Quote:
Originally Posted by HAL 9000
One possibility that rarely seems to be discussed in these climate change studies is how the 'peak oil' problem impacts climate change.
I mean, around half of the fossil fuel we can reasonably access is now consumed, which means around half of the additional co2 we can produce has already been produced (caveat: we can put more in the atmostphere by deforestation).
So it must be possible to calculate a maximum CO2 level in the atmostphere, the amount that is there when we have consumed all fossil fuels and hammered the worlds forests (and when all the Co2 sinks like the oceans are full).
If that is possible to calculate, then we should also, through our understanding of the greenhouse effect also be able to estimate what that climate would look like - I have never seen this done though, maybe I am missing something.
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There may be no definitive way to come up with a mathematical formula with any certainty
yet, and I'm sure it's been discussed and tried, probably with with wildly different degrees of results each time.
If you search peak oil/climate change (like I did due to your question posed) you'll that see those who
profit from these two phenomena have dominated the first few hundred results. Good business platform, not really very scientific.
I just read this book;
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us which really is an innovative look at the peak oil problem.
Scientific American does have an 8 page excerpt titled,
Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil, from the above author.
bit of the discussion on peak oil below,
To answer these questions, we first have to know "when." If we have a hundred years before oil production peaks, then we'll be in a very different position compared to that peak happening next year—or last year. The timing of this peak isn't easy to figure out. The world's supply of oil is harder to measure than carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, for the simple reasons that nobody owns the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is well-mixed. Oil, on the other hand, is a business. It comes with trade secrets. It also comes without an industry-wide standard for calculating untapped oil reserves. If one company tells you how much oil it has left, you can't directly add that to another company's number and get a reliable total, because both calculations were figured in very different ways. Unlike the atmosphere, you can't just take a sample from anywhere on the planet and expect it to tell you something about conditions everywhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dorothy Wood
I'm worried about floods. Two of my neighbors have boats and I live in an attic, so I'll be okay. My house has been standing for 100 years, hopefully it'll hold up for awhile longer.
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I'm always worried about earthquakes, it's a west coast thing. The global warming situation is much more of something I feel I owe to future generations. I can't pretend this isn't happening or deny it isn't happening. So I just keep bringing it up, hoping to see more and more people bringing it up, skeptics too.