Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”
Preface. Thank goodness for world peak oil production in 2018. And peak coal in 2013. Since oil is that master resource that makes every product and activity possible, including oil itself and coal and natural gas, peak oil means peak everything. Oil, specifically the 25% of a barrel that’s diesel, is used by nearly all heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships. Petroleum and natural gas are the for 500,000 products. And fossils are essential for products needing high heat in their manufacture, like cement, steel, iron, glass, ceramics, microchips, bricks and more — there are no electric or hydrogen substitutes and with peak oil in 2018, no time to invent them.
So I would argue we don’t have enough fossil fuels left to reach the hothouse world Ward proposes. You might reply that tipping points have been or will be reached, methane from permafrost, the amazon rainforest turns into grass and so on.
Sure, but there are negative feedback loops. Diatoms evolved about 100 million years ago and consumed so much CO2 they created the polar icecaps for the first time. They are doing very well with the increased CO2, dying, and sinking to the ocean floor in even greater numbers. Nor are methane hydrates likely to ever be exploited or released all at once. And see these posts about why we may not be driven extinct by climate change and at worst reach low-medium IPCC projections. And CO2 rates in the Permian and other extinctions were as high as today’s, so it’s not true that what’s happening now is unprecedented, and lasted for 10,000 to 20,000 years of volcanic pulses from deep in the earth, boiling their way to the surface via coal, natural gas and oil deposits…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
