Guest post by Steven Goddard
The UK Met Office forecast last Autumn “the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. ” We have now passed the 2/3 mark of the meteorological winter, and it is time for another report card to send home. Yesterday’s press release was titled “Wintry start to February” which stated “So far, the UK winter has been the coldest for over a decade” and “Met Office forecasters expect the cold theme to the weather to continue well into next week with the chance of further snow.”
The UK is expecting the heaviest snow in about 20 years tomorrow. “Snow and freezing weather threaten to shut down Britain Arctic blizzards are set to cause a national shutdown on Monday as forecasters warn of the most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years.” “Now is the time you’d expect to see the daffodils coming out but we’re not expecting them for two or three weeks at best if it warms up.“
So why is this important? Climate is not weather, after all. The Met Office is one of the most vocal advocates of human induced global warming, and they have gotten into a consistent pattern of warm seasonal forecasts which seemingly fall in line with that belief system. Is it possible that their forecasts are unduly influenced by preconceived notions about the climate? It is worth remembering that London had it’s first October snow in 70 years this past autumn.
Or perhaps they know exactly what they are doing, and are just having a several year run of extremely bad luck with their long term forecasting.
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evanjones (17:39:13) :
“nothing catastrophic may occur, other than our continued dependencies on finite fossil fuels, more wars in the Middle East and perhaps even World War III…all over control of quickly diminishing reservoirs of oil and natural gas.”
I really doubt that we are running out of or even short of fossil fuels.
You’re doubts are well placed. We know that oil fields deplete according to Hubbert’s Peak. But ‘peak oil’ is not ‘no oil’. The oil runs out the same way it ran in, roughly on a bell curve. It took 100 years to get here, it will take 100 to run back down.
Coal is a 250 to 400 year resource (depending on what numbers you assume). Nuclear from Uranium on land is about 10,000 years. Add Thorium and it’s 30,000 years (roughly). Add in U from sea water (proven to work economically enough) and the lifetime is ‘forever’. As much as is needed to power the entire world erodes into the ocean each year, and then some. We run out of energy when we run out of planet.
But your point was well made: What is a ‘resource’ changes with price and technology. Canadian tar sands were not a ‘resource’ 50 years ago, now they are. U.S. oil shale holds a Trillion+ bbl of oil, but is not counted as a resource when prices are below about $100/bbl. So much natural gas has been found in N. America that the price has been pushed down from $15 to less than $5 (during a very cold winter when demand is up!)
Energy is a ‘red herring’.
To posit wars or even world wars over dwindling resources is contrary to all postmodern (and even modern) experience.
As long as trade exists, there is no need for ‘resource wars’. As technologies have improved, the ‘utility’ of a resource war has plunged.
Why go to war for oil when synthetic fuels can be made from coal or garbage at about $3/U.S.gallon? (NOT a hypothetical, real companies are doing this today.) Why fight for Uranium when it is available from sea water for about $150/lb (cheap, just not as cheap as some land based mines). Why fight over copper when you can buy it for a couple of $$/lb ?
Yet people like to be scared and are fond of ‘running out’ fantasies.
You can tell them all day that nuclear power and limestone mean no limit to building materials, ever. That desalinization means no shortage of fresh water, ever. That nitrogen fertilizers are made from air and that Aluminium is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust (or even that ‘banded iron’ deposits blanket the world). Add the fact that plastics can be made from plants (corn, sugarcane, whatever) and even from garbage (oil is not needed for ‘petrochemicals’ nor plastics; it’s just a cheap source) and glass is sand, melted; and you get a dull stare in return.
Then point out that these resources let you make greenhouses and aquaculture facilities and they will say it’s not practical. (It is being done on several islands… Even Saudi Arabia has desalinizers making fresh water for crops. Heck, visit Disney World, go to The Land exhibit. The produce grown there is served in the hotels.) It is not only practical, it is being done commercially in many countries today. It is just so ordinary that it is not news.
So why are so many folks still enamored of Malthus and the 4 horseman? I can only assume it is some fundamental psychological trait (defect?) in some large percentage of the human race. A holdover from 10,000 years ago when it led people to pack away food for winter and fight over dirt, because then there was no technological revolution to light a better way.
There is no shortage of energy, and never will be.
There is no shortage of ‘stuff’, and never will be.
(All the mined stuff is still on the planet…)
There is no shortage of food, and never needs to be.
There is no shortage of fresh clean water, and never needs to be.
There is a shortage of the will and vision to use known proven technologies to fix any problems with access to these things; but those are political problems, not technical and not physical.
The only problems are with the politicians.
Pat (17:56:04) : Forgive my spelling. There is an interface problem between the keyaboard and chair.
In computer support departments this is called a “Pibkac Error” for Problem Is Between Keyboard And Chair” 😉
Or Layer 8 error, or ID-10t error.
OT: Roger Pielke Sr has an interesting post right now. A follow up on his Litmus Test for Global Warming.
Roger Sowell (18:28:14) : Our power generation primarily will be by natural gas, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) for a few years, IMHO. Then the CCS requirement will likely disappear when the cooling occurs
Primarily, yes. We have lots of each already built, they are very economical and very dispatchable. Those facilities will be with us for decades to come.
But there will be an ever growing component of wind, solar, and wave / tide. There are technologies either shipping or in final stages prior to shipping in all those areas that are surprisingly economical.
