Jump to content
The Education Forum

Global Warming, Peak Oil, and related topics


Wade Frazier

Recommended Posts

Hi:

This will start a series of posts on Peak Oil, Global Warming, and related topics. To begin with, what is temperature? It is a measure of molecular motion. When molecules move faster, they get warmer. All matter above absolute zero emits photons. Most is at wavelengths too large to be seen with the human eye, but as matter gets warmer, the photons are more energetic (have shorter wavelengths), and they eventually get powerful enough to be seen with the naked eye. Warm up metal in a fire, and it can get what is called red hot. Get it hotter still, and it can become white hot. Hotter still, and it begins emitting photons beyond the range of visible light, and ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma rays can be emitted. Those wavelengths are damaging to any living organisms, as they break molecular bonds, and the strongest can strip electrons from atoms and make them ions, which is why they are called ionizing radiation, which is deadly to organisms.

That was a lot to pack into a paragraph, and my big essay covers that territory at a more leisurely pace. The force of gravity attracted hydrogen into the star we call the Sun, and when hydrogen gets squeezed hard enough by gravity, nuclear fusion begins, as hydrogen nuclei (protons) fuse to form larger nuclei (helium, etc.), and all of the elements on our planet heavier than hydrogen, which is nearly all of Earth’s mass, were formed in stars via fusion processes. The Sun is a large star, in the top 5% of star sizes in our galaxy, and is in the “sweet spot” of stars, in which it burns very stably for several billion years before its life begins ending, as the fusion processes begin to end. The Sun has burned very stably for several billion years and will for several more before it becomes a red giant. It burns about a third brighter than it did a few billion years ago, and will continue to do so.

Obviously, the Sun is the source of Earth’s warmth. The radioactive materials below Earth’s surface contribute relatively little to Earth’s surface warmth, but they power Earth’s tectonic activity, which is critical for the chemical makeup of Earth’s atmosphere, and the most important is the carbon cycle. Carbon is vital for life on Earth, and because carbon dioxide is a three-molecule gas, it traps infrared radiation (just below the visible wavelength of light) coming from Earth, and that trapped energy raises Earth’s temperature. In every paleoclimate study I ever saw, carbon dioxide has always been the most important gas for raising Earth’s temperature. If not for the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, Earth’s surface would have been a block of ice since Earth’s early days. If Earth stays in its present orbit, complex life will not be able to live in Earth in about a billion years, and not long after that, Earth will become as sterile as the Moon.

In the eon of complex life carbon dioxide levels have seesawed, which gave rise to hot periods and ice ages. The hothouse Earth period that the dinosaurs thrived in began ending about 50 million years ago, because of continually declining carbon dioxide as volcanism declined (as Earth’s radioactive activity declines), and we live in an ice age today. For the past million years, continental ice sheets have grown and receded like clockwork, due to Earth’s orientation to the Sun, and until human activities began altering Earth’s atmosphere, beginning eight thousand years ago with the rise of agriculture, Earth would already be heading back toward the growth of the ice sheets. Climate scientists estimate that humanity has already delayed that new glacial episode by 50,000 years or so, primarily due to the hydrocarbon age we are in, as we burn Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits with abandon.

While in every scientific discipline some scientists play “devil’s advocate” and challenge the consensus, which can be a noble role, most Global Warming contrarianism has been engaged in by scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby. I have never seen a credible challenge to the idea that increasing the atmospheric carbon dioxide will inexorably lead to a warmer atmosphere. The idea is unassailable. That said, climate systems are incredibly complex and climate science is a young discipline. But every Global Warming naysayer that I have seen, for those who were not on the payroll of oil and coal companies, seizes on either short term oscillations or regional data, which is meaningless as far as being used for a challenge to the idea of Global Warming. The ultimate cause of Earth’s surface temperate is well known, as is the cause of our current ice age, and all of the Fox News talking heads cannot make it go away.

A related issue is where did those hydrocarbons come from? As with the causes of Earth’s surface temperature, there is no credible challenge to the idea that Earth’s coal deposits were formed from swampy forests in which fallen trees did not decay before they were buried in sediments, and most of Earth’s coal deposits formed before any life on Earth had evolved the means to digest lignin, which makes up the wood in trees. On the Internet, you can find all manner of challenge to the idea of why coal formed, often at tabloid sites that the scientifically illiterate swarm to. But no credible scientist takes those ideas seriously.

Similarly, Earth’s oil deposits were formed by organisms that were buried by sediments before they could be decayed by other organisms, and the oil was formed from marine sediments that formed during anoxic events during the eon of complex life, with most of it formed during the reign of dinosaurs. Stalinist scientists played with the idea that Earth’s oil deposits did not form from dead organisms, but from some primordial process in Earth’s mantle. However, with the rise of plate tectonics and the molecular sciences, in which scientists can trace, atom-by-atom, how organic material from dead organisms became Earth’s oil deposits, other than some interest-conflicted contrarian fringe, no credible scientist seriously considers that Earth’s oil deposits formed from anything other than marine anoxic events.

This is a prelude to my coming series of posts on Global Warming, Peak Oil, and related topics, but it is time to begin another busy day at the office, and my work hurricane will not abate for several more days.

Off to work.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 30
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Hi Greg:

The Climategate stuff is mostly a lot of ado about nothing. None of it is really relevant to the core issue, which is that carbon dioxide traps radiation coming from Earth’s surface and warms it. End of story. All the Sturm und Drang over the past generation was led by a cadre of scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and who have purposely confused the issues. Of course, they sing a song that the public wants to hear, of business as usual, which is a typical human failing. Climate scientists without conflicts of interest or playing contrarians are terrified by what is happening, and I don’t blame them. And, of course, I am all about the permanent solution to that mess and many others, but almost nobody on Earth is paying attention, as they hack at branches if they hack at all.

Off to work.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wade Frazier said:

The Climategate stuff is mostly a lot of ado about nothing.

I am not saying that the problem is necessarily with a claim being made (anthropomorphic global warming / climate change) that is untrue. I am saying there is a problem with the methodology used to arrive at such conclusions. That methodology is reflected in the emails that were never supposed to see the light of day outside the tight circle of agenda driven scientists.

I suggest that anyone who is interested in this very important topic, review the emails that were sent between these scientists. Then judge for yourself if what they describe more closely conforms with the scientific method or with The Church of Climatology.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

On to Global Warming. In the 1860s, John Tyndall performed the first experiments with gases and what photons they absorbed. Water and carbon dioxide were strong absorbers of light’s infrared frequency. Different gases absorb different frequencies due to the energy needed for their electrons to jump into higher orbits, also called quantum leaping, and for complex molecules, it can be the energy needed to reach a new state of vibration or rotation. Earth’s atmosphere is largely transparent to visible light, radio waves, and infrared radiation, and it absorbs most of everything else. Different gases absorb different frequencies. While water vapor absorbs more infrared radiation than carbon dioxide does, it is wildly variable and only stays in the atmosphere for about a week before it comes back out in precipitation. Carbon dioxide lasts for more than a century.

Carbon dioxide is the most important gas for determining Earth’s surface temperature, not water. In every paleoclimate study I have seen, carbon dioxide is considered the primary variable in determining global climate, from hothouse periods to ice ages, and models of carbon dioxide levels over Earth’s history have been developed and refined as more data is collected and the models become more sophisticated. Just what levels of carbon dioxide existed in the past is a matter of intense scientific investigation, but no scientists are debating what the overall effects were: when carbon dioxide levels were high, Earth was in hothouse conditions, and when it was low, Earth was in an ice age. There is also no debate that Earth’s mechanisms have been sequestering carbon in Earth’s crust faster than volcanism has been spewing it back out into the atmosphere, which is why Earth has been in an icehouse phase for the past 35 million years.

