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Alternative energy sources such as solar have been cut back throughout the world because of economic conditions. There was a push in Spain 333 Energy Watch Group, Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy, (EWG-Series No. 1/2006, December 2006), at http://energywatchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EWG_
Report_Uranium_3-12-2006ms1.pdf.
334 T. W. Patzek and G. D. Croft, “A Global Coal Production Forecast with Multi-Hubbert Cycle Analysis,” Energy, vol. 35, 2010, pp. 3109-3122.
335 S. H. Mohr and G. M. Evans, “Forecasting Coal Production Until 2100,” Fuel, vol. 88, 2009, pp. 2059-2067. See general y R. Heinberg and D. Fridley, “The End of Cheap Coal,”
Nature, vol. 468, no. 7322, pp. 367-369.
336 R. Heinberg, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, 2009), p. 155.
337 R. Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society, (International Forum on Globalization and Post Carbon Institute, False Solutions Series No.4, September, 2009), at http://ifg.org/v2/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Searching-for-a-Miracle_web10nov09.pdf.
338 T. Trainer, “Can the World Run on Renewable Energy? A Revised Negative Case,”
Humanomics, vol.29, 2013, pp. 88-104.
339 B. Lomborg, “Ballooning Cost is Blowing in the Wind,” The Australian, March 22, 2012, p. 12.
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for the nation to become the world leader in renewable energy. In 2008 Spain accounted for about half of the world’s new solar power instal ation re wattage due to generous government subsidies. Now, however, due to poor economic conditions and the need to curb the public deficit, these subsidies have been temporarily suspended and a dark cloud has passed over solar optimism.340
Safety concerns continue to be an issue with nuclear power, as we have seen from the discussion given previously in this chapter.341
Claims by Lockheed Martin to have made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, and to have a working nuclear fusion reactor by about 2017 (it does not seem to have happened by 2019, but some media reports say 2020), have been greeted with skepticism by the scientific community. The project lead at Lockheed Martin has said that a commercial application would take about a decade. However, others see this as optimistic, with domestic fusion unlikely before 2050.
Richard C. Duncan has seen peak energy leading to the end of industrial society by 2025-2030, with a Malthusian catastrophe and global population crash culling the human population to two billion by 2050.342 An “Olduvai” die off will occur everywhere, and large cities will be very dangerous (and sources of disease from rotting corpses), when the lights of modernity go out. C. Stager, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, writes: We’re already near the limits of economical y viable petroleum production, and the decline of cheap oil will have swift and severe consequences for those who will inherit the full measure of that problem. If and when the prices and availability of petroleum-based fuels, fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, synthetic fabrics, and even roadway pavement go haywire, the 340 The Australian, February 13, 2012, p. 13.
341 See further, “Nuclear Power: The Dream that Failed,” The Economist, March 10, 2012, at http://www.economist.com/node/21549936.
342 R. C. Duncan, “America: A Frog in the Kettle Slowly Coming to a Boil,” The Social Contract, Fal , 2007, pp. 3-13.
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scale of human suffering could outstrip anything in the works for us from climate [change].343
But, peak energy is not humanity’s only existential problem.
The Climate Cataclysm
The best-known doomsday predictions arising from the issue of global climate change were made by James Lovelock, known for his Gaia hypothesis that the Earth (“Mother Earth”) behaves like an organism, exhibiting systems-self-regulation. Lovelock in his various books on the topic used metaphors which transcended normal science and essential y involved philosophical speculation and metaphysics in my opinion. Nevertheless, at a minimum, he saw the world as a non-linear system, subject to chaotic effects. In 2006, he said: “Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”344 In his 2009 book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, Lovelock said “global warming may all but eliminate people from Earth.”345
Lovelock recanted from his doomsday predictions, describing his own predictions as “wrong” and others as “alarmist” – although only holding to the complete annihilation of life would be more alarmist than Lovelock’s earlier predictions. At no point did he examine the survival rates of past extinction episodes involving climate change and human survival. Surprisingly enough, Lovelock himself accepted a non-linear model of climate change, described as follows: “Do not expect the climate to follow the smooth path of slowly but sedately rising temperatures predicted by the ipcc [Intergovernmental Panel 343 C. Stager, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (Scribe, Melbourne, 2011), p. 235.
344 “Scientist Cools on Climate Alarmism,” The Australian, April 26, 2012, p. 11.
345 James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Allen Lane, Camberwel , Victoria, 2009), p. 4.
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on Climate Change], where change slowly inches up and leaves plenty of time for business as usual. The real Earth changes intermittently with spel s of constancy, even slight decline between jumps to greater heat.” Lovelock’s recanting was produced because he believes that climate change has not proceeded as fast as the Gaia model would predict. But, so much the worst for his model.
The earlier, pessimistic Lovelock though was on the right track, and saw the gravest dangers to humanity arising from “starvation, competition for space and resources, and tribal war.” He also said that to survive in the harsh world of the future we need “to prepare ourselves to fight a barbarian warlord out to seize us and our territory.” So, he seems to be logical y committed to the thesis of this book.
