Will The Oil Age Be A Brief Historical Blip?

You don't have to be a die hard Peak Oil purist to agree with the gist of the implications of the graph above, posted at an NPR blog and based on an original presentation slide by Stephen Mayfield.

As noted by Wikipedia on Peak Oil:

Optimistic estimations of peak production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis, without requiring major changes in the lifestyle of heavily oil-consuming nations. . . . Pessimistic predictions of future oil production operate on the thesis that either the peak has already occurred, that oil production is on the cusp of the peak, or that it will occur shortly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006.

Peak oil production in the United States hit in 1970, but was pretty much irrelevant because oil trades in a world market. The U.S. has been a net oil importer since the early 1990s.

The United States isn't the only country in the world that has hit a localized peak in oil production as the illustration below from Wikipedia illustrates:

Some localized peak oil predictions are right around the corner: Iraq: 2018, Kuwait: 2013, and Saudi Arabia: 2014. In my grandchildren's world, most of the Middle Eastern oil powers will have greatly diminished oil wealth.

Whether peak oil is almost upon us or is, very optimistically (e.g. in the opinion of the most optimistic oil industry experts), a century out, in the big picture, the message is basically the same viewed through a long historical lens (and one could reasonably extend the chart above all the way back to 8,000 BCE when agriculture was begun for an even longer run historical perspective).

Most of the optimistic predictions assume that much of the new high cost oil production will come from "unconventional sources such as heavy crude oil, oil sands, and oil shale" that are made more attractive at higher oil prices. Even the optimists aren't predicting a sustained return to an era of oil prices of less than $40 per barrel (in 2008 dollars), and often half that, seen from roughly 1877 to 1972 and again from about 1986 to 2003. Instead, they predict a continued flow of increasingly expensive oil for a very long time. The current price for barrel of oil is about $100 which translates into gasoline prices of a bit under $4 a gallon at the pump in Colorado.

We learned how to make oil powered machines and oil based materials, we drilled and extracted vast amounts of easily available petroleum, and we very rapidly have burned through much of this non-renewable resource and continue to do so without seriously reducing our consumption of it. This use pattern has lasted about a century, and maybe it can last another, but it isn't sustainable.

For an oil economy to be sustainable, it needs to use biofuels or oil obtained from converting coal to a petroleum-like liquid fuel (such as the fuel produced in the Fischer–Tropsch process used by Germany and Japan during World War II). Rentech, Inc. has a proto-type plant in Commerce City, Colorado that produces about 10 barrels of fuels per day using the process from natural gas, and half a dozen other operations produce liquid fuels from natural gas or biomass using the process as well. There are a few small operations in the U.S., including one in Pennsylvania, that do small scale conversions from "waste coal" but only one Sasol plant in South Africa (which is coal rich, but oil poor) currently makes petroleum-like fuels from a combination of coal and natural gas on a large scale commercial basis using the technique.

You can extract more petroleum from deep wells, oil shale and the like, but this approach inevitably is still going to produce diminishing oil reserve growth and higher extraction costs. These options can bend the peak oil curve forward a little, but once the cost of extraction exceeds the cost of producing biofuels or converting coal or using other alternatives to oil (like fuel cell and battery powered vehicles), the technological capacity to extract more petroleum becomes irrelevant. The bottom line is that they aren't making any more new oil, so sooner or later, we're going to run out if we keep consuming it at a high rate as a core basis of our technological culture. Moreover, there is no more oil anywhere else in the solar system, since no place but Earth has ever had the biomass that broke down to produce petroleum.

The good news is that this imposes a natural limit on the amount of global warming inducing pollutants that combustion of petroleum can produce. And, petroleum consumption is the harder fossil fuel to refrain from using without being forced by resource constraints to do so, because it has fewer good substitutes. Our demand for coal is currently almost exclusively for electricity production, and that has easier substitutes that require innovation only by large, sophisticated electrical utilities, not by average people whose electricity consumption experience is unchanged by the fuel used to produce it.

