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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: We Might Avert Climate Catastrophe With This One Radical Choice Yahoo... We have about a 50 percent chance of keeping global temperatures from rising dangerously higher than those of preindustrial times. That is, if we leave most of the world’s remaining supply of oil, gas, and coal unearthed and unburned between now and 2050, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. Globally, about one-third of oil deposits must enter the no-burning zone, along with 88 percent of known and mineable coal supplies and about half the world’s unused natural gas. It adds up to about $6 trillion worth of fossil fuels, suggesting a revolutionary shake-up of the global financial and energy economies. Among them: About $3 trillion in global investments, including enormous funds like the California state pension fund, could find themselves busted by “stranded assets” as the fuel reserves energy companies calculate into their net worth would need to stay unused to avert the worst of climate change. But which and how much of the world’s fossil energy deposits should remain buried? How about all the untapped fossil fuel deposits above the Arctic Circle, 75 percent of Canada’s tar sands, and more than 90 percent of Australian and U.S. coal. The paper is a signal to countries with massive energy reserves that they must reconsider plans to extract those reserves if they want to fight climate change, said Mia Bennett, a Ph.D. student in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, who manages the Cryopolitics blog. “They think it represents a huge sum of money in the ground that they can drill up at will, but these reserves really represent a kind of carbon bubble,” Bennett said. “The assets could be rendered more or less worthless, given future developments on the energy market,” as well as in climate change policies and laws. If reliable methods of capturing carbon emissions and keeping them out of the atmosphere come on line by 2025, we could help ourselves to a few more percentage points of coal, gas, and oil, the researchers determined. But there’s still a need to slash worldwide demand for fossil energy. “Our results show that policy makers’ instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius,” the study's authors state. Slowing down fossil fuel development also renders moot projects that would spend big dollars on fossil fuel exploration and extraction, such as the Keystone pipeline. The study took estimates for how much and what kinds of oil, gas, and coal supplies are left among the different fossil-fuel producing nations and geographic regions. If we keep burning fossil fuels over the next 40 years, previous studies have shown that we would pump about three times more heat-trapping greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than the world can withstand—if we hope to avoid dangerous temperature increases. Among the measures to try to keep catastrophic warming at bay, researchers came up with the following solutions: • Middle Eastern nations need to keep almost 40 percent of their oil resources unburned; the U.S. must leave 9 percent of its oil unburned; and Russia, 19 percent. • But when it comes to coal, the U.S. And Australia need to leave 95 percent of remaining reserves in the ground; Africa, 90 percent; and Russia, 97 percent. • Canada needs to wind down its tar sands industry almost immediately, leaving 75 percent of its oil supply in peace. “This paper is looking ahead 30 years. No one’s going to read it and say, ‘We have to lock up the drills’ tomorrow,” Bennett said. “But the main takeaway is that we have to start reinvesting and reprioritizing away from fossil fuels, possibly a lot faster than some people would like.” Poster Comment: [Gordon Fulks, PhD] This is absolute nonsense from the usual suspects: a journalist and 'Nature' magazine. For those who are unaware, Nature has a policy of refusing all scientific papers that dare to question the prevailing Global Warming paradigm. They also reject papers on other subjects, simply because they are not politically acceptable. That renders Nature far less than a legitimate scientific journal to my way of thinking. As to the potential effects of burning every bit of the known recoverable reserves of about 1,000 Gt of carbon still in the ground, those are minimal. (One Gt is 10exp15 grams) Why? Because the atmosphere already contains about 800 Gt of carbon and that is rising at about half the rate we are burning carbon. In other words, only half of what we burn is actually showing up in the atmosphere, because of the much large amounts naturally in play. That means we will not be able to even double the small CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. But if we were able to double it, the estimated warming without feedbacks would only be one degree Celsius. With feedbacks, the likely warming is far less, because we now know that they are negative. In fact CO2 warming may never be detectable. It probably takes more schooling than journalists have to understand this!145-32 Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics) Corbett, Oregon USA Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
CO2 is a trace gas (1 part per 3,000) and has nothing to do with the so called global warming. The fact is the earth's atmosphere has been losing CO2 for billions of years and is now CO2 starved. We need more, much more, not less CO2 in the atmosphere. Two to ten times as much CO2 in the atmosphere would be better and that would have no measurable effect of global temperature except it might reduce temperature slightly because the additional CO2 would aid plant growth and absorb more sunlight.
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