Few things bother me more in the energy/enviro field than pundits and bloggers[1] going on about one topic or another with an unreasonable level of certainty. The magic term/fudge factor in that sentence is, as always, “unreasonable”; my degree of conviction about the exact number of aliens residing in my neighborhood disguised as dogs might strike you as being, shall we say, a bit over zealous, while I might not share your views on the best way to make large and lasting reductions in our CO2 emissions.

Having said all that, I was very pleased just now to see one of my favorite writers, Jim Kingsdale, chime in on where the US economy stands regarding the numerous large and uncertain issues it currently faces. In particular, Jim addresses the car company train wreck in There Are Still Many Shoes Left to Drop:

On the front burner, obviously, is a required “resolution” to the U.S. auto industry’s decades of mismanagement. The money’s running out and the party’s about over. Their problems include legacy costs (the pensions and health care of retired workers), high cost union contracts, uncompetitive products, and “bad management” such as having too many product lines or too much overhead costs. My personal favorite problem of the U.S car companies is their unattractive and ineffective dealer networks.

Congress and the new administration are coming to understand - as even the board of GM is now admitting - that many of these problems have legal bases which essentially require a bankruptcy proceeding to clean up. But Chapter 11 could be especially daunting for a huge car company for many reasons, not least being questions it would raise in the minds of future potential customers. Therefore, it appears that the government is moving toward providing some sort of debtor-in-possession financing to GM and perhaps Chrysler as part of a plan that I hope will include dramatically revamped operations, new management and new directors.

Even this “solution” is fraught with risks. Will the new plan and/or the new management effectively allow the reorganized company to compete successfully or will it fall into Chapter 7? Will a domino effect on suppliers - and perhaps competitors - hurt many other companies? Will too many people be thrown out of work? Wouldn’t it take several years at least to see good results? In other words, the ripple effects from any G.M. resolution may have unintended consequences and may take a good deal of time to play out.

In the short term perception is reality. I suspect that when a specific re-organization plan for GM is agreed upon there may be a rally in stocks as investors and the public are relieved that strong steps are finally being taken to resolve a very long smoldering infirmity in the American economy.

Just to be clear–I’m not quoting this because Jim echoed my recent reminder about perception being reality (Wrapping our brains around our challenges), but because it’s such a sober, if distinctly unsatisfying and unsettling, approach to this one component of our economic mess. All the people dashing about the infosphere[2] shouting about how “all we have to do is X” are either lying or pathetically deluded; you can decide for yourself which is the greater problem. This is a horrendously difficult situation, with staggering degrees of human impact and monetary cost associated with virtually any public policy, which most definitely includes doing nothing and “letting the market work itself out”.

That tradeoff–how much human pain are we willing to attempt to avoid at what monetary cost–is at the heart of numerous public policy decisions, but seldom so obviously and in such large, rough-hewn blocks as it is in this case. People often get upset with economists for assigning a dollar figure to a human life (or the quality of ongoing life), but as I’ve pointed out before, all of us involved in making public policy (which is everyone who votes), has no choice but to make such tradeoffs. Those of us who are neither economists nor in a formal policy position often have the luxury of making implicit decisions and avoiding talking or even thinking about this uncomfortable topic. We reduce the decisions to tidy, sweeping statements, e.g. “we can’t let GM crash and burn and take all those jobs!” or “we can’t bail out an industry that will only squander the money the way they’ve thrown away almost every other opportunity for decades”, never saying explicitly that we’re willing to spend $X per job saved, but not $X+Y.

When actual human lives are on the line, such as when the conversation turns to “how much should we be willing to spend to restore and protect New Orleans, given that it has a bleak future thanks to geological factors and climate chaos?”, we become all the more dogmatic and even less inclined to discuss those unthinkable issues and attempt to reach a rational conclusion. Even referring to this process with the word “rational” can raise blood pressure among some; I have the angry e-mail to prove it.

But this is the world we’ve created, thanks to a long list of mistakes and sins we’ve committed against ourselves and our children. Car company mismanagement, peak oil, climate chaos, excessive zeal for deregulating everything in sight until the entire US financial system is on the brink–we’re certainly good at painting ourselves into some tight and nasty corners. Now we get to find out if we can be adult enough to make sober and correct decisions about how to rescue ourselves.

And yes, you should go read the rest of Jim’s post, as he touches on energy and the banking crisis, with a nod to the ultimate monster under our bed, deflation.