The bad news is that to the extent that our standard of living is a product of cheap energy from petroleum, the future could bring real hardship as this one time economic boost is no longer available. Economists have attempted to estimate that impact, but given the uncertainties of technological developments and the inseparability of oil from our current economy's functioning, the efforts are speculative at best.

An economy based on cheap oil may be as transient as the brief period in the history of the Americas and of Australia when there was a brief burst of abundance arising from megafauna hunting until those fauna went extinct.

READ MORE - Will The Oil Age Be A Brief Historical Blip?

Modern Continental Drift Rates

For future reference, continental drift in active faults like East Africa's Rift Valley or North America's Pacific Coast is on the order of ten to thirty feet per century; one hundred to three hundred feet per thousand years; about three hundred meters to a kilometer per per ten thousand years; and two to six miles overall since modern humans left Africa. In that time frame, the direction of fault movement has been essentially unchanged. (Links misplaced before I made this post.) The human impact of volcanos and earthquakes is generallly going to be more significant impacts of geological activity than continental drift in this time frame.

This isn't so small that it is entirely irrelevant in the time frame of hominin evolution, but is largely overshadowed by more dramatic changes in this time frame in sea levels and global climate.

READ MORE - Modern Continental Drift Rates

Republicans Hate Hawaii

The Republican spending plan approved by House Republicans in Congress last month would have cut $126 million in cuts for the National Weather Service that houses the Pacific Tsunami Warniing Center in Hawaii. After all, who needs to know about the weather, it's just God's will.

READ MORE - Republicans Hate Hawaii

West Out Of Egypt

About 4000 years ago, the Pharaoh Mentuhotep II sent an expedition to the West from the Nile River Valley via the Dakhla Oasis to Lake Chad.

At the time, this would have been a nicer place to visit:

[T]hey would have a found a land dominated not by desert, but by lakes, vegetation and wildlife.

Scientific studies published in the last few years show that there were two large lakes in the country. One of them, Lake Bodele, was a 91,000 square kilometre water body, making it larger than modern day Lake Superior. To the south there was Lake Chad, at that time a 22,000 square kilometre entity about the size of Lake Erie.
These bodies of water used to be even bigger, at one point they formed one large mega-lake. “At its peak sometime before 7000 years ago the lake was over 173 m deep with an area of at least 400 000 square kilometres, bigger than the Caspian Sea, the biggest lake on Earth today,” writes scientists Nick Drake and Charlie Bristow in a paper.

The journey to the West, which was the direction in which the afterlife was located in Egyptian mythology, included landmarks similar to those described in the land of the dead in Egyptian religious texts, although it isn't the only place to make that claim.

This expedition would have taken place about two thousand years after the domestication of African Sahel crops (which is a likely source of the expansion of the Niger-Congo languages and the population genetics of West Africa), which appeared around 4000 BC when the Sahara was at its wettest.

This expedition would also have taken place close in time to what some archaeology suggests could be the time that sheeps and goats were introduced to sub-Saharan Africa, an event that could plausible be associated with the arrival of the genetically distinct Chadic language speakers into the regions where they are found today, possibly close in time to the arrival of Ethiosemetic peoples into Ethiopia, probably also bringing sheep and goats with them.

I'll recall some observations I made earlier:

The Lake Chad basin is also home to two of the most notable genetic outlier populations in Africa: the Chadic language speakers of North Cameroon, who have a strong element of a Y-DNA haplotype (R1b) most similar to one found mostly in the North Atlantic and Northern Mediterranean, and Fulani language speakers of North Cameroon, who share a Y-DNA haplotype (T) with the Upper Nile basin, Somolia, the Balkans and a swath of Dravidian language speakers in Central and Eastern India. Lake Chad's fluctuations in extent are also believed to be central to the history of the Nilo-Saharan languages.

