Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)

The problem with PETM is the apparent 10,000 year period of high temperatures. This article gets it backwards again. The CO2 is easily explained as a consequence of the extreme warming of the Earth. The problem is explaining 10,000 years of hot climate.

We already have evidence of this exact same behavior been repeated every 100,000 years for 1000 years as a consequence of our long orbit through the Sirius cluster. It is important to note that the temperature effect is about the same and should not be considered a coincidence.

My conjecture is that 55,000,000 years ago, our solar system entered the Sirius cluster which contains a rich emitter in the ultra violet and entered a close but unstable orbit around the cluster for 10,000 years until it was flung out on its present far more stable orbit.

This conjecture nicely uses up the available facts and explains the increase in CO2 as a bonus

Global Warming: Our Best Guess Is Likely Wrong

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Global_Warming_Our_Best_Guess_Is_Likely_Wrong_999.html


Based on findings related to oceanic acidity levels during the PETM and on calculations about the cycling of carbon among the oceans, air, plants and soil, Dickens and co-authors Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii and James Zachos of the University of California-Santa Cruz determined that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by about 70 percent during the PETM.

by Staff Writers
Houston TX (SPX) Jul 16, 2009

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.

The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study, which was published online today, contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

During the PETM, for reasons that are still unknown, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly. For this reason, the PETM, which has been identified in hundreds of sediment core samples worldwide, is probably the best ancient climate analogue for present-day Earth.

In addition to rapidly rising levels of atmospheric carbon, global surface temperatures rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by about 7 degrees Celsius - about 13 degrees Fahrenheit - in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.

Many of the findings come from studies of core samples drilled from the deep seafloor over the past two decades. When oceanographers study these samples, they can see changes in the carbon cycle during the PETM.

"You go along a core and everything's the same, the same, the same, and then suddenly you pass this time line and the carbon chemistry is completely different," Dickens said. "This has been documented time and again at sites all over the world."

Based on findings related to oceanic acidity levels during the PETM and on calculations about the cycling of carbon among the oceans, air, plants and soil, Dickens and co-authors Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii and James Zachos of the University of California-Santa Cruz determined that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by about 70 percent during the PETM.

That's significant because it does not represent a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Since the start of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels are believed to have risen by about one-third, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels. If present rates of fossil-fuel consumption continue, the doubling of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels will occur sometime within the next century or two.

Doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is an oft-talked-about threshold, and today's climate models include accepted values for the climate's sensitivity to doubling. Using these accepted values and the PETM carbon data, the researchers found that the models could only explain about half of the warming that Earth experienced 55 million years ago.

The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM. "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models - the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming - caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM."

Fossil Records On Insect Damage

I have no doubt that the evidence shown here is quite correct, but taking the inference as far as done here is pretty chancy on the basis of one fossilized snapshot.. Putting this is a more recent perspective, a few warming winters and I am talking about a couple of degrees, was sufficient to wipe out huge tracts of pine with the pine beetle. It really does not take very much for a shift here and there to act as a force multiplier in a given biome.

That evidence suggests that insect depredation is primarily a function of climatic conditions over decadal timelines. We already know that a single degree produces huge impact on crop placement and from this on insect populations.

The changes 55 millions of years ago were way more dramatic and decisive than anything the Holocene may ever throw at us so a radical change in insect populations was an inevitability then and that changing plant conditions show up in the fossil record is to be expected. It is nice to see it confirmed.

Why CO2 rose dramatically 55 millions of years ago is not well understood at all and it is way premature to attempt to link causes and effects. In fact the heating that took place may have been responsible for the sharp rise in the atmospheric CO2. In fact if we use that as our guide post, then we are left with either a close encounter with a star or with volcanics. The star proposition is already covered off with a known hundred thousand year orbit around Sirius that also shows us that the dwell time for such an event is simply too short for the events 55 millions of years ago.

That pretty well leaves super sized volcanic activity that was able to supply both heat and CO2. scenarios have been suggested and it will be eventually be sorted out.

Fossil Record Suggests Insect Assaults on Foliage May Increase with Warming Globe

June 12, 10:07 AM ·

The following is a press release from the National Science Foundation.

More than 55 million years ago, the Earth experienced a rapid jump in global carbon dioxide levels that raised temperatures across the planet. Now, researchers studying plants from that time have found that the rising temperatures may have boosted the foraging of insects. As modern temperatures continue to rise, the researchers believe the planet could see increasing crop damage and forest devastation.

The researchers, from Penn State, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Maryland, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Wesleyan University published their findings in the Feb. 11, 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our study convincingly shows that there is a link between temperature and insect feeding on leaves," said lead author Ellen Currano of Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution. "When temperature increases, the diversity of insect feeding damage on plant species also increases."

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Currano collected the study fossils from the badlands of Wyoming, gathering more than 5,000 fossil leaves from five sites representing time zones before, during and after the roughly 100,000 year temperature spike called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

The researchers found that the PETM plants were noticeably more damaged than fossil plants before and after that period. The PETM plants, many of which are legumes -- the family that now includes beans and peas -- show damage with greater frequency, greater variety (such as mining, galling, surface feeding and other assaults) and a more destructive character than plants from the surrounding geologic time periods.