[1] The difference is that pundits are paid for their opinions and typically don’t work in their Star Trek footie PJ’s.

[2] This includes the blogosphere, talking head shows (especially on the cable channels), talk radio, and print media.

Thanks to some ongoing research, mentioned below, the relationship between water and global warming is coming into sharper focus. Sadly for us, the picture we’re seeing as layers of uncertainty are peeled away is nothing to be cheerful about.

I’ve mentioned many times that the primary, near-term human impact of global warming will not be some ridiculously overblown instant climate catastrophe, as depicted in The Day After Tomorrow, or even swamped coastal cities (but that iconic danger has also taken a new turn, as one source below points out). Rather, we’ll see something much more subtle but every bit as dangerous: Shifts in precipitation patterns and temperatures that lead to some densely populated areas having much less water for drinking, crop irrigation, sanitation, and electricity generation. The two main mechanisms at work are as simple as they are devastating:

• Less rainfall in some areas causes drought conditions. (I did say these were simple.) The US West and Southeast and Australia, among other areas, are already reeling from years-long droughts, with no relief in sight.
• Less snowfall in some mountain areas, and the snow that does fall melting quicker thanks to higher temperatures, means that many areas will have much less water from normal runoff of melt water during summer months. This further magnifies the drought conditions and reduces the amount of water we can tap for cooling thermoelectric generation (fossil fuels plus nuclear), which today accounts for roughly 40% of the freshwater draw in the US. It also reduces the amount of electricity we can generate with hydroelectric plants.

But the water/global warming relationship is more complex than that. Let me cite three recent articles as examples of how much we’re still learning about the role of water in our global climate:

Melting ice now main driver of rising sea levels: study:

Runoff from ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland along with melting mountain glaciers have replaced expanding oceans as the main driver of rising sea levels, according to a new study.

The rate at which the global ocean water mark rises could have a devastating impact on hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying areas around the world.

Earlier research had shown that sea levels crept up and average of 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inches) per year from 1993 to 2003.

More than half of that increase came from a process called thermal expansion whereby the ocean gains in mass as climate change pushes global temperatures upward.

The other half, climate scientists calculated, was caused by land ice, especially dwindling glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and Andes.

The new study, drawing on data from two new observational systems, shows that thermal expansion — which is cyclical over periods measured in decades — essentially stopped after 2003.

But sea levels continued to rise, though at the slightly diminished rate of 2.5 millimetres (0.1 inches) per year.

Which left scientists wondering: if the water had stopped expanding, what was now driving the continuing elevation of the world’s oceans?

The answer, it turns out, are the only two masses of ice on Earth big enough to qualify as ice sheets: Greenland and Antarctica. Both are up to three kilometres (two miles) thick, and Greenland — the smaller of the two — is about the size of Mexico.

“During the last decade, Antarctica and Greenland only contributed about 0.5 mm (0.02 inches) per year to rising sea levels whereas today it is about 1.0 mm (0.04 inches) per year,” said Anny Cazenave, a scientist at France’s National Centre for Space Studies and lead author of the paper.

Water vapor confirmed as major player in climate change:

Water vapor is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.

Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically. The research team used novel data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to measure precisely the humidity throughout the lowest 10 miles of the atmosphere. That information was combined with global observations of shifts in temperature, allowing researchers to build a comprehensive picture of the interplay between water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmosphere-warming gases. The NASA-funded research was published recently in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.

“Everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, then warming will result,” Dessler said. “So the real question is, how much warming?”

The answer can be found by estimating the magnitude of water vapor feedback. Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air. Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle.

Water vapor feedback can also amplify the warming effect of other greenhouse gases, such that the warming brought about by increased carbon dioxide allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere.

“The difference in an atmosphere with a strong water vapor feedback and one with a weak feedback is enormous,” Dessler said.

Study Examines Effects of Global Warming on Oceans:

Polar ice is part of a positive feedback loop that exacerbates climate changes. As temperature increases, ice melts. Since ice is white, Arctic melting decreases the reflectivity of the Earth. As a result, more solar radiation gets absorbed, further increasing temperatures and perpetuating the cycle. The opposite is true for temperature decreases.

According to the study, a new trend in Arctic melting is affecting the Atlantic Ocean. The primary change has been an abnormally large influx of water originating from the Pacific and traveling through the Arctic.

