The Idiot Assumptions Of Humankind

I've been reading Curt Stager's book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth. Stager sets the stage by introducing two concepts his readers are probably unfamiliar with, deep time and the Anthropocene. The former is just another way of saying geological time. Stager needs his readers to understand the geological epochs of the Cenozoic (65 million years ago to the present, i.e. the Paleocene, the Eocene and on through to the current Holocene) in order to introduce the Anthropocene, the as yet undefined epoch recognizing the predominance of human influence on the Earth's natural systems (the climate, the oceans, the carbon cycle, etc.).

Drawing on the work of M. F. Loutre and A. Berger (below), and climatologist David Archer, Stager comes to the startling conclusion that carbon pollution will postpone the next Ice Age, which is due about 50,000 years from now. Once resident in the atmosphere, about 25% of the extra CO₂ stays there a long, long time, and this residual amount only very slowly dissipates over time (measured in parts-per-million by volume, ppmv). We are at 392 ppmv of CO₂ in the atmosphere as of July, 2011, which is about 140% of pre-industrial levels.

David Archer, a leading climate researcher who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a new book that looks at carbon dioxide's "long tail" and what it means for changes on Earth in the future.

If the world continues its heavy use of coal over the next couple of hundred years until it's essentially used up, it would take several centuries more for the oceans to absorb about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. In those centuries, there would be a "climate storm" that Archer says would be significantly worse than the forecast from now to 2100.

The remaining carbon dioxide — the long tail — would stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, leaving a warmer climate. About 10 percent of it would still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years, Archer wrote in "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate."

Figure 1 from David Archer's Fate Of fossil fuel CO2 over geologic time. "Model pCO2 results (ppmv) to the year 100,000 A.D. Results (left) neglecting and (right) including the ocean temperature feedback ... silicate weathering runs go all the way to 100 kyr. Top is for 300 Gtons C (Gt C) anthropogenic emissions, followed by 1000, 2000, and 5000 Gtons." Gton = gigaton (1 billion tons) and kyr = thouands of years.

I don't want to get too technical, but heating of the Earth's surface by long-lived CO₂ in the atmosphere (measured in watts per square meter, or watts/m^-2) would overwhelm the cooling effects of the Milankovitch Cycles which cause the Ice Ages (below).

Summer solar insolation (in watts/m^-2) at 65 degrees north latitude. From Future Climatic Changes: Are We Entering An Exceptionally Long Interglacial? by Loutre and Berger. An interglacial is the warm period between the Ice Ages of the last 2-3 million years. The transition from hunting & gathering to modern civilizations occurred during the current warm period. From the abstract: "Most of the natural scenarios indicate that: (i) the climate is likely to experience a long lasting (50 kyr) interglacial; (ii) the next glacial maximum is expected to be most intense at around 100 kyr after present (AP), with a likely interstadial at 60 kyr AP; and (iii) after 100 kyr AP continental ice rapidly melts, leading to an ice volume minimum 20 kyr later. However, the amplitude and, to a lesser extent, the timing of future climatic changes depend on the CO2 scenario and on the initial conditions related to the assumed present-day ice volume. According to our modelling experiments, man’s activities over the next centuries may significantly affect the ice-sheet’s behavior for approximately the next 50 kyr. Finally, the existence of thresholds in CO2 and insolation, earlier shown to be significant for the past, is confirmed to be also important for the future."

The take-away point is this: whether we have an Ice Age 50,000 years after the present (AP), and another one later at about 130,000 years AP, depends almost entirely on how much coal we burn during the current century! You can see why the future has been dubbed the Anthropocene. You would think, then, that it would behoove us to understand as far as possible how much technically, economically recoverable coal there is left to burn, and plan accordingly.

But, no! Climate scientists never consider this question. They merely accept the coal reserves numbers of the World Energy Council (WEC), if they bother to wonder about it at all. Curt Stager never even brings the subject up. I posted on this topic in Coal, Climate And Confusion (December, 2010). As far as I am concerned, there is an open question about "peak coal" which needs to be addressed by the scientific community. Also see my more recent post Peak Coal This Year?

