Three items that I highly recommend to all the TCOE faithful:

First is Mark Lynas’ article, Climate chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion (emphasis added):

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth’s climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

We gave each scenario a name. The most pessimistic was labelled “agree and ignore” - a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed “Kyoto plus”: here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve “first world” status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process - but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.

The third scenario - called “step change” - is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place - from oil and gas wells and coal mines - with the UN setting a global “upstream” production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.

…

But let’s look at the modelled temperature increases associated with each scenario. “Agree and ignore” sees temperatures rise by 4.85C by 2100 (with a 90% probability); for “Kyoto plus”, it’s 3.31C; and “step change” 2.89C. This is the depressing bit: no politically plausible scenario we could envisage will now keep the world below the danger threshold of two degrees, the official target of both the EU and UK. This means that all scenarios see the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice; spreading deserts and water stress in the sub-tropics; extreme weather and floods; and melting glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas. Hence the need to focus far more on adaptation: these are impacts that humanity is going to have to deal with whatever now happens at the policy level.

But the other great lesson is that sticking with current policy is actually a very risky option, rather than a safe bet. Betting on Kyoto could mean triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and crossing thresholds that involve massive methane release from melting Siberian permafrost. If current policy continues to fail - along the lines of the “agree and ignore” scenario - then 50% to 80% of all species on earth could be driven to extinction by the magnitude and rapidity of warming, and much of the planet’s surface left uninhabitable to humans. Billions, not millions, of people would be displaced.

My view is that we’re definitely deep into the “agree and ignore” scenario, as Lynas points out, and that we’ll completely skip “Kyoto plus” and go straight to “step change”. The key questions I have about this meta scenario are [1] how big will the shocking event(s) have to be to kick start our collective response?, and [2] will Earth’s climate cross a tipping point before we take meaningful action, thanks to to our delay now plus the additional time lost when we take insufficient and just plain wrong steps, whenever that happens?

I know this sounds much more pessimistic than is typical for me on this site, but the more I read about the climate mess we continue to make, the worse I think it is. I’m convinced that James Hansen and others are right, and that the magic number (parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere) for avoiding truly awful effects is closer to 350 than 450. (We’re currently at about 385, with a hell of a lot more CO2 effectively in the pipeline thanks things like all those existing and new coal plants, all those existing and new vehicles driving around, etc.)

See 350.org for Bill McKibben’s effort to get the word out about the magic number.

You can download the Climate Scenarios document Lynas mentions above here (small PDF).

Second is yet another article on methane release from the no-longer-permafrost, described in the article, Global Warming Could Release Trillions Of Pounds Of Carbon Annually From East Siberia’s Vast Frozen Soils:

East Siberia’s permafrost contains about 500 Gigatons (1100 trillion pounds) of frozen carbon deposits that are highly susceptible to disturbances as the climate warms.

Called the Yedoma, this permafrost has not undergone much alteration by soil microorganisms since its formation, which took place between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. To investigate how easily this huge carbon stock could be degassed in future warming scenarios, Khvorostyanov et al. use a model of heat transfer and soil organic matter decomposition in frozen soils and find that specific conditions trigger the irreversible thawing of Yedoma, which is maintained by heat production by soil microbial activity.

Once started, irreversible thawing could release 4.4-6.2 trillion pounds of carbon per year into the atmosphere between the years 2300 and 2400, transforming 74 percent of the initial carbon stock into carbon dioxide and methane.

Further investigations reveal that the faster the planet’s surface warms, the sooner fast deep-soil decomposition will start, although the tipping point above which soil carbon starts irreversible mobilization due to permafrost thawing increases slightly with larger external warming rates.

The actual article is here, although only the abstract is freely available.

My most recent posting on this is Pondering a methane apocalypse.

Finally we have one of two dates I refer to as Energy Geek Christmas–the day the BP Statistical Review of World Energy is released. (The other is the day the DOE/EIA releases the Annual Energy Review, obviously.)

The 2008 release of the BP Statistical Review is available in various forms from BP’s site here.

While I haven’t had a chance yet to go through this year’s edition carefully, I did notice a few numbers in the oil section that relates to something I’ve mentioned here numerous times, namely reserves reporting for oil producers, and not just those in the Persian Gulf area.

The numbers below are all from page 6 of the report, the units being billions of barrels of oil in “proved reserves”. (The report also lists Canadian oil sands at the bottom of the table as a separate category from conventional Canadian reserves, at 152.2 billion barrels. Add your own riff on the “it’s not the size of the reserves but how quickly you can extract them” speech here.)

My initial reaction in seeing those numbers? I could lie more convincingly than that when I was a college student trying to get into the house after a few hours at the local bar without my mother figuring out I’d been drinking. And I doubt I ever fooled her even once. The most eyebrow-raising category is the Middle East, which shows in the country-level breakout in the original BP table a set of numbers that practically look like a cut-and-paste operation from the YE2006 column to the YE2007 column.

Matt Simmons is right–we desperately need much greater transparency in the energy field.