There is very little debate amongst scientists on those issues, as they are well established. Those so-called greenhouse gases act on Earth’s atmosphere the same way that sleeping under a blanket does, in that they slow down the loss of heat, keeping you or Earth’s atmosphere warmer than without it. Nearly two centuries ago, a French mathematician discovered what would later be called the greenhouse effect. Scientists began measuring the climate effect of humanity’s burning hydrocarbons back in the 1800s. There is nothing new about the idea of human-induced climate change, and there is really no debate amongst scientists that increasing the key greenhouse gas is going to warm Earth. The only debate is how fast it will happen and what oscillations and localized effects will accompany it. In paleoclimate studies, what became clear was that the equatorial regions were relatively unaffected by icehouse and greenhouse conditions; the polar regions had the big changes. In the late Permian, Mesozoic, and Eocene, forests grew near the poles. During the ice ages, any land near the poles was buried under ice sheets. In at least one instance, almost the entirely of Earth’s surface was buried under ice, in what has been called “Snowball Earth.”

During our current ice age, carbon dioxide levels have oscillated between 160 and 280 PPM, corresponding to cold and warm periods. However, carbon dioxide level changes are not a cause for the changes, but an effect of them, as Earth warms, those polar regions in particular off-gas carbon dioxide. Although falling carbon dioxide levels are the ultimate cause of our current icehouse period, the cause of the advancing and retreating ice sheets are oscillations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun, in what have been called Milankovitch cycles. Other proximate causes have been the oceanic current changes largely due to moving continents.

The Antarctic ice sheet began forming about 35 million years ago, which marks the beginning of our icehouse period. Today, scientists think that carbon dioxide dipped below 600 PPM when that ice sheet began forming, and as it oscillated over the next 35 million years, the trend was always lower, and Earth kept getting cooler. The biggest extinction in the Age of Mammals was when Earth changed from hothouse conditions to icehouse ones. Animals living during the past 35 million years were well adapted to Earth’s icehouse conditions, which is why scientists who propose climate explanations for the extinction of the megafauna are wrong. There have been no climate events in the past 35 million years that would have precipitated a mass extinction of all of Earth’s large land animals except for those in Africa, where humans evolved and the megafauna learned to avoid them (and to a lesser extent, Asia). Humans did it, and humans are responsible for the recent skyrocketing carbon dioxide level, which now stands at 400 PPM, when the natural trend predicts that we should have about 240 PPM today and should be slipping back into continental ice sheets forming. Scientists think that humanity may have already delayed the next ice cycle by 10,000 years with what has already been pumped into the atmosphere by burning the hydrocarbons that have fueled the industrial age, and some wonder if that ice age will return at all. At the end of William Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, he wrote, “It is even possible that we will never return to that now-overdue glaciation.”

By the early 1970s, scientists began predicting what we are seeing today, as carbon dioxide levels skyrocket and Earth keeps getting hotter, with new temperature records set nearly every year in this century. There really is no debate amongst climate scientists that Global Warming is real, and the only debate is what the regional effects will be, whether we will have runaway conditions, how fast the ice sheets will melt and what the resultant sea level changes will be, and so on.

Until a professional biographer joins the fray, I am Brian O’Leary’s biographer, and Brian was a planetary scientist whom NASA asked to go to Mars, for the only human officially put in such a position. Brian was an atmospheric scientist and one of the early voices on Global Warming, and one of the leading Global Warming “skeptics” was once Brian’s colleague. The man sold his soul to the hydrocarbon lobby. Brian told me of his anguish and anger back in 2001, as I had been following the “debate” for a decade by then.

The elite corruption of science goes way back, as science and capitalism make for poor bedfellows. The general rule of thumb is that the more wealth and power invested in the outcome of scientific investigation, the more that corporate interests and the global elite will meddle, often using the world’s governments as tools of promotion and suppression, and the media that they own provides the propaganda. The most spectacular and pernicious instances are conjoined, which is the suppression of the ET presence and their technologies, which include antigravity and free energy. The elite will become obsolete if those technologies are used by the public and they know it, hence history’s greatest act of organized suppression.

But the elite have also been actively mischievous in many areas of health and medicine, where toxic industrial wastes receive surreal makeovers into “medicine” and other violent and lucrative interventions are invented that do more harm than good.

Brian was far from the only hip astronaut on those issues. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the alarm bells really began to go off on Global Warming, the oil companies in particular began buying up scientists with souls for sale to begin a “skeptical” debate on whether Global Warming was real. In the early 1990s, there were less than a dozen of them. Around the same time, tobacco companies mounted an offensive against the evidence of the harm that smoking caused to bystanders, and they literally coined the term “Junk Science” to discredit the scientific evidence, in one of the most blatant instances ever of corporate propaganda.

Today, the so-called Global Warming “debate” is little more than those hydrocarbon lobby shills, their dupes, a little tribe of scientific contrarians that can be found in all scientific fields, and a compliant media. The recent Fox News T&A who challenged Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar acceptance speech is par for the course these days, and the “debate” is nearly all smoke and mirrors designed the lull the masses back into complacency and easy manipulation, and it almost always works. I have watched people embrace certain death rather than question their indoctrination. At first, it was hard to believe, but now I realize that it is normal. The vast majority of humanity is unwilling and unable to escape the shackles of their conditioning. The masses shuffle along to the drumbeat, herded like lemmings, but the “smart” are captured by more subtle means. Materialism is the religion of this Epoch, and it has captured almost all scientists and the “educated,” who are those who most vociferously deny free energy’s reality or desirability.

After getting both barrels of those crazed reactions of denial and fear for several years while he played the Paul Revere of Free Energy, Brian began openly wondering if humanity was a sentient species, and I sadly understood his query.

Those are quite the minefields to walk, but whether Global Warming is real or not, and whether it has anything to do with humanity’s prodigious burning of hydrocarbons, is not one of those areas, unless people get duped by the spectacle of the “debate” today that was fomented by the oil companies and friends, and a compliant public who wants business as usual and being relieved of any responsibility for their actions. This has been the human condition for the entirety of the human journey, and could be called human nature. To some degree, it is, but it does not have to be like this.

Next up will be Peak Oil.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

One last note before I get to Peak Oil. On Global Warming, humanity’s playing with Earth’s carbon dioxide levels is not toying with a proximate cause of our current ice age, but the ultimate cause of the past 35 million-year Icehouse Earth phase. We are risking turning Earth from an Icehouse Earth to a Greenhouse Earth, and doing it in a few centuries. Nothing remotely like it has ever happened before on Earth, and the last transition from an Icehouse Earth to a Greenhouse Earth resulted in the greatest extinction of complex life ever. That is what terrifies climate scientists and biologists. We are engaging in an experiment with the only inhabitable planet for light years in every direction, have our toes over the edge of the abyss, and almost nobody knows or cares, as the horizon of their awareness rarely extends past their immediate self-interest. Shudder. Of course, it does not have to be this way.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

This will be a short one, kicking off the Peak Oil and related discussion. The concept of energy return on investment (“EROI”) will be an important one for these topics. The idea of return on investment in financial terms is a pale reflection of the real thing, which is EROI. The financial economy is imaginary and does not deal with reality very well. The financial economy will disappear in the Fifth Epoch, along with money and other primitive constructs.