Journalists skeptical of the very existence of global climate change have made much of the claims of Kaufmann (et al.) that “global surfaces temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008.”346 These journalists should have read the entire paper, which does not support climate change skepticism. The title of the paper is “Reconciling Anthropogenic Climate Change with Observed Temperature 1998-2008.” It presents evidence that the rapid increase in sulfur emissions, primarily by China’s coal consumption, has been so vast as to mask the increase in radiative forcing (the rate of change of energy or net irradiance per unit area of the Earth relative to the top of the atmosphere) that would have otherwise occurred from rising greenhouse gas concentrations (global dimming). When the sulphur emissions are reduced by technological improvements in the Chinese coal industry, global warming will allegedly return with a vengeance.
A paper by Solomon (et al.)347 puts the position that man-made pol utants may have slowed global warming as aerosol particles from burning coal may reflect sunlight back into space. More will be said about the issue of “the pause” shortly.
346 R. K. Kaufmann (et. al.), “Reconciling Anthropogenic Climate Change with Observed Temperature 1998-2008,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/
cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1102467108.
347 S. Solomon (et. al.), “The Persistently Variable ‘Background’ Stratospheric Aerosol Layer and Global Climate Change,” Science, vol. 333, 2011, pp. 866-870.
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Climate change skeptics maintain that there is no direct evidence that 20th and 21st century warming (if such warming did occur – the skeptic teams are divided on this), was caused by carbon dioxide increases, as ice ages have occurred when the atmosphere carbon dioxide levels were higher than at present.348 The causes of an ice age are complex and inv
olve more factors than just the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Factors include Milankovitch cycles (variations in the Earth’s orbit), sunspot cycles, volcanism and other factors. It is possible for an ice age to occur even with a higher than present-day concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases relative to these other factors.349 However, there are various
“signatures” of human-caused climate change, rather than natural variability, such as cooling in the upper atmosphere, with lower-level warming, nights warmer than days, winters warmer than past summers and land warming more than oceans.
The Earth has also experienced a number of past mass extinctions, such as the Cambrian extinction of 490 million years ago and the more recent Paleocene thermal event of 55 million years ago.
These were caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to changes in ocean currents and circulation patterns, via the disruption of ocean conveyer currents. This disruption led to the massive growth of green sulfur-producing bacteria and other bacteria producing hydrogen sulphide. The gas enters the atmosphere, and over millions of years builds up to such a high concentration that the Earth’s protective ozone layer is destroyed. The influx of ultraviolet radiation and high concentrations of hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere kil s off most of life on Earth.350 According to University of Washington paleontologist, Professor Peter Ward, “[t]he present rise in carbon dioxide levels seems to eclipse any other rate of increase 348 Ian Plimer, “Basic Sciences is the Answer, Not Blinding Ideology,” The Australian, January 4, 2012, p. 13.
349 R. A. Muller and G. J. MacDonald, Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes: Data, Spectral Analysis and Mechanisms, (Springer-Verlag, London, 2000).
350 Peter P. D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future, (Smithsonian Books/Collins, New York, 2007).
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from the past” and once co levels rise above 450 parts per million 2
(ppm) (May 15, 2019 atmospheric co levels are at 415.64 ppm, noaa-2
esrl data) “we head irrevocably toward an ice-free world, which will lead to a change in the thermohaline conveyer belt currents [which]
will lead to a new greenhouse extinction.”
Professor David Battisti of the University of Washington, however, sees co levels reaching 800 ppm by the end of the 21st century and 2
rising to 1,100 ppm shortly after that, melting the world’s ice sheets and setting in motion the next greenhouse extinction.351 Some authorities believe that adding co levels from other greenhouse 2
gases means that we may already be at the tipping point of 450 ppm, so that humanity is already on the highway to extinction.352
While climate change skeptics maintain that global temperatures have not risen since 1997,353 other climate scientists have said that the past decade is the warmest on record. For example, Professor Richard A. Muller was once one of the world’s leading climate change skeptics, and was a skeptic because of the poor quality of data from temperature stations, with temperature uncertainty of 2-5 C or more.
This margin of error is due to the stations being in cities, which are typical y hotter than rural areas (known as the “heat island effect”).
Muller chaired the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, which obtained over 1.6 billion measurements from over 39,000
temperature stations across the world. The urban-heating bias was avoided by using rural locations. It was concluded that: “The changes at the locations that showed warming [⅔ showed warming, ⅓ did not] were typical y between 1-2°C much greater than the ipcc’s average of 0.64°C.”354 Muller concluded that global warming is real.
351 As above, p. 194.
352 Foundation for the Future, Humanity Three Thousand: Anthropogenic Climate Destabilization: A Worse-Case Scenario, (Executive Summary), at http://www.
futurefoundation.org/documents/HUM_ExecSum_ClimateDestabilization.