"This study shows that insects responded rapidly to a major change in climate during the PETM," said Enriqueta Barrera, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, which helped fund the project. "This is in agreement with previous findings by [co-author] Scott Wing of the Smithsonian Institution who found that plants that previously were common much farther south migrated northward at this time"

In order to test alternative reasons for the increased damage, the researchers looked at whether the plants in the analysis had key traits that made them more palatable to insects. However, after using established analytical techniques to measure various leaf structures in all of the specimens, the researchers concluded that the PETM plants do not appear to vary structurally from the plants in the rock layers above and below the temperature spike.

The researchers also looked to see if the insect species feeding on the leaves changed over the time period. The analysis showed that what changed was the abundance of insect species that are highly specialized in the type of plant they consume and the way they consume it, such as leaf miners and gallers - they are far more abundant in the PETM.

"We wanted to see whether the increase in insect damage during the PETM was because the leaves were less tough or more nutritious," said Currano. "There is no evidence to support this. Instead, we think that the warming allowed insect species from the tropics, particularly those that feed in a highly specific manner, to migrate north."

Biologists are already aware that insects in the tropics consume more plants and that warming temperatures are causing organisms to widen their ranges. In addition, research has shown that plants grown under higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) are less nutritious, so insects must eat more plant tissue to get the same sustenance. These earlier studies support the recent findings about the PETM.
Because food webs that involve plant-eating insects affect as much as three quarters of organisms on Earth, the researchers believe that the current increase in temperature could have a profound impact on present ecosystems, and potentially to crops, if the pattern holds true in modern times.

"This study represents a highly integrative approach, using well-studied systems, to model ecological dynamics during upcoming climate shifts," said William Hahn, a program director in NSF's Division of Graduate Education who supported Currano's work with a research fellowship. "The truly relevant description of past climate-change effects on plant-insect interactions, specifically the probability of increased insect damage to plants with rising temperatures, is a forward-looking approach that will help us prepare for the effects of future global warming," he added.

In addition to Currano's Graduate Research Fellowship, the research team was supported by grants from NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, as well as funding from the Roland Brown Fund of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Evolving Earth Foundation, the Paleontological Society, Penn State, the Petroleum Research Fund, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.

Flare Gas Conversion Achieved

This is an exceptional development in improving oil field operations. All oil fields produce some gas, otherwise the oil is dead and usually refuses to flow. It is the dissolved gas that expands and pushes oil out of the pores and cracks in a geologic formation. That some of that gas can be a sulphur gas is never good news.

It appears that this process can take that messy blend of odds and ends and by consuming a little over fifty percent as fuel, it can produce a gasoline and byproducts out of impurities such as sulphur. The exhaust gas is clean CO2 that can be usually injected straight away back into the formation itself or into another formation.

This sounds like it is capable of handling the whole oil industry byproduct stream in one simple process and bypassing multiple stages which are barely justified in any field,

Many engineers have put their minds to this problem but no blanket solution was ever suggested except simply burning the gases. Perhaps that will now be ended.

Flame Off!: Turning Natural Gas Pollution into Gasoline

Rather than pollute the atmosphere by venting or flaring the natural gas that comes out of oil wells, a new technology would turn it into gasoline or other products

By Dave Biello

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=turning-natural-gas-pollution-into-gasoline&sc=CAT_TECH_20090429id

As if burning oil and all of its derivatives wasn't bad enough for the environment, there's also the natural gas that bubbles up as the oil is pumped out. This byproduct cannot be easily harvested in many cases—some oil fields are far from pipelines that can transport it and other options are very expensive.

As a result, oil companies either release it into the atmosphere—a process known as venting—or burn it in a flare.Using either method produces gases that the atmosphere doesn't need more of: venting discharges methane, a potent greenhouse gas, whereas flaring generates carbon dioxide.

The World Bank estimates that the 5.3 trillion cubic feet (150 billion cubic meters) of natural gas that bubbles up at oil wells worldwide adds some 400 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year—as well as more methane.

Existing technologies allow oil producers who cannot pump the natural gas into a pipeline to simply reinject it back underground, use it to generate electricity or, by installing a so-called Fischer–Tropsch conversion system, change the former nuisance gas into liquid fuel, among other options. But those approaches cost much more than the approximately 50 cents per thousand cubic feet (28 cubic meters) for flaring, and add up to millions of dollars for a large oil field.

A Fischer–Tropsch system, for example, starts at a billion dollars.Now a new process offers hope of turning that stranded natural gas into something useful and transportable instead: gasoline. Dallas-based company Synfuels International peddles a process that converts oil well emissions into the building blocks of plastics or fuel. Since 2005 the company has been running a demonstration plant in Texas and is in negotiations to put up its first commercial facility near Houston.

"Our process can go into oil fields and operate without the need for electricity or water to convert what otherwise would be flared gas into gasoline or it can be mixed with crude [oil] to increase quality and quantity," says Synfuels president Tom Rolfe.

"Any transportation fuel that is salable is really our end goal."Here is how it works: The natural gas is cracked with heat—produced by burning some of the natural gas to generate temperatures from 2,700 to 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit (1,480 to 1,815 degrees Celsius)—into acetylene, a simple hydrocarbon.

The acetylene is absorbed by a liquid solvent and then reacted to produce ethylene, a longer hydrocarbon chain that is the starting constituent of many plastics, detergents and other products. When liquid fuel is the goal, then the ethylene is chemically bound together to form even longer hydrocarbon chains that we know as gasoline or kerosene (jet fuel).

