The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on Alaska’s North Slope, is the new hope. The Prudhoe Bay oil field, one of the world’s biggest reservoirs, is just sixty miles west of the refuge. Surveys carried out by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest that ANWR may contain about ten billion barrels of recoverable oil. If this estimate turns out to be reliable, and if exploration starts next year, in 2025 anwr could be generating about a million barrels of oil a day. This is a lot of fuel, but it dwindles next to our energy requirements. By 2025, according to the Department of Energy, Americans will be consuming almost thirty million barrels a day. With luck, an ANWR oil field operating at full capacity could satisfy perhaps three or four per cent of that total, meaning that most of the oil we use would still have to be imported.
I have to say sometimes it seems like no one is doing the math on this stuff. It really seems that the only reason to go into ANWR (is that all caps or what... it's an abbreviation, right?) is to try and keep oil cheap. But if that's the only goal we had, then a lot of things would be cheaper. For example, we should just clear cut the forest right next door, rather than getting all that wood from the middle of nowhere. I do not think that's what we're optimizing for. It's a very interesting article overall, I highly recommend it. I finished reading it and wasn't exactly sure why we're not drilling the hell out of Russia rather than dealing with the Middle East at all.
But with global warming, I got into a very interesting discussion over mail recently which I'll replicate here (and ultimately led me to edit my "facts" from yesterday's post).It started with two opinion pieces in the Telegraph:Leading scientific journals are censoring debate on global warmingandGlobal warming generates hot airOk, to the first, I think we can all agree that censorship in any form is much badness. Specifically with the above, I think the right thing to do would be to expose the items not selected for review, a link to the article and the reason for lack of publication. This is the Internet age, after all, and total transparency is easy! Then let the readers decide. I guess this means you get one attempt to publish and then you're done, since a cause for rejection is having your points "widely dispersed on the [I]nternet", but the author could decide that as well.
As to the follow up opinion, I disagree with a few points in there:
1) This comment is wrong:
Six such individuals have just published a paper arguing that cosmic ray intensity and variations in solar activity have been driving recent climate change. They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting some modest cooling over the next couple of years, as cosmic ray activity increases cloud cover. Since the conventional - sorry, consensus - wisdom says we are on a rising temperature curve to disaster, a couple of cool years would deal a serious blow to the anthropogenists.
It’s not global warming that is the problem; it’s fundamental climate change exacerbated by increases in reflective IR. Cool years/warm years don’t help or hurt the long term theory; it is the variation from the norm that's the problem, even if that variation is only local (a specific region being particularly hot or cold, as an example). Unfortunately, this can be difficult to distinguish from normal extreme variations in temperature or climate, but I think a good indicator are the numbers associated with weather-related costs (such as the increase from $3.9 B in direct losses in the 50's to $63 B in direct losses in the 90's (I do not know if these numbers are inflation adjusted or not)).
2) As to this point:[The authors of the dissenting papers] are not nutcases, nor are they in thrall to the oil companies (even if they were, does anyone seriously believe that Big Oil wants to destroy the planet?).
No, no one would think that Big Oil would want to destroy the planet. I have no doubt that they are acting in a way consistent with their thoughts on what is best for their shareholders. But, simultaneously, Big Oil is near-sighted… and required to be so! If the board of Exxon cut all funding for projects for the next 10 years in hopes of building out their 15 year strategy, they’d be laughed out of the boardroom (and likely sued). It's simply not their responsibility to think long-term without economic guidance... this is why consumers (and to a lesser extent, government) need to set the social norms about how long a company should think and penalize companies that do not think that far ahead.
3) Even if I take the author’s position to be correct, that there are individuals who could be publishing papers which contradict the majority of positions out there, this comment seems odd:
But that hardly justifies Draconian measures that will make us poorer, unless the scientific evidence is overwhelming.
By the author’s own admission, there have been HUNDREDS (928 to be exact) of papers in 10 years which all agreed. Even if 10% of them were outright lying, or 1/3 of them were positive and the rest neutral (as the first paper suggests), that’d still be fairly overwhelming consensus for action, right?
I don’t know how grim things are/will be, and forecasts are never going to be that good. But here are the (updated) facts as I see them:
- Fact 0: H20 & CO2 reflect infrared better than N2 and O2 (and other trace gases in the atmosphere).
- Fact 1: As the % CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the amount of IR reflected back to the Earth's surface increases.
- Fact 2: We have more CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times and are putting out CO2 faster than ever before in man's history.
Likely hypothesis? Our CO2 output is affecting the reflected IR and thereby affecting the climate. Follow up hypothesis? Affecting the climate is a bad thing.
I’m not saying Draconian measures are necessary, but certainly taking us down a path to get us closer to the way the atmosphere was before substantial human effect is probably a good thing (tm).
D