[FatherOfTwo]

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/climatesnapshot/peak-oil-solved-climate-will-fry-bp-report

[SeaGypsy]

Hey Dad, we are supposed to comment on pasted links under the CoC.

The linked article should be titled "Peak oil stalled a decade or 2, climate could kill us all." It grasps neither the intractability of peak oil and it's next substitute nor the possibility of tipping point 'runaway' climate change.

It's a psych piece intended to induce dull worry about climate whilst eliminating fear of 'running out of oil'.

[Plantagenet]

I suggest changing this thread title to:

Peak Oil isn't solved and climate will fry anyway

[meemoe_uk]

>Hey Dad, we are supposed to comment on pasted links under the CoC.

It never stopped Cid_yama from spamming POforums with links and copy-pasting some of the link with zero of his own comment. He did it for years, and I think he was nominated as best poster on PO.com.

[Revi]

This is what really scares me. I used to worry that we would run out of oil. Now I worry that we won't. The effects of catastrophic climate change are so severe that it makes peak oil look like a pimple. If we succeed in warming the planet by 6 degrees C, we won't even be around to care if there's no oil. And it looks like that's where we're headed. If we don't reduce carbon by 80% in the next 7 years we are cooking up to those climate numbers. We may even be headed up to 4 degrees C by mid century by some estimates. We're talking the desertification of a major chunk of the planet and a lot of it becoming uninhabitable for up to hundreds of thousands of years. There are major positive feedback loops that ensure we won't be able to get back to a habitable planet in anything like a human time frame. Here's an English climate scientist who happens to have the name Anderson talking about how the reality is far worse than even most climate advocates are letting on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U

[Revi]

That article from the Vancouver Observer was excellent. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[dorlomin]

We are able to extract some really expensive oil that will no longer be profitable if demand destruction kicks in with any real vigour.

This is 'solving' peak oil?

Where is our 105 million barrels a day we were supposed to be headed towards?

[SeaGypsy]

Really there are 3 cats chasing this bird, in no particular order: peak oil (translate to peak energy if you like), ecological catastrophe and climate disaster. The bird is running on fat debt. There is a fair bit of fat left, but the bird is in trouble, because it can't stop without being pounced on. The cats run on negative energy, black hole power, entropy.
Which cat gets the bird? Is it worth a bet? Does it matter, when all are going to rip it to bits once it's caught?

[Dybbuk]

Hopefully those whiz kids at Monsanto will invent a genetically modified tree that can grow in the desert. Plant a few billion of them and we can soak up all that extra CO2.

[SeaGypsy]

A few billion trees over a few hundred million years and we might be back near where this started. So far the carbon sink system is an absolute joke, a whitewash, an excuse to continue polluting whilst pretending to do something called 'mitigation'.

[ralfy]

Related:

"World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns"

"Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this 'lock-in' effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ate-change

[Outcast_Searcher]

Hopefully those whiz kids at Monsanto will invent a genetically modified tree that can grow in the desert. Plant a few billion of them and we can soak up all that extra CO2.

Actually, that hits on an important point. Since **IF** we manage to turn things around and survive long term, we will have messed up the planet really badly first -- it will take some sort of remediation of epic proportions -- if we can even come up with the technology to do it.

Regardless, I see a lot of poverty down the road. Very expensive energy. Very expensive cleanup. Little resources left for what we're now hell bent on (collectively) -- cheap trinkets and massive growth (on an already crowded planet) at ANY cost.

...

By the way, nice as the super-tree idea sounds, nature seems to have a funny way of evolving to limit the usefulness of the super-plants that Monsanto and their ilk engineer. So, unless they can do a better job of maintaining the viability of the tree, than say, their pest resistant crops -- I believe this would be a relatively short term solution, at best.

[SeaGypsy]

Screw Monsanto, they have taken decades to make a few crops capable of surviving 'Round Up'; potentially a trillion dollar enterprise and extremely unpopular.

Nature has developed species, particularly in Australia, capable of surviving on as little as 20mm a year (see Mulga Tree & desert Acacias).
I doubt Monsanto or anyone else is going to do much better than a billion years of evolution. The fact is in arid country it's grasses which tend to do better than trees. Then there are issues of species compatibility. Buffel grass for example does extremely well in desert areas, but burns so hot it kills off everything else.

[Dybbuk]

I was only semi-serious about the genetically modified tree idea. I guess my general point is that it would take something that profound to fix the problem, since people who have a choice aren't going to voluntarily take a major hit to their standard of living to stop some future disaster...a disaster they aren't completely sure is even going to happen, thanks to the politicization of everything.

[AgentR11]

A genetically modified super tree is not enough. A tree has to have water to bind up carbon. No matter how great the genes are, without sufficient water, its pointless. Thus, desertification further seals the deal. Doesn't matter if a tree can survive there or not; it can't sequester carbon at any significant rate because it has little to no water.

[Loki]

The best we can hope for on the climate front is rapid permanent economic collapse at a global scale. Luckily, there's a good chance of that happening, and sooner rather than later. The Great Recession has already done wonders for America's carbon emissions:

America's carbon dioxide emissions last year fell to their lowest levels since 1994, according to a new report....

The reduction in climate pollution – even as Congress failed to act on climate change – brings America more than halfway towards Barack Obama's target of cutting emissions by 17% from 2005 levels over the next decade, the Bloomberg analysts said.

By the end of last year, America's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions had fallen 10.7% from the 2005 baselines.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... est-levels

The article claims renewables and energy efficiency measures account for this drop in emissions, but fails to mention the massive economic spasm that we've been enjoying the last 5 years. Seems a rather disingenuous omission.

In a related piece, Gail Tverberg just did a good post on why US oil consumption has dropped to 1990s levels. She ascribes only 7% of this drop in oil demand to more efficient vehicles. Most of the rest is due to people driving less (fewer jobs to drive to, young folks can't afford cars, etc.) and the deindustrialization of our economy. I thought this graph was interesting:


Another upside of economic collapse is that demand destruction may make tar sands and oil shale too expensive to produce. See, there's a silver lining in every cloud

[Dybbuk]

The article claims renewables and energy efficiency measures account for this drop in emissions

I thought it was mostly because of switching from coal to natural gas.

[peripato]

This is what really scares me. I used to worry that we would run out of oil. Now I worry that we won't. The effects of catastrophic climate change are so severe that it makes peak oil look like a pimple. If we succeed in warming the planet by 6 degrees C, we won't even be around to care if there's no oil. And it looks like that's where we're headed. If we don't reduce carbon by 80% in the next 7 years we are cooking up to those climate numbers. We may even be headed up to 4 degrees C by mid century by some estimates. We're talking the desertification of a major chunk of the planet and a lot of it becoming uninhabitable for up to hundreds of thousands of years. There are major positive feedback loops that ensure we won't be able to get back to a habitable planet in anything like a human time frame. Here's an English climate scientist who happens to have the name Anderson talking about how the reality is far worse than even most climate advocates are letting on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U

BP's projections are based on business as usual continuing uninterrupted for decades to come. One needs to ask, how likely is this, given all the bottlenecks - climate induced included, that are slowly but surely squeezing the life out of the world economy?

[ennui2]

All the planet cares about is total emissions worldwide, so look past the US, and emissions are still going up. You can keep playing hot-potato with limits to growth, but it's gonna crash in the end. It's only a matter of time.

[hurricanechaser]

peak oil is not solved...and the climate will not fry...

peak oil: an imminent factor that could define humanity and lifestyle as we know in a few years/decades

global warming:a gradual increase in temperature of about 0.8 C /century(or) millenia