The Peakist

Calculated Earth is a collaborative effort by Malcolm Burke and Jonathan Burke and arises out of a piece of background research work that lead  them to the many freely available topographical data sources on the net.

The maps and animations are plotted using the June 2006 ETOPO2v2 data set from the US National Geophysical Data Centre.

The maps simply show graphically the selected height across the ETOPO2v2 dataset without interpretation or adjustment. So landlocked areas of the world that are below the selected level will show as being flooded regardless of being without a connection to the sea. No adjustments are made for tides.

Considering the flooding currently plaguing England, plotting the first few metres of sea level rise on this site should make you think about the scale of disaster we are facing if the polar caps continue melting.
http://calculatedearth.com

Howard Kunstler wrote ‘The Long Emergency’ on the premise that in the near future our lives will change dramatically due to a confluence point of simultaineous global problems. The primary issue here being peak oil. A secondary issue he touched on was climate change, to which many are attributing this summer’s uncharacteristic weather patterns.

I believe this is the first micro effects of a confluence of problems that will directly effect the standards of living in the western world.
” In the 40 years between 1950 and 1992, the area of planted arable land increased by 14.5 per cent from 611 million hectares to 700 million hectares; in the same period, grain output rose from 692 million tons to a staggering 1,920 million tons, an increase of 177.5 per cent…….. The ability of agriculture to produce far greater quantities food this century than in previous centuries can be attributed to four factors: advanced plant breeding techniques, the use of intensive irrigation, the availability of fertilizers on a commercial scale, and the development of plant protection products. Applied together, these four technologies have produced a remarkable outcome: although there has been an enormous increase in world population during the twentieth century, and although there are still parts of the world where people are suffering from malnutrition, nowadays, starvation is no longer a common cause of death, as it was in the last century. Nevertheless, because the population of the world continues to rise, 680 million people - or 12 per cent of the world’s population - could be chronically undernourished by 2010, according to FAO projections. This means that the demands on agriculture to be both productive and sustainable are increasing. ” source EFMA

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David Strahan, author of The Last Oil Shock writing for Prospect magazine.
The Stern review on the economics of climate change was published to almost universal acclaim, and six months on, only a handful of economists have found anything to criticise. In one sense, Stern’s conclusions were entirely predictable. Now that climate change so clearly has a pistol at the head of our species, there could only be one response, irrespective of cost. But there was also a surprise: paying off the highwayman of climate change would not be extortionate. In fact, it would be an absolute steal. Stern concluded that if we do nothing, the effects of climate change could shrivel the global economy by as much as 20 per cent over the next two centuries. Avoiding that risk would cost only about 1 per cent of world GDP to 2050.

Some economists charged Stern with minimising the costs of mitigating climate change and exaggerating the threats. Since climate change is already stirring positive feedback loops that could spark runaway global warming of the kind that caused the Permian mass extinction 250m years ago—the one that wiped out 95 per cent of species on the planet—these critics are as wrong as only economists can be. But that doesn’t make Stern right. His review is indeed based upon a mistaken assumption—but one which means our situation is even more dangerous than his analysis allows. (more…)

That’s a pretty stark warning from the IEA. And begs the question whether OPEC can increase production by 4.9 million barrels over the next five years. There’s supposedly
3.5-4 mbd spare capacity in Gawar, but as posted in February, a Saudi Aramco spokesman admitted last year that its mature fields are now declining at a rate of 8 percent
per year,a decline 50% of production in about 9 years time. This all puts enormous significance on the un-exploited Iraqi reserves. This again makes me ponder the question upon which, without exageration, the future of mankind depends - will the oil supply crunch have a positive effect of constraining global carbon emissions? Potentially, high oil costs put a brake on economic growth and encourage energy efficiency gains while high energy costs more generally make renewables economic. Two key factors working against this are of course that the high cost of conventional oil makes economic the production of carbon intensive unconvential oil (whether tar sands or coal liquefaction) and bio-deisel (which, unless there is substantial control on the use of palm oil and soya as feedstocks will lead to a huge increase in rain forest destruction in S.E Asia and South America Respectively). Would the reduced emissions resulting from decreased consumption be out weighed by the consequence of economic stagnation - namely, a failure to invest in low carbon technologies? I’m reminded that the only Kyoto signatories that “achieved” substantail cuts in carbon emissions was Russia during the collapse of its industiral base.

These issue make two campaigns all the more important : (more…)

“It is already the world’s biggest country, spanning 11 time zones and stretching from Europe to the far east. But yesterday Russia signalled its intention to get even bigger by announcing an audacious plan to annex a vast 460,000 square mile chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic…” writes Luke Harding in in the Guardian (more…)

As Baghdad burns, destabilising the entire region and sending the price of oil soaring, Calgary booms.

“The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history,” writes Naomi Klein in Friday’s Guardian (June 1, 2007). “All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely “tax holidays”, and pay a laughable 1% in royalties to the government.

This isn’t the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law - that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta. For four years now, Alberta and Iraq have been connected to each other through a kind of invisible seesaw: as Baghdad burns, destabilising the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms.” (more…)

Last week the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a federally funded think tank for the Department of the U.S. Navy, published a report called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change”. The CNA brought together eleven retired admirals and generals “to provide advice, expertise and perspective on the impact of climate change”. Most significantly the report explicitly calls on the US to engage in the international effort to stabilize climate change. (more…)

Ivan Semeniuk reports in New Scientist on the carbon threat from the US coal mountain: “AT THE back of Ernest Moniz’s mind a clock is ticking. Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mental countdown marks the narrowing window of time that remains for the US to address a looming environmental disaster fuelled by the burning of mountains of cheap American coal. (more…)

Yes, really. The BBC have launched an online game based roughly on IPCC models where you are president of the European Nations. You must tackle climate change and stay popular enough with the voters to remain in office.

Climate Challenge 

It’s rare that an opinion is expressed so contrary to one’s own received wisdom by someone of such authority that you just can’t ignore it. So when James Hansen, Director and lead climate scientist of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science says that the remaining oil and gas can be burnt whilst limiting atmospheric CO2 to ~450ppm and incremental temperature increase to only 1°C, it stopped me in my tracks. Hansen famously accused the Bush administration of trying to silence him after calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in 2005 and stated last year, in the context of reporting the results of NASA studies on arctic sea ice loss, ““We have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change – no longer than decade at most” (more…)

Does substantial mitigation of climate change, absent global economic collapse, presuppose social revolution? Is a global economic collapse resulting from oil and gas depletion the most likely scenario for substantial mitigation of climate change?

I find it difficult to articulate my political desires (for systemic socio-economic transformation) with the foreshortened timescale we are presented with within which to substantially mitigate climate change. I am wary that climate change can become the vehicle for political desires (my own included) such that realistic options may be rejected on ideological grounds - or to put it another way that the profound potential for climate change to act a vehicle for social transformation becomes an ideologically driven focus above and beyond the objective conditions of climate change. An illustration of the problem… (more…)

by Richard Heinberg

The problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil both result from societal dependence on fossil fuels. But just how the impacts of these two problems relate to one another, and how policies to address them should differ or overlap, are questions that have so far not been adequately discussed. (more…)