"We're still developing a process to produce diesel," Rolfe says.The process converts roughly 50 percent of the natural gas to acetylene—the other half is burned for the heat that drives the process, which still releases CO2 into the atmosphere—and nearly all of that acetylene to ethylene, and then ethylene to fuel.

"Overall conversion rates from the [natural] gas to fuel-grade liquids is as high as 46 percent in optimal, real-world conditions," Rolfe says—as good or better than established facilities employing Fischer-Tropsch, such as Johannesburg-based Sasol, Ltd.'s plants in South Africa.

The resulting fuel has no sulfur. (Sulfur and mercury are removed as solids and can be buried or converted to useful materials.) And, it can be directly used in cars or other vehicles in some countries. (In the U.S., air pollution regulations would make it necessary to ship it to a refinery for final processing or blend it with a less aromatic gasoline.)

"In a country like Saudi Arabia, you could fill your car up with the gas we make and drive away," Rolfe notes.

In the U.S. generating electricity or putting the natural gas into a pipeline often makes sense because of existing infrastructure.

But in Nigeria, for example, oil companies flare some 850 billion cubic feet (24 billion cubic meters) per year at oil platforms that have no need to generate electricity because of the platform's remote location and no pipelines to carry off the natural gas.

At such locations, Synfuels's process or Fischer–Tropsch could make financial sense. But the $150 million to $200 million that Rolfe says a Synfuels process plant will cost is just a fraction of the Fischer–Tropsch price.

"If there's no pipeline, you're just burning money [by flaring] and hurting the Earth," Rolfe notes.In addition, the Synfuels process can handle small volumes of natural gas—ranging from one to 300 million cubic feet (8.5 million cubic meters) per day.

That is important because most oil wells do not spew a lot of natural gas, which makes the Synfuels approach useful even at smaller fields.

Depending on the quality of the natural gas itself, the process can then make gasoline at a cost of roughly $31 to $63 per barrel (73 cents to $1.50 per gallon), depending on whether the natural gas is pure methane (more costly to transform) or has other hydrocarbons mixed in.

But the technology is not just useful for so-called stranded natural gas in the developing world; in Alaska, much natural gas is simply reinjected back into the oil wells from which it came either to boost oil production or simply avoid atmospheric venting or flaring.

"With Synfuels plants, if you captured and processed all the natural gas that is being reinjected and wasted today, you could make 550,000 barrels (87.5 million liters) of gasoline a day," Rolfe says.

That translates into money: Converting just 10 percent of the flared natural gas worldwide to gasoline sold at $70 per barrel would net $3.1 billion in revenue.

"From an environmental point of view, any use of natural gas is preferable to flaring," notes chemical engineer James Miller of Sandia National Laboratories. But "the economics would be highly dependent on what you do with the syngas components of this [process]."

"All of the syngas goes into heat or energy production," Synfuels chemist Ed Peterson says, and the company cuts down on cost by using such by-products to make energy and employing components built with cheaper steel alloyed with carbon as well as easy to maintain low pressures.

Within the next three years, the company hopes to build four such plants in the U.S., Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, and Iraq and is negotiating in Argentina, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kuwait.

"There's a huge impetus to stop gas flaring around the world," Peterson says. "This is just one of those ways."

Rasmussen Poll on Global Warming

Public Opinion polls are a curious beastie that mean little as far as the science itself is concerned. What is remarkable here is that the public is moving firmly out of any support for the global warming theory and is certain to punish political types that hang unto the program. This has occurred in the face of almost blind levels of media support for the theory and no end of pro theory propaganda. The anti theory crowd has been fighting a battle to get their side out and in fact has almost been feeble.

Yet the public is in complete revolt if these numbers hold up. Of course, the cause of public skepticism is the unrelenting lack of cooperation from the weather. Two clod winters in a row and a complete reversal of the warming trend line is impossible to cover over and explanations are shallow and not been strongly promoted since the proponents are also now covering their backside.

I always thought that linking the weather to CO2 pollution was a bad move in a strategic sense. If the linkage failed to visibly hold up as has abruptly happened, then the linkage damages the linked theory that still needs support.

The arguments for managing CO2 production are excellent and well received. Yet we are all starting back at square one in building support.

There is a lesson here on the power of the media and its real limitations that is unclear.

Energy Update

Only 34% Now Blame Humans for Global Warming

Friday, April 17, 2009

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/environment/energy_update

Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, while seven percent (7%) blame some other reason. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

These numbers reflect a reversal from a year ago when 47% blamed human activity while 34% said long-term planetary trends.

Most Democrats (51%) still say humans are to blame for global warming, the position taken by former Vice President Al Gore and other climate change activists. But 66% of Republicans and 47% of adults not affiliated with either party disagree.

Sixty-two percent (62%) of all Americans believe global warming is at least a somewhat serious problem, with 33% who say it’s Very Serious. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s a not a serious problem. The overall numbers have remained largely the same for several months, but the number who say Very Serious has gone down.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of Democrats say global warming is a Very Serious problem, compared to 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliateds.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? Sign up now. If it's in the news, it's in our polls.) Rasmussen Reports updates also available on Twitter.

President Obama has made global warming a priority for his administration. Half (49%) of Americans think the president believes climate change is caused primarily by human activity. This is the first time that belief has fallen below 50% since the president took office. Just 19% say Obama attributes global warming to long-term planetary trends.