The Caspian Sea also has fairly little known but important climatalogical history that is important to recent human pre-history. The Caspian was connected to the Aral and Black Seas by water for some part of the period after the Last Glacial Maximum, and there is evidence that its highest and lowest surface levels have varied by 100 meters in relatively recent times. Rock art from around 4000 B.C. in the Caspian Sea depicts boats similar to those found in Egypt at around the same time. There is also evidence of giant stone monument construction there. There also appear to be connections between Caucusian geographical place names and names found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

It isn't clear to me if the references alluded to by those seeking a connnection between the Caspian Sea basin and the Book of the Dead, and the Lake Chad basin and the Book of the Dead, are the same passages. Both endorheic basins seem to hide some undiscovered parts of human history.

I'd previously suggested that these genetic outliers might simply have followed the White Nile to its source and then crossed the short divide into the Lake Chad basin but the discovery of a documented expedition around 4000 years ago and an awareness of the greater extent of the lakes in that basin at the time makes a more direct route seem plausible.

READ MORE - West Out Of Egypt

An Ancient Megadrought

Between the Last Glacial Maximum (the peak of the most recent full fledged ice age), and the Neolithic Revolution (the domestication of plants and animals), there were the worst droughts of the last 50,000 years in the regions that were home to most of the modern human population. The timing suggests that these droughts may have set in place key events from pre-history that followed including proto-farming of non-domesticated plants and the settlement of the Americas.

[O]ne of the most widespread and intense droughts of the last 50,000 years or more struck Africa and Southern Asia 17,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago, large amounts of ice and meltwater entered the North Atlantic Ocean, causing regional cooling but also major drought in the tropics,
"The height of this time period coincided with one of the most extreme megadroughts of the last 50,000 years in the Afro-Asian monsoon region with potentially serious consequences for the Paleolithic humans that lived there at the time[.]" The "H1 megadrought," as it's known, was one of the most severe climate trials ever faced by anatomically modern humans.

Africa's Lake Victoria, now the world's largest tropical lake, dried out, as did Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and Lake Van in Turkey. The Nile, Congo and other major rivers shriveled, and Asian summer monsoons weakened or failed from China to the Mediterranean, meaning the monsoon season carried little or no rainwater.

What caused the megadrought remains a mystery, but its timing suggests a link to Heinrich Event 1 (or "H1"), a massive surge of icebergs and meltwater into the North Atlantic at the close of the last ice age.

Previous studies had implicated southward drift of the tropical rain belt as a localized cause, but the broad geographic coverage in this study paints a more nuanced picture. "If southward drift were the only cause," says Stager, lead author of the Science paper, "we'd have found evidence of wetting farther south. But the megadrought hit equatorial and southeastern Africa as well, so the rain belt didn't just move--it also weakened."

From here.

READ MORE - An Ancient Megadrought

Friday Links of Interest

* Colorado's incarceration rate for women (93 per 100,000 population) is the third highest in the United States after Oklahoma (134 per 100,000), and Texas (98 per 100,000). The national average is 69 per 100,000. "In 2004, [Oklahoma] imprisoned more than 10 times as many women per capita as Massachusetts or Rhode Island."

* Microsoft's customer support website chronicles the ire of people who have had Bing hijack their systems.

* "[H]ow many offenders sentenced under the old 100-1 crack guidelines (and the amended version applicable from 2007 to 2010) would benefit from retroactive application of the new 18-1 crack guidelines that the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act produced"?

12,835 offenders sentenced between October 1, 1991, and September 30, 2009 (fiscal years 1992 through 2009), would be eligible to receive a reduced sentence if [the new sentencing guideline] were made retroactive. If these offenders were to receive reduced sentences . . . the dates on which they would be released would span more than thirty years....

Based on [additional] assumptions, the average sentence reduction for all impacted offenders with sufficient information to perform this analysis would be 22.7 percent (or 37 months, from 163 months to 126 months). Table 6 shows that 7,612 offenders (76.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of 48 months or less. Conversely, 286 offenders (2.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of more than 10 years.