Wind is nearing competitive with coal and natural gas (just not as ‘dispatchable’) in the American west ‘wind corridor’ north of Texas, while solar is highly competitive for summer peak demand (which is when places like California need peak power supplements!) Solar thermal isn’t talked about much but is highly competitive for summer peak A/C demand. A recent announcement projected a 5 cents / kWhr rate from a thin film solar panel maker. Watch this space…
Wave power is much more reliable and dispatchable and is entering production now (US Navy has a field going in in Hawaii). There are a couple of companies putting in their first production fields of these devices in Europe. These would be ideal for England. IIRC a 100 x 100 km field of these off shore would power all of England. (One presume proportional areas for other states in the U.K.)
THE big problem, though, is not with ‘power’ in general (not electric power) but with ‘motor fuels’. 95% or so of the vehicle fleet runs on petroleum fuels. Electrons don’t help. Converting the fleet to non-petroleum is a 15 to 20 year problem. Electric cars are ‘copper limited’ so unless you can convince Chile or Indonesia to strip mine at a prodigious rate, the production of new cars will take decades. So you need to create the fuels.
The best / cheapest / cleanest / fastest solution is coal to liquids and gas to liquids. Yes, you can make liquid fuels from trash, plants, any carbon source, but some fuels are cheaper than others and coal is very cheap. This is the place where the AGW agenda hobbles things. Instead of $2/gallon coal derived fuels, you get $5 or more fuels… or a mandate to go buy a new car…
Then there is the dark horse candidate of algae. At least 2 companies in this space are entering production. We will see if their projections hold up in real life! While most biomass fuels take very significant areas (cellulosic would take about a 100 x 1000 mile area minimum for the U.S.A.!) if done with algae, that drops to about 100 x 100 miles. IFF yields can be held high as in a laboratory setting…
The most dramatic ‘take away’ from this, though, is that we have a real embarrassment of riches in both electric power sources and motor fuels. There are at least as many more that I’ve not listed here. Many of the described sources (algae, solar thermal, solar electric, coal, nuclear, waves) could power the whole place from a relatively small area. There really is no shortage of power available to us, should we chose to use it.
Pat (20:06:01) :
Roger, I believe I share your view on peak oil too. My post earlier relates to the inefficient extraction of oil at some sites, leaving much of it behind, as you suggest.
It makes me chuckle when someone says big oil is blocking progress on carbon capture & sequestration. As of right now they are in need of large amounts of liquid CO2 to extract that very oil in those old fields… The quantity needed is prohibitive, unless of course “cap and trade” made it cheaper …
I don’t believe current nuclear technology is not the way forward either, I understand there isn’t enough of the fuel if the world switched.
This is an artifact of the definition of a ‘resource’. U was about $40/lb not too long ago. At that price most mines are not economical, so most of the U is ‘not a resource’. At about $150 / lb the quantity of U available is functionally unlimited (sea water extraction is economical). A chunk of U about the size of a small Tootsie Roll has the same energy as a barrel of oil, so clearly $150/lb is very competitive with oil…
The problems with nuclear are mostly: 1) dealing with spent fuel and other contaminated junk. 2) Making passively safe designs like pebble bed that can’t “go Chernoble” on you…
You could add a 3) dealing with rampant costs, but that doesn’t hold for all countries…
Adam Sullivan (21:26:52) : Peak Oil was the fashionable worry when Oil was in a bull market and the need existed to bring more speculators in to push prices higher. So we got up to about $150/bl at which point several things happened –
Basically, demand dropped a little bit and supply went up a little bit. For a commodity that is very price in-elastic (ie. you gotta buy food and price won’t stop you, unlike buying a new sport coat) a small change in the balance causes ‘glut’ instead of ‘shortage’ and the price collapses.
And peak oil is much more than a fashion. It is a very real physical statement of fact. But it took us about 100 years to reach peak, so the top of this production curve is very broad and flat. We will be on it for about a decade before production drops off enough to prove it.
#3 is the key thing […] That will give the oil sheiks and speculators the opportunity to push the price to a higher threshold once the market recovers (it will and they will).
Your speculation on speculators is a bit ill formed. It is the price-inelastic nature of oil that causes the price swings, in both directions. Oil futures are a physical delivery market. If you don’t clear your trade (sell the contract to someone who wants the oil), you must take delivery of the oil and do something with it. At the end of the day (or month) a speculator can only shift the price if they have large tanks to store oil… millions of barrels worth… (Everyone blamed speculators for the rise, but somehow not for the collapse of prices when several oil trading houses when out of business…) Far larger was the impact of China adding massive demand, then cutting off buying during the Olympics.
Oil has always been thus. See the history of the Texas Railroad Commission. It pre-dates OPEC and is the model…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Railroad_Commission
IOW, the economic scare behind Peak Oil pales in terms of total economic impact when compared to Peak Regulation.
Absolutely. Peak Oil is a decade long slow adjustment process to start shifting to known, proven, economical alternatives, followed by a 100 year ‘build out’. Regulation is a 10 minute panic fire drill with capricious demands and no clear solutions…
Flanagan (00:25:50) :
Adam: I think your analysis lacks the fact that since 2004, oil consumption largely exceeds its production.
By definition, oil demand equals production (modulo the modest quantity that can go into oil storage, substantially ignorable…)
There has been no significant excess of consumption over production (and indeed can not be: there is not that much storage to have provided the difference!) These are physical quantities.
I think what you meant to say was that demand exceeded supply (even if some of that demand was unrequited …)
Steven Goddard (09:54:51) :
Mick J,
The Telegraph article you quoted states “It is the first time in four attempts that their long range seasonal forecast has been so inaccurate.
This is complete rubbish, as documented here –
Steve, I think you misunderstood! They are bragging that after four progressive attempts they have finally reached this pinnacle of inaccuracy!
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