Climate May Be Less Sensitive To CO2 Than Previously Thought 413
a_hanso writes "A new study suggests that the effects of rising levels of carbon dioxide on temperature may be less significant than previously thought. 'The new models predict that given a doubling in CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels, the Earth's surface temperatures will rise by 1.7 to 2.6 degrees C. That is a much tighter range than suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, which suggested a rise of between 2 to 4.5 degrees C."
A few points... (Score:5, Informative)
It's an interesting piece of work. There are two issues to bear in mind:
- They are calculating climate sensitivity at the last glacial maximum. Climate sensitivity varies with temperature, so the sensitivity now may not be the same as the sensitivity at the LGM. It is entirely possible that both this study, and all the studies which put a higher value on current sensitivity, are both correct.
- Even their most likely value of 2.3C only gives us about 15 years extra breathing space to sort out our emissions.
- The UVic model they use is rather simplistic, and I'm not sure it reproduces 20thC climate that well. It would be interesting to see this work repeated with a model ensemble.
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Like I keep repeating - there's only 40 years of oil left.
While I find your argument of proof by repetitive assertion convincing, I think that 20 years ago there was only 30 years oil left. In another 40 years it may have reach 80 years left. Maybe there's more people repeating the opposite to you and it's actually driving the oil supplies upwards?
We have certainly reached "Peak Oil" - we are not increasing oil production in the face of increasing oil demand. We are going after harder to extract oil (oil sands, deep water oil), we ARE improving fractional production from existing wells through horizontal drilling and fracking and other methods but this serves more to make a long tail type of decline.
"Running out" of oil (or petrochemicals in general) is a more complex issue than can be stuffed in a sound bite. We will never run completely out of oil - there are thousands of 'stripper wells' pulling out a couple of barrels of crude oil per day and will do so for hundreds of years. But you can't run a major industrial economy on stripper wells. It will depend on a number of inter related issues - economic growth, conservation, solar / wind / hydro / nuc power, wars, etc.
But we;re already beyond 'cheap oil' - if that's any consolation to the planet.
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:saved! (Score:3, Informative)
“We are looking at more than four and a half trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil. That number translates into 140 years of oil at current rates of consumption, or to put it anther way, the world has only consumed about 18 percent of its conventional oil potential.
Re:How does this change anything? (Score:2, Informative)
“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary,” -- Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office.
“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne adds.
“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.” “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wrote to Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released in Climategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!! ”
"How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.
"What is at issue is the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go,they tossed aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE and LIA as global events,and all on the basis of tree rings –a proxy which has all the deficiencies I have stated above"
"It seems to me that you have the difficult problem of wearing two hats: one as the advocate of particular policies and viewpoints, and the other as an editor of a journal which aspires to be a neutral forum for policy discussion."
So much more... Your beloved Climate Scientists are nothing more than a collection of thugs pushing a failed theory with propaganda.
Re:Excellent... (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, there is a lot of oil left. Now, how do you get it out of the ground - that's the rub. Even in a totally depleted, water soaked oil field, there is a metric shitload of oil under the surface. Just no way to economically bring it to the surface.
Same with Ultradeep oil in the Gulf of Mexico (and elsewhere). You stick a $2 billion dollar rig on surface, spend a long time drilling (and oopsie occasionally - dry holes and the unavoidable blowout) and you get a couple more million barrels for a few years (Deepwater plays tend to be smaller fields that go flat pretty fast because of the pressures and the geology). Keep doing that and you've driven the price of oil up to like $100 / barrel. Add increasing growth of Homo Industrialis and now oil is $150 / barrel. Fine, that gives the folks with the billion dollar oil rigs more economic room to drill in Godknowswhereistan (or Cleveland) but that brings home heating oil up to $5 / gallon. Fine, you say, just insulate. Oopsie, my income stream has been flat to going backwards over the past several years because the economy (which is only happy at constant to accelerating growth) isn't growing.
Get's complicated. There will always be oil (which is good - petrochemicals are wonderfully useful) but cheap energy may be a thing of the past.
And cheap energy is what has driven the Industrial Revolution so far.
Now, back to the original subject - we might have a few more years of breathing room. Maybe.
Re:saved! (Score:2, Informative)
Try and prove that statement incorrect. I would be very interested in actual proof that the world has no more oil available. Don't forget to look 20 miles into the Earth's crust, we can't ignore any potential new source, now can we?
That's not what's needed for Peak Oil. Peak Oil means even with higher demand, as we have now, there won't be more Oil on the market. And that's exactly what happens since around 2005/2006: the absolute amount of oil extracted and sold sinks slowly every year, while before that it increased always except in times of severe crisis, economic or price hikes (1970s).
That 20.000 leagues under the Sea oil is more and more expensive to extract and therefore less and less is sold. In 2005 to 2008 we had a very much expanding economy and still there was less oil extracted.
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Now this one really does require a citation. And oil doesn't just have to be pumped in the traditional manner.
Unfortunately the assertion that there is x numbers of oil left is based on a number of observations. So where to start.. We can start with the observation that for any given well or field supply/production follows a bell curve. Production increases until it hits a peak and then declines. Advancing technologies gives the bell curve a long tail but peak production is only hit once. If you add the curves for each well it will create a curve for each field. Add each field together and you get a curve for each region. Keep going and you will get a curve for each continent. At some point there will be a curve for the earth as a whole.
.5 trillion to as much as 2 trillion. Personally I think 2 trillion is wishful thinking as we have been looking for oil for a century now.