Forty-eight percent (48%) rate the president good or excellent on energy issues. Thirty-two percent (32%) give him poor grades in this area.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of adults now say finding new sources of energy is more important that reducing the amount of energy Americans currently consume. However, 29% say energy conservation is the priority.

A growing number of Americans (58%) say the United States needs to build more nuclear plants. This is up five points from last month and the highest finding so far this year. Twenty-five percent (25%) oppose the building of nuclear plants.

While the economy remains the top issue for most Americans, 40% believe there is a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Thirty-one percent 31% see no such conflict, while 29% are not sure.

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Eastern Forest Recovery

It never occurred to me that anyone ever thought that the carbon retention ability of eastern north America was even close to been satisfied. But I guess that some did. The rebound has been natural and pretty inefficient. I have championed the need for a restoration of close forest management similar to that of the original managers who created an open forest of mature trees supporting a maximum of biodiversity.

That is what needs to happen and it has to be accomplished in partnership with local government acting as a stakeholder in the timber itself, since the life cycle is way beyond that of an individual operator. Good forest management will provide a stream of forest products including charcoal. Open woodlots also will provide areas for cattle and buffalo and deer husbandry.

The partial forest recovery is actually successful but rather dominated by weed trees. This needs to be changed.

Potential To Amass More Carbon In Eastern North American Forests

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Potential_To_Amass_More_Carbon_In_Eastern_North_American_Forests_999.html


http://www.terradaily.com/images/wisconson-woodland-forest-bg.jpg



The results have implications not only for Wisconsin, but also for regions across eastern North America where forests were leveled historically to make room for agriculture, and then grew up again as settlers abandoned their farms and headed west. In Wisconsin, for example, forest biomass and carbon have been steadily recovering since the peak of agricultural clearing in the 1930s, while those in the northeastern U.S. have been rebounding for about 125 years.



by Staff WritersMadison WI (SPX) Apr 08, 2009

With climate change looming, the hunt for places that can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is on.

Obvious "sinks" for the greenhouse gas include the oceans and the enormous trees of tropical rainforests. But temperate forests also play a role, and new research now suggests they can store more carbon than previously thought.

In a study that drew on both historical and present-day datasets, Jeanine Rhemtulla of McGill University and David Mladenoff and Murray Clayton of University of Wisconsin-Madison quantified and compared the above-ground carbon held in the forest trees of Wisconsin just prior to European settlement and widespread logging, and the total carbon they contain today.

Writing in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that despite decades of forest recovery, Wisconsin's woodlands still only hold about two-thirds the carbon of pre-settlement times - suggesting substantial room for them to accumulate more.

"There's probably more potential (to store carbon) than people were considering," says Mladenoff. "There's still a big difference between what was once there and what's there now."

He adds that the true storage potential is probably at least two-fold higher than what he and Rhemtulla calculated, since they factored in only the live, above-ground biomass of tree trunks and crowns, and not the carbon stored in roots and soil.

The results have implications not only for Wisconsin, but also for regions across eastern North America where forests were leveled historically to make room for agriculture, and then grew up again as settlers abandoned their farms and headed west. In Wisconsin, for example, forest biomass and carbon have been steadily recovering since the peak of agricultural clearing in the 1930s, while those in the northeastern U.S. have been rebounding for about 125 years.

Yet, it's precisely because many temperate forests have been recovering for so long that people tend to assume their potential as carbon sinks is "maxed out," says Mladenoff.

"Our results suggest we need to rethink this," he says. "Rather than there being an intrinsic limit on how much carbon a forest can store, how we use the forest - how much we log, how we manage - may be more important."

The findings come amid sweeping discussions of international carbon treaties and accounting systems that are designed to reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change. In the future, for instance, countries might earn credits for maintaining carbon-rich old-growth forests, or replanting trees on lands logged off previously for agriculture.

Areas that once supported large amounts of forest biomass might also be good sites for growing plantations of hybrid poplar and other biofuels crops, says Mladenoff. But, he cautions, any move toward planting more land in trees must be weighed against competing social and economic factors, such as the need for farmland.

"The landscape is full," says Mladenoff. "So if we're going to add something like forests, we're going to need to take something out."

That certainly seems to be true in Wisconsin. Based on historic carbon levels, the researchers' analysis found that much of the best land for growing trees is the north-central region and along northern Lake Michigan. If those lands could be reforested to pre-settlement levels, the scientists estimate they could add 150 teragrams of carbon (150 million metric tons) to the state's current total of approximately 275 teragrams.

The problem, however, is that most of those lands are still being farmed, setting up an interesting dilemma for policy makers: how to weigh the current economic benefit of agriculture against the future environmental benefit of carbon storage.

"Because we often forget the invisible services, like climate regulation, that ecosystems provide to us for free, we don't usually factor them into our decision making," says Rhemtulla. "But this will need to change if we're going to find ways to meet our immediate needs without compromising critical services over the long term."

Global Warming Trends

When I commenced this blog two years ago, global warming had been with us for at least a decade and perhaps realistically for twenty years. It was indisputably warmer but is had also stabilized near the top end of the natural range as demonstrated in the historical record.

