Climate Change and Peak-Oil

By Kar Lee

Why is Climate Change so controversial? Are we running out of oil? Was the burning of Moscow in 2010 a result of Global Warming? What is the science behind all these claims? This book provides a critical but concise analysis of the evidence and anti-evidence of the Global Warming theory and the Peak-Oil claim. Anyone who is interested in the future of our society will find this book informational.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KL Books
• Release date: Nov 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301616312

Kar Lee

Kar Lee received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington. After a two-year post-doctoral research appointment in a national accelerator laboratory in Virginia, he left the world of fundamental physics research for industry. Since then, he has been in various technical, managerial, and consulting positions in technology and product development. Science and philosophy, particularly that of the mind, are his life long passions.

Book preview

Climate Change and Peak Oil

By Kar Y. Lee, Ph.D.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 Kar Y. Lee

All rights reserved.

Initial Release Nov. 2012

Table of Content

Introduction

An interesting coincidence

part 1 Global Warming

Chapter 1 – The climate’s natural cycles

Chapter 2 – Carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature

Chapter 3 – Is global warming good or bad?

Conclusion on Global Warming

part 2 - Peak-Oil

The Oil Boom

Doubt about actual world reserves

Oil discovery rate and backdating

Reserves and Production Rate

Shale Oil

Oil Shale

Conclusion on peak-oil

Climate change and peak-oil

Introduction

"134 killed in southern Russia floods disaster - Flash floods deluged Russia's southern Krasnodar, killing at least 134 people in the region's worst natural disaster in decades…," read one news headline on July 7, 2012. Rain poured down on the Krasnodar region of Russia near the Black sea area, dumping as much as 5 months worth of rainfall in a matter of hours, flooding villages and stranded residents. The amount of water was so huge that local people suspected, though incorrectly, that it was the release of water from nearby reservoirs that had flooded their place.

Then on July 12, torrential downpour bored down on southern Japan, causing flash floods and displacing a quarter of a million people. In some area, rain as heavy as 4 inches per hour was recorded. The pond surrounding the Japanese cultural icon, the Golden Pavilion, overflowed, though the temple itself remained above water.

We have seen more and more of these kinds of extreme weather phenomena. Once-in-a-century events seem to be occurring annually, or so it feels.

So, that’s why you have headlines like "Start of 2012, March shatter US heat records. This one is from an Associated Press article on April 9, 2012. The article continued, The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the U.S. has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming. One climate scientist said it is the weather equivalent of a baseball player on steroids, with old records obliterated."

Then, against this backdrop of extreme weather events, earlier in 2011, a Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever decided to resign from the American Physical Society over its position on Climate Change. American Physical Society’s official position has been that yes, climate change is real, and we should do something about it. It was this position that caused it its support from Giaever. Giaever is a non-believer. He thinks global warming can be good if it is real.

Giaever is not alone in his position though. He is also not the only Nobel Prize winning non-believer. Freeman Dyson, another physicist with a Nobel Prize under his belt, too is a non-believer. "Dyson doesn’t deny that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the planet. But he predicts that advances in bio-technology—especially the creation of genetically engineered carbon-eating plants, which he foresees within two decades—will mitigate the damage with a minimum of economic and social disruption, explained a November 2009 article in The Atlantic magazine. It prompted writer Kenneth Brower to ask, in another article in The Atlantic, How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment?" Brower offered an answer: great physicists are often contrarians.

Of course, not all Nobel Prize winning scientists are non-believers. If this were so, the debate would have been over. But no, not so fast. In fact, in March of 2010, more than 2000 scientists and economists, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, delivered a letter to the U.S. Senate calling for the Senate to address climate change immediately. At the beginning of the letter, it reads, "We call on our nation’s leaders to swiftly establish and implement policies to bring about deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions. The strength of the science on climate change compels us to warn the nation about the growing risk of irreversible consequences as global average temperatures continue to increase over pre-industrial levels."

As you can see, climate change is a difficult topic. It is difficult even for the Nobel laureates. Do you thing the public has a chance?