Water in the Pacific Ocean is less salty than water in the Atlantic. Approximately once every decade, some water from the Pacific travels through the Arctic and spills into the Atlantic.

However, in 1989, the freshwater infusion was more powerful than expected. Proposing that greenhouse gases were the main cause of this anomaly, Greene said, “Greenhouse gases are contributing to more fresh water in the Arctic Ocean [since global warming can lead to] greater precipitation, runoff, melting tundra and melting ice.”

The study identified two major symptoms of this change: a dramatic movement in the oceanic biosphere and a “regime shift” in the composition of Atlantic water.

The 1999 freshwater infusion had some peculiar characteristics. In May of that year, specimen of Neodenticula seminae, a species of boreal plankton, were detected in the Atlantic Ocean. N. seminae had been absent from the northern Atlantic fossil record for 800,000 years. However, since its discovery, the species has proliferated along the Eastern seaboard.

…

Since the water remains stratified for longer, the Atlantic growing season has been extended. The study observed a recent surge in copepods, one of the main predators of phytoplankton.

However, not all species have benefited from this transition. The study hypothesized that the infusion of fresh Arctic water has played a role in the dramatic fall in cod stocks in the northwest Atlantic.

The study also discussed the effects of the regime shift on the global oceanic conveyor belt. Approximately 10 years ago, scientists seriously discussed the possibility of an extreme disruption in NADW possibly halting global heat redistribution. However, the study reported, “results from more recent climate change models have downplayed the likelihood of this scenario, at least in the near future … NADW formation and the global ocean’s [conveyor belt] are likely safe from abrupt change during the 21st century.”

However, Greene is cautiously optimistic. “A great reduction or even a complete shutting down of NADW formation [are] real possibilities in the coming centuries … change would likely be quite abrupt.”

In spite of the powerful implications of the study, Greene warned strongly against taking the study for more than it was worth. He criticized several publications for distorting or sensationalizing the point of the paper.

You can decide for yourself just how much good news or bad news is in these and similar news items regarding global warming, but the one inescapable conclusion I draw from them is that we’re continuing to tweak (or jostle or kick, depending on one’s views) our planet’s biosphere at a terrifying rate, given the nature of the discoveries we’re still making. Seems like something we should stop doing, doesn’t it?

I’ve just started reading Chris Wood’s Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America. While I can’t provide a full review based on just the first two chapters, it seems to be a very good treatment of the topic for a mainstream audience.

Frequent readers of TCOE know that whenever I talk about my personal short list of must-read authors, Bill McKibben is always right at the top. Well, he’s at it again, this time with a piece in Mother Jones, The Most Important Number on Earth:

Sooner or later, you have to draw a line. We’ve spent the last 20 years in the opening scenes of what historians will one day call the Global Warming Era—the preamble to the biggest drama that humans have ever staged, the overture that hints at the themes that will follow for centuries to come. But none of the notes have resolved, none of the story lines yet come into clear view. And that’s largely because until recently we didn’t know quite where we were. From the moment in 1988 when a nasa scientist named James Hansen told Congress that burning coal and gas and oil was warming the earth, we’ve struggled to absorb this one truth: The central fact of our economic lives (the ubiquitous fossil fuel that developed the developed world) is wrecking the central fact of our physical lives (the stable climate and sea level on which civilization rests). For a while, and much longer in the US than elsewhere, we battled over whether this was true. But warm year succeeded warm year and that fight began to subside. Instead, the real question became, is this a future peril, the kind of thing you take out a reasonably priced insurance policy to guard against? Or is it the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else to deal with? Will Hitler be happy with the Sudetenland, or is the world going to spend every cent it has, not to mention tens of millions of lives, fighting him off? Trouble, or TROUBLE? These last 12 months, we’ve found out.

It was September 2007 that the tide began to turn. Every summer Arctic sea ice melts, and every fall it refreezes. The amount of open water has been steadily increasing for three decades, a percent or two every year—it’s been going at about the pace that the hairline recedes on a middle-aged man. It was worrisome, and scientists said all the summer ice could be gone by 2070 or so, which is an eyeblink in geologic time but an eternity in politician time. In late summer of last year, though, the melt turned into a rout—it was like those stories of people whose hair turns gray overnight. An area the size of Colorado was disappearing every week; the Northwest Passage was staying wide open all September, for the first time in history. Before long the Arctic night mercifully descended and the ice began to refreeze, but scientists were using words like “astounding.” They were recalculating—by one nasa scientist’s estimate the summer Arctic might now be free of ice by 2012. Which in politician years is “beginning of my second term.”