Also it was a matter of creditable measurement that the CO2 content of the atmosphere was very slowly increasing over the past century or two and this was clearly linked to our combustion of the fossil fuel inventory. No one could reasonably dispute the direct correlation and no one has. Very clearly, Mother Nature is slow at sponging up the surplus and it may also be true that higher levels are welcome. Theory has suggested that absorption will increase more rapidly as the percentage increases, so it is not linear.

Theorists then connected the dots and proclaimed the hypothesis that CO2 increase was forcing the climate change. The press was sold on the veracity of the theory and it became part of popular scientific belief. This belief system has since struggled to hold its own in the face of an unfortunate and sharp reversal in apparent climate ending the very nice twenty year trend line.

We have had two classic cold winters in a row and there is little reason to expect a reversal. In fact the present trend is negative and could possibly stay on the cold side of the historic range. Quite simply, facts in the field have demolished the trend line that supported the received fact of ongoing global warming. It simply ceased to be a fact.

In the meantime the sunspot theorists have been largely on the right side of the global warming curve and recent comments suggest that cycle 23 may have bottomed late last fall and we are about to enter an upswing there with concomitant rise in the global temperature. Again, we must wait and see.

Were I have taken issue is that the best projected impact of any CO2 forcing is totally within the real temperature range of the Holocene climate norm and we cannot properly predict and account for all the variables that contribute to that. This means that accepting any conclusion regarding CO2 forcing is both premature and most probably wrong to boot, while we cannot prove otherwise. This is true for both the pro and con position, but the balance of probabilities weigh against the pro position, now so popularized.

Importantly, CO2 forcing is not linear and is increasingly resisted by Mother Nature. All that means though is that the proper public policy is to ignore the weather and concentrate on the step by step removal of fossil fuels from the energy regime.

And that returns me to my original objective. The removal of CO2 must be done in conjunction with an ongoing reform and redesign of the operation of global agriculture. We have come a long way in understanding how that might be done.

Snowball Earth Musings

A lot of this theoretical thinking is premature at best, but we have seen snowball earth and other models enthusiastically picked up on over the years.

A look at the various moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus promises no simple answer. Any early model of earth’s atmosphere must add in methane at least and a lot of it, all of which with carbon dioxide would have established a gaseous atmosphere with maximum greenhouse heat retention while sponging up the oxygen been produced by emerging life.

Yet I have seen little mention of methane in the literature. Since I am unaware of any Precambrian oil deposition, or coal deposition, this seems a bit curious because it begs the question of where might it be hiding besides the atmosphere?

The oceans produced oxygen and grabbed carbon from somewhere to sequester in the sediments. It is a pretty good bet that methane was a big atmospheric factor up to the point that life was able to leave the ocean and its final decline may in fact been the initiating event.

My point is simply that there is an incredible amount of carbon tied up in the sediments that has made it there solely as a result of biological processes. It was tied up in the form of CO2 and Methane at the beginning just like every other planet we are able to look at.

Unless I am missing something, most of it was accumulated post Precambrian when life was already established on land.

It may have been snowball earth, but the liquid ocean certainly existed and was slowly growing and brewing up the necessary changes that set the stage for life to transition onto land. It may have been associated with Deep Ocean and volcanism to begin with, because the early snowball earth must have comprised both ice and frozen methane as in the arctic permafrost. And as in Antarctica, regions would even have had frozen CO2.

In the end, life had to strip carbon and produce water from the mostly frozen gas mix from the very beginning and this process dominated until the methane and CO2 was almost fully reduced. This makes exploring similar planets very interesting.



Modern day scourge helped ancient Earth escape a deathly deep freeze

http://www.astrobiology.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=27242

The planet's present day greenhouse scourge, carbon dioxide, may have played a vital role in helping ancient Earth to escape from complete glaciation, say scientists in a paper published online today.

In their review for Nature Geoscience, UK scientists claim that the Earth never froze over completely during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago.

This is contrary to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, which envisages a fully frozen Earth that was locked in ice for many millions of years as a result of a runaway chain reaction that caused the planet to cool.

What enabled the Earth to escape from a complete freeze is not certain, but the UK scientists in their review point to recent research carried out at the University of Toronto. This speculates that the advancing ice was stalled by the interaction of the physical climate system and the carbon cycle of the ocean, with carbon dioxide playing a key role in insulating the planet.

The Toronto scientists say that as Earth's temperatures cooled, oxygen was drawn into the ocean, where it oxidized organic matter, releasing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The review's lead author, Professor Phillip Allen, from Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, says that something must have kept the planet's equatorial oceans from freezing over. He adds:

"In the climate change game, carbon dioxide can be both saint and sinner. These days we are so concerned about global warming and the harm that carbon dioxide is doing to our planet. However, approximately 600 million years ago, this greenhouse gas probably saved ancient Earth and its basic life forms from an icy extinction."

Professor Allen, whose previous research has found evidence demonstrating hot and cold cycles in the Cryogenian period, says a plethora of papers has been published and much debate has been devoted to the Snowball Earth theory since it was originally proposed. He says:

"Sedimentary rocks deposited during these cold intervals indicate that dynamic glaciers and ice streams continued to deliver large amounts of sediment to open oceans. This evidence contradicts the Snowball Earth theory, which suggests the oceans were frozen over. Yet, many scientists still believe Snowball Earth to be correct."

