You could be right. It is also possible they have more than they expect to be able to sell before demand for oil disappears. That would explain why they are no longer restricting their output. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” - Sheikh Zaki Yamani, previous Saudi Arabian oil minister.
The group that developed this study was created and mandated by Canada's privy council. Canada does not exactly benefit from the findings of this study. And what about Bloomberg Business and Swedbank? Are they also "Whack-Jobs"?
Like I said, it's inevitable that the oil market shrinks, but that video didn't address the areas where electricity isn't practical.
That doesn't matter much to Canada. Canadian oil is expensive to extract. It is not economical even at the current price. Canada needs demand to grow substantially in order for its oil to become economical once again. If demand drops at all then it is game over for oil extraction in Canada. Analysts are expecting demand to drop substantially and in relatively short order.
even the "polar icecaps are melting" crowd admit that it will takes hundreds to thousands of years.
Look at the trajectory of summer sea ice area in the arctic: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/n... . We have about 1/2 of what we had just 30 years ago and the loss appears to be accelerating.
Solar energy intercepted by Earth is massive at about 1370Wm^-2, but the variability in solar output is only about 1Wm^-2. That's still significant at 127 TW over the surface of the Earth, but since solar output has been falling over the last several decades it has served only to dampen the recent observed warming.
I've replicated the work in your link but included data from the last few decades. Temps continue to diverge from solar output since the 80's: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s...
On top of the observed warming, something has been compensating for the falling solar output over the last few decades. Since solar output is cyclical, we should expect temperatures to warm even faster once the sun recovers.
Scientists who have attempted to quantify the human contribution to the current temperature rise have found that anthropogenic sources account for between 80% and 150%. See Tett et al. 2000, Meehl et al. 2004, Stone et al. 2007, Lean and Rind 2008, Huber and Knutti 2011, Gillett et al. 2012, Wigley and Santer 2012 , and Jones et al. 2013.
It may be unintuitive to think that humans may have cause more than 100% of the current warming, but remember that natural factors have generally been forcing planet towards another glacial period. We've just had the weakest solar cycle in over 100 years. If solar variability is a strong contributor to global mean temperature then other forces have not only caused all of the warming that we have recently observed, but also caused enough additional warming to offset the cooling caused by the sun.
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
Solar output has been dropping over the last several decades. The sun does (obviously) affect the surface temperature, but to the extent that it does it has been driving temperatures DOWN: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s...
That means something else has been not only counteracting the cooling effect of the sun but also warming the planet at a rate unprecedented in the last 10,000 or so years.
Meanwhile Mars has been coming out of an ice age for the last 370,000 years (according to TFS). There are other factors at play here than just the sun.
There are plenty of negative results due to a warming planet. Ice caps may melt changing the ocean levels and salinity, animals in areas may lose habitat. But it also means that crops can grow further north and those areas become more habitable. Of course migration does become a political issue but it seems to me that the migration issues that are extent today, caused by geopolitical reasons, are substantially worse than moving due to temperature change.
Global temperatures have been gradually falling for the last 8000 years or so... until about 100 years ago when they started to shoot straight up: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap...
It's hard to imagine that the global climate could be considered 'stable' over the last 200 years when compared to the last 8000.
British Columbia has one now that's been quite successful: "We've grown our economy at the same time we've had what the World Bank calls the most successful carbon taxes in the world." - http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Burgers aren't tax deductible. Nor should they be. Nor would I expect you and your neighbors to chip in on the cleanup bill if I took a dump on your lawn.
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, but another option is dividends. Just return the carbon tax equally to all citizens at the end of each year. This would minimize political interference.
Not taxing the money BP spent on oil clean-ups was the biggest example
I think you misread. $9.9 billion of that cleanup was paid by you and me. Why are we paying to clean up their mess? How are they incentivised to clean up their act if we're willing to socialize the cost of their mess?
Which is why even oil companies are preparing for a post-oil world. Everyone is. The Saudis are creating the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know the game is up, and oil has only decades left.
It was a Saudi minister of oil and mineral resources who said "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."
Right. Plus, if it's a revenue neutral tax like they've implemented in British Columbia then other taxes are reduced and no net income is generated for the state.
How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Yes. That's what he's suggesting. Get rid of subsidies and implement a carbon tax. Let the market rather than the politicians decide which alternatives to support and which will fail. If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral then you can reduce income and sales tax - two things we ought to be encouraging rather than taxing.
On geological scales, 14 years isn't soon. 14 years is now.
14 years for detection. No timeline for when this becomes a threat to marine life. The editor wanted an attention grabbing headline that is not supported by the paper or even the article.
Slashdot Mirror
You could be right. It is also possible they have more than they expect to be able to sell before demand for oil disappears. That would explain why they are no longer restricting their output. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” - Sheikh Zaki Yamani, previous Saudi Arabian oil minister.
The group that developed this study was created and mandated by Canada's privy council. Canada does not exactly benefit from the findings of this study. And what about Bloomberg Business and Swedbank? Are they also "Whack-Jobs"?
Like I said, it's inevitable that the oil market shrinks, but that video didn't address the areas where electricity isn't practical.
That doesn't matter much to Canada. Canadian oil is expensive to extract. It is not economical even at the current price. Canada needs demand to grow substantially in order for its oil to become economical once again. If demand drops at all then it is game over for oil extraction in Canada. Analysts are expecting demand to drop substantially and in relatively short order.