I’ll cut right to the chase on Peak Oil. Only about a third of the oil in an oilfield is extracted. The rest stays in the ground. The reason is that the EROI falls to around one for that remaining oil, which means that it takes as much energy to get it out of the ground as the energy that that oil provides, which makes the exercise pointless. In East Texas nearly a century ago, the EROI from those oil fields was more than 100-to-1, in the Golden Age of Oil. The EROI of oil extraction around the world has fallen ever since. In 1990, global oil EROI was about 30, is less than 20 today, and may fall to 10 in the next several years. Conventional oil will be entirely depleted long before this century ends.

The pioneers of the EROI concept estimate that an EROI of around 10-to-1 is the minimum required for running a civilization, and we are coming close to it already, at least for oil. The Peak Oil idea is that peak production for an oil well is reached when about half of the exploitable oil is extracted. Then the curve of extraction declines down to where the method of extraction cannot get any more. What makes EROI go down is that the oil near the surface does not take much energy to extract, and the deeper you go, the EROI declines. When converted to money terms, it can mean extraction cost per barrel. The only reason why the USA has a military presence in the Middle East today is that it has the world’s last easy oil, with a cost of extraction of a few dollars per barrel. Iraq had the world’s largest oil reserves, with the highest EROI, that was not subjected to corporate control (along with Iran). That is why the USA murdered millions of people there, and any other “reason” provided is pure obfuscation and distraction.

The so-called fracking boom in the USA was all about oil with an EROI of around three (or direct costs of extraction of $40 per barrel or so, and fully amortized costs of up to $80 per barrel, which is why those fracking operations are all going bankrupt now, with $40-per-barrel oil). It is not conventional oil, which is what the father of the Peak Oil idea, M. King Hubbert, wrote about, and is the low-quality dregs that all declining societies scrape on their way to oblivion, as they run out of energy. Canada’s tar sands are more of the same: an environmental catastrophe in the making with an EROI of less than five.

Time for work.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Other than some fringe types, there is no debate among scientists that the remains of marine organisms formed Earth’s oil deposits. Until the eon of complex life, there was not much that could make the oil deposits, so the Ediacaran Period produced the first oil deposits of note. The process of oil formation is well known, and it was the “lucky” marine organisms that became today’s oil deposits. Most of today’s oil deposits were laid down during the reign of dinosaurs, during anoxic events along the shores of the Tethys Ocean. For hundreds of millions of years, there was a constant tectonic plate movement that kept creating oceans and then squeezing them out of existence. Before there was the Tethys, there was the Proto-Tethys and the Paleo-Tethys, and each in their turn was squeezed out of existence, as their ancient shores were jammed under the southern rim of Asia. That jamming created sediments that are miles deep, and that is the source of not only Middle East oil, but Texas oil, African, South American, and the like were all created by the same process, as ancient anoxic shores were subducted. The final remains of the Tethys are the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Aral seas. There is an “oil window” from about one-to-three miles deep, and if ocean sediments from anoxic events get shoved into that window, then what we call conventional oil can form.

Even after it forms, however, most conventional oil eventually leaks back out into the oceans, and only relatively rare ocean sediments are formed and get trapped in specific kinds of geological formations, just “waiting” to be discovered by oil companies.

Before the science of plate tectonics was developed, beginning in the 1960s, some scientists, Stalinist scientists in particular, theorized that oil was not formed from ocean sediments, but by some primordial processes in the mantle. It was championed in the USA by Thomas Gold, but like so many hypotheses, it has fallen by the wayside as more evidence was amassed. Plate tectonic theory not only helped kill the abiotic oil formation hypothesis, but also the “pole-shift” hypothesis by Charles Hapgood also fell by the wayside, even though Albert Einstein endorsed Hapgood’s work. Einstein died before the rise of plate tectonics, and he surely would not endorse Hapgood’s work if he was alive today, nor would he take Velikovsky’s ideas seriously for a moment. There is a phenomenon called True Polar Wander, but Hapgood’s hypothesis had pole shifts happening a thousand times faster, which no scientist takes seriously today, although plenty of non-scientific fringe types still promote such nonsense.

Most sediments from anoxic events never entered and stayed in the oil window. Going below the oil window completely destroyed the oil and turned it into natural gas, while sediments that never got that deep remained kerogen, which is what oil starts as.

Conventional oil is a particular “grade” of hydrocarbon that exists in formations that can be drilled by the methods developed since the 1850s, when the first commercial well was drilled. Capitalism went into overdrive with oil, as John Rockefeller soon took over the industry by controlling the refining arm of it, and became Earth’s richest human who soon became a “philanthropist.” The world has paid dearly for the “philanthropy” of the rich. The Rockefellers’ malign influence can be felt to this day, in various areas such as medicine and economic theory, and they helped wipe out my companies.

I heard Tom Bearden talk about it in 1998, and I agree, that the oil companies themselves are not behind the organized suppression of FE, although they have plenty to answer for. Corporations are too short-sighted for those kinds of activities, and they would be too easy to uncover, so the suppression originates from higher levels of the game. Fossils, atmospheric data, geological studies, astronomy, and the like are not easily subjected to the kinds of organized suppression that abounds regarding FE, alternative medicine, and related areas. All that the forces of organized suppression have to do is neutralize relatively few people and their disruptive theories and technologies, which are not easily reproduced or implemented, which is typical with such fledgling efforts. If they can be strangled in their cradles, then it is relatively easy to keep such upstarts at bay, and the Big Boys know very well what game they are playing.

But that conspiratorial activity is a far cry from what petroleum geologists and scientists do. It would not be easy to classify excavations, geological findings, and so on. The national security state has covered up plenty of nefarious activity, but they can’t go classify all of the world’s fossil beds, geological formations, astronomical data, etc. But all manner of fringe talking head spins grand yarns with little evidence, and the scientifically illiterate New Age/conspiracist crowd laps it up. There is a boatload of that stuff out there, and one example is the idea that Antarctica was ice free in historical times, based on highly flimsy interpretations of old maps and the like. Hapgood started it, and that invalid hypothesis still has life amongst the fringe crowd.

The evidence is overwhelming that Antarctica began developing its ice sheet nearly 50 million years ago, as Earth transitioned from hothouse to icehouse conditions, and by 35 million years ago, it had healthy ice sheets that have mostly grown since then. It probably shrank a little during the Miocene, but it has been very healthy for the past ten million years, and in the past three, it has been largely as it is today and even larger during the intervals when ice sheets covered the northern hemisphere. The idea that Antarctica was ice-free a few hundred years ago is not taken seriously by any professional scientists.

The abiotic oil idea is nearly in the same dustbin today, although at least there you can find professional scientists, generally with conflicts of interest, advocating the abiotic oil idea, although no professional geologists take them seriously. There is simply far too much evidence that anoxic marine sediments, acted on by very particular geological processes, formed today’s oil deposits, especially with the rise of molecular biology, so that scientists can now construct, step-by-step, how the remains of dead marine organisms were “refined” into what we call oil today.

The Canadian tar sands are not made of conventional oil at all, but kerogen that was never pushed into the “oil window,” so has not been “distilled” into oil. Hence, the processing of those tar sands that occurs today is very energy intensive, to do the work that geological processes did to conventional oil. As I previously mentioned, the energy return on investment (“EROI”) on East Texas oil in the 1920s was more than 100-to-1, in the Golden Age of easy oil. Its EROI was so high because it was close to the surface. The further you have to drill, the lower your EROI. Also, those Hollywood movies of people happily being covered in oil gushers that made them rich were real events, but always short-lived. After that initial pressure on a tapped oil formation was bled off, then it was the task of sucking that oil out of the ground, not just letting it flow into waiting storage.