Professor Allen hopes his review in Nature will prompt climate modellers to realign their thinking about the Cryogenian period and review their models to reflect a warmer Earth during this time. He adds:

"There is so much about Earth's ancient past that we don't know enough about. So it is really important that climate modellers get their targets right. They need to build into their calculations a warmer planet, with open oceans, despite lower levels of solar radiation at this time. Otherwise, climate models about the Earth's distant past are aiming for a target that never existed."

Roy Spenser on Al Gore's Propaganda

Roy Spencer wades into the fray again, this time pointing out the reality of the global warming debate. As he points out, this no longer scholarly debate so much as a PR campaign. These methods are often used piece meal and quite innocently. Here that is simply not the case.

Gore and Hansen have grabbed the ring and are not backing down even as it becomes apparent that their arguments are fading in a morass of negative evidence.

This is becoming a clinical study on the application of propaganda and likely nothing else as Mother Nature tramples the position.

This summer we will be awash with news about the extent of fresh sea ice and the general coolness in the Northern Hemisphere.

It has become unfortunately clear that the organized party of the scientifically willing are standing by their position for other than the reasons of science. Most likely it is good old lucre. They understand that they will get research grants forever if they stand by their hero. The only thing unusual in this revealing demonstration of feet of clay, is that they were ever so dumb as to tie the process to the weather. That may still derail the rush to underwrite large research budgets.

We are having a winter that now compares to the worst. At least so far. I have every reason to expect it to pile up the snow until March 31. In short, we are having complete comfirmation that the global temperature has dropped back to the natural low. A few more storms are pending.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/al-gores-propaganda/

Al Gore’s Propaganda

January 27th, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The methods used by global warming alarmists to convince you that more carbon dioxide is going to ruin the Earth are increasingly laced with insults and attacks directed toward anyone who might disagree with them. For instance, one of the many intellectually lazy (& false) claims is that I am paid by Big Oil.

Mr. Gore’s tactics have been a little more subtle, and reminiscent of propaganda methods which have proved to be effective throughout history at influencing public opinion. One should keep in mind that his main scientific adviser, NASA’s James Hansen, has the most extreme views of any climate researcher when it comes to predicting a global warming induced Armageddon.

Listed below are ten propaganda techniques I have excerpted from Wikipedia. Beneath each are one or more examples of Mr. Gore’s rhetoric as he has attempted to goad the rest of us into reducing our CO2 emissions. Except where indicated, most quotes are from his testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, March 21, 2007. (Mr. Gore is scheduled to testify again tomorrow, January 28, 2009, before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee…if the cold and snowy weather doesn’t cause them to reschedule.)

Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population.

“I want to testify today about what I believe is a planetary emergency—a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.”

Appeal to authority: Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position, idea, argument, or course of action. Also, Testimonial: Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited.

“Just six weeks ago, the scientific community, in its strongest statement to date, confirmed that the evidence of warming is unequivocal. Global warming is real and human activity is the main cause.”

“The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There’s no longer any debate in the scientific community about this.” (from An Inconvenient Truth)

Bandwagon: Bandwagon and “inevitable-victory” appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that “everyone else is taking”. Also, Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people’s natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their best interest to join.

“Today, I am here to deliver more than a half million messages to Congressasking for real action on global warming. More than 420 Mayors have nowadopted Kyoto-style commitments in their cities and have urged strong federal action. The evangelical and faith communities have begun to take the lead, calling for measures to protect God’s creation. The State of California, under a Republican Governor and a Democratic legislature, passed strong, economy wide legislation mandating cuts in carbon dioxide.

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have passed renewable energy standards for the electricity sector.”

Flag-waving: An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. Also, Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action.

“After all, we have taken on problems of this scope before. When England and then America and our allies rose to meet the threat of global Fascism, together we won two wars simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.”

Ad Hominem attacks: A Latin phrase which has come to mean attacking your opponent, as opposed to attacking their arguments. Also Demonizing the “enemy”: Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman.

“You know, 15 percent of people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number still believe the Earth is flat. They get together on Saturday night and party with the global-warming deniers.” (October 24, 2006, Seattle University)

Appeal to Prejudice: Using loaded or emotive terms to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition.

“And to solve this crisis we can develop a shared sense of moral purpose.” (June 21, 2006, London, England)

Black-and-White fallacy: Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice.

“It is not a question of left vs. right; it is a question of right vs. wrong.” (July 1, 2007, New York Times op-ed)

Euphoria: The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale:

Live Earth concerts organized worldwide in 2007 by Al Gore.

Falsifying information: The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organization. Pseudo-sciences are often used to falsify information.

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” (May 9, 2006 Grist interview)

Stereotyping or Name Calling or Labeling: This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. Also, Obtain disapproval: This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience

“There are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all. And it’s no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere.” (January 15, 2004, New York City)

Vostok Ice Core Interpretation

We have learned enough to ask a few pointed questions regarding the interpretation of the extremely important Vostok Core. This core was pulled from very deep Antarctic ice at the Vostok station and has been given treatment by the global warming enthusiasts who tried very hard to make this support their pet ideas. In fact this is the key data that argues against the linkage of CO2 and temperature. It is backwards with CO2 arriving centuries after the warming has started.

This also reconfirms the unique nature of the Holocene. Of several temperature run ups, this is the only one that suddenly became stable at the peak no less. It made sense for it to perhaps stabilize part way up this curve but it takes something extraordinary for this to occur the way it did. Its two degree variability is confirmed across the entirety of the data, so the two degree variability of the Holocene represents a continuance.