A more modest adjustment to the crack sentencing guidelines in 2007 was applied retroactively. "The 2007 reduction benefited over 15,000 crack prisoners, though the amount of sentence reduction was only around 2 years of imprisonment."

The federal corrections budget would be reduced by about $1 billion if the sentencing guideline change mandated by the Fair Sentencing Act was made retroactive.

* Mohamad Hammoud was the first man convicted of charges including material support for terrorism after 9/11 (he was the first man charged under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to give money to designated terror groups and was found guilty and sentenced shortly after 9/11). He was sentenced to 155-years in prison "for smuggling cigarettes and sending $3,500 of the profits to Hezbollah." This was reduced this past January by Judge Graham Mullen on the grounds that this was "grossly disproportionate." But, the new sentence for the man who has served about ten years in prison so far is 30 years in prison after the original sentence was reversed on appeal. Thus, "the 37-year-old from Lebanon will spend an additional two decades in prison, then likely be deported." Hammoud plans to appeal the new sentence as well.

His attorneys wanted Hammoud to walk out of the courtroom with a sentence of the more than 10 years he already served. . . They contend he sent the money to a wing of Hezbollah that helps provide Middle Eastern communities with clean water and good housing, not the military wing labeled terrorists by the United States government for numerous attacks on Israel. . . . defense attorneys brought up more than a dozen cases in which people got sentences much shorter than Hammoud, including sentences of only a few decades for defendants that provided actual weapons and hundreds of thousands of dollars to terrorist organizations. "This is a case where people get seven years, eight years," Hammoud's attorney Stanley Cohen said.

From here.

* Twin studies, surprisingly, show a strong hereditary component to adolescent crime victimization:

[G]enetic factors explained a surprisingly significant 40 to 45 percent of the variance in adolescent victimization among the twins, while non-shared environments (those environments that are not the same between siblings) explained the remaining variance. But among adolescents who were victimized repeatedly, the effect of genetic factors accounted for a whopping 64 percent of the variance.

The study's author surmises that "genetically influenced traits such as low self control affect delinquent behavior, and delinquents, particularly violent ones, tend to associate with antisocial peers."

* Low prices of consumer electronics in the U.K. have caused criminals to shift from committing burglaries to muggings where small, high value items like iPods and laptop computers are stolen.

* High IQ people of modest means are considerably less likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden, while low IQ people from affluent families were more likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden. Higher education is free in Sweden to students with good grades and test scores, but money is still a barrier to these students in the United States.

Notably, Harvard and several other Ivy League schools have instituted sliding scale tuition arrangements so that they can continue to admit the most qualified applicants regardless of means. For example, Harvard limits tuition to 10% of the first $180,000 of family income and has ceased including student loans in undergraduate financial aid packages.

* Tree ring data from Mexico released last year showed that a "large ancient drought previously confirmed for the Southwest of the United States is shown to have extended into central Mexico (1149-1167 AD)."

[It] also provides the first independent confirmation of the so-called Terminal Classic drought, a megadrought some anthropologists relate to the collapse of the Mayan civilization. This decades-long dry period had been previously determined by analysis of lake and basin sediments in other areas of Mexico and the Caribbean. . . [The data] narrowed the event's timing to 897-922 AD and confirmed that it had a wider geographical impact than previously thought, extending into the highlands of Central Mexico, where other classic period cultures were located.

This parallels recent 2500 years of paleoclimate data from Europe that also shows a strong link between the major upheaval in European civilization in the last couple of thousand years and climate trends.

At times of social stability and prosperity, like the rise of the Roman Empire between 300 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., Europe experienced warm, wet summers ideal for agriculture. Similar conditions accompanied the peak years of medieval Europe between 1000 C.E. and 1200 C.E. . . .

In the 3rd century C.E. . . . extended droughts matched the timing of barbarian invasions and political turmoil. Around 1300 C.E., on the other hand, a cold snap combined with wetter summers coincides with widespread famines and plague that wiped out nearly half of Europe's population by 1347. . . . In eras of prosperity, more trees were cut down for building and fuel, yielding more samples in the archaeological record. At other times, like the years after the Black Death and the so-called Migration Period between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. when the Roman Empire was overwhelmed by tribes pushing in from the east, the number of wood samples dwindles to nearly nothing.

Krugman and Brad DeLong, meanwhile, have recently noted an interesting article from 1970 on the connection between the institutions of slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Black Death. Climate data may elucidate some of the unanswered questions from that analysis.

READ MORE - Friday Links of Interest

Cold

Today's high temperature in Denver will be -2 degrees F. The low is forecast to be -17 degrees F. With windchill the low is anticipated to be -35 degrees F. Schools have been shut down, mostly because they don't want children freezing at bus stops.

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Twenty Obvious International Trends

Lots of economic, environmental and political predictions are hardly better than horoscopes. Others are reliable enough to be thought of a "fundamentals." I'm more interested in the latter. Here are a few:

1. China's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods (e.g. three years or more) than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

2. China will experience a notable economic crash in the next decade or so, because it hasn't had one for a long time and periods of even strong sustained growth are almost always interrupted periodically by economic crashes.

3. India's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

4. India's economic growth rate will exceed that of China sometime in the next ten to fifteen years, because China's per capita GDP is significantly greater than that of India, leaving India with more "catch up growth" potential than China.

5. Oil dependent nations in the Middle East will each experience serious economic contractions not long as oil production in the nation in question starts to fall due to exhaustion of the nation's oil supply. These nations are heavily reliant on oil revenues to sustain their standard of living with imported goods and temporary immigrant workers, both of which will be harder to come by when there are not new oil revenues available.

6. Countries in Africa that experience war and authoritarian governments will experience less economic growth than those with sustained periods of peace and democratic government.

7. In the developing world, it will be a long time before environmental and climate change concerns have enough political clout to cause air pollution to be reduced more rapidly than the increasing scope of economic activity increases air pollution. As a result, emissions will not be reduced rapidly enough to stop continued global warming.

8. Nuclear power will spread to more countries.

9. Oil more be more expensive in real terms in 2020 and more expensive again in real terms in 2030 than it is today. Rising oil prices will make technologies that are powered by energy sources other than oil more attractive. This trend will be a global one, because oil trades in a global marketplace.

10. Oil rich countries that are not close to exhausting their reserves will receive an economic boost from rising oil prices.

11. North Korea's political and economic system will collapse, probably within a couple of decades, if it fails to open itself up to the rest of the world. If it does collapse, it will probably be reabsorbed by South Korea.

12. Public health measures will improve in most of the developing and undeveloped world that are not war torn as patents on new effective drugs expire and make those drugs more affordable.

13. Global fertility rates will fall as more countries become more economically developed.

14. Developing countries will become less religious as they become more economically developed in fairly close synch with falling fertility rates.

15. The need to impose taxes as oil revenues decline will force Middle Eastern monarchs who have not already been deposed in revolutions and democratized of their own free will to make genuine democratic reforms.

16. The proportion of the world population engaged in farming will fall steadily for decades to come.

17. Some small island nations will be swallowed up by the sea and forced to relocate all or most of their populations as sea levels rise with global warming sometime in the next century.

18. A large share of the world's languages, probably half or more, will die in the next few decades.

19. A significant number of plant and animal species will go extinct in the next few decades.

20. The proportion of Africans who are Christians will increase significantly over the next decade.

READ MORE - Twenty Obvious International Trends

The Good News Of The Last Decade

Rather than coming up with my own good news from the last decade, which I'm not disposed to do with the front page story in the paper is Republican plots to repeal health care reform, I'll crip off others including science fiction writer Charles Stross who notes:

1. AIDs is treatable.
2. "[B]oth China and India underwent annual economic growth averaging around 10% per year throughout the decade. The number of people living in poverty and with unsafe water supplies world-wide today is about the same as it was in 1970. Only difference is, there were 3 billion of us back then and today we're nearer to 7 billion. Upshot: the proportion of us humans on this planet who are living in third world poverty (unable to afford enough food, water, clothing and shelter) has actually been halved."
3. "Africa averaged around 5% growth throughout the decade, too." Some haven't shared in those gains due to events like the Congo War, but those who escaped wars have come out far better than that average.
4. "we haven't nuked ourselves." We have had the longest time period (about sixty years) without an international war in Europe since the Roman Empire, and the number of people living in war zones dropped greatly in the last decade on top of further drops after the Cold War.
5. Computer technology is faster, has greater broadband speed, has more storage capacity and in cheaper by orders of magnitude from a decade ago.
6. Genetic science has advanced greatly.
7. The pace of terrorism seems to have slowed down in the first world.

And, I'll also turn to "The Big Picture" which notes:

1. Cell phone use has gone from rare to predominant.
2. Internet use is way up.
3. U.S. population density is modestly up and U.S. power consumption is modestly down. In part driven by rising oil prices.

But, the environmental picture is still bleak. Global warming continues and is speeding up, more species are endangered, and natural disasters have been worse in the last decade than in the decade before it.

Economically, the good news is that things aren't getting worse in employment or GDP. The bad news, however, is that employment isn't improving very fast.

READ MORE - The Good News Of The Last Decade

Good Riddance 2010

As the year of record unemployment and a stagnant economy comes to a close, it is fifty degrees colder here in Denver than it is in Buffalo, New York. In Colorado Springs, fireworks had to be cancelled because it was 25 degrees below on Pike's Peak with 70 mile an hour winds. People lost homes to foreclosures and fires. Low interest rates are irrelvant because no one seems to be lending. The crazy people have taken the reins in Colorado's House of Representatives and the United States House of Representatives.

Maybe we'll do better in 2011.

READ MORE - Good Riddance 2010

Quick Science Hits

* The brain structure called the amygdala is closely associated with the instinctual fear. But, that isn't all it does. A large amygdala is associated with "a rich and varied social life among humans" and closely related primates. It has been linked to the social deficits in autism and regulates emotions in social situations in coordination with other parts of the brain. It may play a key part in interpreting facial expressions and monitoring personal space. Atypical amygdala function has been associated with: borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, more severe social phobia, bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia. The role of the amygdala in interpreting facial expressions, particularly fearful ones, and in fear generally, appears to be implicated in many of the mental conditions, and the left amygdala seems to be implicated more often than the right amygdala.

* "[A] single DNA change that blocks a gene known as HTR2B was predictive of highly impulsive behavior. HTR2B encodes one type of serotonin receptor in the brain. . . . "we found that the genetic variant alone was insufficient to cause people to act in such ways . . . Carriers of the HTR2B variant who had committed impulsive crimes were male, and all had become violent only while drunk from alcohol, which itself leads to behavioral disinhibition." From here via here.

* Eating fried fish is linked to strokes.

* Out of Africa migrations may have been via a wet Sahara rather than the Nile River Valley or Red Sea:

Analysis of the zoogeography of the Sahara shows that more animals crossed via this route than used the Nile corridor. Furthermore, many of these species are aquatic. This dispersal was possible because during the Holocene humid period the region contained a series of linked lakes, rivers, and inland deltas comprising a large interlinked waterway, channeling water and animals into and across the Sahara, thus facilitating these dispersals. This system was last active in the early Holocene when many species appear to have occupied the entire Sahara. However, species that require deep water did not reach northern regions because of weak hydrological connections. Human dispersals were influenced by this distribution; Nilo-Saharan speakers hunting aquatic fauna with barbed bone points occupied the southern Sahara, while people hunting Savannah fauna with the bow and arrow spread southward. The dating of lacustrine sediments show that the “green Sahara” also existed during the last interglacial (∼125 ka) and provided green corridors that could have formed dispersal routes at a likely time for the migration of modern humans out of Africa.

READ MORE - Quick Science Hits

Winter Solstice Today

Today is the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year.

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