Wednesday
Nov102010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Journos come running
Nov 10, 2010 Climate: Mann As soon as the global warming movement puts out the call, much of the press simply comes running, ready to repeat the mantra on request. The latest to involve themselves in the Mann media movement is MSN.
"They can threaten whatever they want," the Penn State professor told me on Sunday, after his talk at the New Horizons in Science meeting at Yale University. "I'm quite confident to fight those sorts of witch-hunt attempts."
Reader Comments (57)
TinyCO2: "Climate scientists and journalists like to pretend that nobody supported global cooling theory back in the 70s."
On that topic, just to add that over at Omniclimate, Maurizio Morabito has found quite a few articles from the 1970s onwards that touch on the global cooling alarm, in an online archive from Italian newspaper La Stampa, which has just been made available:
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/a-new-treasure-trove-of-1970s-global-cooling-articles/
I agree with Pete in thinking CAGW is a political front to peak oil. The fact that the solution to CAGW is to use a lot less fossil fuel the only big difference between the 2 is that a peak oil belief would emphasise the importance of the substantial coal deposits that exist. The UK's energy needs, and decline in north sea production, will quickly raise this as an issue over the coming few years.
Pete - coming back on some of your points.
Climate science has many many more unknown unknowns, than supply/demand have known unknowns.
Absolutely, but to hear them you'd never think it.
whatever is representing "fields yet to be developed or found" needs to come online now, improved technology which may improve total recovery rates need to increase production rates, now.
This is why high oil prices are a good thing, of course, because they incentivise this. The best answer to an oil shortage is $146/barrel.
I think shale oil is a pipe dream, it would make more sense not to bother and just use the saved energy anyway, besides it was included in the graph with other unconventionals.
Perhaps, and no doubt shortages and shocks await: especially if cartels, regulators, and Russian oil crooks mess around with the supply or demand fundamentals. Periodically this disincentivise the development of new production because the price is too high ("we're making enough $$ anyway") or too low ("it's not worth finding").
My wider point, though, is that although one can say the day of peak oil is approaching, one can also respectably disagree. The range of disagreement even in what is, as you've said, a relatively uncomplicated field and time horizon is huge. 1 trillion left? or 7? or 30? All are plausible, a factor of 30 between high and low estimates - and as you've said this, compared to 200-year climate forecasts, is a simple business.
Course the peakers could be wrong, there could be a massive new discovery (not arctic tho, I think the ice will remain a problem for a long time)
I'm not so sure - the challenges today of getting oil out from under the Arctic are probably less daunting than getting out from under the North Sea were in 1970, given the available technology in either case. The greater issue I reckon is going to be the attempts to landgrab the oil and claim it's Russian, or whatever.
since new discoveries peaked in the 1960's you think they would have found one by now tho. If you look at recent oil prospecting investment, there's not much going on
And that's the problem right there. From 1995 to about 2005, nobody's really been looking. All the majors spent spare cashflow on buying back their shares during that time, for example, rather than trying to find oil and expand production. Where they did, it often led them into dodgy countries whose leaders either nicked all the resource (Nigeria), misdirected it (Chad), or expropriated it (Venezuela).
I have done much less research regarding coal, although reading articles like this one http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29919 I don't get a good picture. I know China produces by far the most coal in the world, and has one of the largest reserves, I recently read they will be importing 230 million tons this year, so clearly we need to look at supply and demand rather than total reserves.
If the Energy Watch Groups report for the German gov (referenced in the above article link) is accurate, "global coal production could peak in as few as 15 years" I find it difficult to imagine large scale increases in production for coal to liquid sufficient to mitigate a 3-6% annual decline in oil production, let alone supply sufficient to meet the expected rise in demand.
On the issue of reliability of tree rings to represent global average temperatures, this presentation from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences web page is very entertaining:
http://iahs.info/perugia/2007IAHSKlemesTreeRings.pdf
Donna Laframboise has published a powerful, heartfelt essay on what I would call the de facto collaboration of journalists with oppressive forces from the so-called 'Left', including their promotion of alarm about CO2 and climate: http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/lest-we-forget-the-importance-of-liberty/
MSM: Mann Stream Media