of time. The Federal Reserve’s active manipulation fosters a wealth effect, but it also fosters an asset bubble. When the balloon inevitably pops, corporations batten down their hatches, unemployment surges, and consumers rein in their consumption. The severity of a “wealth effect reversal” will trigger the next recession.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4258630-will-cause-next-recession
The “wealth effect” is very closely related to inflation. It occurs in all kinds of asset prices when interest rates fall. We have been living on the wealth effect since 1981, basically, with ups and downs caused by the Federal Reserve manipulating the short term interest rates. Lower interest rates make assets cheaper to buy, essentially because the monthly payment is lower. (The Wealth Effect is part of what has been used to offset the rising price of fossil fuels.)
Every time the Federal Reserve manipulates the short term interest rate up to match the long term interest rate, we seem to enter recession. This happens because banks “borrow short and lend long.” When they can’t make money on the difference, they cut way back on their lending.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/3-month-and-10-year-interest-rates-through-march-27-2019-1.png
It seems like the special measures being taken to avoid hitting the debt ceiling would have an adverse impact on the world economy, by themselves. The world economy really needs growing debt levels, one way or another.
More cars sitting in showrooms doesn’t really help the US economy (and other equivalent inventory gains) as much as the GDP calculation gives it credit for. This is the problem.
“The global economy softened considerably last year as a result and certain sectors fell into contraction in different developed countries. Although, the manufacturing sector has been hit the heaviest since most tariffs are targeting manufactured products. This sector fell into contraction in China at the end of last year.
“It finally came back into expansion in March, but last month we saw another slowdown and now the manufacturing activity is near contraction again in China. Manufacturing has also been in contraction in Italy since October last year while in February, Germany and France joined in what seems to be a dip contraction.
“Yesterday we saw Canadian manufacturing fall into contraction as well, while the US ISM manufacturing declined considerably. Today, the Eurozone manufacturing reports are scheduled to be released…”
https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2019/05/02/global-manufacturing-heading-to-contraction/
“Eurozone manufacturing activity continued to contract in April, even if at a slower pace than in the previous month, according to a closely watched survey of industry executives.”
https://www.ft.com/content/776c84c2-6caf-11e9-a9a5-351eeaef6d84
“The US manufacturing sector grew at its weakest level in two and a half years in April, the Institute for Supply Management said…”
https://www.ft.com/content/a072b436-6c19-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
“Factory activity recovered last month in parts of Asia but still appeared to be on shaky ground as global demand remained subdued and China’s stimulus measures were yet to show their full pulling power. That left the outlook for the region’s central banks skewed towards easing, with Malaysia and New Zealand prime suspects for potential rate cuts, and Australia — whose monetary policy setters also meet next week — facing growing calls to ease.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-economy-asia-factory-activity-041454798.html
The US economy still looks good compared to a lot of the rest of the world (talking about rate cuts). This helps the dollar stay higher relative to other currencies. A high dollar tends to keep the price of commodities (such as oil) down, because this tends to make the commodities relatively more expensive for the rest of the world–in particular the ones making interest rate cuts.
I wonder if this is related to the lower oil supply since the beginning of the year. People are looking for the shortfall in supply to lead to higher prices, but it can also lead to a slowdown in demand from the manufacturing sectors. With the dollar being relatively high, many people around the world are finding their paychecks stretched. I am not sure about the status of carbon taxes, but the big protests in France give an indication they were of concern. All of these things cut back demand at the same time as supply is cut back. Manufacturing is cut back in response to lower demand, because of the stretched paychecks.
The French problem goes very deep, it’s has been brewing for decades, only that in very recent years it became so close up to a face apparent stagnation/contraction vs. even some of the Benelux countries, not mentioning Germany proper, which benefited most from the rise of Asia and new protectorates-colonies of the “enlarged Europe’ as additional low wage supplier chain.. comparatively to France, which has been out of the loop.
France seems increasingly at the end of the road, too few industrial orders vs Germany or Asian competitors, while still running huge expenses on the social sphere, army-nuclear deterrent and other spending black hole ‘grand nation’ priorities.
In essence the French public was confronted with the reality of ever decreasing prosperity and in response not insignificant part of them directly (or with silent support) went into streets to protest.
“This is the worst annual earnings season ever for China’s corporate sector, with a record 452 out of 3,602 public companies incurring annual losses, as the effects of the year-long US-China trade war seep into corporate earnings. By the end of April, the number of loss-making companies had doubled from 2017, while the proportion of such companies also hit an all-time high of 12.5 per cent…”
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3008432/corporate-china-hit-worst-earnings-record-2018-trade-war
“Chinese module manufacturer Yingli has warned it faces being broken up entirely to satisfy creditors who have already lodged numerous lawsuits against its debt-laden businesses. The annual accounts filing lodged today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission spells out the full horror of Yingli’s balance sheet and is a 200-plus page litany of unpaid debts, angry creditors, ever mounting losses and even links to sanctions-busting entities in Syria, Iran and Sudan.”
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/05/01/yingli-reveals-the-full-extent-of-its-huge-debt-mountain/
I remember reading a while back that if one solar PV module in an array fails, you need a replacement from the same manufacturer to maintain the same efficiency of the overall group of modules. I don’t know if this still is true. If it is still true, losing solar PV manufacturers to bankruptcy is not a good idea.
Also, the high debt level suggests that the low selling cost of solar PV modules does not really represent a low manufacturing cost of the modules. The idea of projecting ever-lower solar PV prices is probably wrong. In fact, it may already reflect artificially low past pricing.
Speaking as an electrical engineer, I don’t see any sane reason why this would be true.
It could be that the manufactures want to make consumers and installers think this is true, in order to sell more panels. But a volt is just a volt, and amp is just an amp, a watt is still a watt… as time goes by.
It seemed a little strange to me as well. It seems like something that Pedro Prieto reported in his book about the problems with the solar power installations in Spain, and why later costs were higher than expected. I would need to check, though.
In a mature market, dominant players turn from innovation to protecting their market share.
In such a case, I could see one or two dominant players design in non-compliance with other manufacturers. Sony has their proprietary “memory stick,” while everyone else has gone to SD cards, for example. Microsoft is infamous for their “embrace, embellish, extinguish” approach to software standards, as another example.
But the solar panel market could hardly be called mature, and there doesn’t seem to be a couple dominant players, which I think are two conditions for markets to turn from innovation to protection.
These huge arrays follow certain specific ‘topography’ of wiring, which is permanent by the time the facility is connect into the grid (or after major overhaul-upgrade), so from it follows using few different spec components can cause lot of stability problems. Different efficiency also means slightly different voltage/amperage/time(out) parameters.. etc.
It would be highly ironic, and poetic justice, if countries referred to by some Presidents as ‘shit-holes’ were the ones to manage the transition to a low energy future more successfully than developed nations. I imagine the loss of an integrated transport system in for example, the USA or Germany, will cause far greater problems than declining fuel supplies in a country such as Mozambique, where people are used to living a low energy, subsistence lifestyle.
Nasdaq is broken.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5gfBCUWAAIpEEA?format=jpg&name=large
Headed downward?
As I understand it: when a rising wedge breaks down to the downside a crash is coming.
I don’t know why. A rising wedge is perhaps unsustainable? It is perhaps speculative in nature and needs to be corrected?
The WTI broke down from its rising wedge as well. The WTI is down to USD 62.10 today.
I see it is at reported at $61.57 today. Stocks of oil rose both the most recent week and one week prior. So much for reduced oil production from OPEC raising prices!
The WTI continues to fall.
Trump has blocked more oil from the markets through sanctions than OPEC has cut in production…and still inventories are rising.
We need more “demand” for prices to rise. This mostly comes from more wages, especially for non-elite workers. Long term, productivity growth (helped along by growth in the use of cheap energy products) is needed. But for the short term, even an increase in debt will help add more jobs.
I don’t know what charting theory would say. I expect that there is a physics reason for the relationship underlying the pattern.
What I expect happened is that for a while, buyers of oil futures and oil speculators relied on the many people saying, “Supply is going down; surely price will rise.” In fact, some speculators may have borrowed money based on this assumption. But after a while, all of these “oil bulls” figured out that oil prices really aren’t going up very much. The interest the paid on loans to fund this speculation was starting to become a concern. And if the price actually did fall, the profits that they might make were going to disappear, and may even put them in a loss position. So that it was best to get out now, before there is too much of a drop in prices. Of course, once prices go down very much, other speculators will decide that they need to sell as well.
With respect to Brent, I notice that this time’s peak daily price seems to be about $75. This corresponds to a previous high price at a peak in 2018 of about $85. The peaks are moving downward, as we would expect.
Sunlight through the atmosphere with Co2 and the black space as background, will give the sky a blue colour. So by releasing Co2 into the atmosphere we will get blue skies.
But Nasdaq has now broken down from its rising wedge. No more blue skies in market?
Good Post, Gollie good….
However, there are those that are in line to “debate” you…..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vYj5baVfB0Y&t=10s
Not only politicians but educated, respected members of the scientific professions
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pwvVephTIHU
In a nutshell, you are correct, everyone has an opinion.
By and large, we will continue to do so, because we have no choice, until we have no choice but to stop.
From my reading the proposal is to actually bring down emissions to zero….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FsyP6D365Oc
HA, HA, HA….GOOD LUCK with THAT
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year that in order to keep global warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, the world must halve greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 2030, get to zero net emissions by 2050, and go negative thereafter…
NEGATIVE EMISSIONS after 2050!!!!
Sure, EASY PEASY….WHAT are these People SMOKING?
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/30/18522680/beto-orourke-2020-climate-change-proposal
Former Democratic Texas representative, 2020 presidential contender, and table-stander Beto O’Rourke on Monday released a new policy proposal, what he called “the most ambitious climate plan in the history of the United States
O’Rourke is pitching big numbers and ambitious targets: $5 trillion in new investments, halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2050. It’s his first major policy proposal and it’s a stab at distinguishing himself from the crowded field of 2020 presidential candidates on a major issue for Democratic primary voters. An April Monmouth University poll of Iowa Democratic voters showed that climate change was the second-most important issue to voters after healthcare.
Beto on the road with his campaign manager to the next rally stop in California!!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EIpfWFUfJV8
Seems when reality strikes, best to stock up on Mary Jane to ease the pain, LOL
Fast Eddy lives!
I don’t even know if I can post anything about CC, because usually posts of mine get nixed. But since this is an article about the subject, I’ll try. Climate change is worrisome to those that work in that field because it is unknown when the climate could switch into a completely different state. Already the reduced temperature difference between the arctic and tropics has caused the jet stream to meander, holding weather in place longer with disastrous results, with huge floods, droughts, heat waves, etc.
But the larger concern is the potential for temperatures to rise sharply over a short period of time with feedbacks forcing temps even higher. That will be a tipping point that we cannot reverse, so yes, there is great concern for continued carbon emissions and their increases, like we saw in 2018.
Climatologists have little or no knowledge of stores of fossil fuels, or whether the world economy can continue to generate massive emissions. They just know the dangers IF it continues, and that doesn’t even mean for decades to come. That means from year to year, because the time period of when a tipping point will be hit is unknown.
Those in power throw out the year 2100 as a point in time when the climate could finally be a problem, knowing full well they are manipulating the masses, knowing most people today won’t be alive in 2100. There is also the idea we have a carbon allowance, but like I wrote above, we don’t know when a tipping point may be breached so an self given allowance is more like wishful thinking. In my opinion from what I’ve read about the subject and the inherent momentum of adding thermal energy to the oceans, we may already be past the point of no return. It is probably a case in which carbon must be removed from the atmosphere to avoid runaway GW.
But that’s an opinion. My observation of our species is we are great at ignoring potential problems, and most often only do something once its a crisis, which is most likely what is going to happen with CC.