Sucking that oil out takes energy, and the further you have to pull it up, the more energy it takes. Also, the oil is not just in some kind of pool but is impregnated into the geological strata, in the pores of the rocks. When only about a third of the oil in an oilfield is extracted, the remaining oil is so energy intensive to extract that the EROI drops to one, meaning that it takes as much energy to extract the oil as the oil provides, making the exercise useless.

Also, there are grades of oil. Because sulfur is an essential element in biology (which gives egg yolks their yellow color, and hydrogen sulfide is what makes rotten eggs smell so bad, and human digestive gas), it remains in petroleum. Oil with less than 0.42% sulfur is called “sweet crude,” and is the good stuff that oil companies covet. Oil with greater than 0.42% is called “sour crude.” Sour crude takes more energy to refine, to remove that sulfur. If cars ran on sour crude without the sulfur removed, the skies would be filled with sulfuric acid clouds. As it is, air pollution from burning oil is bad enough, without adding a bunch more sulfur to it.

This is a very brief summary how oil is formed, extracted, and delivered to your gas tank. Next will be the concept of Peak Oil, and then the dregs-scraping activity known today as the fracking boom, which came to a screeching halt in the USA recently, as oil prices collapsed, and Canada’s tar sands operations have suffered similarly.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Other than some fringe types, there is no debate among scientists that the remains of marine organisms formed Earth’s oil deposits.

Russians & NASA Discredit ‘Fossil Fuel’ Theory: Demise Of Junk CO2 Science

Last week new NASA photographs proved methane lakes exist on Saturn’s moon, Titan, showing that such hydrocarbons (or so-called ‘fossil fuels’) are seemingly plentiful in our solar system. This startling discovery turns on its head the long-held western belief that petroleum is a limited resource, because it is primarily derived (we had been told) from the fossilized remains of dead dinosaurs and rotted carbon-based vegetation.

But with that notion now exploded in the article ‘NASA Finds Lakes of Hydrocarbons on Saturn’s Moon, Titan‘ thanks to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, energy scientists are now compelled to admit that petroleum oil is, in fact, substantially mineral in origin and occuring all through the galaxies.

Two Years ago it was reported that the Max Planck Institute, Germany have discovered that the Horse Head Nebula galaxy in the Orion constellation contains a vast field of hydrocarbon (see ‘Top German Scientists Discover ‘Fossil Fuel’ in the Stars‘).

As such, long-held fears about Earth’s shrinking ‘fossil fuel’ reserves may be bogus. These important new cosmological discoveries come coincidentally at a time when huge succeses in American oil drilling technology (‘frakking‘) are bringing a glut of oil onto the energy markets, causing a slide in global oil prices. Fresh oil reserves are being struck all over – some miles beneath the oceans, where Dino the dinosaur never roamed.

As we reported (November 08, 2014) NASA’s new evidence supports previously controversial Russian claims that ‘fossil’ fuel theory is junk science. No wonder skepticism of the wide-ranging Green Agenda grows and serious doubts are rising as to whether humans need to divest themselves of the supposedly fast-diminishing energy source after all.

Bodies of credible, independent western scientists, collaborating and collating their findings via the internet through fledgling organisations such as Principia Scientific International are calling for a re-assessment of over 2,000 eastern European peer-reviewed science papers on the issue, previously ignored by western governments, state-funded universities and the mainstream media.

For decades Russian scientists have known that the fossil fuel theory is bogus and have compellingly demonstrated that petroleum is derived from highly compressed mineral deposits deep beneath the surface. But the most startling consequence to these findings is that oil is a constant renewable regenerating in nature.

Since the Middle East oil crisis of the 1970’s gasoline suppliers have stoked media fears that our planet’s reserves are fast in decline. The term ‘peak oil’ was coined and we were told ‘fossil fuels’ would have to become increasingly more expensive as our insatiable appetite drank this ‘finite’ liquid energy source dry. Are we talking conspiracy theory or well-intentioned, but misguided group think that limits to our industrial expansion were essential if we were to tackle ‘peak oil’ and fears over man-made global warming (which has been stalled for a generation).

Let’s be in no doubt, the emergence of group think about our ‘carbon footprint’ (dare we call it, propaganda) suited the long-term interests of the oil industry and western governments. ‘Big Oil’ has benefited from being told by academics that their resource was precious and limited (putting upward pressure on prices). Tax-raising governments are being increasingly taken to task for encouraging (through generous research grants) sympathetic academics to get on board to build a consensus on these inter-related but evidentially weak scientific theories.

Repositioning Theory as Fact

For decades the terms ‘peak oil’ and ‘fossil fuels’ have been synonymous. They imply we are inexorably faced with diminishing natural resources and the days of cheap carbon-based energy are gone. Supplanted in the public consciousness as real we grew to accept the inevitable coming of ever-higher energy prices as a consequence of our energy-reliant, consumer lifestyle.

Journalists gleaned their own ‘evidence’ for such an apocalyptic narrative from bleak books such as James Howard Kunstler’s ‘The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century’ and Richard Heinberg’s ‘The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies’ among others and the public were sold on the fears.

Constantly fed a diet of this garbage our collective unconsciousness unwittingly allowed the repositioning of Hubbert’s Theory of Peak Oil into fossil fuel fact.

As a consequence, in 2005, Congressional Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, Republican of Maryland, and Senator Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat created the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus and at a stroke turned attention to debunking such ‘limits to growth’ fallacies.

Scientists who dissented from the (peer-reviewed) groupspeak were vilified or ignored. In the 1980’s distinguished British scientist, Sir Fred Hoyle FRS was one who tried and failed to expose the chicanery of proponents of the fossil fuel theory and diminishing world oil reserves. Hoyle, without the benefit of the worldwide web tried repeatedly to expose this flimflam, “The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.”

The English professor valiantly argued that oil is abiogenic (i.e. from mineral deposition) and cannot be a biotic (from fossils). Yet despite his eminent stature Hoyle’s sage insight gained him no media platform.

Along with Hoyle other western scientists refused to toe the politically correct line as evidenced in an increasing number of articles to redress the balance about petroleum economics. While several papers by Professor Michael C. Lynch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also exposed the myth of “oil exhaustion” and demonstrating the high-pressure genesis of petroleum. No media voice for them either.

Russia Becomes World Energy Superpower

Only in Russia, a nation that since the 1990’s and fall of the Berlin Wall, has eschewed military supremacy to become a global economic superpower, did Hoyle’s and Lynch’s words find a welcome community of likeminded scientists. Indeed, outside of the English-speaking world there is no controversy and its common parlance that oil is a mineral, not a biological product and as such our planet has endless untapped reserves.

As a consequence of applying this knowledge Russia has gone from strength to strength astutely capitalising on its ‘liquid gold’ reserves. “I would describe the mindset right now among the Russian political elite as infused with ‘petroconfidence’,” So says Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, in an interview with the BBC.

Indeed, between 1951-2001, thousands of articles and many books and monographs were published mainly in the mainstream Russian scientific journals proving abiotic petroleum origins – all ignored by western governments and media. For example, leading expert V. A. Krayushkin has alone published more than two hundred fifty articles on modern petroleum geology, and several books.

Russian mineralogists, oil explorers and each successive government since the dark days of the former Soviet Union have been unalterably upbeat that they’ve ousted the ‘peak oil, fossil fuels’ nonsense. And who are we to argue – they’ve got the money in the bank to prove it.