The key phrase, really, was “tipping point.” As in “I’d say we are reaching a tipping point or are past it for the ice. This is a strong indication that there is an amplifying mechanism here.” That’s Pål Prestrud of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo. Or this, from Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado: “When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out…I think there is some evidence that we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region.”

“Tipping point” is not, in this context, an idle buzzword. It means that the physical world is taking over the process that humans began. We poured carbon into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat; that excess heat began to melt ice. When that ice was melted, there was less white up north to reflect the sun’s rays back out to space, and more blue ocean to absorb them. Events began to feed upon themselves. And in the course of the last year, we’ve seen the same thing happening in other systems. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report showing that 2007 had seen a sudden and dramatic surge in the amount of methane, another heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere. Apparently, one reason is that when we burned all that fossil fuel and began raising the temperature, we also started melting the permafrost—melting eight times more of it in some places over two decades than had thawed for the previous 1,000 years. And as that frozen soil thaws, it releases methane; enough of it now bubbles out to make “hot spots” in lakes and ponds that don’t freeze during the deepest part of the Siberian winter. The more methane, the more heat, the more methane. Wash, rinse, repeat.

…

And we have a number—350. The most important number on earth. If the Internet has a cosmic purpose, this could be it—to take that number and spread it everywhere on the planet, so that everyone, even if they knew little else about climate change, understood that it represented a kind of safety, a bulwark against the monsoon turning erratic, the sea rising over their fields, the mosquito spreading up their mountain.

I’m part of a group of people calling ourselves 350.org. Our goal is simple—to try to get people everywhere to spread that number. We’ve started finding musicians and artists, athletes and video makers, and most of all activists, the kinds of people who are working to save watersheds or babies, or to educate girls or to block dams, or any of the other thousand lovely things that won’t happen if we allow the basic physical stability of the planet to come unglued. We need a lot of noise, and we need it fast, in the scant months—14 now—before the world meets in Copenhagen next December to draw up a new climate treaty. Because one clear implication of 350 is that that treaty is our last real chance to get it right. If we don’t, then all we’ll be dealing with is the consequences. Once the ocean really starts to rise, dike building is pretty much the only project.

It’s not clear if a vocal world citizenry will be enough to beat inertia and vested interest. If 350 emerges as the clear bar for success or failure, then the odds of the international community taking effective action increase, though the odds are still long. Still, these are the lines it is our turn to speak. To be human in 2008 is to rise in defense of the planet we have known and the civilization it has spawned.

I’ve quoted just the first and last grafs here. Please go read the whole thing. You can thank me later.

The 350 number is, of course, 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. I’ve talked about this number repeatedly on this site, and how James Hansen (also on the must-read list) is convinced it is “the” magic number for CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, even though we’re currently at about 385 ppm and growing. See my post from yesterday, Document alert: Target Atmospheric CO2, for a brief excerpt from the latest paper on the topic from Hansen and his colleagues, plus links to the paper and its supplementary material.

Related posts on the general topic of 350 ppm and this latest work from Hansen, et al.:

• 350.org
• NASA’s James Hansen, et al, on what’s needed to avoid a total ice-melt on Earth
• Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al

Some other items related to the general notion of what we’re doing to the planet, and, therefore, ourselves, by pouring 27 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year:

Southern Ocean close to acid tipping point:

Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought.

Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and CSIRO looked at seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of an important chemical compound, carbonate, in the Southern Ocean.

The results, published in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, show that these seasonal changes will actually amplify the effects of human carbon dioxide emissions on ocean acidity, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by 30 years.

…

Once the acidity of the Southern Ocean reaches a certain level, the shells of these and other calcareous marine creatures will start to dissolve.

“That’s a really bad point to get to,” says McNeil. “After that point, we can’t go back unless we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere.”

This so-called ‘tipping point’ of acidification had been predicted to occur when atmospheric CO2 levels hit 550 parts per million, around the year 2060.

However, the new research shows levels of the carbonate that these creatures need to build and maintain their shells drops naturally in winter, due to natural variations in factors such as ocean temperature, currents and mixing, and pH.

This means the tipping point is likely to be reached at far lower atmospheric CO2 levels - around 450 ppm, says McNeil, which also happens to be the target set by the IPCC for stabilisation of CO2 emissions.

Translation: Even if we’re “lucky” and the magic 350 number is too low, we could still wind up dealing a devastating blow to the oceanic food chain.

(The paper mentioned above doesn’t seem to be online yet.)

The Southwest in the Anthropocene:

Until recently, natural landscapes varied as droughts came and went, warm years were followed by cold years and so on. Now, though, the actions of people have widened the parameters of this natural change, with potentially troubling results in places like the Southwest.

That’s what William deBuys, an author and conservationist who has spent decades working in and writing about the region, says in the current issue of Rangelands, a publication of the Society for Range Management. (You can download a pdf of his essay here.)

In particular he is talking about the mountains and rangelands of New Mexico. Always shaped by fire, lately they have been shaped by fire suppression. Always modified by grazing elk and other animals, now they are threatened by overgrazing of livestock. Always vulnerable to drought, now they are stricken by drought and heat together. And the heat is not the heat of a normal warm year, it is the heat of human-induced climate change, he says.

Translation: When you jostle a complex system (like Earth’s biosphere), it can change its behavior drastically, often in extremely inconvenient ways.

Global Warming Predicted To Hasten Carbon Release From Peat Bogs:

Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.

Such an atmospheric release of even a small percentage of the carbon locked away in the world’s peat bogs would dwarf emissions of manmade carbon, scientists at Harvard University, Worcester State College, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology write in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Our modeling suggests that higher temperatures could cause water tables to drop substantially, causing more peat to dry and decompose,” says Paul R. Moorcroft, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Over several centuries, some 40 percent of carbon could be lost from shallow peat bogs, while the losses could total as much as 86 percent in deep bogs.”

…

Each square meter of a peat bog contains anywhere from a few to many hundreds of kilograms of undecomposed organic matter, for a total of 200 to 450 billion metric tons of carbon sequestered in peat bogs worldwide. This figure is equivalent to up to 65 years’ worth of the world’s current carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning.

“Peat bogs contain vast stores of carbon,” Moorcroft says. “They will likely respond to the expected warming in this century by losing large amounts of carbon during dry periods.”

Translation: Have we pushed the boulder far enough down the hill that gravity will pull it away from us at an ever faster pace, no matter what we do now? No one knows yet with any degree of certainty.

So, what’s the point of this global warming mashup? Is this just another angst-fest, in which we all huddle around our monitors and rock gently, trying to wish all the Bad Things into the corn field? Is it yet another plaintive call to action, which far too few of us will answer?

Honestly, it’s up to you, because, as the saying goes: It is what it is. Scientists continue to peel back the layers of uncertainty around some of the most interesting questions in climate science, and the revelations they’re making are anything but cheering. As I’ve pointed out many times on this site, we’re going through a period when nearly all of the surprises related to global warming are very bad news, and these articles quoted above continue that unnerving trend. More CO2 in the atmosphere means more warming and polar melting, more changes to weather patterns (droughts in some places, floods in others), more threats to the oceans, and creeping ever closer to the ultimate climate tipping point where we’re carried away by unstoppable, self-reinforcing change.

If we choose to remain in denial and continue pouring immense amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, then the biosphere will continue to respond in a way that’s ultimately disastrous for much of life on Earth. The only unknown is how quickly those changes will happen and the exact form they’ll take. As the old saying goes, reality is that which, even when you refuse to believe it, continues to exist. And that may be the least convenient truth of all.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Already In Danger Zone, Revised Theory Shows:

If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today, according to a study published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of 10 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

The authors, who include two Yale scientists, assert that to maintain a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, an optimum CO2 level would be less than 350 ppm — a dramatic change from most previous studies, which suggested a danger level for CO2 is likely to be 450 ppm or higher. Atmospheric CO2 is currently 385 parts per million (ppm) and is increasing by about 2 ppm each year from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and from the burning of forests.

“This work and other recent publications suggest that we have reached CO2 levels that compromise the stability of the polar ice sheets,” said author Mark Pagani, Yale professor of geology and geophysics. “How fast ice sheets and sea level will respond are still poorly understood, but given the potential size of the disaster, I think it’s best not to learn this lesson firsthand.”

The statement is based on improved data on the Earth’s climate history and ongoing observations of change, especially in the polar regions. The authors use evidence of how the Earth responded to past changes of CO2 along with more recent patterns of climate changes to show that atmospheric CO2 has already entered a danger zone.

According to the study, coal is the largest source of atmospheric CO2 and the one that would be most practical to eliminate. Oil resources already may be about half depleted, depending upon the magnitude of undiscovered reserves, and it is still not practical to capture CO2 emerging from vehicle tailpipes, the way it can be with coal-burning facilities, note the scientists. Coal, on the other hand, has larger reserves, and the authors conclude that “the only realistic way to sharply curtail CO2 emissions is phase out coal use except where CO2 is captured and sequestered.”

In their model, with coal emissions phased out between 2010 and 2030, atmospheric CO2 would peak at 400-425 ppm and then slowly decline. The authors maintain that the peak CO2 level reached would depend on the accuracy of oil and gas reserve estimates and whether the most difficult to extract oil and gas is left in the ground.

Accessing the report is a bit convoluted, as it relies on those funky indirect links (i.e. you can’t do the “right click/save target as” trick. The report is here [15-page, 2.1MB PDF], and the supplemental material is here [zip file containing a single PDF, 1.8MB].

You can find the article in the journal it was published in is here (the article is in Volume 2).

When you obsessively read and write about peak oil (and global warming), as I do, it’s very easy to get so close to the topic, so thoroughly cocooned in your own vision of said Big, Scary Event that you don’t just miss big patterns (forests and trees, and all that), but you skip over some details that deserve a bit more discussion. This latter phenomenon came to mind recently in an e-mail exchange I had with Kory Sorrell, a TCOE reader and occasional commenter.

With permission, I’m quoting his observations on peak oil and where we’re collectively heading:

I would suggest that the peak oil debate has shifted a bit. There is little support for the idea that we can increase flow rates (that is what peak oil is about) significantly going forward, certainly not at the rate an extrapolated demand would require.

I believe peak oil theory gets a bit muddled — and folks started talking past one another — because it starts off as a geological concept, but one then has to start adding political (oil is largely a national resource) and economic influences like the export land model or current drops in demand due to the economy or changes in prices due to fluctuating currency valuation to get a more complete picture. Actual flow rates at any one time vary due to a number of causes, but putting this all together, some folks are suggesting we have hit at least Peak Oil Lite - we may not produce much more per/day going forward and this may trail off for a variety of factors, including resource nationalism, geological constraints, (eventual) decreases in demand. Whether this is good or not, I don’t know. I’ve seen suggestions that, all considered, it’s better to hit an earlier constraint, as we can deal with it sooner and face unremitting geological constraint later — in other words, at least political constraints can be mitigated, whereas there’s just no persuading the earth to yield more than it can.

Having read my share of peak oil books, articles and websites, I now focus more on (1) decline rates, since this informs our pace of adaptation — that’s why this upcoming IEA report is a Monster. One way or another, we will adapt, and the Doomsday scenarios are hardly inevitable, though I suspect we may have some unpleasant times, especially if we are looking at rapid decline scenarios. (I have a hunch that this early report will be qualified in several ways, but we’ll see). (2) The second thing I now focus on, already indirectly touched on, is forms of adaptation. The Hirsch Report is a great place to start, but that is primarily an assessment of mitigation through liquid fuels substitution (CTL, etc.). I think there is also a tremendous amount of change in the offing in terms of behavior — all the sorts of things Simmons, for example, suggests: telecommuting, carpooling, 4-day work week, moving closer to work, etc. — but also other changes that include reducing the number of cars on the road (China is already doing this in at least two ways: encouraging electric motorscooters (there are some 15 million in use now, I believe) and taking cars off the road by license plate number (800,000 per day)). And of course this is in addition to the just over the horizon gradual replacement of our fleet with much more efficient ICE cars and then all electrics. To put it much more briefly, we are going to rapidly diversify and electrify our transport sector to use less oil; the question is, how quickly can we start outrunning depletion? While the numbers are daunting — how do we make up for a 5% a year reduction (4-4.5 mbd)? — this is spread out over a lot of economies. Assuming that since the US has to make up 25% of that (since the US uses 25%), that is 1.125 mbd. Hard, maybe; impossible, no. Note in the Hirsch Report that 70% of all driving is /discretionary/:

In the short run, much of the burden of adjustment will likely be borne by decreases in consumption from discretionary decisions, since 67 percent of personal automobile travel and nearly 50 percent of airplane travel are discretionary.32

page 24, http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

(In other words, to echo a recent article I read elsewhere, we’ll have to do something “radical” to conserve oil: stay home.)