353 J. Leake, “Warming Data Shows Shades of Grey,” The Australian, February 7, 2012, p.13; B. Stephens, “Climate Zealots, the End Isn’t Nigh,” The Australian, November 30, 2011, p. 10.
354 R. A. Muller, “The Case Against Global-Warming Scepticism,” 21 October, 2011 at http://
www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.
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James E. Hansen, director of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has said that his predictions in 1988 about increasing global temperature have been proved true, but he was too optimistic about the speed at which temperature changes would result in an increase in extreme weather.355 His research team’s analysis of six decades of global temperature statistics found a statistical y significant increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers. The analysis shows “that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtual y no explanation other than climate change.”356 Plotting the temperatures of the world over time on a Gaussian or bell curve, showed that the extremes of unusual y cold and unusual y hot are changing, so that they both become more severe and more common. Thus, in the period of 1951 to 1980, extremely hot temperatures covered 0.1-0.2
percent of the Earth, but since that time the extremes now cover around 10 percent of the Earth.357 The European heat wave of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the droughts in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011, the extremely hot 2012 US summer, and perhaps the 2018
droughts across the US, all have probably been caused by climate change, or the intensity of these events influenced by climate change.358
In 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) released its latest scientific report from Working Group I, which is said to constitute the “consensus” view on climate change.359 The report states that the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are at an 355 J. Hansen, “Climate Change is Here – and Worse than We Thought,” The Washington Post, August 4, 2012, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here--and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html.
356 As above.
357 J. Hansen (et al.), “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 20 C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 15, 2015, pp. 20059-20179.
358 Q. Schiermeier, “Droughts, Heat Waves and Floods: How to Tell when Climate Change is to Blame,” Scientific American, July 30, 2018, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/
article/droughts-heat-waves-and-floods-how-to-tell-when-climate-change-is-to-blame/.
359 T. F. Stocker (et al., eds.), Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013).
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unprecedented level compared to other times over the past 800,000
years.360 A 5,000 year long-term cooling trend has been reversed; the period 1982-2012, for example, in the northern hemisphere was very likely the warmest 30 year period in the past 800 years and likely the warmest 30 year period for 1,400 years.361 The average temperature for the 20th century was approximately 0.4 C higher than the average temperature of the past five centuries.362
From 1901 to 2012, almost the entire planet experienced warming.363
There was a warming trend of 0.85 C for 1880 to 2012, with respect to the global y averaged combined ocean and land temperature. The total increase between the average of the 1850-1900 period and the 2003-2012 periods is 0.78 C. Most of the Earth’s heating has been in the oceans; the 1971-2010 estimate of energy gain being 199 x 10¹²
W, equivalent to 0.42 Wm-2 of heating over the Earth’s surface and 0.55 Wm-2 warming over the ocean’s surface. Such warming has led to both an annual multi-year and perennial
decrease in Arctic sea ice extent from 1979-2012 of about 3.5 and 4.1 percent per decade.
In the period 1971-2009, the total mass loss from all glaciers (except those on the periphery of ice sheets) was very likely 226 gigatonnes/
year (range, 91 to 361 gigatonnes/per year). The Greenland ice sheet has lost ice at an accelerating rate since 1992 and it is very likely that the increase is 34 (- 6 to 72) gigatonnes/per year for 1992-2001.
Earthquakes of magnitude 4.6 to 5.2 have occurred in Greenland due to large icebergs breaking off from tidal glaciers, forcing the glaciers backwards. There has been an increase of seven-fold of such earthquakes since the 1990s.364
Most ice loss in the Antarctic ice shelf has been in the northern Antarctic Peninsula and Amundsen Sea, from the melting of outlet 360 As above, p. 1.
361 As above, p. 41.
362 M. Ahmed (et. al.), (PAGES 2K Consortium), “Continental-Scale Temperature Variability During the Past Two Millennia,” Nature Geoscience, vol.6, 2013, pp. 339-345, cited p. 339.
363 Stocker (et al.), as above, p. 37.
364 T. Murray (et al.), “Reverse Glacier Motion During Iceberg Calving and the Cause of Glacial Earthquakes,” Science, vol. 349, 2015, pp. 305-308.
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glaciers, with the average rate of ice loss increasing from the 1992-2001 period of 30 gigatonnes/per year to 147 gigatonnes per year in the period 2002-2011.365 However, in 2015 sea ice in Antarctica averaged 14.93 million square kilometres, and in June 2015, this was the third highest June extent in the records. This was thought to be due to strong atmospheric wave-3 patterns, rather than from a reversal of climate change impacts.366
The ipcc accepted that there has been something of a “pause” or
“hiatus” in global mean surface temperatures from 1998 to 2012. As already mentioned, this “pause” has been taken by climate change skeptics as showing that global warming is not occurring, or has ceased. The rate of warming from 1998 to 2012 is smaller than the trend from 1951 to 2012; the 1998-2012 trend was 0.05 C (-0.05 to 0.15