The Internet is exploded with climate change information and mis-information. People are as emotionally charged as ever. Why are people so emotionally charged? Because it can potentially impact every one of us - not in the sense that natural disasters can hit us all, but in the sense that some government actions can, especially if the result is the establishment or the abolishment of some governmental policy that everybody has to be obliged by. If you believe global warming is harmless, while the government wants to impose tax to make your gasoline more expensive, how will you take it? If your neighbor wants the government to impose regulations on carbon dioxide because he/she believes global warming is bad, how will you take your neighbor? In some sizeable segment of the society in the United States, the Federal government is perceived as a greater threat than natural disasters, sometimes rightly so, though at the same time, the same segment has also voted to give the Federal government more power to erode civil liberty, including how one should behave in his or her own bedroom. Isn’t that ironic?

Climate change can be discussed in two fronts. First, is it real? Second, if it is real, is it bad? After all, if climate change is not bad, why worry about it even if it is real? Part of what Freeman Dyson was saying is not that global warming is not real, but it may not be bad, and there is no point in being so alarmed. After all, plants grow better with more carbon dioxide around, and people regularly breathe 1000 ppm (parts per million, 3 times present atmospheric level) carbon dioxide in office environments with no apparent adverse effect.

The first question, that whether global warming is real, is a scientific one. The second one is not. Scientific questions tend to have clear answers. Non-scientific questions tend to have not. We will see more evidence of that in this book.

As the saying goes, if it does not kill you, it makes you stronger, referring to some adverse situation that once you overcome, you become stronger. Now, then, is the it that almost killed you good or bad? If it is bad, it made you stronger. But if it is good, it almost killed you. So, is it good or bad? How do you answer such a question, such a non-scientific, value judgment question?

When a study showing that wearing high heels can increase the chance of having heart problems (a scientific statement) was released, a TV reporter went out to the street and interviewed passing-by high heel wearers. One woman interviewed said dismissively on TV, When that happens, I will think about it, and then strode off on her high heels, with a certain degree of wobbling in her strikes. To a portion of the human male population, that struggling walk of a human female is perceived as a sexy act. Apparently, for a portion of the human female population, the risk of heart disease is not enough to overturn the extra mysterious self-confidence that comes with wearing high heels. Men like high heels. Science can tell you the effect of wearing high heels, but science cannot tell you whether it is good or bad for you because even it may shorten your life, it could give you higher quality life if it also gives you some psychological boost. This value judgment part, is what you have to decide for yourself. The debate about climate change has the same flavor.

In a Sustainability Forum near Boston, a businessman suggested, "Only show people how much money they can save being green. Don’t talk about global warming. Many people don’t believe it anyway. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg goes one step further. He told Ira Flatow, the host of Science Friday on National Public Radio, If you care about the environment, my suggestion is do not tie it to global warming. Because nobody cares or believes what is going to happen 50 years from now."

According to a Gallup Polls study conducted in 2007 and 2008, only 49% of Americans believed in human caused global warming, while more than 90% of Japanese believe it. Where you stand depends on where you sit. If you are sitting on a land of active geological activities, you will probably believe Mother Nature doesn’t always behave like a mother. You better not get her upset.

Scientific data sometimes help fuel the debate. For example, shown in Fig. 1 is the change in ice coverage in the Arctic and Antarctic regions in the last thirty years. Please take a good look. It has two curves, one for the North Pole and one for the South Pole. If the Globe is getting warmer, you should expect to see less ice coverage on both poles, right? But according to the scientific data, they don’t. Only the North Pole has less ice. The South Pole, on the contrary, has accumulated more ice.

Fig. 1

This graph comes from National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc.org), a neutral scientific institution supported by NASA, NSF (National Science Foundation) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (If you insist, like many conspiracy theorists, that all these governmental organizations lie and they provide false data, as some extreme climate skeptics claim, you instantly lost credibility in front of many rational people.) The red trend line shows a slight increase in the amount of Antarctic ice since 1979, while the blue trend line shows a dramatic decline in Arctic ice since 1979.

Opponents of climate change theory immediately call to people’s attention that Antarctic ice has increased: how in the world can the South Pole accumulate more ice when the earth is warming up? Being put to the defensive, some supporters of the climate change theory scrambled to find an explanation (real scientists would look for the root cause for the apparent inconsistency anyway) for what is happening in Antarctica – probably a warmer atmosphere stores more water and so a normally dry Antarctica can experience more precipitations, increasing the ice covering area while the temperature there is still pretty much below freezing. At the same time, they point out the obvious: ice cap at the North Pole is indeed melting away (but why the mechanism that has lead to the increase in South Pole ice coverage does not occur in the northern hemisphere? Oh because it is