As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline
Carbon sequestration, wind, solar, geo-engineering, and other remedies are trivial compared to the effect declining fossil fuels will have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The natural rate of decline today is 8.5%, exponentially increasing, and offset by 4%, so the gap will continue to grow wider, with petroleum eventually decreasing by 6% and more a year in the future.
- Peak oil: “It’s the flows, stupid!” Energy abundance depends entirely on the RATE of energy flow
- Global oil discovered 7.7 times less than consumption in 2019
- Giant oil field decline rates and peak oil
Climate change is also a symptom of overpopulation and overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. If family planning became the green new deal, there would be a chance for all problems to be reduced in severity. “Renewables” are certainly not a solution since transportation and manufacturing can’t be electrified or run on anything else (see Chapter 6 and 9 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).
Climate models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show a range of greenhouse gas trajectories. The worst-case IPCC scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This predicts a rise of temperature by 5°C, and this is the scenario you read about daily in the newspapers as being the most likely “business as usual” future. But lately many scientists think around 3 °C (RCP 4.5 to RCP 6) is more likely (Hausfather and Peters 2020).
Geologists have a far more optimistic outlook. Using realistic fossil fuel reserves in climate models, they predict an outcome from RCP 2.6 to RCP 4.5 (Doose 2004; Kharecha and Hansen 2008; Brecha 2008; Nel 2011; Chiari and Zecca 2011; Ward et al. 2011, 2012; Höök and Tang 2013; Mohr et al. 2015; Capellán-Pérez et al. 2016; Murray 2016; Wang et al. 2017).
The IPCC scenarios do not model fossil fuels at all, since their assumption is that we will be burning fossil fuels, at exponentially increasing amounts until 2400. The IPCC RCP 8.5 hothouse world scenario assumes a fivefold increase in coal use by 2100 (Ritchie and Dowlatabadi 2017), even though coal production may have peaked, or will soon (see chapter 6 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).
So rather than becoming crisply well-done, perhaps we’ll scrape by with a medium rare sunburn.
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