As a result Russia is firmly ensconced as the world’s second-largest oil exporter and is becoming so preeminent in the field of oil and gas exploration and innovation that the nation is set to usurp the U.S. not as a military force, but as the world’s energy superpower for the 21st century.

Oil – Our Greatest Natural Renewable Energy Source

Exploiting their cutting-edge technology Russia has successfully discovered numerous petroleum fields, a number of which produce either partly or entirely from a crystalline basement and which appears distinctly self-replenishing. Yes, you read that right – Russia enjoys the best naturally renewable energy source – petroleum! No billions wasted on wind farms, solar or wave white elephants here.

Indeed, to our former soviet cousins, the idea of ‘peak oil’ is laughable because, if they’re calculations are right, oil is the most bountiful, most efficient and cheapest renewable fuel and will last at least for many hundreds of years to come.

Disgruntled that the Russians have been allowed to take such a big lead the brightest and the best in the west are now using the blogosphere in helping to forge resurgence against the fossil fuel, peak oil myth. So says Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power” and chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a company that advises governments and industry.

Yergin like others cites the compelling evidence that the MSM won’t show you; these anti-fossil fuel theorists cite alkanes, kerogen and many other petroleum related chemicals that have been found on meteorites – which we know can support no organic life and thus proving the lie of the fossil fuel theory.

Why are We Still Being Lied to?

Indeed, so lame has the fossil fuel theory become that even its most strident supporters are unable to muster the flimsiest of evidence for their position. In “The Abiotic Oil Controversy” key proponent of the abiotic (fossil) origin, Richard Heinberg admits his case is exposed as threadbare lamenting, “Perhaps one day there will be general agreement that at least some oil is indeed abiotic. Maybe there are indeed deep methane belts twenty miles below the Earth’s surface.”

So scant is the evidence to support Heinberg and other western pro-fossil fuel theorists that in researching his article ‘The Evidence for Limitless Oil and Gas’ (Digital Journal), Bill Jencks reveals, I searched the internet including Google Scholar and there seems to be no ‘absolute proof’ or support from direct modern research for the Biogenic Theory of oil and gas formation. This theory — for want of a better word — seems to be greatly ‘assumed’ by geologists throughout geological research.”

Like me, Jencks found a mountain of evidence backing Russian claims. From the Joint Institute of the Physics of the Earth Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow we find incredible sources as revealed by A Dissertation by J.F. Kenney which condemns the outmoded 18th century “anarchaic hypothesis” that petroleum somehow (miraculously) evolved from biological detritus, and is accordingly limited in abundance.

Instead, the fossil fuels hypothesis has been replaced during the past forty years by the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins which has established that petroleum is a primordial material erupted from great depth. Kenney states, “Therefore, petroleum abundances are limited by little more than the quantities of its constituents as were incorporated into the Earth at the time of its formation; and its availability depends upon technological development and exploration competence.”

In a straight scientific shootout Peak Oil Theory vs Russian-Ukraine Modern Theory the Russians win hands down. But it remains a peculiar anachronism that there is no body of American or other English language peer review to verify or disprove the Russian science.

But why are we still being lied to? With such unwillingness to correct these intellectual failings it is little wonder that there is growing dissatisfaction among voters and thinkers in English-speaking nations and the EU. Those who study carefully the facts now reasonably conclude that beyond the media hard sell there is no energy crisis; the world has a plentiful supply of cheap renewable petroleum and another enviro-myth needs to be mercilessly culled.

References:

Kudryavtsev N.A., 1959. Geological proof of the deep origin of Petroleum. Trudy Vsesoyuz. Neftyan. Nauch. Issledovatel Geologoraz Vedoch. Inst.No.132, pp. 242-262 (In Russian)

Kudryavtsev N.A., 1951. Against the organic hypothesis of oil origin. Oil Economy Jour. [Neftyanoe khoziaystvo], no. 9. – pp. 17-29 (in Russian)

Edited by Greg Burnham
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

A reader presented me with some “hacked” climate data, and I analyzed it, for what it is worth, but am going to use it as a spring board for a few posts. I have attached the data, rendered in graphic form, and have compared it to a similar graph on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia graphic is at the top, and below it is the graphic for the Northern Hemisphere, and the bottom is for all of Earth. I can’t vouch for the data’s authenticity or accuracy, but I am going to make some important points regarding it.

To compare the Wikipedia chart to the “hacked” data, you need to look only at the last half of the Wikipedia data, as it spans 2,000 years, while the hacked data only spans 1,000 years.

The year 1000 CE was the height of the Medieval Warm Period, and the Wikipedia value for the temperature “anomaly” was about -0.2. The depth of the Little Ice Age was about 1600 CE, and the anomaly was about -0.7, or a half degree Celsius between the height of the good times of the Medieval Warm Period and the hellish depths of the Little Ice Age, which is about one degree Fahrenheit. One degree! One degree meant the difference between troubadours plying their trade through Europe during an era of (relative) peace and plenty and the Hell on Earth of the Thirty Years’ War.

Agrarian civilizations simply had no margin for error, as their energy surplus was so thin. If you look at that hacked data, it does not look quite right, but the biggest downward spike in the Northern Hemisphere’s record was in the 1400s, and from top to bottom was about 0.6 degrees. So, the variations for Wikipedia and the hacked data are about the same range. The Wikipedia graph merges several results from different studies, and is going be more meaningful than that hacked data, which gives a misleading level of precision, for starters, going out to four places past the decimal point.

Actual temperature readings are only a couple of centuries old, and true global mean temperatures from direct instrument readings is only decades old, and the “steep” climb from 1800, of about one degree Celsius, or two degrees Fahrenheit, is largely missing in the hacked data. There is no argument that my lifetime is the warmest period in many centuries, and maybe since the last interglacial 100,000 years ago. Every year but one in this century is warmer than any year before 2000 ever recorded.

Not only do the climate models predict it, but the fossil record is very clear that the difference between icehouse and hothouse phases is felt most dramatically at the poles, with forests growing at the poles in hothouse periods and the poles buried under ice in icehouse phases, especially the South Pole, which has had Antarctica at it nearly continuously for 500 million years. I have been literally watching glaciers vanish in my beloved mountains, and my late uncle was amazed at what he witnessed in his lifetime.

Best,
compare.jpg
Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

These recent Global Warming and Peak Oil posts have been stirring some things up in various forums that I post to, and touches on subjects that are important for what I am attempting. I feel the need to address them. A key aspect of my effort, which I have devoted the rest of my lifetime’s “spare” time to, and it won’t succeed without it, is to have my little band comprised of people who are scientifically literate. Together, we can help usher in the biggest event in the human journey. But we won’t be able to help if we can’t keep our eye on the ball, get distracted by the daily circus, get sucked in by the blizzard of disinformation that exists on important topics, grind the egocentric axes that feed us, etc.

It wasn’t until early 2003, more than a quarter-century since that voice in my head suggested that I trade my science studies for business studies, and 15 years since my free energy journey radicalized me, that I was introduced to Bucky Fuller’s work and the paradigm that I had been groping toward since my cradle finally crystallized. Ever since, my work has been consciously comprehensive in nature. I resumed my science studies in earnest about then, and starting in 2007, my studies were performed with the specific intention of writing what became my big essay. I’ll not write its like again in this lifetime, and again this year, I will update it for the past year’s studies, similar to how college textbooks are updated. I expect the pace of updates to slow down before long, as the essay gets into the shape that I originally envisioned for it. It is damned close to it today, but there is still some important work ahead of me.