When I read these climate books, and I've read many, I am always astonished that climate scientists are unwilling to do their homework on such an elementary question affecting everything they write. I was in the library the other day browsing the new book shelves when I came across paleoclimatologist Richard Alley's new book Earth: The Operator's Manual. Hope abounds in this popular presentation. As I always do, I looked in the index to see what Alley might have to say about "peak oil". And it was mentioned! Right there on pages 54-57. In the end, Alley dismissed the whole subject in one paragraph.

However, South Africa today makes liquid fuel—oil—from coal at competitive prices. Germany did this during World War II, and scientists at my university (Penn State) have developed ways to make jet fuel from coal. Reasonable arguments can be made that the chemical engineering required to allow one fossil fuel to substitute for another is just not that difficult or expensive, and thus that all fossil fuels should be considered as interchangeable—oil shale and tar sand and coal can be thought in the same way as oil.

So let's look at how much fossil fuel there is, and how rapidly it was made naturally compared to how rapidly we use it...

Stupidity (or obtuseness) on this scale is almost enough to convince me to dismiss all climate scientists as total idiots whom nobody should listen to about anything. I do however trust the research they do within their fields of expertise, and of course the Earth is warming due to CO₂ emissions. Now is not the time to talk about the complexities and economics of coal-to-liquids (CTL) or gas-to-liquids (GTL) conversions, energy returned on energy invested (EROI), problems with oil shale, "light" versus "heavy" oils, and so on. Instead, let me explain to you what Alley did rhetorically.

Alley has two agendas, the first hidden, the second one not, and these are shared by all climate scientists to my knowledge. First, he wants emphasize just how serious the climate problem is. To do so, he must discount the very idea that there may not be enough exploitable fossil fuel left to overwhelm a new Ice Age 50,000 years hence (to take a relevant example). This he accomplishes by reducing all fossil fuels in their many forms to one element in the periodic table—carbon—and then assuming without further inquiry (as does Stager) that there are thousands of gigatons of carbon (Gt C) in the form of coal (or tar sands, or oil shale) left to burn. Pay no attention to rising oil prices over time. 

Estimates of the total reserve of fossil fuels that might be economical for us to dig up and burn are often in the neighborhood of 4000 Gt C...

Armed with all the carbon his heart desires, Alley is off to the races. Alley's other not-so-hidden agenda is to spend most of the last half of his book talking up solar, wind, geothermal and whatever else he can think of that might replace all the fossil fuel energy we use today. Serious technical difficulties (e.g. providing base load power, storing energy harvested from the the sun) are glossed over, just as "peak oil" was. As usual, there's a lot of hand-waving.  (See Obama energy secretary Steven  Chu.)  The term "base load" appears once in Google's online edition of Alley's book. Yet that is why humankind found coal to be indispensable in the 20th century! And still finds it so today.  See China.

Alley just assumes that we humans will eventually switch to clean, renewable energy sources in the future, although there is no indication whatsoever at present that we are willing or able to do so. Presumably, we'll still have plenty of carbon (coal, tar sands, oil shale) left to burn when we do make the switch, but we will have wised-up by then. How this profound change in the human species will actually happen he doesn't say.

But in the deepest sense, all the idiot assumptions of humankind are displayed in the work of climate scientists like Alley, Stager and all the others I've read. And yes, it's all about The Hope. Economic progress is inevitable, irreversible and endless. Technology solves all problems. When push comes to shove, humans will make wise decisions about their future, following some version of the Precautionary Principle. The Earth can support seven billion people, with an extra billion being added every 11 years or so. And so on. See my post Learning From The Aquacalypse.

And one more thing. Stager is worried about how those Ice Ages might affect people 50,000 or 130,000 years from now. Maybe global warming is a good thing if you look way down the road. I've got news for you, Curt. There won't be any human beings on the Earth 50,000 years from now to witness the advent of a new Ice Age, or alternatively, nothing at all. At least not at the rate we're going.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Bonus Video — Conversations With "Great" Minds. Thom Hartmann talks to Curt Stager.

 

Comments

[Alexander Ač]

Excellent post!!

Being authority in one scientific field almost guarantees stupidity in other field (check climate scepticism of Bob Hirsch, for instance).

Paradoxically, people acknowledging climate change AND peak oil at the same time are usually NOT scientist, not the best one in their fields...

Yeah, nevermind, human ingenuity is endless... or is it human stupidity?

Cheers.

Alex