At this website, there is a general assumption the world economy doesn’t have much time before it collapses, but we all need to realize that is a projection, not a given. Nothing is known for certain until it actually occurs. For example there were many presumptions in peak oil regarding the idea Russian oil would decline sharply after 2005, but that didn’t happen. There was a presumption Saudi oil would decline sharply after 2010, but that didn’t happen either. If history tells anything the future is an untold story, period. Climatologists simply know the course we are on and warn about it with data and graphs, nothing else. They know nothing of oil decline rates, the economic implications of EROEI declining or the economically recoverable amounts of fossil fuels that can be used.
why is it that End of the World experts always dismiss geo-engineering attempts when the Glo-bal War-ming CO2 build in the atmosphere was itself a geo-engineering event? it is because of the energy required to undo the CO2 build and war-ming? what if clever attempts avoided the use of excessive energy?
No, no, no….looka here doomphd…LOL
Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?
Researchers propose a carbon-neutral “synthetic oil well” on every rooftop
A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The result: “Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells” in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. “The envisioned model of ‘crowd oil’ from solar refineries, akin to ‘crowd electricity’ from solar panels,” would enable people “to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths.
The research group has already developed an experimental model that can complete several key steps of the process, Dittmeyer says, adding, “The plan in two or three years is to have the first experimental showcase where I can show you a bottle of hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide captured in an air-conditioning unit.
MORE AIR CONDITIONING, makes super sense to me!
BAU BABY, FULL THROTTLE…from Scientific American Journal no less.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-air-conditioning-fix-climate-change/
Yes, we are definitely on the right path…more research and demos and grants.
How about opening the windows in the building, and letting fresh air blow through?
Sort of like reversing combustion, made possible by (hopefully) nearly free electricity. Hubbert had a similar idea, back when he thought that nuclear electricity would be almost free. The catch, of course, is that solar electricity is not free, any more than nuclear electricity is free. We also start running out of materials quickly.
If we want more debt, this would be a good scheme for ramping up debt.
You can easily tell when people don’t have a clue………
“The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, ”
That is a very neat trick turning CO2 into Hydrogen…
First off, we got to where we are over some 200 years, although admittedly, the lion’s share has happened in the past 50 or so years. So you might expect that it might take approximately as long to un-engineer as it took to “engineer” in the first place.
More importantly, putting the CO2 into the air was an entropic, exothermic event, from order to disorder, releasing energy in the process.
Regarding entropy, one could just as well say, “We used a hammer to break a mirror into a thousand shards of glass — why can’t we just reverse that process?” (Why, indeed, can’t we just use the same hammer to put the mirror back together?)
We released energy in the process. The rules of thermodynamics says it will take the same amount of energy to reverse the process as it took to do the process in the first place. So all the miles driven will have to be “un-driven” to revert the CO2 back into hydrocarbons. Not only that, but we “used” the energy we obtained, by turning its high-temperature differential into mechanical motion and releasing the excess as low-temperature differential energy. Again, entropy rules.
No one is actually talking about turning the CO2 back into fuel. (Well, a few are, but I’m not believing them.) But we are still back to re-assembling the mirror part, which is essentially what “carbon capture and storage” is about.
So, the mirror we broke is dispersed: mixed with dirt, sand, and other garbage that, in many cases “looks” a lot like CO2, like grains of sand might look like mirror fragments. There are ~400 bits of mirror mixed in with a million other bits that we don’t want to capture and store.
Is this problem sounding difficult yet? 🙂
former Energy secretary Cheu proposed everyone should paint their rooftops white. that would help, at comparatively low energy expenditure. shooting aerosols into the stratosphere, like some volcanoes do, also reflects incoming sunlight and cools the planet. i don’t have the cost analysis, but that process seems lower than all the energy expended in adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
a lot of commenters, here and elsewhere, are aware of the lack of reflecting aerosols problem, when airlines stop flying and industry stops polluting the atmosphere. why not try some mitigation? at least study the process. toss some dirt up and see what happens.
as for CO2 lowering, correct it took centuries to add, but what we’re looking for is a high-gain energy source that can allow us to try wotking the process backwards. i propose nuclear fusion. it’s not as far away as some here seem to believe. fusion has lots of advantages, like unlimited fuel (the ocean) relatively clean power (no fission products, just some neutron-irradiated materials near the reactor core, just like current fission models), and obviously no CO2 production other than in the materials used to make the reactor.
your analogy of a broken glass mirror is apt. of course it will take energy to restore it, but it can be done, with enough heat to fuse the pieces together again. that’s why an ultimate fix to the CO2 problem will cost considerable energy. fusion provides that energy in a relatively clean form.
I know that here in Atlanta (which is pretty far south), heating energy far exceeds cooling energy used. How would painting our roofs white help?
perhaps sec. Cheu was thinking more about reflecting light energy back into space than to cooling the houses or other structures.
“At this website, there is a general assumption the world economy doesn’t have much time before it collapses, but we all need to realize that is a projection, not a given. Nothing is known for certain until it actually occurs.”
Most people who know me in the real world consider me to be a ‘doomer’ and a very negative person. There may be some truth to that, but I think those criticisms are formed primarily due to our difference of understanding / knowledge on how the “system” we call our society operates / functions (i.e. the people I know and love are, unfortunately, ignorant dullards).
So, with all that being said: despite being a perceived uber-doomer by the “normies” in my everyday life, over time I have come to agree with the above quote by Chrome Mags. It has become my biggest criticism of OFW and one I have become more vocal about in some of my response posts to Gail’s comments.
I hope those comments / criticisms don’t offend anyone (I love the dialogue here!), but the truth is that I spent several years following this blog and sharing the view that when collapse finally happens, it will be curtains for all of us and nothing will really matter. Devastating recent events that upended my personal life / livelihood / social & financial capital (i.e. personal collapse), however, have been instructive, in that they taught me that nothing “ends” so simplistically or completely – instead, things change, and every decision made after the “collapse” is equally as important and every decision that preceded it.
Thus, I’ve had to abandon the childish / stunted point of view that I knew for certain that collapse was imminent, or that I knew for certain that any actions I took could save me (and the people I love) from collapse in any meaningful way. At the same time, I had to abandon the equally ridiculous fantasy that nothing would matter / everything would end when BAU finally falls apart.
My new understanding is that things will change in ways we can never know with any degree of certainty. Some of us will thrive and survive during and post collapse, and some of us won’t. All we can do is try to make the choices we perceive to be best at any given moment in time, and hope that they are the “right ones” (if such a thing as right and wrong even really exist). We should be wary of ever making the assumption we know with any certainty what is to come, if only for the fact that our beliefs of certainty can crowd out the seeds of possibility.
*end of rambling rant*
Cheers,
-GBV
Acting as though civilization may end tomorrow can be detrimental to surviving today. If we decided to grow all our own food using nothing but animal labour, we would not be competitive in the local farmers market, and would have to do other things for cash needs that don’t go away just because we feel certain that we won’t have fossil fuel someday. In other words, ploughing by horse is not going to pay our property taxes.
I prefer to “doomstead” things that I’d want to do anyway: grow more and more of our own food and produce more and more of our own energy, while avoiding actions that are non-productive in our current zeitgeist because they seem like they would be useful in very specific future situations, such as stocking ammunition or hoarding gold coins.
Pick your battles carefully. Look for things that make sense in the current energy regime that will still be useful in a low-energy future.
last test China
How many 1GW reactors China can fuel?
sorry, Ed, that I also don’t have a definitive answer…
but, it’s been pointed out many times that affordable electricity is of no use unless people also can afford devices that run on electricity…
so the big issue (besides population increase) continues to be diminishing returns…
almost everything we have in IC will continue to become less affordable…
more NPPs might extend BAU a wee bit longer, but diminishing returns never sleep…
A lot when they start to recycle the fuel in Russians facilities or licence their technology..
This has been discussed in detail already numerous times.
That’s not the problem, the core issue is the moment when the legacy owner of the global system finally reaches the end of the road: no trust hence no credit, no surplus resources, non cohesive and rioting population.. Then only way out is to push a button and or some kind of inward secession, balkanization.
And if he doesn’t push the doom button for whatever reason, some of the ‘Asians’ might get a few more decades depending on other factors such as pollution (incl. war induced from other regions), biodiversity crunch, demography and migration. Perhaps few more decades extra, doubtful about longer span.. but not entirely impossible few more centuries in outlier scenario.
Basically it’s a rehash on the W/E Roman Empire theme split again..
I have a moderation mystery sorry for making a mess
Does anybody have a feel for how much nuclear fuel there is?
“Endless,” according to the nut jobs who claim we could get it from sea water.
As with fossil sunlight, this is a complex question with no simple answer, as evidenced by googling for an answer, which leads to divergence as wide as “100 trillion years” to “peak uranium within a decade.”
That usually tells me, “we don’t really know.” But you can bet that the longer we use it, the harder it will be to get.
Look Jan! It’s one of those nut jobs you have been warning us about!
He and his fellow nut jobs are working just down the road from you in the Great State of Washington, so best keep your doors locked and bolted
http://world-nuclear-news.org/BlankSiteASPX/media/WNNImported/mainimagelibrary/front%20end%20fuel%20cycle/Yellowcake-produced-from-uranium-captured-from-seawater-using-LCW-s-modified-yarn-(LCW).jpg?ext=.jpg
Researchers have successfully used acrylic fibres to extract uranium from seawater in a trial conducted at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The team say the technology, which uses inexpensive material, could be competitive with the costs of land-based uranium mining.
http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/First-yellowcake-from-seawater-for-US-team
Well tie me down and call me “doggie.”
If a research lab can get five grams from a kilogram of recycled yarn and an unspecified, high-tech coating, then powering the world’s nuclear reactors can’t be far behind! Certainly, if a nuclear power advocacy website says it is so, it’s Just Around The Corner™, sort of like fusion power, right?
O ye, of little faith!
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said man could fly
They told Marconi, Wireless was a a phony. It’s the same old cry
They all laughed at Keith Henson when he said we can get all the power we from the sky….
https://youtu.be/Uo5jWJXCBos
All of those things you cite took time to fully develop.
From 1492 to 1620, The Americas were uninhabited by Europeans. Do you think we have 128 years to bring fusion power into the mainstream? 64 years? 32 years? 16 years?
Sure, if things could go on as they are for even a few more decades, fusion might happen. But the fusion folk have been saying “20 years from now” for what, 60 years?
We’re out of time for “developing” technologies. If it ain’t here now, it ain’t gonna happen before it won’t be able to happen.
Personally I don’t do forecasts, but there is apparently an old Danish proverb made famous abroad by Niels Bohr and subsequently misattributed to Yogi Berra that goes along the lines of “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
However, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the hidden elite were choreographing our common human future from behind the scenes with the goal of moving us to a world run along lines sketched out in the Georgia Guidestones with a max. population of 500 million humans and with much of the energy coming from nuclear power, both fission and fusion. Nope, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
If this is the plan, why would they spoil it by giving the great uncultured masses access to electricity that’s too cheap to meter? Surely that would be an own goal.
Speaking for the elite, HRH Prince Philip has publicly expressed the wish to be reincarnated as a deadly virus. While his fellow elitist Sir David Attenborough, when he isn’t spreading misleading propaganda about walruses, likes to wax paternalistic about the population issue.
Sir David, who is soon to present a programme on human beings, said population control was a “huge area of concern”, adding the world was “heading for disaster unless we do something”.
He warned if humans do not act soon, the “natural world will do something”, as he argues famine in Ethiopia is about “too many people for too little piece of land”.
He suggested humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming: “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.” …
When asked about comments he made on population control earlier this year, when he said human beings were a “plague on the Earth, Sir David agreed they could be considered “blindingly obvious” but claimed nobody else had made the point publicly.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10316271/Sir-David-Attenborough-If-we-do-not-control-population-the-natural-world-will.html
Meanwhile, Bill Gates has got it hand. He’s thinking long term, for the benefit of all of us. He’s going to control our population for our own good you understand, using vaccines among other things. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was a member of the elite too, dining with the likes of Prince Philip and David Attenborough.
https://youtu.be/6WQtRI7A064
Sigh. It was Aristarkhos of Samos who proved the world round, and nobody laughed at him until the “fake news” of the Topographia Christiana asserted the world was flat.
Nobody laughed at Edison because Scott de Martinville and Cros had invented sound recording decades earlier.
They might have laughed at the Wright Brothers, who were rather stupid, but powered flight had been around since 1852, and Alberto Santos Dumont had more than proved its feasibility by 1901.
And wireless communication was invented by Heinrich Hertz a decade before Marconi.
(Thank you John North, former Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford, and one of my more memorable teachers)
It’s just a song from a Gershwin musical, Robert. The lyrics were never intended to be taken literally, by the writers or by me. What you have to remember is entertainment was quite primitive in those days.
Some papers linked on Dieoff said that we were already in a decline of nuclear fuel, but those figures were probably revised. Breeder reactors, of course, would in-theory make fissile material out of spent fuel, but they have not exited the research phase.
Not that I am a proponent of nuclear energy, but breeders have been around since at least 1966, when Fermi I melted down outside Monroe, Michigan, about five miles from where I’m sitting. I was eleven at the time.
Read the comments of this blog more thoroughly, as discussed before: industrial scale breeder reactors exist in Russia. Also their spent fuel program – facilities got recently expanded as they want to make a buck on recycling supplied fuel of their NPPs designs in Finland, Hungary, Czecho/Slovakia, Bulgaria, (Turkey/Egypt)?, .. , and possibly also in Asia/China..
The amount of nuclear fuel available depends a whole lot on the price of uranium. The price of uranium that a person sees published seems to follow a similar curve to other fuels. There was a price peak in 2007-2008, and a secondary peak about 2011, but the price has been a whole lot lower since. Uranium prices are negotiated, so this price chart may not be correct.
The price also depends on how much Bill and Hillary sell off to Russia.
test nuclear
Test test
China will go all in for nuclear when there is nothing else left (meaning in the next ten years). Does anybody have a feel for how much nuclear fuel there is? How many 1GW reactors China can fuel?
Ed, I disagree. China has never been imperialistic. There is a fabulous film called The Coming War on China. What is unbelievable are the amount of US military bases ringing in China – from just about every direction. All the wars the US is presently fighting across the globe are with countries that have the energy the US needs: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Venezuela….. get the picture?
I think Cheney said it after 9/11: “Our way of life is not negotiable.”
Be prepared for the US to drop the atomic bomb… again. Then be prepared for nuclear war.
China has never been imperialistic?
That’s a provocative statement considering the place was officially run as an empire most of the time for over two thousand years.
And post-Imperial China’s record in colonizing Tibet and East Turkestan and its persistent threats to “liberate” Taiwan—which incidentally Imperial China first conquered over in the 17th century by driving out the Dutch and then subduing the indigenous non-Chinese Formosan natives—and its policy of developing Africa as supply base for natural resources and raw materials and as a destination for manufactured products all have a whiff of imperialism about them when sniffed and from a certain point of smell.
https://i1.wp.com/thecaribbeancurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Is-China-Buying-Africa-2.jpg?resize=440%2C257&ssl=1
Of course, I am expecting to be soundly rebuked by Godfree at any time now. He sees and smells the world from a less Sinophobic perspective than I do.
And by the way, it was Bush the Elder who first said “The American way of life is not up for negotiation. He made that remark at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That was such a gem that it was later recycled by both Bush the Younger and Dick Chenney.
Tim, I’m not cheer leading for China. Just more afraid of the US. China does claim to be something completely different than what it is – unlike the US. In more recent history, the US is the imperialist.
I don’t disagree that the US has been the most imperialist power in recent history. But that follows from the fact that the US has the most power. Doubtless there are others that would like to take over that role if they could.
There is a nice graph in ‘Energy at the Crossroads’, by Vaclav Smil, showing energy consumption vs infant mortality in a number of countries. As you can expect the energy consumption per capita of for example, Afghanistan, is very low with a correspondingly high infant mortality rate. The opposite is true for the USA. Howeve, what is more interesting are countries like Italy or Chile who have much lower energy consumption per capita than the USA (for Italy about 1/3) yet have equally low infant mortality rate. This says to me it is possible to transit to a lower energy lifestyle while still maintaining a decent standard of living.
I know that peak oilers and those interested in sustainability have talked for a long time about “transitioning to a lower energy future.” I don’t think the world can do this, without a whole lot fewer people. Even with a whole lot fewer people, I am afraid the future we will transition to will be one without electricity and computers, for example. There probably won’t be antibiotics either.
We depend to a huge degree on international trade and the world banking system now. If these break down, the future will be very different from what it is now. The natural order is for each woman to have several children and only two (on average) survive to adulthood. It takes energy to create any deviation from this baseline. Our population problem has been the result of too many children, on average, surviving to adulthood.
Gail, the good news is that everything we’ll ever need has already been made! The future is a salvage future.
As for our energy predicament. There are three main energy suckers: Number one is buildings. If we can retro/rebuild our homes into passive solar designs then the indoor temp will stay the same all year anywhere in the country with no need of an AC/heating unit. Number 2 is the animal slaughter industry. This one is the easiest; adopt a vegan diet. Number 3 is transportation (which is counter-intuitive) and can be ameliorated to some degree over time.
Cuba is an excellent example of an industrialized nation collapsing, pretty much overnight, and reverting to an agrarian nation. To solve the transportation problems, they developed 5 mile radius complete communities. They took 3 Universities and broke them down into 50. Everything people need was within a five mile radius. Of course it took time.
Everyone was ordered to grow food on any available land immediately and Castro partially privatized farming. Farmers became the new wealthy class. (Farming also became organic.) Castro knew that if the populace got too hungry, they would eat him!
There is a fabulous resource called suvivorlibrary.com, The site provides pdf’s of 18 and 19th century technology books. The gentleman running the site had access to the 2008 Commission report on the effects of an emp/grid-down in the US and was compelled to start building a data base on how to live without electricity.
BTW, love your site, I tell everyone about you.
Woa, do you know any vegans who are actually producing a large portion of their own food? I’ve never met one.
I agree that the industrial meat system needs to go away. But most vegan food is industrially processed, as well.
Humans cannot live off the salad bar. The pulses and legumes that vegans require for protein are difficult to provide in quantity on a small farm. And even those are an incomplete protein, and will require additional protein from rice, oats, etc., and grains are tough to produce in quantity by a small farmer, too.
Don’t even get me started on quality fats! Things like omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid are very difficult to get directly from plants, in reasonable quantities.
And let’s not forget vitamin B12, currently an industrially-manufactured product.
In a low-energy future, we will depend on four-footed sunlight-gatherers to supply most of our protein, generally from lands that are not suitable for conventional agriculture. And you don’t really have to eat them, either — dairy and eggs can supply vast amounts of quality protein and fat. Yes, there is the “excess males” problem, and we put cockerels and old hens in canning jars every other year or so, to be brought out on special occasions.
The “vegan argument” is that, if we eat the plants that meat animals eat, we make more efficient use of it. But that has two fatal flaws: 1) that the land currently used for meat animal feed can continue to be farmed using industrial methods, and 2) that animals that are currently fed by industrial methods cannot be raised using more sustainable methods.
Bottom line: the survivors of the coming bottleneck will depend upon animal-based protein. Vegan diets are not sustainable.
Are you going to grow food for your animals? Growing food for animal consumption is what is unsustainable. We are feeding billions and billions of animals world wide for slaughter. Way more than our human population. Even Gail stated the one thing we can do individually is adopt a vegan life style. Yes quality fats are needed, and if there was no grocery store, I know that dairy and even eggs would have to be in my diet for the needed calories and fat.
Jan, you have bought into the protein myth. The ONLY way to have a protein deficiency is to be in a state of starvation. Read The China Study. There are amino acids in every single food. All fruits. vegetables, grains and legumes have amino acids. We don’t need protein per se, we need our essential amino acids – eight of them – the remainder our bodies can manufacture.
We do right now, and can continue to do so.
Goats can live in a forest without additional feed — a forest that cannot really grow much other food. Chickens and ducks can also forage well. What they need more than anything is protection from predators.
Mind you, foraging animals are not going to produce as much as grain-fed animals. But they can produce a significant fraction as much.
Okay, so you think there will still be grocery stores. Got it. Thanks for explaining that!
Lorraine, you have bought into the vegan myth that eating vegan can somehow save civilization. Civilization is going away. Prepare for “no grocery stores,” or go hungry.
Have you ever actually grown any food? You’d better get started! Knowing how to feed goats and fowl without feed stores is a skill that takes time and experience to develop.
The survivors of the coming bottleneck (if there are any) will be supplying their own food. They will not be eating vegan food from grocery stores!
It is a whole lot easier to grow vegan food supply in India and other very warm areas of the earth. That seems to be why the share of plant food eaten seems to be seems to be a lot higher in warm areas of the world.
In cold areas of the world, meat provides a way of getting adequate calories during the winter months, especially. Also, I would expect that the hours of human labor per 1,000 calories would be a lot lower for meat from animals that forage compared to bread from processed grains.
Perhaps some among the survivors of the coming bottleneck will be Jains. They seem to live quite contentedly without any help from McDonald’s or Colonel Sanders.
The practice of non-violence towards all living beings has led to Jain culture being vegetarian. Devout Jains practice lacto-vegetarianism, that is eat no eggs, but accept dairy products if there is no violence against animals during their production. Veganism is encouraged if there are concerns about animal welfare. Jain monks and nuns do not eat root vegetables such as potatoes, onions and garlic because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and because a bulb or tuber’s ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a higher living being.
Jan,
Have you looked into insect-based protein at all?
The idea is kind of a turnoff for me, but if they were ground up into power and baked/cooked into other foods I’d probably give it a go.
Cheers,
-GBV
Haven’t considered it; haven’t been hungry enough!
I suspect it is rather specialized. Insects are tiny. You’d have to figure out techniques for farming, cleaning, and processing them.
I’ve heard Black Soldier Fly maggots are supposed to be easy to raise. One gram of eggs can expand 2,400 times in 18 days, fed only on compost. This is way beyond the yield from warm-blooded animals!
https://youtu.be/jWEM6ohctwU
I think I’ll stick to goats and fowl.
Lorraine was talking about veganism. Vegans do not even eat honey, and would not eat insects.
I was thinking more along the lines of cricket flour / cricket powder…
http://entomofarms.com/
Here’s a producer closer to your neck of the woods, Jan:
https://www.coastprotein.com/
Cheers,
-GBV
PS – pretty amazing that the time-lapsed pizza video you posted was only 2 hours :O
Lorraine,
We can retrofit our buildings but we can’t move them to where they will need to be. It seems like a lot of homes in farming areas have been taken down to make more room for farming. If people are using hand processes, we will need a lot more people working on farms, and they will need homes.
Apartments in high rise buildings will not be of much use without electricity, I expect. I saw 11 or 12 story walk up buildings in China, but even there, the upper floors were not popular.
Bewarte destroying the embedded energy in them when you demolish buildings. That may cost more than the cost of erecting shed surfaces over them to grow food on. Or grow directly on reinforced flat roofs. Creeping squashes can even grow atop ridge roofs.
Buildings, especially, are a problem. First of all, our civilizations worship them and regard them irrationally as totems. They are not used optimally, including insulating them from the outside at minor cost.
USA is high-energy because it is large and we have to drive everywhere. USA probably has more detached housing, overall, as well. THere are few medieval-design cities and towns, and our low-trust society ensures that there will be a continual push-pull of economic performers and economic drainers, which creates growth and decline in various regions of the country at various points in time.
I’m sure Italy and Chile are beneficiaries of the global economic system, so a collapse could lead to problems similar to what Afghanistanis are suffering.
Practical solutions for “climate change”:
Climate can be mitigated or even reversed,by restoring the local water cycles and soils. Sources:
https://www.rainforclimate.com/
Walter Jehne – The Soil Carbon Sponge, Climate Solutions and Healthy Water Cycles ( https://youtu.be/123y7jDdbfY )
See also Allan Savory’s TED-Talk and his talks and interviews on Youtube, as well as his books.
If German is not a problem, searching with “wilhelm ripl klima” on youtube finds very interesting interviews and talks.
A lessen from history, not on climate change, but on resource wars:
Loosing World War 1 and the Versailles Treaty decreased the energy and resources still available per person in Germany. This brought Adolf Hitler to power. One can (and better should) see his politics as a strive to increase the available resources and energy per capita of his people. See also http://www.eiaonline.com/history/bloodforoil.htm
It’s impossible at this point to believe these people about anything.
I’m OK with working to alleviate climate change as long as I can keep my job, car, house, holidays, heating/cooling and full supermarkets.
So what dyou want me to do first?
It’s the same with medical care. The public wants all the latest technology to be unleashed to provide for their care, and they don’t want to have to wait for it, and don’t think they should have to pay a penny for it, And one more thing, if the doctor messes up (even if an honest mistake- they do occur on occasion), we want to be able to sue him (and the other deep pockets) for everything he’s got. The fact that our diet is lousy, we are overweight, smoke, drink to excess, and get no exercise is no excuse!
First secure a water source, second start growing food on any empty land you have access to. There is a pretty big learning curve to growing food. Once you’ve grown the food, then you have to know how to process it, and in some cases, cook it! Have you read the 2008 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the US from EMP Attack? Read chapters 7 and 8 on food and water.
All the work, studies, and predictions on a grid down (collapse) scenarios put out by the Feds are woefully lacking in engaging the public. Essentially, we’ll be on our own, while simultaneously having to deal with new laws/rules that have the effect of tying our hands.
In the previous thread someone posted a link to an excellent documentary about the English Green activist couple who moved to rural Ireland. He had been an anti-motorway protester in his younger and more passionate days. Now they still worry about eco-doom, they correctly out wind farms as a continuation of our problems—not a solution—and they have two kids and a car and a toilet composting routine.
I am not criticizing them for their lifestyle choices and I think they have done nothing wrong in making them—and I think their kids are —but these committed folks can’t manage to go carless and kidless for Gaia’s sake, what hope is there for the vast bulk of the population who don’t give a tinker’s curse about anything beyond their immediate needs and gratifications. (Can I say “tinker’s curse”? Or is it too rude these days?)
What I want you to do, Norman, is to go back to school and de-program yourself from this CC nonsense, undergo climate satori, and then go back to complaining about the bloody weather like any true Englishman. In the long run, you’ll feel a lot better once you know in your that those little molecules we are liberating by burning FFs are not doing very much of anything apart from feeding the plants and greening the planet.
As you point out, there is a perfect storm of factors pointing to collapse, But while limits on energy production are likely to trigger economic collapse, climate change modelling also fails to properly account for economic costs of climate change. Stern acknowledged this but didn’t remedy it. CO2 emitted to date, even if emissions were to stop tomorrow, lock in 50 years of heightened CO2 levels. Insurance data shows economic costs of climate change damage are rising exponentially. However, mainstream economic models treat such expenditure – rebuilding productive capital, infrastructure, and housing – as contributing to economic growth, when it would reflect reality better if it was recognised as a diversion of funds from expanding the economy into replacing that which without climate change would have continued to function. Instead these exponentially increasing climate damage costs should be deducted from forecast economic growth, not counted as contributing to growth. When I did that the scale of damages starts exceeding BAU forecast growth by the mid 2020s, and shrinking the economy to pre industrial levels by mid century. When you add in limits to economic growth caused by energy limits, whereas BAU forecasts assume infinite growth in energy consumption, the picture is even grimmer, as contracting energy consumption won’t immediately reduce climate impacts.
I would point out that insurance rates really haven’t been rising exponentially because of climate change. Actuaries are constantly on the lookout for as much of an excuse as possible to raise rates. I know that homeowners rates have been going up in my area, but I think that has as much to do with giving coverage for mold damage, as anything. Rates for reinsurance for “catastrophes” such as hurricanes have stayed low, in part because this coverage is sold through catastrophe bonds, and these are not built on high loss expectations.
Most hurricane damage is on property that is outside the insurance industry. For example, if a road is washed away, the state or federal government will repair it, without insurance proceeds. In fact, any flood insurance is generally Federal Flood insurance, because it is easy to see when a person is building in the flood plain. The Federal Government has tended to provide give-away plans for this type of coverage. No insurance company would want to compete with them.
I’m not talking about rising rates. I’m talking about their analysis of rising costs, whether or not they pay for them. Those costs have been rising exponentially. They’ve been changing their policies to exclude those costs. Society still has to bear them.
cost climate change
In 2002 Andrew Dlugolecki, insurance expert on climate change, reported on his analysis of historical data on costs of weather related damages. He showed that while economy grew at an average of 3% a year over the 20th century, damages due to weather related phenomena grew at 10% a year for the last decade of the 20th century. He projected these to show that damages would equal forecast economy by 2065 (right in line with Limits to Growth scenarios). If you deduct these growing costs from projected GDP under BAU growth scenarios, the economy starts contracting about 2025. This is quick and dirty calculation that ignores feedback effects, and tendency for economy to crash rather than gradual decline.
‘Climate change: Huge costs of warming impacts in 2018’ by Matt McGrath
BBC 27 December 2018
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46637102
Andrew Dlugolecki 2008 ‘Climate change and insurance sector’
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41952974?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
2002 ‘Interview with Andrew Dlugolecki: Climate change in the risk management of institutional investors’, Germanwatch, 31 May, http://www.germanwatch.org/rio/sidluint.htm (na)
Andrew Dlugolecki 2000 ‘Climate change and insurance industry’
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41952553?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Wheely Down
Written by Richard Thompson
She womanly lay like the lay of the land
The land around Wheely Down
And every curve was a high, high hill
To hang above the town
From Holland they came to make the maps
And they had made her well
For the rivers danced all across the green
And the pinewood sweet did smell
As far as ever a man can see
It yields him more and more
And every house he washes it white
And he covers it all with straw
Except for the fool, who makes his home
Upon the flooded ground,
And the still on the tide is a glass to the eyes
That stare out of Wheely Down
All things must change within the earth
The moving and the lame.
For the worms will rot the miller’s wheel
And the rats will eat the grain.
And the armies of deliverance
Are run into the ground,
And the kestrel turns in the empty skies
On high over Wheely Down.
https://youtu.be/iKkoZ2I-F8M
Did he include cost effects of inflation? Doubt it. Lets Look at an example. The big hurricane that hit New York City, was no more serious of a storm as what had previously hit New York, yet the huge damages were parroted to be a result of global warming.
Storms are no worse than normal in nature.
There are lots of parrots coming out of the woodwork on this topic.
Building a lot of buildings along the ocean front will definitely increase the cost of hurricanes hitting. I know that that has been a big issue.
This is at least a good news for global warming since our emissions of CO2 will inevitably decrease once oil and coal will have peaked, even if we won’t be here to witness the results.
Now, regarding your conclusion : “energy consumption cannot be reduced significantly at the world level without increasing the probability of collapse or a major war.”
The probability of collapse is already high, and it will be triggered as soon as the world energy output starts to decrease. Wouldn’t be better to trigger it ourselves, reducing our energy consumption in order to control better the consequences ? My opinion is that the outcome will depend on our capacity to be resilient, and it starts with slowing down our economies voluntarily.
In forums when I put forward the view that only by promoting economic collapse will CO2 reduction be achieved, the response is abject silence – I presume people are not willing to contemplate losing (as Norman says) job, car, house, holidays, heating/cooling and full supermarkets. Ok, well how about “is it possible to extract sufficient non-renewable natural resources to build our renewable future and then renew it every 25 years?”. At least that approach usually elicits a reaction.
There are those of us working toward that goal!
Although I think working toward de-industrialization and the collapse of civilization has less to do with reducing CO2 than it does with reducing the myriad effects we are having on the planet and each other — including climate change.
A lot of climate change is already “locked in,” whereas we could eliminate continued single-use plastic pollution overnight if things crash quickly enough.
“is it possible to extract sufficient non-renewable natural resources to build our renewable future and then renew it every 25 years?”
That is an interesting approach to the problem. It is hard to come up with something that doesn’t stop people cold.
Given that there is a ten year time lag between emission of a carbon dioxide molecule and maximum heating from that molecule, I don’t see any cause for optimism. The warming we are experiencing in 2019 is from emissions in the first year of the Obama presidency, when carbon dioxide levels were around 20 parts per million lower than they are today. And that is without taking into account any of the dozens of self-reinforcing feedbacks we have triggered, such as loss of albedo from diminished ice cover.
“is it possible to extract sufficient non-renewable natural resources to build our renewable future and then renew it every 25 years?”
I think a few of us are working towards this, but in very different ways, depending on vision, culture and geography. It requires extreme order and planning, in my view of it.
Simon Michaux reported recently on Facebook that he made a presentation at the 3rd Metals Conference that there weren’t enough cobalt, nickel, and lithium reserves to make all of the electric cars and batteries planned. People tend to assume that prices will soar, or we will develop better mining techniques, to get more of these critical elements out. At some point, this plan fails. Recycling doesn’t work very well either, because it uses fossil fuels in the process, and there is a loss every time an element is recycled.
My hero!
I love it when industry insiders with stolid scientific backgrounds and credentials point out that the emperor is naked. Michaux has spent his entire career in the mining industry.
Sort of like when a stolid actuary takes on the risks of civilizational collapse. 🙂
Michaux points out that, not too long ago, we were getting kilograms of metal for every tonne of ore mined. Now we are getting grams. One could expect that in a similar time period from now, we’ll be mining for milligrams of metal per tonne? I don’t think so.
Type “Simon Michaux” into YouselessTube and open your eyes about where all the rare earth metals needed to build wind turbines and solar panels are going to come from.
Ha, ha, ha
As production continues to outpace pipeline construction in the Permian Basin, operators are
burning off, or flaring, an estimated 104 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year instead of shipping it to market. Simonelli said he views wasted natural gas, a byproduct of oil drilling, as a business opportunity.
“We’re solving some of our customers’ toughest challenges such as logistics, power and reducing flare gas emissions with products from our portfolio,” Simonelli said during the call.
Climate Change: Baker Hughes pledges net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050
Baker Hughes estimates 500 hydraulic fracturing fleets are deployed in shale basins across the United States and Canada. Most of them are powered by trailer-mounted diesel engines. Each fleet consumes more than 7 million gallons of diesel per year, emits an average of 70,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and require 700,000 tanker truck loads of diesel supplied to remote sites, according to Baker Hughes
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/amp/Baker-Hughes-chooses-Permian-Basin-to-debut-13808592.php
“Climate Change: Baker Hughes pledges net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050”
Obviously, Readers of OFW and realize there won’t be an economy by 2050!
There are a lot of ways to get to net zero carbon emissions.
I often think, too, that there are lots of ways to get to a 100% renewable economy. An economy with a total population of 100,000 using burned biomass as fuel would qualify, for example.
🙂
I have seen the future, and it is powered by photosynthesis.
http://www.bytesmiths.com/Personal/pix/from_the_future.png
Good way of putting the situation!
If you have time to dig into this report, it would be interesting to hear your assessment, Gail.
http://energywatchgroup.org/new-study-global-energy-system-based-100-renewable-energy
I got far enough into the report to see that the study is aiming for the single largest source of energy to be solar, followed by wind. Together, they would provide over three quarters of the energy provided. Fossil fuels would be phased out almost completely by 2050.
I am sure that the devil is in the details. The whole system will clearly need a whole lot of batteries and a whole lot of electrical transmission. If the lines are put above ground, they are likely to start fires and take down the system, in hot dry areas, similar to California and Venezuela (where long distance wires have already been a problem starting fires). They then take down the system. Or the lines can be buried underground, at something like 10 times the cost.
Then there is the question of transforming all kinds of equipment to electrical. For example, specialized farming equipment may need huge batteries to operate.
What happens to the value of all of the phased out equipment? If the resale value of a car operating on gasoline goes to zero, what does a person use for a downpayment?
How high can the prices for all of the necessary materials, such as lithium, go? If they don’t go very high, don’t count on much supply.
The group putting the study out is the Energy Watch Group. They claim to be unbiased, but my view historically has been that they are a group with an agenda they want to prove. The find volunteers willing to prove the assertions of their agenda. The ability of the groups funding this to get donations depends on publishing reports favorable to their cause.
There is also the timing issue. We don’t have until 2050 to fix our problem. Our problem is a very real financial problem, right now in the 2019 – 2020 era.
Sorry to say that the report is fantasy.
Just one big wish list.
There is no detailed analyses of energy transition requirements, Energy cost of energy, actual scaling requirements verses actual current trends and trajectories.
This is just spin, no evidence that their demand based models will come even remotely close to supply constraints creating a completely different outcome.
They may well be right though. 100% renewables by 2050 – just that it is small bands of humans living off burning wood.
Having rather intimate knowledge and a pencil and the back of an envelope, I think you’d need to add the cost of ten battery packs to the cost of an electric tractor to make industrialized agriculture work.
A single farmer can work 80-160 acres in a day, with 2-3 re-fuelling breaks no longer than it takes him (or her) to dispose of twenty ounces of coffee.
The best battery technology available would allow industrialized agriculture on no more than 5-10 acres per charge. If you are constantly charging and changing battery packs, you might still be able to work the same amount of land in the same time — but you cannot charge a pack in the time it takes to discharge it, so you’ll need multiple swap packs, plus the Tesla-like technology to quickly swap a thousand pounds or more of battery.
The same arguments hold for highway trucks. To my knowledge, the only serious work being done is on short-haul delivery vehicles. There exists no battery than can run a highway truck for the twelve hours of a driver’s shift. You’ll need perhaps ten battery pack swaps to run a semi for twelve hours.
With extensive electrified rail, Europe is in a much better position to do this than North America, which has almost no electrified rail infrastructure.
One thing I notice when I glanced at the report again is the fact that the report is subtitled, “Power, Heat, Transport, and Desalination Sectors.”
I did a search on the word Agriculture, and found that the was one of the things left for future analysis. I didn’t look far enough to see exactly what all had been left out, but I am certain that it was a very large amount. I expect “Mining” was left out for example. In fact, Industry in general seems to be left out. No one makes computers, for example. There may have been a chart explaining how much had been left out, but I didn’t see it.
Gee, they sorta started with the low-hanging fruit, didn’t they.
If it doesn’t cover agriculture, it seems pointless.
Gail, thank you for tackling this topic of utmost interest. One that, I myself, have taken great research in to understand the pronouncements by the Scientific Community, such as, the IPCC.
In that vein, I’ll abstain and reaction because it is obvious from your writing it is not feasible to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels with creating a collapse. I care not of model projections, either low, medium or high climatic sensitivity. I’m past 60 and the inertia in the thermal system will not kick in until after I’m gone. In that order, a good tune to enjoy and be grateful for BAU today!🤗
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NkwJ-g0iJ6w
It will be fascinating how all this unfolds and if the word gets out to the general population.
But I doubt it
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzRQZiK24r0
I have a lot of experience attempting nation building endeavors. The biggest drawback I find is that people don’t know the realities Gail writes about. IMO, the word desperately needs to get out. Think how much pointless energy is diverted onto “renewables!!!!!” That energy and funding delegated to common sense measures (like monitoring marine sanctuaries to produce more fish, or like teaching people to grow more food)) would help. It could also create work and raise demand.
That energy and funding delegated to common sense measures (like monitoring marine sanctuaries to produce more fish, or like teaching people to grow more food))
Not nearly as sexy as “renewables” is it?
What do you mean by this? Climate models used by climate scientists (as opposed to the kind of models used by economists) are simply models that represent our climate and are used to understand how it responds to pertubations. There are many ways they can be used, but maybe the most high-profile are when they are forced with Representative Concentration Pathways. These are simple a range of possible future atmospheric CO2 concentration pathways which vary from one where we substantially limit our emissions, to one where we continue to increase them. These models themselves do not assign some probability to these pathways. We might do so in retrospect (we’re unlikely to follow either the lowest, or highest, emission pathways) but the climate models used by climate scientists are mostly used to how our climate respond to various changes, not determine which future energy pathway we might actually follow.
I think that the paper Al Bates presented at the 2018 Biophysical Economics conference pointed out that none of the Scenarios presented in the last IPCC report represented an actual feasible scenarios.
If only non-feasible energy pathways are presented, what do the reports really tell us?
I have no idea if the energy pathways are feasible. However, the concentration pathways used by the climate models probably do bracket what is likely to actually happen. It’s unlikely to be lower than RCP2.6 and unlikely to be higher than RCP8.5. These models then tell us something about how our climate will respond to these various pathways. If we wish to avoid some of the potential impacts associated with the higher concentration pathways, then we will either need to find ways to follow a pathway that leads to lower emissions, and hence a lower concentration pathway, or develop technology that removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
My point is that I don’t think your assessment of how economics has influenced climate modelling is correct, at least not when it comes to models of the actual physical climate system. These pre-dominantly study how our climate responds to changes and – by and large – consider a range of possible changes that brackets what is possibly in the coming ~100 years. What we do with that information (when it comes to economics/energy systems) is largely up to us.
If there is nothing we can do to fix the situation, it really doesn’t matter for planning purposes if the change is 0.0 degrees or 2.6 degrees of 8.5 degrees.
Yes, the climate models merely try to project what could happen in various scenarios. Since no-one else is saying none of the RCPs are likely, why should climate scientists take all that upon themselves to try to weave likely scenarios based on resource shortages and societal effects of unaffordable energy?
To a degree, Gail is correct, that societal effects will render most climate change projections wrong. But, of course, all projections are wrong. The path we’re on at the moment (with regard to climate change) is almost worst case. At some point, emissions will start to decrease rapidly as societies collapse. But there will still be a lot more carbon in the atmosphere by then (assuming we haven’t taken serious action) and so the catastrophic outcomes are still a high probability. Consequently, climate change is, and will be, possibly the most serious problem we face or at least will severely impact our ability to cope as societies collapse.
We cannot afford to underplay the seriousness of climate change and I despair (even more) when people do just that.
Coup in Venezuela
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/clashes-flare-after-venezuela-opposition-leader-calls-for-military-uprising/ar-AAAJTe3?OCID=ansmsnnews11
With too little energy per capita and lots of wage/wealth disparity, what do we expect?
Oil exporters without high enough prices are very vulnerable to overthrown governments and to collapse.
It’s more interesting news from the angle of political situation as that foreign agent self proclaimed president had to move ‘boldly’, go beyond reasonable, i.e. openly instigating military coup, well nobody answered his call.. So he is finished, even many insane W countries won’t openly continue supporting such defeat and failure..
Now, the next question is what is the legal gov of Maduro going to do with their heavy oil? Are Chinese going to build there some petro facilities, blending the stuff, and or cooking the stuff with natgas etc? Or is it just borrowed time – pause – before another color revolution finally succeeds and the curtain over any oil there closes down for eternity?
Is there any possible (even non economic) way to thin the oil without nat gas? Like using a lot of cheap labor to help the process?
Furthermore, the climate models are basically useless since they are unverifiable. There is no way the climate scientists can conduct planetary scale experiments to verify these models. It is by its nature an intractable problems.
At best, the climate science can be viewed as a pseudoscience. At worst a hoax and a means for the productive class to accept tax hikes and other means of GDP boosting and wealth transferring smoke and mirrors.
Oh, they’ve verified it, alright. It’s called “Venus.”
Didn’t you see the cloud-penetrating radar images of the Venusian surface? It’s paved all the way round with industrial smokestacks! 🙂
Seriously, if there is any “climate change conspiracy,” it is one of the status-quo. Those making “pseudo-science” arguments almost universally lack scientific education. Those who understand the scientific process know there are so many credible people looking at this that it would be impossible to falsify.
It doesn’t matter how exact the instruments used for collecting measurement data are when the models where you plug in the data can not in any tractable way be verified.
There is no way of conducting experiments on a planetary scale to validate the model. No matter if the model is Earth or Venus.
All there is today is a unverifiable highly nonlinear model used for propaganda and policy making.
It is a horrific state of affairs.
Climate change is a factor which will continue to worsen for some time, whatever we do. In that respect, it is an issue that is probably the greatest of those humans face. Of course, societies perhaps face a greater issue, as you outlined above but, even then, climate change is a big factor in how societies will collapse, especially as there are so many features of it (heat waves, sea level rise, etc.). Whilst climate change modelers probably don’t factor in societal collapse, it’s hardly comforting to say that climate change won’t get as bad as some of the worst case scenarios because societal collapse will make those scenarios invalid. Given that societal collapse is inevitable (all societies collapse eventually), it would seem better to at least adapt to the climate change we know is coming (remember that when CO2 was at this level in the past, termperature was 3-4 degrees C warmer than now) when we may still be able to afford those adaptations rather than wait for collapse before doing anything. This is particularly true since a severe reduction in industrial activity will reduce aerosols and so accelerate warming for a period.
From what you say, there is no way to avoid societal collapse but there may be a way to mitigate (not halt) climate change. Consequently, it seems reasonable to characterise climate change as the biggest problem we face. If that message gets across, we may start to take meaningful action to mitigate.
I am not sure that we can really adapt to climate change in any way that will make a meaningful difference post-collapse.
The big collapse difference, I expect, will be a lot fewer people. Any economy will need to be very local. Things like computers won’t be available. In fact, electricity transmission lines and paved roads will be out of the question. What do we do to adapt to climate change in such a situation?
Besides adaptation, I also mentioned mitigation. We could emit less GHGs, if we took the predicament seriously, making the problem a bit less severe for future generations. Mitigation is a type of adaptation but we could also move people to higher ground and away from areas more prone to severe heat waves or to flooding. Just some examples of adaptations which may help future generations to cope with the different environmental conditions even as societies collapse. I’d rather have a habitable planet, or at least habitable areas of the planet, in a collapsing society, than not have that.
If John Michael Greer’s ideas of catabolic collapse are right, or even Kunstler’s idea of a long emergency are on the mark, then that would be easier to negotiate if the climate (and environment generally) is not changing too rapidly.
We can’t avoid collapse, we could (in principle) avoid warming greater than 2C. So I would say climate change is the biggest predicament we face that we could do something about (though, of course, not solve), if we choose.
Our current CO2 levels of over 400ppm have, in the past, equated to a 3 degree C rise in temperatures. This suggests we already have 3 degrees baked in and it’s just the inertia in the system that is temporarily holding the rise at bay.
Also, if we hit 2 degrees even, we trigger big feedback loops that will tend to runaway warming, and so we accelerate to 3, 4, and 5 degrees regardless. At 5 degrees we are somewhere near the Permian mass extinction which saw off 95% of all life on earth.
There’s still a lot of commentary out there that says we still have time to hold it at one and a half degrees, or even two, but the logic behind this seems very flimsy to me.
So yes, climate change looks like a massive problem that’s pretty much going to finish us off this century. Meantime we have an energy crunch induced depression that probably comes first and we’ll be left a lot poorer, but on a much hotter and inhospitable earth.
It really doesn’t look like there are any answers to all of this.
The question is whether the energy crunch leaves us poorer or deader. If it is the latter, whatever the rise in temperature won’t matter a whole lot to us.
We have decided we humans are in charge and have the full ability to control the climate. I don’t think that this is the case. We are living in a dissipative structure that behaves to a great extent on its own. We might say that there is a literal Higher Power giving rise to all of the energy flows that power the system.
I think a big part of our problem is thinking that if we only would try harder, we could fix our problem. I am doubtful there is, given what seems to be the timing.
At the same time, I don’t disagree with people trying to figure out solutions. Maybe there are things that we don’t understand that could work together to put off the inevitable for quite some time.
“So yes, climate change looks like a massive problem that’s pretty much going to finish us off this century”
Jeez. I must have accidentally typed “Nature Bats Last” instead of “Our Finite World” into my web browser today… 😐
Cheers,
-GBV
This is an overly long piece of writing that makes several assumptions, particularly about growth, development and capitalism.
Quick things that are accurate: yes, USSR effectively went bankrupt as it could not fetch the price of oil expected. The Reagan Administration encouraged the Saudi’s to pump out so much oil in return for armaments while technologically sabotaging the development of its pipelines. As Gorbachev started with political reforms, he opened such a can of worms he never got to implement his economic reforms before the game was up. The low price of oil helped the US and a west pull out of the recession.
High oil prices do précéde recessions but there are other factors. 1973 oil price spike ultimately enabled the post Breton Woods system dollar and this money was lent out via World Bank etc to developing countries. Would recession have happed without high oil prices following Iranian revolution? Was the world lunging to a credit-fuelled recession when Hussein walked into Kuwait? There was already a global credit crunch a year before the 2008 recession. Petrol pump prices are almost as high as the highest oil price peak in 2008 albeit crude prices are 40% of their 2008 peak. High energy prices made industry, eg aviation, seriously look at its non-fossil fuel energy options around this time which beggars the question of what could happen with a serious global carbon price.
Emissions growth has decoupled from economic growth in countries like Canada.
While inexpensive energy has enabled economic growth, it is likely not the driver if development in other parts of the world. Other investment to develop those economies is more likely required. However as the logic of capitalism is to do things at least cost and maximum profit, cheap wage labour is often the way forward unless markets facilitate technology to replace this at lesser cost and greater productivity. Access to market is another factor.
But as low wage costs in the West were increased due to the political pressure of social/liberal democracy and unionization, national division of labour became transplanted by an international division of labour… one aspect of globalization.
Addressing these inequalities alongside addressing the energy food and water trilemma facing the 21st century where 60% of the world’s population live on 20% of the world’s landmass from Tbilisi to the Solomon Islands is the challenge of the Rio+20 SDGs.
So the untold climate story is that with a global carbon budget of about 400 billion tonnes to have a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees, how much energy is required to have an Aristotelian sense of the good life and how do we apportion and price that budget?
I don’t think this is true. It’s not possible to grow any mixed economy without growing energy use (in all countries that contribute to the economy in some way, so imports have to be factored in) and with fossil fuels making up the bulk of energy use, emissions are bound to increase (when all emissions due to economic activity are factored in) also. Of course, it’s possible to increase efficiencies, to a degree, in how energy is used but, so far, no economy is decoupled from emissions.
I don’t think so. Not past a certain point.
You hear this a lot from economists. When an economist says, “The economy became more efficient last quarter,” what they are really saying in most cases is, “We were able to substitute more fossil-fuel slaves for human labour last quarter.”
There is a “sweet spot” in the efficiency curve, also called the “maximum power point.” Theoretically, to achieve 100% efficiency would require infinite energy. So at some point, increasing efficiency has a hidden cost of more sunken costs. Using technology to increase efficiency is simply using the embedded energy cost of that technology to create the illusion of increased efficiency — it is an unsustainable bubble, that must pop at some point.
There are lots of good (but hidden) reasons why three and a half billion years of evolution has only resulted in a photosynthetic efficiency of a few percent. We delude ourselves that we can do better in under a hundred years or so at our peril.
“There are lots of good (but hidden) reasons why three and a half billion years of evolution has only resulted in a photosynthetic efficiency of a few percent. ”
Uh oh… Jan, you need some Electric Universe theory to banish those uniformitarian ideas of evolution over massive timescales! 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDhBaP7a37Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yccR12vDJM
Cheers,
-GBV
Well, I did say “to a degree”, so I don’t think efficiency can get you to a decoupled economy, only that the growth in emissions may be less than the growth in an economy but you can never decouple, provided emissions are a major part of economies globally.
Can you explain further?
Are you saying our economy is proceeding apace of emissions, or are you saying the Canadian economy is faltering while emissions rise?
Canada is an unusual situation. We export a lot of crude (via both pipeline and rail), and import nearly all our gasoline and diesel. So we “export” the emissions of refining, as well as the emissions of production of consumer retail goods, like the US does.
You cannot claim energy is decoupled from economy if the energy use is simply exported to developing nations.
So without further explanation, I have to disagree that any significant energy-economy decoupling has occurred in Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=efwLPQv-Vvo
Sorry, had to share it…
-GBV
Emissions have “decoupled”, only because the West moved its manufacturing base over to Asia – China principally. It’s a cheap accounting trick, exercised by flakes and shills, to delude the general public. The emissions are still there, when looked at globally.
Actually, CO2 emissions (in the aggregate) have increased. But as long as politicians can get citizen to believe the accounting trick, it makes it look like real progress is being made.
Yes, still growing. The only way this will stop, ever, is upon the collapse of the industrial world. Coming to a planet nearby, shortly.
“Emissions growth has decoupled from economic growth in countries like Canada.”
If you are relying on debt to create a mirage of economic growth, then this probably isn’t the case. Exporting your carbon emissions to manufacturing countries like China also hides true emissions figures.
Gail,
Do you have any analysis of how fracking has fared financially, now that it has had time to run and generate a track record? I remember that several years ago, you and others were speculating on the “Red Queen Syndrome”, in which the oil companies would have to run ever faster with new drilling to cover past bets as their older well deplete faster than they pay off. Is this in fact occurring? I ask on the assumption that fracking may serve as an interesting microcosm that illustrates the larger dynamic you are describing. But so far, I have seen little in the business press to confirm the Red Queen Syndrome with regard to fracking.
I think that the first entrants have not fared very well financially, but there always seem to be willing new entrants. Hope springs eternal.
One issue has been that frackers have tried to drill more and more wells per acre and the new wells seem to be cannibalizing the old wells. As a result, wells don’t seem to be performing as well as in the past. The WSJ had an article about this on March 3. Shale Companies, Adding Ever More Wells, Threaten Future of U.S. Oil Boom
Newer wells drilled close to older wells are generally pumping less oil and gas and could hurt output, leading frackers to cut back on the number of sites planned and trim overall production forecasts.
At the same time, we see big oil companies diving into this type of production. They must think that they can somehow make money, even if previous companies could not. Or they are thinking that oil prices will sometime go up, and things will get better.
There was a big drop in US rig count this past week. It dropped by 20. Nine of those were in Texas and one was in New Mexico. This is that area of the Permian Basin, but the counts don’t show up as Permian Basin counts. The big drop in counts had some speculating that companies were getting unhappy with the poor results and leaving.
In total, production still seems to be rising.
“Adding electricity storage looks like it would be a solution to the intermittency of wind and solar, but it tends to add costs and to defeat the CO2 benefit of these devices.”
——————————–
Here is an article from Politico, admittedly not a technical magazine, but a level-headed publication
“But now another technology revolution is underway that could help solve that problem: an electricity storage boom. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has plunged 85 percent in a decade, and 30 percent in just the past year, so utilities across the U.S. have started attaching containers full of them to the grid—and they’re planning to install far more of them in the coming years”
“Last March, FPL hailed its 10-megawatt Babcock battery as the largest storage project ever built alongside a solar farm in the U.S. But the utility recently announced a 409-megawatt battery project alongside a solar farm in Manatee County, four times larger than the largest on earth today.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/29/trump-wrong-about-wind-power-electricity-battery-storage-226755
—
If I were punish’ed
for every pun I shed,
there would not be left a puny shred
of my punnish head.” –Samuel Johnson
.
I think to some extent the batteries are being used to eliminate the need for gas peaking plants, which are pretty expensive and inefficient. Thus, there may be a use for batteries, even apart from the wind and solar intermittency issue. ( I see the article mentions this issue too.)
If the cost of batteries can be brought down, that is a step in the direction of eliminating some of the intermittency of wind and solar. Of course, then a person starts asking other questions:
1. How long will the new batteries last?
2. Can lithium be recycled into new batteries easily?
3. When do we start running into lithium shortage issues? We can’t count on prices always rising.
4. How stable is the supply chain for making replacement batteries?
Allow me to put in a plug for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. It is renewable, sustainable, and continuous not intermittent. The thermodynamic efficiency is low (about 20%), but there’s an awful lot of it. And as a bonus, fish love it, because it lifts nutrients from the deep into their comfort zone.
The last research I did indicated that lithium recycling costs about ten times as much as mining it.
Lithium is very abundant, but mostly dispersed. That is a double-edged problem, as zealots tend toward gross quantity arguments, like nuclear zealots: “There’s enough uranium in seawater to last a bazillion gazillion years!”
So I don’t expect lithium recycling to get much traction until it’s too late… typical human behaviour pattern!
There is no mention in this article about positive feedback loops. Fossil fuels are not the only
source of increasing levels of greenhouse gases. One of the main concerns of climate scientists
is the triggering of the release of the enormous quantities of methane held at present in frozen
form as methane hydrates (or clathrates) in shallow sea bed deposits. Also the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the decomposition of the permafrost tundra peat deposits.
There are abundant articles about the feedback loops.I just read this one after I posted
the comment above.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=9d991fd363-briefing-dy-20190430&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-9d991fd363-43515525
Methane release is one problem I don’t feel so bad about. Methane is transient it is oxidised by large electrical discharges, which Nature provides in abundance. Just wait about 100 years and it will all be gone. Gone the same way as cow farts.
I don’t have 100 years; do you? Does civilization? Does the human species?
If there’s no food in a world with methane-induced super-warming, it will make it much harder for survivors to sit out those hundred years, waiting for a cool-down.
Jan, thank you for your challenging comment. I doubt I have 10 years, much less 100. But hope my descendants will. And I was perhaps thinking from a planetary perspective, in which a mere century is an eyeblink. So talk of methane turning us into another Venus seems unlikely.
I think the big drama with climate change is latency – with the current atmospheric CO2 levels, historically trees were growing in the Antarctic (recent fossils found). So the forget 1.5-2.0° limit, we are already locked into to a very difficult (for humans) climate as temperature catch up. And, we are adding and adding more all the time. So, we face multiple limits, all difficult, most will lead to population drop, probably the biggest problem = too many people chasing too much stuff, consuming and wasting and polluting too much with the threat of overwhelming ecosystem health everywhere. Nukes are another short-term, very expensive, solution with non-renewable fuel stocks. Solution? Learn to live within limits? Ride out the storms? Move to cooler climes? There are not enough wise people around to guide big populations to manage hitting the limits… and a very small amount of people who understand ecology, physics, and nature’s inherent process of finding a dynamic homeostasis and the primacy of energy. I have very intelligent and very Christian friends who are positive we can find a solution with our “God-given brains” and that because “God is good”, we will be fine. Not sure if that is how it works. Apologies for my rambling.
People lived through past ice ages so I presume that they can live through a very warm period. Probably not very many people, but at least a few.
Moving to a cooler climate might or might not be helpful. You need food and water wherever you are. This could be a problem.
Thanks for the article.
As you are aware the northern – cooler regions are able to provide a lot of food, be it for fraction of today’s pop and somewhat raw middle ages like realities in the end. And even up there problems are already at hand with water table, invasive species, etc.. But certainly way better existence than hot hellish elsewhere down in the south.. So, it will be a game of massive triage, the battle for the last standing.. futile yes, but nevertheless attempted. And obviously the appropriate gov factions in the control now about it well and prepare for it as we speak, hence the new ongoing arms and trade route domination race for the North..
Civilization is a problem in such a case.
For much of human existence, we have been nomadic, following food with the seasons, just like most other animals do.
Only when property lines and titles go away will humans have a chance at survival, via neo-nomadism.
Yes, but can we ever get rid of property?
Certainly not while there are more humans than there is land to feed them sustainably.
I wonder if property becomes “owned” by whoever has the most power in an area.
Right now, we have a government that ultimately decides who owns what. You as owner are required to pay taxes each year. The government can effectively take the land away from you by raising taxes to a level that you cannot pay.
If the government is dissolved, then there is no one to support your “ownership” of the land. Turchin and Nefedov make the point in “Secular Cycles” that after a collapse, areas for new settlements were determined based on how easy the area was to defend–not based on how good the area was for farming. Thus, castles were put on tops of hills, and farming was done nearby (even though farming in valleys would have been more productive). I doubt that individual farmers had “ownership.” Everyone had jobs, and some of the more important jobs were defending the area.
“who are positive we can find a solution ”
They might be right. We certainly have better tools for thinking and more knowledge than we did when the Roman Empire was on its last legs.
Perhaps, but we don’t seem to be doing anything much with it, except find new and ingenuous ways to kick the can down the road. Nothing wrong with that, as it beats the alternative. But eventually the road ends in a brick wall. Splat!
I would imagine that the IPCC climate teams are in between a rock and a hard place in modeling an economic collapse scenario.
I don’t know this, but my guess is the “political” committees reviewing the IPCC committee work and accepting or rejecting language for the report would never have agreed to an fossil fuel depletion scenario produced by depletion/limits to Growth. It is not in the strategic interests of Saudi Arabia, Russia, or the United States to admit such scenarios publicly, or at least, that they could happen near term. (Even while the U.S. Congressional record is full of testimony of U.S. military leaders openly discussing peak oil and planning for it…..) In a related thought, I recall Dennis Meadows (of LtG) saying he got shut down when he tried to talk peak oil with I think it was the World Bank.
And how to you model such a collapse scenario, when is seems like any predictions of peal fossil fuel resources have not come to pass?
There is some web discussion outside of the IPCC reports that it is unlikely that we will follow the RCP8.5 emissions scenario. A couple of links below. (I cannot believe I am including a Judith Curry blog….)
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/rcp8-5/
https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/24/is-rcp8-5-an-impossible-scenario/
http://theoildrum.com/node/5084
http://priceofoil.org/2016/04/06/beyond-450-why-the-iea-climate-scenario-falls-short/
On the other hand….there are more and more climate scientists and some independent observers who are willing to state that we have already burned enough fossil fuels/raised the CO2 equivalent levels (C02, CH4, N2O etc.) to go past 2C and maybe 3C in global average temperature rise.
In terms of the effect on the biosphere, it is not just the amount of warming that will take place, but RATE of climate change may be too fast for the biosphere/tropic levels to evolve to exist in new conditions. It may be that our GHG emissions and land degradation etc. will change the Global Average Surface Temperature by at least ~2-3C in just a ~150-200 year time period.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/DecadalTemp “According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade.” “A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age.”
And then there is this which should cause one to pause. Estimated climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is ~3C (Range 1.5—4.5C) from various older and current models. Discussion here on sensitivity models. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-scientists-estimate-climate-sensitivity
“But in at least eight of the next-generation models, produced by leading centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, that “equilibrium climate sensitivity” has come in at 5°C or warmer. Modelers are struggling to identify which of their refinements explain this heightened sensitivity before the next assessment from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the trend “is definitely real. There’s no question,” says Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Is that realistic or not? At this point, we don’t know.” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/new-climate-models-predict-warming-surge
Well, let’s hope the modelers find there models are running “hot” because those models are NOT accurately reflecting the climate system. But we have burned millions of years of fossil sunlight in the blink of geologic time, and degraded carbon sinks such as the forests and oceans, and my own personal opinion is we don’t fully understand the impacts of these changes. The fact that we may not perfectly understand how the climate system works should not be a source of comfort.
Our current CO2 levels of over 400ppm have, in the past, equated to a 3 degree C rise in temperatures. This suggests we already have 3 degrees baked in and it’s just the inertia in the system that is temporarily holding the rise at bay.
Also, if we hit 2 degrees even, we trigger big feedback loops that will tend to runaway warming, and so we accelerate to 3, 4, and 5 degrees regardless. At 5 degrees we are somewhere near the Permian mass extinction which saw off 95% of all life on earth.
There’s still a lot of commentary out there that says we still have time to hold it at one and a half degrees, or even two, but the logic behind this seems very flimsy to me.
So yes, climate change looks like a massive problem that’s pretty much going to finish us off this century. Meantime we have an energy crunch induced depression that probably comes first and we’ll be left a lot poorer, but on a much hotter and inhospitable earth.
It really doesn’t look like there are any answers to all of this.
Homo sapiens, or any of the other great apes, have never lived with Co2 this high.
We shall see- overpopulation, ecological destruction, religion, etc doesn’t give us very good chances of survival.
That is the norm of course, almost everything that has evolved, is now extinct.
Richard b, we are already over that 1.5C limit. Industrial pollution is causing about 0.8C of sunscreen, so add that to the current 0.8 and you have it. We are clearly on target to hit 2.5C even if we shut down civilisation tomorrow, so I have no doubt we shall hit 3.0C.
That the sixth mass extinction will mean the end of us is a thesis I find very, very hard to doubt; my only tiny consolation is that it would be the best thing to happen to the planet in the last 100,000 years.
And yet, you delight in having nine descendants to carry on? I’m having some cognitive dissonance.
Not to put down anyone else’s choice, but I had a childless vasectomy in my 20s. I don’t think that makes me care any less for a future with humans in it!
Indeed, I think it may well be “immediate heirs” that cause people to push us further into overshoot, rather than striving for a more-or-less graceful transition to a low energy future.
Also, I don’t think humans have been an unrelenting problem for 100,000 years. It’s only been the past 15,000 or so when human numbers have reached the point where we could destroy regional forests and exterminate megafauna.
The question is: are we really any smarter than yeast cells? I hear a lot of people boasting our big brains will get us through with technical innovation. Why can’t our big brains get us through by reducing our numbers and limiting our consumption? Now that would be a revolutionary thing for a truly advance species to accomplish!
Jan: And yet, you delight in having nine descendants to carry on? I’m having some cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance admitted to. Long ago, I decided to live as if I were expecting the best. It is called “hoping against hope”, and it is the way we are made (or evolved). And thank you for your cogent response.
The problem with limiting our numbers voluntarily is that the intelligent, thoughtful, and foresighted will do just that, while the others will continue breeding like rabbits. Which would make us less smart than yeast. I raised that point with a teacher at the age of 15 (it is rather obvious), and his response was to call me a Fascist. My response you already know.
I don’t see any evidence that the “more smart” among us is doing a significantly better job than yeast!
The story is indeed very political. Peak oilers and climate change folks have tended to have very different views for a very long time. I know my first contact with Kjell Aleklett was with respect to something he had written, contesting climate change beliefs.
In early World Energy Output forecasts, the IEA first used Jean Laherrere’s peak oil projections to make forecasts about future output. When the time of peak oil got too close, the IEA started emphasizing climate change instead. (There was a period of overlap in their reports.) The following is a link to the 1998 World Energy Outlook report, which had both Hubbert Curve information and Climate Change included.
https://www.iea.org/media/weowebsite/2008-1994/weo1998.pdf
Look at Page 96 and following for the Hubbert Curve discussions.
There were quite a few Peak Oilers who thought that the climate change emphasis of IEA represented a deliberate attempt to hide the Peak Oil story. The IEA has been involved with estimates used by the IPCC in looking at future fossil fuel use.
“Adding electricity storage looks like it would be a solution to the intermittency of wind and solar, but it tends to add costs and to defeat the CO2 benefit of these devices.”
I remember reading an article in a regional newspaper here in Ontario where there was discussion about converting an old quarry into a “renewable” battery – i.e. water would be pumped to a holding area at the top of the quarry all day using solar-powered pumps, and the water could be released back into the quarry through a hydro turbine to generate electricity when the demand called for it.
I know that constructing such a thing would require a lot of up-front energy, and the pumping of water all day (on sunny days) to the top of the quarry would also consume some of the energy that was produced. But I’m curious if you have seen any other proposals / ideas such as this one, Gail, and if you were aware of how much of an impact such a set-up would have on the EROEI of solar / hydro (particularly in comparison to a giant battery made of rare earth metals)?
Cheers,
-GBV
Think about the water volumes in rivers used for hydro. A quarry would be puny.
Euan Mearns writes about pumped hydro, in volumes larger than a quarry.
The Marmora Pumped Storage facility (which may be the unnamed quarry I was referring to in my original post) apparently has a 400 MW capacity generated over 5 hours.
https://www.northlandpower.com/What-We-Do/Development-Projects/hydro/Marmora_Pumped_Storage.aspx
An unrelated electrek article on a Telsa (boo!) 80 MWh powerpack station suggest that it could power 2,500 homes in the US for a full day.
https://electrek.co/2017/01/23/tesla-mira-loma-powerpack-station-southern-california-edison/
So, if people did reduce their energy consumption, it would seem that even a “puny” quarry could potentially offer a fair amount of energy for a small town or large community (Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth has a few YouTube videos on how her and her family reduced their energy demand by almost 90%).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESYAix1QD1E
The problem, as I see it anyway, is that it takes 400 MW over 6 hours to pump all the water back to the top of the reservoir 😐 I Google-searched to see if I could find renewable energy projects that generated that kind of energy, and the first two i came across were the Scaltec Solar Benban project in Egypt (the 400 MW project is split up over 6 different solar plants, and of course, Egypt is probably a much better environment for solar power than Marmora, ON) an the Suncor Forty Mile Wind Power Project (400 MW of wind power generated by 96 wind turbines over 50,000 acres).
Scalability often seems to be the problem with the “renewable” (sustainable?) dream. A pumped storage battery is conceptually a great idea, but doing the pumping with renewable energy seems improbable. At best, it looks like it would be a very costly way of addressing the intermittent nature of renewables (i.e. if wind turbines / solar panels are being used to pump water into a pumped storage facility, that energy would be stored to be used when needed).
Now, perhaps if we connected this system to a GIGANTIC water hammer / ram pump…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzaInlFVq0s
Cheers,
-GBV
400MW x 5h = 2GWh total storage capacity, if full.
If it is supposed to pump 8h/day (“sunny”) and generate 16h/day, capacity is reduced to 125MW.
Norway generates 130TWh per year.
We could cut consumption, but it wont happen voluntarily, and a lot of consumption is done outside of the households.
Pumped hydro is also sometimes used in conjunction with nuclear power plants as well as with wind and solar.
Nuclear plants generate electricity at a constant rate while demand for electricity can vary markedly throughout the day, the week and the year. Using spare power to pump water up hill and then letting the water run downhill to generate electricity when needed helps ameliorate this problem, but the infrastructure can be costly to build and it depends on having suitable topography available.
Solar and wind produce electricity intermittently and if the electricity isn’t required at the time of generation, it can be used to pump water up hill just as nuclear-generated electricity can.
Electricity “saved” in this way is not going to be cheap compared with coal or gas fired generation. Whether it’s cost effective compared with just “wasting” the surplus electricity from solar or wind is something I have no idea about it. I’d have to ask an actuary about that.
http://euanmearns.com/the-seawater-pumped-hydro-potential-of-the-world/
There is a classic case of the author did not do enough research. On the Nullarbor Plain here in Australia is an area of 200,000km2 that sits flat with 70-90 metre cliffs down to the ocean.
If someone built an earth berm to hold just 10 metres deep of seawater, the pumped hydro capacity would be around 416Twh of storage. The entire area being desert just above and right on the edge of the Southern ocean is perfect for both wind generation and solar (ave of 8-9 hrs of sun/day).
416 Twh is double Australia’s entire annual electricity production and consumption.
It would provide 50Gw of electricity constantly for a year!!
Of course you would only need to move about 60 Trillion cubic metres of dirt at an approx cost of $180 Trillion dollars. Perhaps scale it down a tad.
Whoops, multiplied the sides instead of adding them, it is ‘only around 1 billion cubic metres of dirt needing movement, so around $3 Billion. That is in the realm of doable!!
Gail you’ve taken a very complex predicament and explained it magnificently! I’m going to do an expensive of my own and forward your article to a few select friends and wait for a response. My guess is they will accept your findings but the consequences are decades away. I think I’ll let them hang on to those thoughts.
Experiment of my own.
Gail, are you familiar with the research findings of atmospheric physicist Tim Garrett of the University of Utah? If not below is my summary of the essence of his work with a link at the end articles and papers by and about Garrett. I would be interested in your thoughts on the similarities / differences between your work and his — perhaps in the form of an article.
Here’s my summary —
According to Garrett, humanity is caught in a double-bind ending in the global collapse of the economy and civilization within decades. Here’s the essence of Garrett’s double-bind dilemma: If we cease to globally grow the consumption of energy and raw materials, then the global economy must collapse; And if we DON’T cease to globally grow consumption of energy and raw materials, we still collapse within decades due to climate change and environmental destruction.
Even worse, says Garrett, there are no solutions and no way out. Laws of thermodynamics rule out transition to a sustainable steady state economy. Re Garrett’s double-bind dilemma, lower levels of production will still lead to collapse. As for lowering the human population, Garrett notes that “People themselves are a relatively small proportion of the world’s total resource consumption.” He also discounts: transition to 100% renewables; conservation; clean energy; geo-engineering technologies; production efficiency measures; sucking carbon out of the atmosphere; degrowth, and whatever other solutions are being tossed around — All likely futile. Such is the power of Garrett’s application of the laws of physics to economics.
Garrett’s hypothesis (circa 2008) underlying his research is testable and, so far, it has not been refuted.
To read more by/about Garrett and his research, visit my website link: https://tinyurl.com/ya5qj9pd . The title of the linked page is: “Civilization/Economic Collapse ~ Links to All Posts By or About Dr. Tim Garrett’s Research” I suggest you start with his article titled: “Tim Garrett explains why civilization is caught in a double-bind, ending with its collapse this century.”
I read some of Tim Garrett’s work a few years ago and corresponded with him at that time. I am not up-to-date on what he has been writing about recently. I will take a look at your link.
I am a little suprised about is recent collapse-related work. My understanding earlier was that his academic appointment was a climate change appointment. It is hard to get research grants in the area of climate change, writing articles about collapse being ahead. This is a link to Garrett’s home page at The University of Utah. He doesn’t make global collapse stand out in the titles of things he writes about.
Think that this is a better link to what you were trying to link to.
https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/tim-garrett-explains-why-civilization-is-caught-in-a-double-bind-ending-with-its-collapse-this-century/
Gail, the people of Europe made a pretty good transition from a collapsing to a sustainable economy. We call it the Fall of the Roman Empire, but as Kenneth Clark taught us in his wonderful series “civilisation”, it was followed by a great rebirth, the rebirth that gave us the gothic cathedrals, the monastic movement (where so much classical learning was preserved, and almost all recovered from Islam by the Crusades was translated), a stable and uncorrupt banking system (the true legacy of the Knights Templar), and, at last, the Renaissance, which I date to the publication of Leonardo of Pisa’s “Liber abaci” in 1202.
Deo gractas.
Whatever the Roman Empire did/did not do—expanded/contracted–rose and fell, it is important to grasp the point that it was all done at a walking pace.
That was their ”normality”—they knew no other way–if they were wiped our by plague or famine, it was the concern of no one else.
To the Chinese, or the Inca, the Roman empire meant nothing. The ”transition” to the renaissance took 1000 years, and it was mighty unpleasant in the doing
Our own time is different
our ”normality” is xxx mph, whenever we choose, with foods from around the world whenever we choose , and ultimed energy. We alter the climate to suit ourselves and know what’s happening 10000 m away the instant it happens
What happens in China or America matters to us because our destructive potential is now universal–whether through weapons or finance
Norman the Roman Empire (“Ta Tsin”) meant a lot to the Chinese. It was their ultimate purchaser of silk, and main provider of silver bullion.
A trade that all but collapsed when the Byzantines stole the secret. Owen Lattimore’s “Silks, Spices and Empire” is the classic short volume on this subject. And the transition to the Renaissance took 724 years from the fall of the Western Empire. Indeed, it was well under way before the Eastern Empire fell.
Localisation means the absence of bulk trade in cheap goods; it does not mean the absence of trade in luxuries, or in ideas. As Marco Polo proved.
my meaning was that the chinese did not have a concept of an ”empire” as a land mass as we know the Roman empire was—obviously there was trade, but the trading channels were long and tenuous, not like now where trade is massively interlocked
Silks were walked across Asia, there was no other means
barbarians at the gates of Rome would have been nothing more than passing conversation
Religions of the world clearly traded a lot of ideas with each other.
You can “collapse now or collapse later”……Collapse now, because the longer we kick the can, the harder the can will kick us during the imminent collapse.
I am not sure about “the longer we kick the can, the harder the can will kick us during the imminent collapse.”
If we are dead, we are dead. Admittedly, the longer it takes, the more people will die. But I expect the drop will be pretty much the same, regardless. I would vote for kicking the can down the road as far as possible.
“I would vote for kicking the can down the road as far as possible.”
And Fast Eddy approves of this message !
That’s one thing people seem to forget, the mortality rate is 100% regardless of what happens on the planet. Eventually the Grim Reaper visits everyone just like the Repo Man looking to take back your car because you refuse to make your car payments.
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Fight Club
Definitely true.
Or as Keynes put it, “In the long run we are all dead.”
Individual mortality hasn’t seemed to stop people thinking about something bigger than themselves to care about…perhaps not nearly as much in the past as now.
Oh no, Artleads: people in the past cared far more than we about “things bigger than themselves”. That’s why they built Notre Dame de Paris. And now half the intelligentsia are denouncing its repair as an enormous waste of resources, while the other half are demanding it be handed over for “modern architects” to urinate on.
My amateur research: the reason feudal societies are sustainable is that everyone has a stake in the future. The king wants to leave his kingdom to his sons; the peasant farmer his half hectare likewise. And they want to leave their domain at least as good as they found it.
Keynes had no children, so he had no future to care about. And a frightening number of the leaders of the EU are in the same condition. When I go to meet Osiris, I shall leave behind five children and (so far) four grandchildren. And most of my life savings will be theirs, for they (and my library) are my only true treasure.
Robert Firth says:
May 1, 2019 at 6:40 am
Oh no, Artleads: people in the past cared far more than we about “things bigger than themselves”.
Sorry, I said it badly. I meant exactly what you say. I suspect that Keynes is a symptom of modernism, secularism and individualism, and not the reverse. Helpful to hear feudalism defined as you did it. It reinforces the importance of family, intentional or otherwise.
I am sitting beside my Mom’s bed in a foster home, feeding her Ensure™ mixed with thickener, through a 60ml syringe, to keep her from dehydrating. Last Thursday, hospice said she had “days, not weeks” left. So I hopped on the next plane to burn some of what George Monbiot calls “love miles.” (I stopped flying, otherwise.)
I think each of you would do the same for your loved ones. This is why I plead and hope for an early termination of civilization, so those who remain will have a bit of an easier time of it. The survivors may not have Ensure™, but if civilization goes away tomorrow, they may still have working tools with which to bridge the gap.
It may seem like a paradox that those who are actively resisting civilization may well be contributing to it’s overshoot by freeing up resources that others can use. But on the other hand, by limiting our participation in an economy that must continue growing, it hastens the demise.
I might not disagree, except for collateral damage — the longer modern civilization survives, the more innocent non-human species will be dragged down with us.
Also, I differ from many here in that I think a sustainable life for at least some humans is possible post-collapse. Joseph Tainter notes that “civilization” is the exception for humans, rather than the default situation. So why make things harder for the survivors by despoiling more of the planet with this “exuberant irruption” of human biomass?
We should all be working toward crashing civilization as rapidly as possible.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the fate of life, other than ours. Species come and go. It’s nature’s way. Besides, the Earth has gone through 9 different extinction events, and bounced back every time, as good as new! In 5 million years, a weekend in geological time, the planet will be pristine again, new life forms will fill every possible niche, and all traces of mankind’s impact during the “Anthropocene” will have been virtually erased.
And actually erased, too!
(Sorry, one of my pet peeves is misuse of the word “virtual.”)
Look for Alan Weisman’s A World Without Us for a good explanation of how humanity’s artifacts will survive the aeons. I think he mentions “brass statuary” as lasting ten million years. And of course, there will be a fossil record, a thin, greasy line in the strata, with some fossilized bones here and there.
No worries, but in 5 million years who”ll be around to care? 🙂
Perhaps Bonobo-descended archaeologists?
I hope enough human artifacts and fossils survive to serve as a warning to any sentient species that arises!
We look at a thin line in the strata with an excess of Irridium at the -65,000,000 year level, and conclude a meteor wiped out the dominant life forms of the day.
Perhaps they’ll look at a thin greasy line in the strata at -10,000,000 years or so, and say, “Hey, we’d better do things differently!”
I think intelligence on our level is a one shot affair, wherever it arises. And because we have never been discovered by an expanding extraterrestrial civilisation, or come across any indication that they might exist, through SETI etc., it’s safe to say that species like ours tend to flare out on their home worlds, before they ever address the biological/cultural weaknesses in their evolution, which led to their inevitable destruction. Explains the Fermi Paradox nicely. Space is God’s great quarantine area.
Even if tool making intelligence were to arise twice in a planet’s geological history, the second intelligence would never have the chance to create an advanced technological society, since the easily extracted raw materials that gave rise to the first would have already been dissipated.
And not all of those non-humans are innocent, Jan.
As I’m sure you agree when they get into you veggie garden.
This is why beginning farmers are going to have a tough time.
Over years and decades, we’ve worked out many methods for combatting pests without pesticides, and are constantly working out more. Pests are not a huge problem for us.
Having freezing weather in winter helps get rid of pests. I expect the pest situation is worse in warm areas. It certainly leads to more human infectious diseases.
Glad to hear that Jan. It’s the same here. We live and learn on the farm.
To me, CC is the least of our worries. First we need to address all the pollution and garbage that’s being dumped into the oceans. Pollution from plastics is a huge concern because it feeds up the ocean food chain. And lets not forget the radioactive waste from Fukushima that’s still being dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
But the current meme is CC and yet you need energy to power the economy. But the CC crowd wants everyone to stop using FF’s. OK so explain how you are going to transport freight from China to different parts of the world without FF’s? The just in time delivery system would come to a halt which means supermarkets and your Walmart’s would run out of inventory within 3-4 days. People just don’t think things thru.
Rodster, we had no difficulty transporting goods from China before there were fossil fuels. It was called the Silk Road.
The issue is moving bulk freight, but that is part of the problem, and the solution is relocalisation. Which will happen, and most of us will live better lives because of it.
With relocalization, we won’t have very much. In fact, trying to get enough food to feed ourselves will likely be a challenge. We won’t have machines, so making productive use of what land is available will be difficult. Women will probably be having a large number of children, so that there is a possibility of two living to maturity. It will be a very different life.
camel shares seem to be a good investment then
I don’t think it’s an “either : or” issue. Yes, it’s “all of the above” in terms of crises. Your point 11 (“If the world economy is headed toward near-term collapse, climate change shrinks back in the list of things we should be worried about.”) is spot on; economic collapse is the “simplest” solution to AGW there is.
Here’s one good perspective on the multitude of crises: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
Thanks for the link. I know that Paul started writing about this issue quite a few years ago. Anyone who can make a model of the future, based on the assumption that their limit is the only one, can get a lot of interest and funding.
Nailed it. This is another reason why nuclear is the only feasible replacement. The carbon tax refrain is an elite idea, for those that can afford it because they sit at the top of the economic pyramid. We see the result of that in France. This is exacerbated by the intense efforts the fossil fuel industry is making to keep market share as solar and wind expand. They have done this in Germany and the USA by getting nuclear plants shut down. The amount of energy provided by solar and wind in both nations is almost exactly equal to the mount of electricity taken offline by shutting down nuclear.
The fossil fuel industry has curated anti-nuclear ideas starting with Rockefeller in the 1950’s pushing the linear no threshold (LNT) model for radiation. David Brower was funded with $200,000 ($1.2 million in today’s dollars) by Standard Oil to start Friends of the Earth which Brower than used to take over the Sierra Club. Mark Z Jacobson has been funded by oil money for a couple of decades.
This is an intense batttle, and you are completely correct about he world’s need for energy. It’s a, if not the, primary correlate to GDP. (Efficiency does matter.)
If one day we lose the grids, or have to abandon large areas of the earth due to climate change, how do we keep all of these nuclear power stations functional, or stop them from melting down?
Seems to me that we could have thousands of Chernobyls going on simultaneously. That will hugely add to our problems which by then are going to look pretty insurmountable anyway.
Richard,
Don’t forget pandemics!
If 70% – 90% of people and their families got very ill and/or died, they may not show up to work to (safely) operate nuclear power facilities. Even if you can somehow safely automate these facilities, people wouldn’t be showing up to work to fill and then drive tankers of diesel fuel to said facilities to gas up the back-up generators.
I’m glad some people still recognize the incredible hubris and danger that is inherent in wielding nuclear power…
Cheers,
-GBV