I first published my fluoridation essay in 1998, as a prelude to my medical racket essay. I began studying for that essay way back in 1990, when I was introduced to Rife’s and Naessens’s work, many years after I had already witnessed health miracles that orthodox medicine declared “impossible” and bore the brunt of the medical racket at work. The people who have been steamrollered by the medical racket the worst have generally been MDs and biological scientists, not untrained fringe types.

I am anything but Mr. Orthodox, and scientific literacy does not mean drinking the Kool-Aid of materialism, but understanding the processes and findings of mainstream science, for starters. What needs to come with that is sharpening one’s tools of perception and assessment, so that we are not just watching the salvos of scientific controversy fly, like watching a tennis match, but developing our own informed opinions on those matters, not taking some authority’s word for it or blindly embracing some fringe voices because they are fringe, which I see all the time. There is a mountain of chaff for every kernel of wheat on the fringes, and I am constantly besieged by people who shovel the chaff at me, unable to distinguish wheat from chaff as they leave their critical faculties at the door, if they ever had them in the first place.

I am the biographer of one of the leading scientific fringe voices, who left the orthodox fold after his mystical awakening and could no longer drink the Kool-Aid of materialism, which ruined him as a mainstream scientist, which is typical of my relatively few fellow travelers. But as fringe as he was, he still believed in the process of science, and it is a worthy ideal, just like a truly free press is a worthy ideal, even though the reality is like Orwell and Huxley depicted. Rupert Sheldrake is a wonderful challenger of materialism, which is the religion of this Epoch, and the “skeptics” are all over him, getting him banned from venues where his voice is sorely needed. But Sheldrake also believes in the scientific process, even as he disputes what its findings mean, as he performs his own experiments that falsify materialism. But what Brian and Sheldrake did, or Ralph Moss, is a far cry from what I see dominating the fringes, as either paranoid conspiracist or naïve New Age material abounds. From many years of immersion in both milieus, I came to understand what their virtues and limitations were, and above all, they rarely take a scientific or scholarly approach, but glom onto any shiny object that they come upon that appeals to their predilections, and they end up deluded and often dangerously so. It is really sad to witness, and I have seen many go off the deep end.

Let there be no mistaking my stance: I know that technologies exist on the planet today that turn the physics textbooks into doorstops, and Ed Mitchell’s perspective was close to mine on the UFO/ET issue, and Brian’s life was shortened by his snooping into the UFO issue. So, again, I am far from Mr. Orthodox, but the fringes are filled with what amounts to gossip, and on scientific matters, one can always find a contrarian scientist to challenge the consensus, which can be a noble role to fill, but hypotheses are not evidence, much less proof, and the scientifically illiterate lap that stuff up when it appeals to their beliefs, which is a worthless way to digest scientific material.

Back in the late 1990s, when I had my email address on my site and took on all comers, before I decided that it was not worth my time anymore to do that, I was besieged by fringe claimants, and one body of work I eventually called “hillbilly science,” as it kind of resembled science and scholarship in superficial ways, but the punchline was always along the lines of how the Bible was literally true (a highly dubious notion) or supported other beliefs and folk tales that poor agrarian American white people grew up with. There are even Biblical fundamentalists in those circles who believe that Earth is flat and think that scientific evidence supports it. Never mind that any teenagers with a little gumption can disprove that notion to themselves, there are people, in today’s USA mind you, not some medieval village, who believe that Earth is flat. I heard about a Flat-Earther who is a pal of one of my pupils, and my pupil told me of that Flat-Earther in tones of amazement and resignation.

This post is a prelude to scientific literacy and the Global Warming and Peak Oil issues. Being scientifically literate on those issues does not mean blindly drinking orthodoxy’s Kool-Aid, but understanding the theories, the evidence, and the battles of the hypotheses that abound in such highly charged areas. It also means understanding how and when the national security state, corporate interests, and even Godzilla muddy the waters, and in ways that mainstream scientists are generally naïve to. There needs to be worldliness, too.

Scientific literacy includes understanding what areas are disputed and why, what areas have almost no dispute because the evidence is robust, and where the evidence is more equivocal and the hypotheses more speculative. It takes some work and mental horsepower to become scientifically literate on those issues, but people do not need genius-level IQs to achieve that literacy, but just a love of the truth and a willingness to do the work.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

On to scientific literacy and the issues around Global Warming and Peak Oil. This may turn into a series of posts, and I’ll begin with the carbon dioxide issue.

The carbon dioxide issue

We need to go back a ways, to where carbon comes from. Astronomers and cosmologists are unanimous that all elements heavier than hydrogen were formed by the fusion processes in stars. After hydrogen and helium, carbon and oxygen are considered to be the two most common elements in the universe. In fact, of the most important elements to life on Earth, only phosphorus, calcium, and potassium are not represented in the top ten. Life on Earth made do with what was available.

Earth is in what is called the “habitable zone,” which means a planet’s orientation to a star that makes life as we know it possible, and possessing liquid water is one of those requirements, which requires an atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is a vanishingly tiny proportion of Earth’s mass, but without it, life as we know it would not exist on Earth.

Earth’s atmosphere is 99% comprised of diatomic oxygen and nitrogen, and the oxygen only exists because of oxygenic photosynthesis. That oxygen also created the ozone layer. Other than those gases, nearly the entirety of the remaining atmosphere is argon, which is a noble gas that won’t react with anything. Water also evaporates and precipitates, and is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect on Earth. I wrote a recent post on why water and carbon dioxide absorb infrared radiation while oxygen and nitrogen do not. Atmospheric molecules of more than two atoms can absorb infrared radiation, and that produces the greenhouse effect that prevented Earth from being a big ball of ice.

While water is ten times as plentiful in Earth’s atmosphere as carbon dioxide is, carbon dioxide is more important than water for the greenhouse function, as its boiling point is hundreds of degrees lower, so it does not precipitate out of the atmosphere like water continually does.

Almost the entire range of electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by some gas in Earth’s atmosphere. The ability to absorb electromagnetic radiation is dependent on the energy level of the radiation and the energy “niches” in the gaseous molecules. It is just like quantum mechanics in that only certain energy levels are possible in the electron configurations, so only certain frequencies of light (AKA wavelength) are absorbed by certain gases.

Fortunately, oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to visible light, otherwise, it would have never reached Earth’s surface and powered photosynthesis, which is where virtually all energy in all life on Earth originates from. Even chemosynthetic organisms rely on solar energy.

Greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation, slowing down Earth’s energy loss to space, and it is like putting on a blanket when you sleep, as it reduces your body’s rate of heat loss.

Paleologists have been able to piece together the broad strokes of Earth’s development from when it formed about 4.6 billion years ago, soon after the Sun did. The Sun is obviously the greatest variable on Earth’s temperature, but the Sun is in a class of stars that burn very steadily for ten billion years or so. Our Sun is in its middle age, and will steadily burn for several billion more years before it becomes a red giant. If Earth stays in its present orbit, it will be obliterated by then, and life as we know it on Earth will come to an end long before that, mainly from the continual loss of carbon in the carbon cycle (as plate tectonics slows and volcanism wanes, which is the primary source of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere) and Earth will eventually lose its ocean. The beginning of the loss of Earth’s ocean is currently estimated to be a billion years or so away, as the Sun keeps getting brighter.

Carbon dioxide concentrations were once many times higher than today’s, and Earth was much warmer. During the eon of complex life, the hothouse and icehouse periods on Earth are thought to rest entirely on the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content. Everything else is of minor significance.