Now that's not all of it of course. There are undiscovered reserves. For any given region there is a bell curve for discovery. We discover more and more and then less and less. The discovery curve will tend to peak about 10 (give or take 5 year) before the supply curve. As an example we can look at the continental U.S. In 1956 Hubbert predicted peak oil for the continental in the United States to occur around 1970. He was correct. In the 30 years since continental oil production peaked, oil production has been on a gradual decline. Matching predictions made over 50 years ago. Note, the continental U.S. is just that it does not include Alaska and off shore oil but is an example of how peak production occurs in a given area and follows peak discovery.
Of course we need to know more to make an estimate for peak oil for the world. We need to know how much oil we've already used and how much we know about that is left and how much we don't know about that is left. For the first part we know we've used about 1 trillion barrels of oil so far. For the second part we know a range that geologist use. P10, P50 and P90 number provide 10%, 50%, and 90% probabilities of reserves. We use P90 numbers to denote proven reserves meaning there is a 90% chance that it is how much we have left. According to the oil industry proven reserves are between 1.1 and 1.3 trillion barrels in 2007. Adjusting for the last 4 years and that proven reserves are 90% sure not 100% lets just call it an even 1 trillion.
Ok so 1 trillion used and 1 trillion in proven reserves but of course there's the undiscovered oil too. Now we have to rely on speculation but we can take some things into consideration. For instance we have seen peak discovery in some areas so we can extrapolate what is left to be discovered by looking at the curves. We can further argue that larger fields are easier to find than smaller ones in much the same way we could say there are still undiscovered islands in the ocean but it is unlikely there are undiscovered continents. There is a lot of speculation when it comes to estimating what we haven't discovered. Some based on optimistic numbers and some based on pessimistic ones. It ranges from
But Ok, I'll give 2 trillion barrels of undiscovered oil. So now we can say total oil is around 4 trillion. We've used 1 trillion and have 3 trillion left in proven and undiscovered oil. The world uses ~80 million barrels/day or about 30 billion a year. If demand stays constant (there is no reason to believe it will, everything indicates it will rise) We can safely say we will use 1 trillion barrels in 33 years. So in 33 years we will have used 2 trillion bbls total and have 2 trillion left. This is the optimistic number for peak oil. Now for peak liquid oil (excluding tar sands and such) many estimates for peak liquid oil are put at sometime in the last 3 years. Probably around 2008. That year when gas in the U.S. went over $4/gallon and then dropped under $2 as the economy crashed and demand went down.
When supply peaks demand will be constr
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let the informed battles begin (Score:4, Informative)
Non-paywalled version of the paper (Score:4, Informative)
The manuscript is freely available here [princeton.edu].
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Oil is always going to be available. Whether or not it will be available at prices that allow for stable economies around the globe is the question. If oil hits, for example, $500 / gallon and thus gasoline prices are $15 / gallon "business as usual" (aka the economy) has big issues. Big issues.
1) China's and India's economies have been expanding at an insane pace in the last 10 years. More people in those countries drive cars now than every before. The demand has continually been increasing.
And the oil exporters in the Middle East, understanding they have a limited supply of oil in the ground are NOT increasing output much, if at all. The US / Canada in a mad attempt to keep up has been utilizing every drilling rig available for the past 5 years and we are just barely keeping pace with output reductions from the older fields.
So, if Chindia keeps munching on the fossil fuels and we keep doing the same AND production INCREASES don't keep up, you have, wait for it, Peak Oil.
2) Developed nations (most notably the U.S. and Canada) have politically decided that oil is "dirty" and entire industries have been prevented from expanded production of oil in these 2 nations (which have vast tracks of land, full of oil), this is to say nothing of the rest of the world, which seemed quite content to just let the monopoly OPEC exist and just deal with them.
Well, aside from the implication that the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are running things (you might want to tell them), we are, as I mentioned, punching holes through our 'vast tracts of land' and not keeping up with the big increases. Hint - go look up the geology of future North American 'conventional' oil reserves. The USGS keeps dropping that number every year. And a lot of geologists think that the official USGS figures are still overstated.
You have an funny definition of 'monopoly' - Oil is probably the most decentralized power supply on the planet. OPEC / Brazil / China / US / USSR / whateverstan / Non OPEC Middle East - it's everywhere. We've just sucked out the easy stuff.
Now it gets as Johnny Depp would say, complicated.
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the definition of 'peak oil' can be complicated. Absolute production is one metric, and of course, we will never know when that happens. The production curve has been pretty flat [theoildrum.com] for a while (warning: complex, lots of graphs, don't just grab a number an run).
But just looking at production only shows part of the problem. If various economies are price sensitive to energy (which they appear to be) and economic growth is considered a 'good thing', then if demand increases significantly past production (which is our current situation), then you have a problem, Houston.
Re:saved! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an interview with the author of the paper: http://newscience.planet3.org/2011/11/24/interview-with-nathan-urban-on-his-new-paper-climate-sensitivity-estimated-from-temperature-reconstructions-of-the-last-glacial-maximum/ [planet3.org]
Q. It’s a little funny, to me, that your paper was receiving such positive comments from skeptics while many of those same skeptics also support claims by Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer purporting to find an essentially insensitive (~1C or less) or self-stabilizing climate. Does your paper support such incredibly low values for ECS?
Our analysis found a lower bound of 1.35 C for climate sensitivity (less than 5% probability of being below this bound). We tried a range of statistical and physical assumptions, and found sensitivities as low as 1.15 C, and as high as 4.65 C (if we analyze the land data). I don’t think sensitivities lower than our bound are consistent with either our study or paleoclimatic evidence in general.
Q: Any other thoughts on the skeptics’ reception of your paper?
One blog did surprise me. World Climate Report doctored our paper’s main figure when reporting on our study. This manipulated version of our figure was copied widely on other blogs. They deleted the data and legends for the land and ocean estimates of climate sensitivity, and presented only our combined land+ocean curve:
Re:saved! (Score:4, Informative)