...and a bit under the weather, too

The second great religion of the doomsayers who may not be challenged is the concept of man-made climate change. I'm not a climate change denier, but I think that many of those who are rightly concerned about climate change do themselves no favours by overstating the case. In that sense, the climate change doomsayers are remarkably similar to the peak oil doomsayers.

We know that the earth’s climate is changing. Of course it is – as far as we can tell, there has never been a period when it hasn’t been. There have been lengthy periods of comparative climate stability, but climate has never been unchanging. So, whatever we do as humanity, we’ll have to deal with climate change at some level.

We also know that, since adopting an economy based largely on hydrocarbons, human activity has been pumping more carbon dioxide (as well as other gases) into the atmosphere, at a much greater rate than would happen without human activity. And that rate is increasing as more and more countries build up their industrial base.

We have very good reason to believe that changing the levels of carbon dioxide etc. in the atmosphere will impact on the global climate. Indeed, it would be very surprising if changing the composition of the atmosphere, even marginally, did not have an impact on climate, given the huge complexity of climate.

What we don’t actually ‘know’, however, is how much of a man-made impact on climate change there will be, nor what that impact will be. All of the predictions are based on complex mathematical models, and all of those models are based on assumptions (guesses to you and me) about some of the key variables. There's a good consensus around many of those guesses, and the people making them are seriously clever people; but a consensus of very clever people does not turn a guess into a fact. And there are some serious anomalies which some climate change alarmists are far too quick to dismiss.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously. Significant climate change, whether man-made or natural, will have a massive impact on human society. And I’m certainly not arguing that we shouldn’t take urgent corrective action to reduce our impact on the atmosphere. Given how little we really know for certain about the impact of what we’re doing, it is madness to not only maintain our level of emissions but to be actually increasing them.

But it is equally a mistake to believe that reducing the impact of human activity to zero will avoid climate change - it won't. Earth's wobbles on its orbit, cyclic changes in the Sun and other factors will continue to have an impact on climate, whatever we do. We need to be preparing for climate change as well as trying to reduce or eliminate the man-made element – these are not either/or alternatives.

Feeling a little Peaky...

In comments on previous posts, Draig chides me a little for my scepticism over the connection between the current high price of oil and the concept of Peak Oil. Peak Oil (like Climate Change) is certainly on my list of things to worry about. Both issues are challenging for all of us – although they may not be the two most pressing.

Peak oil, again like climate change, has become one of those things which have an almost religious status for some, and any challenge to it is met with outrage. But shouting ‘peak oil’ whenever the oil price goes up is as meaningful as shouting ‘climate change’ whenever we have a freak storm; neither follow necessarily from the science or mathematics.

In essence, the concept is incredibly simple. As oil is a finite natural resource, there will come a time when oil production reaches its peak, and production will decline thereafter. Unless the global economy has planned for this, and we have put alternative energy sources in place, the inevitable result will be price rises and energy shortages.

So far, so good. I have no quibble with that at all – my disagreement is about whether the current high prices are in any way related to the peak oil theory. Peak oil theory certainly predicts high prices; but it is a complete non-sequitur to argue that high prices at a particular time therefore prove the theory. I think that there is another, darker reason for the current high prices.

There will, of course, come a time when oil production does reach its geological peak, although estimates of when that will be vary. There are two main complicating factors in knowing when it will happen.

The first is that the current level of supply is artificially capped by the producing countries. I don't blame them or criticise them for doing that; but there is a great deal of difference between a cap on production based on geology and a cap based on politics, even if the effects (rising oil prices) might look similar.

The second is that, as the price increases, oil reserves previously considered unrecoverable on economic grounds become economic after all, so that the geological cap may continue to move a little further away in the short term.

At this stage, I remain unconvinced that the current price hikes are actually based on a real shortage of oil, or even on a genuine fear that there will be a shortage in the near future. Prices have been forced up largely by speculators who are betting on there being a fear of a shortage, and then trying to make vast sums of money by creating the fear that will enable them to win their bets. Those bets are thus in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, but gambling on this scale doesn’t prove the peak oil theory – and this sort of gambling is hardly a rational basis for running the world economy either.