The ideas in this post are not denied by any credible scientists that I am aware of. The evidence is very robust, and I am not aware of any experimental data that calls it into question. There can be vociferous debate on many issues, such as oxygen’s role in the rise of complex life, but nobody denies the importance of oxygen to complex life today or the role of greenhouse gases in Earth’s climate and carbon dioxide’s central importance. There is really no scientific debate of note on those issues. The sporadic role of methane has been investigated and debated, but no climate scientist that I am aware of will seriously question the leading role of carbon dioxide in Earth’s greenhouse effect.

I have noted that some scientists have sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby to cloud the issue, but even they do not dispute the central role that carbon dioxide has always played in Earth’s climate. There really aren’t any other contenders, and it is a pretty simple issue.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Here is the next subject that I want to cover…

The Carbon Cycle and Human Impacts on It



The atmospheric effect of carbon dioxide, of trapping infrared radiation and warming Earth’s atmosphere, is denied by no credible atmospheric scientist that I am aware of. Even the Global Warming “skeptics,” prostitutes that the most prominent are, don’t deny that. I have yet to see a paleoclimate study that denied the leading role that carbon dioxide has played in global surface temperatures, including its hothouse and icehouse phases. But you can find all manner of scientifically illiterate “skeptic” on the Internet making arguments against the role that carbon dioxide plays, but they are usually the equivalent of people making the case for a Flat Earth. Few professional scientists, and no professional climate scientists, even the most contrarian amongst them, are going to deny those very basic issues of physics.

The next issue that I want to cover is the carbon cycle and how carbon dioxide levels have seesawed over the eons, and how carbon starvation is likely going to mean the end of complex life on Earth. For a couple of centuries, a philosophy known as uniformitarianism dominated Earth sciences, which assumes that the only processes that were ever on Earth are the current ones. Today’s scientists have largely rejected uniformitarianism and try to imagine what processes may have existed millions or billions of years ago, with the understanding that they may have been very different from what exists today. They develop their hypotheses and then hunt for evidence that either confirms or falsifies them, and hunting for falsifying evidence is more important than hunting for confirmatory evidence. Only hypotheses that have survived attempts to falsify them graduate to the status of theories.

The carbon cycle is how carbon moves through Earth, including its crust, oceans, atmosphere, and ecosystems. At its most basic level, carbon dioxide is added to Earth’s surface environments via volcanism and is removed from the atmosphere by weathering and the burial of organism remains. Until the rise of complex life, organic burial was largely limited to sandstone, which actually comprises most organic carbon burial. It has been estimated that there is 26,000 times more organic carbon buried in Earth’s crust than exists in today’s ecosystems. This graphic shows the comings and goings of the carbon cycle. Again, no credible scientists dispute those numbers or the dynamics depicted in that picture.

The seesawing of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the eons was due to imbalances in those dynamics. The most dramatic additions have historically come from volcanism. Volcanoes spew out carbon dioxide, among other gases, and the spewing of volcanic carbon dioxide is responsible for ending the previous Icehouse Earth phase. The volcanism was related to the formation and breakup of a supercontinent, Pangaea in that instance. The volcanism that ended the Karoo Ice Age kept on happening, and kept Earth’s surface warm for 200 million years, during the entire reign of dinosaurs.

But the first thing that that volcanic warming did was contribute to the greatest mass extinction in the eon of complex life. Ironically, Charles Darwin made uniformitarian philosophy the heart of his evolutionary theory, and that philosophy made the idea of a mass extinction taboo, and for more than a century, any Western scientist who advocated mass extinctions was risking his career. It was not until the 1970s that the taboo began lifting, and then it was spectacularly blown away by the asteroid impact hypothesis for the dinosaurs’ demise, proposed by a team of scientists led by a Nobel laureate working outside of his field of expertise. Mainstream science has regularly been shaken up by outsiders, and the leading edge of science today is happening between the disciplines, as interdisciplinary and comprehensive works abound, and I used them extensively in the studies that led to my big essay.

The asteroid impact hypothesis is the only known one that can be a single-cause for previous mass extinctions. The others had multiple causes that made Earth hostile to complex life, but volcanism is being proposed as an ancillary cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction, as there was another big volcanic event just before the dinosaurs died off. I’ll follow that controversy with interest, but I think that volcanism is not going to come close to explaining the end-Cretaceous extinction. The asteroid impact was the ultimate cause that dwarfed all else.

To say that the asteroid impact hypothesis is the only single-cause is not quite accurate, as there has been a new one: humanity. Humans have been causing a mass extinction for 50,000 years, beginning with driving Australia’s megafauna to extinction after they migrated from Africa. Nothing else of note has contributed to that extinction. Ironically, as a cadre of corrupted scientists argues against climate change as a way to deflect responsibility from humanity, another scientific clique argues for climate change as a way to deflect responsibility from humanity. Everybody likes defending their in-groups.

The radioactivity of uranium and other metals causes the heat within Earth, and as the radioactivity has dwindled, tectonic plate movements have slowed down, volcanism is dwindling, and long-term carbon starvation will eventually spell the end of complex life on Earth. Current estimates have it happening about a billion years from now, at around the same time that Earth begins losing its ocean because of our ever-brightening Sun. But there has been a blip in the decline, which began about 8,000 years ago, when humans began deforesting Earth to make way for agriculture and civilization.

That blip is represented by those red numbers in that carbon cycle picture, which represent human impacts to the carbon cycle. The most important of humanity’s carbon cycle impacts has been mining and burning Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits. In future posts, I will go into depth on what formed those hydrocarbon deposits, but there is no dispute that mining and burning hydrocarbon deposits have raised the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere. This is another area where there is no credible dissent.

In fact, if a bunch of college kids were given a science project, to come up with a way to quickly increase Earth’s carbon dioxide levels, the winning entry would be to mine and burn all of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits (or use nuclear bombs to try to open up holes in the crust to stimulate volcanism, but humanity might not survive that science project. :) ). But humanity might not survive the winning entry, either. Global Warming by itself won’t spell humanity’s demise, but the dislocations that it is already causing could lead to wars that do see humanity wipe itself out. A five-foot rise in Earth’s oceans, which could easily happen within the next century, would displace hundreds of millions of people. Where are those displaced people going to live? The same climate change that causes sea level rises will also cause epic droughts and floods, which will disrupt humanity’s food supplies. What will happen when there are hundreds of millions of homeless and hungry people? My generation will likely get “lucky” and die before we find out the answers to those questions, but today’s children might not be so lucky.

And humanity largely has its head in the sand on those issues. Polymaths such as Peter Ward write about what may be coming, but his is a voice in the wilderness. The next post will be on the Global Warming “debate,” which was fomented by a bunch of hack scientists working for the oil companies and the corporate media, which helped create the illusion of a debate where one does not really exist. TV shows such as Fox News, which people close to me cannot get enough of, attack the idea of Global Warming all day long, parading “experts” to make their case. I had a college-educated Fox News aficionado inform me just the other day that there is no evidence of human-induced climate change. People like that abound in the USA, which is a fairly short step from believing that Earth is flat.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:


The Global Warming “Debate”

Back in 1997, when I began the full-time study that began my second site, I read Julian Simon’s magnum opus, The State of Humanity, after reading an article on him in Wired magazine (which inspired this book, which was predictably lauded by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist), spent months studying the work of his authors, and wrote my first essay of my current effort (and lost the essay due to serial hardware failures). It was an educational experience, to read the work of scientists and scholars who had sold their souls. Simon died not long after I wrote that essay, and likely reaped what he sewed. After he died, he was replaced at Cato Institute by Steve Milloy, who was literally a tobacco company front man who coined the term “Junk Science” to attack research that showed the harm that second-hand smoke caused.