As I have previously posted this is caused by the elimination of the Northern Ice Cap by the thirty degree shift of the crust. If you have not, please read my posts.

Two other factors need to be now considered. These peaks and their shapes are conforming even to the pair of secondary peaks. This powerfully suggests a cosmological explanation, certainly for the peaks. They demonstrate our expectations for a fairly fast pass through a star system that we are orbiting. The secondary highs do not, but may show high ultra violet radiation sources been passed through or even incoming material that heats up the sun.

The take home message is that this is not random. And since we are not now in close orbit of our parent star, when that happens, our climate will get ten degrees warmer. It will be well forested in the Arctic and a lot of that Antarctic ice will melt. It will last for ten to twenty thousands of years while the effects wear off. The actual transit and build up will be fairly quick. There is a good chance that all the polar ice will actually be melted before the cold begins to settle back in.

It is still a good plan. We have swapped ten thousand years of good weather and one hundred thousand years of very bad for one hundred thousand years of very good weather and ten thousand years of very hot weather.

The second factor is that the scale is flawed as expected. It tends to shrink as you go back in time and variation progressively wrecks accuracy. The current scale is the best estimate. If the peaks are associated with stellar events the actual scale could be as much as one million years long with a solar orbit approaching 180,000 years. We could also be over estimating the more recent layering of the ice.

Using the peaks as fixed points, it should be possible to make a tentative match to a putative orbit and take it from there.

Ice Core Evidence for Global Warming - a sceptical/skeptical view

alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/index.html

One of the main planks in the global warming theory is the extraordinary Vostok ice core, dragged 2.5 km out of the Antarctic ice by the Russians in the '80s and '90s. (Other ice cores and analysis methods tell much the same story, but we will concentrate here on Vostok) The data from the ice, published in 1999 gives snapshots of temperature and CO2 concentrations going back 400,000 years. Since the two data sets have different time scales, it is a little tricky to graph them together.

http://www.noe21.org/dvd2/Global%20Warming%20FAQ%20-%A0%20temperature.htm

But, here they are:

http://alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/CO2_temp.gif

An Excel spreadsheet and graph of the data can be downloaded from here.If one sits down to look at the curves, a few things are apparent:

1. Four times in the period, (ie, roughly every 100,000 years) the temperature has quickly shot up to 2°C - 3°C above today's and then slowly slipped back to about 8°C below today's temperature. It looks as though the Earth's complex, non-linear climate system has two stable states and flops rhythmically from one to the other.

2. We are currently hovering near the top of a cycle and an ice-age seems to be due. However, comparing today's position with the 4 previous peaks suggests that the temperature should have reached 2°C or more some 10,000 years ago, but it hasn't. If anything, the world is now somewhat colder than we might expect.

3. CO2 and temperature track each other well. When one goes up, so does the other and conversely. They show such a strong correlation that one might suspect they are causally connected.

4. But which is the cause? We normally think that causes come first and consequences come after. Over long periods in this data, it is temperature that comes first and and by several thousand years (except for a short period about 340,000 years ago). Al Gore, in his film, seems not to have noticed this detail.

5. One explanation might be: when the world gets warmer, the oceans expel CO2 and, some hundreds to thousands of years later, the gas concentration rises. When the world get colder the oceans absorb CO2 and, some time later, the concentration falls. For some reason, when the temperature is rising, CO2 tracks quicker than when the temperature is falling.

6. The fashionable theory of gobal warming says that a rise in atmospheric CO2 causes more of the sun's heat to be retained in the atmosphere. This raises the world's temperature and warms the oceans. As the oceans get warmer they expel more dissolved CO2 and the effect accelerates. This would seem to be a recipe for runaway positive feedback which will raise the world's temperature to an uncomfortable level. We would like to do an experiment to see whether this happens or not.

7. In an area of science where experiments are hard to do, nature has given us 4 repetitions. The Vostock core clearly shows that when the temperature reaches 2°C a mechanism kicks in which sets the temperature falling again and initiates an ice-age. Since this mechanism has repeatedly worked well after 100,000 years of disuse, it seems to be robust.

8. Since the Industrial Revolution, man has contributed increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. It is said that these extra greenhouse gasses will change the climate cycle and that this time the temperature will climb far above the historical maximum, plunging the world into disaster.

9. There is about 800 B tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere and human activities release another 27 B tonnes per year, or 3% of the total . CO2 in the air dissolves in the oceans and there is a lot more in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere. CO2 in the oceans slowly forms limestones, chalk and other rocks. More than 100 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is locked up in these stones (The White Cliffs of Dover are largely CO2). But how much goes where and how long it stays there is not well understood. (See 'non-linear' in para 1). Even if one accepts that man is contributing large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, it will dissolve in the sea and then turn to limestone without any help from us.

10. If we consider all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2, the most important by far is water vapour, which contributes 36% of the total effect. Short of wrapping all the oceans in plastic sheet, we can't do much about that.

11. CO2 contributes 9% of the greenhouse effect. Industry currently pumps 3% more CO2 into the atmosphere each year, which is responsible for .27% of the total greenhouse effect. If we shut down all transport and industry tomorrow, it is hard to believe it would have much immediate impact on global warming.