To draw this to a point, I would invite responses to the following. As the above paragraph suggests, I have a somewhat middle of the road view of what’s in front of us. I think we really need to steel ourselves for some very difficult and sobering times, but I see Martenson’s “the next 20 years” to be a bottleneck, on the other side of which we may have genuine progress and a future worth fighting for. In other words, I do not see an inevitable Long Descent to a world of ever-less-energy, but a painful travail opening on to a lush energy future. This is a future with very little coal, lots of renewables and 4th generation nuclear power (see Kirk Sorenson’s website). It is also a world where we are coming down from our peak population (fast forward that population bulge Martenson depicts in the Crash Course). Obviously, we have plenty of opportunity to ruin this melioristic vision, have had plenty such opportunities already (the usual reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis will do), and will likely make this all a lot harder than is necessary. But even tempered thus, it seems to me that this “20 years from now” is entirely possible, maybe likely, and in any case is the future we should work for.

My take on this:

• I think we definitely tend to talk past each other in this debate, and part of the reason is the failure by people in different parts of the debate to ignore certain parts of the big picture. KS is right that what constitutes or triggers peak oil is far more complex than simply geology. I’ve made this point perhaps a billion times on this site, but given how seldom it’s recognized online (except in the most perfunctory way and then ignored),
• I’m firmly in the camp that says the sooner we hit peak oil for above ground reasons, the better. That leaves more carbon in the ground, where it can’t contribute to global warming, and it also leaves us more of a supply buffer for future years, in case we can’t find the political spine to transition away from oil as quickly as we “should”.
• The IEA report, which is due next week and has already been the subject of much press leakage (e.g. Highlights of the IEA report), will indeed be a Monster–at least for those of us who pay attention to such things. I fear that between mainstream consumers who’ve never heard of the IEA and some of their elected representatives[1], this will be just one more Monster that gets swept under the bed, at least in the short term. I will have more to say on the IEA report in time.
• We will indeed make very large changes in our behavior, but only after we’re sufficiently forced by economics to do so.[2] The tiny minority of people who lead significantly greener, less oil-dependent lifestyles will be a sliver of the market until either the free market or our elected representatives raise the cost of living a gray life.
• The key point in Sorrel’s e-mail, and the part that moved me to get his permission to post it, is his observation about how we’re in for some very tough times, but we’re not necessarily making a monotonic descent in terms of the quality of life. This is the crucial dividing line between the ever gleeful doomers and those of us who recognize the reality and seriousness of peak oil, but temper that with the knowledge of humanity’s ability to respond to a crisis. It’s also the point that triggers the bizarre e-mail I get from people who accuse me of being nothing more than the latest economist villain straight out of central casting, someone who thinks we can sit back, ignore peak oil and global warming and everything else so many fret about, and watch as the magic and glorious market solves our problems.

  Put another way, on the spectrum of views about peak oil, we have the peak oil deniers at the far right. Just to the left of them is a mix of camps, including those who think that peak oil will only happen 50 or 75 years from now, as well as those who think the rate of decline in production will be so gradual that natural market adjustments will gently ease us out of oil consumption without so much as mussing our hair.

  Further left is my crowd–the “peak oil is real, imminent, and a very serious problem” camp.

  Far to my left, in the “here be dragons” part of the map, are the doomers.

  I’m not entirely sure where one group should be placed, the people who think “the” problem we face is global warming and that peak oil is therefore a blessing because it will constrain our emissions. They probably belong to my right, between me and that mix of people who think peak oil is real but won’t be a major problem for a variety of reasons. This group, which is almost entirely devoted and passionate environmentalists, is definitely worth paying attention to, however, as they present a perfect example of why viewing such vast and complex problems as peak oil or global warming as standalone issues is so dangerous. Once again, blind men, meet the elephant.

Thanks to Kory Sorrell for the e-mail and permission to reproduce it.

[1] I note, with a mixture of resignation and horror, that in this week’s elections everyone’s favorite Senator, James “global warming is the greatest hoax in the history of mankind” Inhofe of Oklahoma, was returned to office via 56.7% of the popular vote.

[2] Regulation and legislation fall under economics, as the cost of violating the law and being caught and punished offsets all or part of the gains from cheating.