Only Venesuala and Saudi Arabia have greater oil reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But Canada's oil is expensive to recover. If demand for oil drops then so will price and Canada will be sitting on stranded assets. Even at the current price Canada's oil is not economical. Breakeven costs for existing projects such as Kearl Phase 1 stand at US$42 per barrel, with Husky’s Lloydminster (US$28), Cenvous’ Christina Lake ($26) and Suncor operations (US$30.3), WTI has declined to $30 per barrel.
Canada needs demand to grow substantially if it is going to survive - or for supply to dry up elsewhere.
We're going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster than anyone thinks? I'm not sure how that's going to happen.
According to Bloomberg Business, "Electric Cars Could Wreak Havoc on Oil Markets Within a Decade"
Conventional energy will be obsolete by 2030 according to Swedbank: there are four key categories of technologies all of which are improving by double and triple digit basis every year. Each one of them is disruptive in it's own way.
We know that the proxies have much lower resolution than the actual measurements and are not comparable at all
Nonsense. Many paleo data sets have an annual resolution. There is only so far global mean surface temperature can stray in 1 year.
The reconstruction I used overlaps the instrumental record (with remarkable agreement) and shows (you guessed it) a sudden spike at the end!
even the "polar icecaps are melting" crowd admit that it will takes hundreds to thousands of years.
Look at the trajectory of summer sea ice area in the arctic: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/n... . We have about 1/2 of what we had just 30 years ago and the loss appears to be accelerating.
Solar energy intercepted by Earth is massive at about 1370Wm^-2, but the variability in solar output is only about 1Wm^-2. That's still significant at 127 TW over the surface of the Earth, but since solar output has been falling over the last several decades it has served only to dampen the recent observed warming.
Even for solar cycle length the correlation breaks down after the 1980s: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
I've replicated the work in your link but included data from the last few decades. Temps continue to diverge from solar output since the 80's: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s...
On top of the observed warming, something has been compensating for the falling solar output over the last few decades. Since solar output is cyclical, we should expect temperatures to warm even faster once the sun recovers.
Here's the fixed link: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap...
Here's the long view. Something peculiar happened on Earth about 150 years ago: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap... (red is CO2, green is temp).
That cannot be related to what has been happening on Mars over the last 370,000 years.
Scientists who have attempted to quantify the human contribution to the current temperature rise have found that anthropogenic sources account for between 80% and 150%. See Tett et al. 2000, Meehl et al. 2004, Stone et al. 2007, Lean and Rind 2008, Huber and Knutti 2011, Gillett et al. 2012, Wigley and Santer 2012 , and Jones et al. 2013. It may be unintuitive to think that humans may have cause more than 100% of the current warming, but remember that natural factors have generally been forcing planet towards another glacial period. We've just had the weakest solar cycle in over 100 years. If solar variability is a strong contributor to global mean temperature then other forces have not only caused all of the warming that we have recently observed, but also caused enough additional warming to offset the cooling caused by the sun.
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
Solar output has been dropping over the last several decades. The sun does (obviously) affect the surface temperature, but to the extent that it does it has been driving temperatures DOWN: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s...
That means something else has been not only counteracting the cooling effect of the sun but also warming the planet at a rate unprecedented in the last 10,000 or so years.
Meanwhile Mars has been coming out of an ice age for the last 370,000 years (according to TFS). There are other factors at play here than just the sun.
Based on the slashdot summary? Maybe dig a bit deeper. Scientists can be proud and rash, but it is likely backed by mountains of data.
There are plenty of negative results due to a warming planet. Ice caps may melt changing the ocean levels and salinity, animals in areas may lose habitat. But it also means that crops can grow further north and those areas become more habitable. Of course migration does become a political issue but it seems to me that the migration issues that are extent today, caused by geopolitical reasons, are substantially worse than moving due to temperature change.
They may not be unrelated: Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria
Global temperatures have been gradually falling for the last 8000 years or so... until about 100 years ago when they started to shoot straight up: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap...
It's hard to imagine that the global climate could be considered 'stable' over the last 200 years when compared to the last 8000.
British Columbia has one now that's been quite successful: "We've grown our economy at the same time we've had what the World Bank calls the most successful carbon taxes in the world." - http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Burgers aren't tax deductible. Nor should they be. Nor would I expect you and your neighbors to chip in on the cleanup bill if I took a dump on your lawn.
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, but another option is dividends. Just return the carbon tax equally to all citizens at the end of each year. This would minimize political interference.
Not taxing the money BP spent on oil clean-ups was the biggest example
I think you misread. $9.9 billion of that cleanup was paid by you and me. Why are we paying to clean up their mess? How are they incentivised to clean up their act if we're willing to socialize the cost of their mess?
Which is why even oil companies are preparing for a post-oil world. Everyone is. The Saudis are creating the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know the game is up, and oil has only decades left.
It was a Saudi minister of oil and mineral resources who said "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."
Right. Plus, if it's a revenue neutral tax like they've implemented in British Columbia then other taxes are reduced and no net income is generated for the state.
How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Yes. That's what he's suggesting. Get rid of subsidies and implement a carbon tax. Let the market rather than the politicians decide which alternatives to support and which will fail. If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral then you can reduce income and sales tax - two things we ought to be encouraging rather than taxing.
On geological scales, 14 years isn't soon. 14 years is now.
14 years for detection. No timeline for when this becomes a threat to marine life. The editor wanted an attention grabbing headline that is not supported by the paper or even the article.