In The State of Humanity were the works of authors who are notorious today as Global Warming “skeptics,” such as Fred Singer (who also attacked second-hand smoke evidence, calling it “Junk Science”) and Patrick Michaels. Michaels was unabashedly on the oil companies’ payroll and getting most of his money from hydrocarbon interests. Michaels works at Cato Institute, too.

Michaels’s article attacked the recent temperature record, and his methods of attack became a staple amongst Global Warming “skeptics.” While not denying that carbon dioxide levels had skyrocketed during the industrial era, Michaels suggested that where global temperatures were taken were flawed, as in near cities and other “heat islands,” which provided a faulty temperature record. He suggested that sulfur dioxide pollution may actually be saving the Northern Hemisphere from warming, stated that the Northern Hemisphere had not warmed at all, and further stated that the only warming unequivocally measured was nighttime warming, and that was a good thing. So, no Global Warming, and what may have happened was beneficial.

Michaels’s work can be seen as a framework that other Global Warming “skeptics” have used. In William Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, he recommended reading Michaels’s co-authored The Satanic Gases as an example of the “value systems” that people bring to the Global Warming issue, in Ruddiman’s chapter on the shameful politicking that currently dominates climate studies. Al Gore, AKA Mr. Environment, went on the road promoting his Global Warming presentation, and he presented ice age data and carbon dioxide levels, and that was misleading, too. The advancing and retreating ice sheets are due to Milankovitch cycles, and the related carbon dioxide fluctuations are an effect, not a cause. All of that Sturm und Drang served to cloud the real issues related to humanity’s epic burning of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits.

The current Icehouse Earth phase began 35 million years ago, after 15 million years of cooling off from a 200-million-year Greenhouse Earth phase, which was caused by high carbon dioxide levels from volcanism. As with the other Icehouse Earth phases of the past several hundred million years, this one began with ice forming at Antarctica, and nobody is disputing that Earth’s declining carbon dioxide levels are the ultimate cause. There are different hypotheses for the decline, and reduced volcanism is surely a primary variable, but another may be increased carbon burial. One hypothesis has been used for past Icehouse Earth phases, which is mountain-building. Mountain-building exposes rock that then weathers, which sequesters carbon, and India slamming into Asia created the Himalayas, which exposed vast amounts of rock, which has been weathering for about 50 million years, which coincides with the beginning of Earth’s cooling into this Icehouse Earth phase. That is the important dynamic, not annual temperature fluctuations.

As I have written, climate science is young, and today’s skyrocketing carbon dioxide levels are unprecedented in Earth’s history. How it is going to exactly play out, year-by-year, nobody knows, but what everybody can agree on is that Earth will get warmer with that carbon dioxide blanket growing. All but one of the first 15 years of the 21st century were warmer than any year measured before the year 2000. Those kinds of trends are meaningful, especially as carbon dioxide levels skyrocket.

To dive into the minutia of the recent temperature record is to get lost in the trees and fail to see the forest. While trying to tease the signal from the noise is good work, oscillations and other short-term and regional variables have been seized on and debated, when they are really pretty meaningless. It is the longer-term and larger-scale changes that should be focused on, but the issue has become a huge political football, such as when an American politician brought a snowball into Congress one day, as “proof” that there is not Global Warming, and the man chaired the Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, in one of many instances of the fox managing the henhouse.

Global Warming deniers seize on this and that, like lawyers trying to form a shadow of doubt in the jury’s mind, and the corporate-owned media gives them the floor, as if their interest-conflicted drivel really means anything, so that it can be back to business as usual.

What climate scientists all agree on is that their science is young, and exactly how the warming will play out will be complex, with regional variation, El Niños, La Niñas, and other events creating short-term variation, but that the trend will inexorably become warmer. What the Global Warming models are unanimous about is that the poles will feel it first and the most, as they have during previous phases. Ice forms at the poles in the Icehouse phases, and forests are near the poles in the Greenhouse phases. And just as those models predict, we are seeing vast and startling changes in the ice at the poles. Worldwide, all glaciers have experienced pronounced retreats, and I can see it in my home state. It is very dramatic. People do not need to descend into temperature-reading minutia to witness the trends. That is what has climate scientists terrified, for good reason. Humanity is not toying so much with what happens year-to-year, but we are threatening to turn Earth from an Icehouse phase to a Greenhouse phase in mere centuries. The last transition from an Icehouse to Greenhouse was accompanied by the greatest mass extinction in the eon of complex life, and we don’t want to find out what might happen this time.

Another thing that most Global Warming deniers explicitly state is the economic cost of bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. I have witnessed this in related areas, as their last line of defense to business as usual, to emphasize the immense cost of changing our ways, to encourage us to do nothing. As George Carlin once said, the most powerful force in the universe is inertia. :) So, those Global Warming deniers are singing a song that, quite frankly, most people want to hear, of “all is well,” and even if it wasn’t, then there is really nothing that we can do about it anyway, so “Move along, there is nothing to see here, or really, nothing that you want to see.”

In summary, there is a huge faux debate about niggling issues, which are designed to distract from the big ones. I was not going to name him while he is still alive, but one of the Global Warming “skeptics” referred to in this post was Brian O’s former colleague, and Brian was angry and saddened that his colleague sold his soul to the oil companies. I just riffled through Brian’s books and found where Brian did name him in his last book, on page 93 of The Energy Solution Revolution, and Brian’s writing deserves to be reproduced here:


“…during autumn 2007, I was invited to appear on the Kevin Smith radio talk show, in which for the first hour, Mr. Smith grilled me that, according to a recent neoconservative think tank Hudson Institute Report, human-induced global warming and climate change are a hoax! During our interview, we could never get beyond being mired in such arguments. We did not even begin to embrace my solutions, or be able to imagine the world in a post-hydrocarbon age.

“One of the most vocal signatories to this appalling “Open Letter” to UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon was S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist who had been one of my mentors during my graduate school years in the 1960s and a collaborator on various scientific projects in the 1970s and 1980s. Over the past two decades, Singer took a curiously abrupt turn to right-wing politics. Moving to Washington, he soon joined neoconservative and big-business lobby groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Global Climate Coalition, and the billionaire Reverend Sun Moon’s scientific advisory panel. Before climate became an issue, about twenty years ago [late 1980s – Ed.], he invited me into Houston and London first-class. (This may have been another example of a carrot dangled before me to “join the club” rather than reject it.) On these occasions, we could really determine where establishment science would go; in service to those who run the world. Like many of his climate-skeptic colleagues, Singer has sold out in promoting his “Moon-to-Moon” lunacy.”


So, it was Fred Singer. In the next paragraph, Brian wrote about a conference to reduce carbon dioxide emissions:


“So what came of the long-awaited Bali meeting? It became a circus in which all nations opposed the U.S.-dominated refusal to support even the modest Kyoto protocols limiting carbon dioxide emissions. The United States, with four percent of the world’s population, emits a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases, by far the highest per-capita rate of any nation in the world. It was no surprise that the U.S. representative to the Bali climate talks was booed off the stage for American inaction.”


What makes Brian’s work, or mine, surreal is that the solution that makes all those issues and many other go away, almost overnight, is ignored by all sides. Not long before he died, Brian wrote of trying to get his foot in the door at those “progressive” “philanthropist” gatherings, of people such as Richard Branson, and he was always shut out, with free energy entirely off the table, while the “solutions” bandied about were the same tame “solutions” that Brian promoted in the 1970s, before he really woke up.

Next on my list is Peak Oil.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now

×
×
  • Create New...