12. A fact that is often overlooked is that the amount of heat radiated by the earth into space varies as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. That is, if the average temperature of the atmosphere rises from 20C to 21C (293K to 294K or .3%), the radiated energy increases by 1.4%. This fourth power law has a strongly stabilising effect on global temperature.

13. It may be true that this small amount of extra greenhouse gas will trigger run-away global warming, but it is hard to find solid evidence for it in the historical record. What evidence there is must come from models of the way the climate works. But models of such complicated mechanisms as the climate are notoriously unreliable until they have been refined and rigorously checked against the historical evidence. Which has not yet happened.13. I am not a climatologist, but there is a solid looking review paper here. There is a scientific review of Al Gore's film here.

Natural global warming seems to be expected about now in the cycle, but I'm sceptical/skeptical about man-made warming.

Politics

If the science is hard to understand, the politics is easy. The 'man-made CO2 calamity' gives the developed nations a wonderful stick with which to beat the emerging superpowers of India and China. 


If the west can persuade them that they have a moral duty to clean up their industries, substantial extra costs are imposed on them which will do something to offset the west's higher wages.

On the campaign level in the west, things work as usual in practical politics. Here is one of several accounts by scientists who changed their views about global warming, from

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming051607.htm "I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed. The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role," he added. "Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics."

Global Coal Reserves

This piece surprised me because it challenges the integrity of reported reserves by government agencies. He is saying that historically governments have seriously overstated coal reserves and that this process continues.

I beg to differ. Governments will report a resource rather than a reserve. The resource is the total amount of material that might or could be mined regardless of cost. Canada has a 1.7 trillion barrel resource in the tar sands. It has a reserve of 175 billion barrels economically available for now.

Once cost becomes an issue we are talking about reserves. These measure what can be reasonably mined in view of current costs and selling prices. A lot of perfectly good coal will get reclassified as rock.

The one thing that I learned about the mining industry is perfectly good ore reserves turn into rock amazingly often. In fact we are living through one such transition right now.

Double the selling price of coal and I am sure that vast new resources will spring up. Let me put this another way. I have inspected my share of oil drilling logs. Every so often another coal seam will be typically encountered since we normally drill in sedimentary basins. They are all too deep to ever consider mining for the present. None of these are ever even counted as resources.

It is obvious that the USA can double their resource estimate by the simple expedient of measuring deeper. At least it would be more ethical than the resources added by OPEC.

And a note on that. Few understand that the first two discovery wells in a new field plus seismic has proven sufficient to define proven oil reserves. It is very unlikely that later work will significantly increase that figure. In fact the reverse is likely. Those vast new OPEC reserves announced in the eighties did not coincide with new field discoveries. Therefore they are fairy tales.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/world-coal-rese.html

World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates

By Alexis Madrigal December 17, 2008 6:29:35 PMCategories: AGU 2008, Clean Tech, Energy, Geology

SAN FRANCISCO — A new calculation of the world's coal reserves is much lower than previous estimates. If validated, the new info could have a massive impact on the fate of the planet's climate.

That's because coal is responsible for most of the CO2 emissions that drive climate change. If there were actually less coal available for burning, climate modelers would have to rethink their estimates of the level of emissions that humans will produce.

The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total — including all past mining — of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.

"Every estimate of the ultimate coal resource has been larger," said ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study. "But if there's much less coal than we think, that's good news for climate."

The carbon dioxide emitted when humans burn coal to create usable energy is primarily responsible for global warming. Leading scientists think that the stability of Earth's climate will be dictated by how the world uses — or doesn't use — its coal resources. And the thinking has been that the world has more than enough coal to wreak catastrophic damage to the climate system, absent major societal or governmental changes.

So the new estimate, which opens the slim possibility that humankind could do nothing to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and still escape some of the impacts of climate change, comes as quite a shock.

Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves.

It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries.

"The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production."

More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that's assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council — and they were wildly different.

"The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have," Rutledge said. "That much is obvious."

The National Research Council's Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually agrees with many of Rutledge's criticisms, while continuing to maintain far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal.

"Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s," the committee wrote in a 2007 report. "Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually mineable reserves.”

And don't look to technology to bail out coal miners. Mechanization has actually decreased the world's recoverable reserves, because huge mining machines aren't quite as good at digging out coal as human beings are.

With Rutledge's new numbers, the world could burn all the coal (and other fossil fuels) it can get to, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would only end up around 460 parts per million, which is predicted to cause a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures.

For many scientists, that's too much warming. A growing coalition is calling for limiting the CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, down from the 380 ppm of today, but it's a far cry from some of the more devastating scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Coal emissions really need to be phased out proactively — we can't just wait for them to run out — by the year 2030," said Pushker Kharecha, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There is more than enough coal to keep CO2 well above 350 ppm well beyond this century."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses economic models that assume that the world will not run out of coal. Some IPCC scenarios show 3.4 billion tons of coal being burned just through 2100.

That's more than five times what Rutledge thinks will be possible — and a good deal higher than the WEC's estimate for recoverable coal reserves, too.

On the other hand, if the world were really to encounter a swift and steep decline in accessible coal resources, it's unclear how humans could retain our current levels of transportation, industry and general energy-usage.

So, even if coal were to run out and the most dangerous climate change averted, the imperative to develop non–fossil-fuel energy sources would remain.

"Peak Oil and peak gas and peak coal could really go either way for the climate," Kharecha said. "It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources."