Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these attempts to model oil & gas are pretty basic algebra.
Maybe using some non-linear or fractal equations might produce the sort of result which factors in the inherent discrepancies found in the data? _________________ "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1434 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2004 6:37 pm Post subject:
The entire basis for Campbell's models is based on his best engineering judgement. He can also make a best engineering judgement of what the probability of his being correct. The two pieces of data are entirely independent. So far he has provided one of those pieces of data and hasn't even attempted (as far as I am aware) putting a number to the second guess. This exercise is entirely different from placing error bars around measurements. First he doesn't have any measurements , second he hasn't got a model for the probability distribution. As a first guess, I would say that it shouldn't even be symetrical.
By the way, other, equally plausible (IMO) people see a near term oil surpus so I'd advise not to jump just yet:
Smiley, with regard to your point about reproducibility.
Yes, this is a necessary requirement for a scientific paper. Unfortunately, this will fundamentally be lacking whenever information is sourced from a private proprietary database. When Pops reminds us that Campbell, Simmons, etc., acknowledge the inherent weaknesses even in proprietary databases (i.e., inability to audit directly in some cases), that may highlight how difficult it would be to get Nature to accept Campbell's model in the form it is in. Can you imagine reading in Nature that the author has generated the model from a private database, which in turn takes it's data from sources that cannot be checked, and the author has not even been able to actually audit the data to which this database refers. It's just too fluffy.
This reliance on propriety data is one of the weaknesses that Michael Lynch likes to pick up on. And I think that in this criticism, at least, he is fair.
All of us here who agree with the peak oil thesis (myself included) might do well to acknowledge a few faiths that we share:
That Campbell's source data in accurate.
That when Campbell claims his numbers are P50, he has not missed a source of systematic bias (i.e., that Campbell's treatment of the data is mathematically sound).
I begin to agree with the peak oil thesis because I see the potential of the argument put forward by Campbell, Simmons, Laherrere etc. to be correct. I continue to agree with the peak oil thesis because it seems consistent with some of the strange movements in politics that have taken place recently. Lastly, I am sympathetic to the focus lent by peak oil because I believe in learning from history - things will not always, simply, just plod along; there will be upheavals. The deep interconnected dependence of modern society, and distance from the supply of energy resources of first world economies means, for me, that given serious instability, artificial peak oil could be instigated. Hence, it's worth looking at. I am partial to the view that all resources of the planet are being dangerously erroded by human activity. In that context, an interest in peak oil can be a useful allegory, pre-empting later problems.
That doesn't amount to my acceptance of peak oil as a scientific claim.
I wouldn't accept peak oil as a scientific claim until:
I knew in detail how the data points were established.
I (or others) was able to collect data in the same manner, and that this data could be compared against data used by Campbell.
Knowledge of the workings of the model are of course important.
It would be nice if Campbell included confidence interval information regarding his predictions. In their absence, it may be even more important for us to focus on the confidence interval that we ascribe to them.
full disclosure: I am currently considering an all-fluids peak 2008-2016.
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 309 Location: Ontario, Canada
Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2004 9:02 pm Post subject:
Private data sources?
Why can't Campbell put out in detail all the numbers he uses, all the calculations he uses, so someone can take his same assumptions and do the math and reach his conclusions? _________________ "Our forces are now closer to the center of Baghdad than most American commuters are to their downtown office."
--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, April 2003
Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2004 11:17 pm Post subject: http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com
Nero: good point on the asymmetric data. By definition statistical information along the time axis has to be asymmetrical, due to causality. The contrarian Michael Lynch nags incorrectly that many of the Peak Oil curves are suspect because they do not follow a normal distribution or some other classic symmetric distribution. Lynch fails the acid test and is just a statistics poseurs.
Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 158 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2004 8:37 pm Post subject:
Pops wrote:
but until the data can be verified…
... nobody can be certain of the true position. It's not that important anyway - the peak is coming. It might be here already. And the sooner we respond to it the better.
Meanwhile, it's all speculation. Informed speculation in many cases, certainly, but it makes little difference whether the peak is in 2006 or 2008.
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