How it plans to get its groove back:
Look for this to be the headline of the next IPCC report, due out in September. The report will walk back previous estimates of climate sensitivity, but will affirm that we’re still doomed unless we go ahead with the previous program of handing over power to bureaucrats to control our energy supply. You read it here on Power Line first.
The interesting part will be to see whether climate orthodoxy proposes a new, and theoretically more plausible, GHG emissions reduction target and timetable, like a 50 percent cut by the year 2060. I doubt it. Hatred of “fossil fuels” is the categorical imperative of modern environmentalism, and it long predates the arrival of global warming as an issue. The original complaint was that that hydrocarbons produced too much conventional air pollution, but once we solved that problem global warming became the fallback position. Nothing will deter environmentalists from this wisp—certainly not facts or progress. I’m betting they’ll stick with the previous 80 by 50 target. But if they come in with a different one, I’ll do the math to figure out what year in the past it will take the U.S. back to: I’ll bet it will still be something like 1925. Stay tuned.
It was never about science. It was always about control, and political power.
It’s fascinating how the solutions to all of these so-crises is always some sort of total state control mixed in with Marxist Socialist economic mismanagement. It’s almost like these people want to impose their Economic Creationist beliefs on the rest of us “by any means necessary”, because this time they’ll get it right. Not that the Nomeklatura will suffer when socialism fails again.
What’s even stranger is that their belief in a socialist environmental utopia is directly opposed by the actual environmental record of communist/socialist countries. Those countries are/were heavily polluted. I’ve been to China and Vietnam. The air pollution was eye watering. The former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries had terrible pollution. And in the face of that, the green weenies believe that “this time will be better” because they’ll be in charge.They’re even dumber than the communists.
FTFH.
Given that we’re headed in for a long term cold period due to the sun going on vacation until about 2040 or 2050, they need to find a way to blame pollution for the cooling trend like they did in the 1970’s. Then we’ll have to give up our SUV’s and coal plants to warm the planet instead of giving them up to prevent warming.
The means change, but the end is always the same.
Why is “fossil fuels” in scare quotes?
I call them hydrocarbon fuels.
The exact processes by which oil comes to be in nature are not known — I asked this question of a chemical engineer at the U whose research is on synthetic processes for going directly from sugar to usable motor fuel (his team may be targeting butanol, which is closer to gasoline and may not need to be blended).
The idea that oil comes from dead dinosaurs is an oversimplification from the popular imagination and from an oil company ad campaign. That the straight-chain alkanes (e.g. octane) come from plant or animal material subject to the conditions in “the oil window” in the Earth’s crust is as unlikely as diamonds forming under those conditions.
One route to oil I have seen in the scientific literature is that certain species of algae have vesicles containing parafins (i.e. the straight-chain alkanes comprising oil), in other words, algae that synthesize gasoline. The idea is that oil therefore comes from algae growing in a body of water with the dead algae forming anoxic sediments on the bottom.
Another route, and I have seen scientific literature on this (in the journal Nature), is the combination of calcium carbonate (limestone), FeO (a type of iron ore) and water under conditions in the upper mantle — the temperatures and pressures at about 100 miles down into the Earth.
Much as Thomas Gold told an interesting story (hydrocarbons found on Earth default to being of organic origin whereas any hydrocarbon anywhere else in the Solar System defaults to being of inorganic origin), I find his “cold-dark accrection” model of large amounts of primordial carbon in a reduced chemical state (not bound to oxygen as in CO2 or limestone rock) to be quite unlikely, especially in light of the compelling hypothesis for the complete melting of the upper layers of the Earth in the putative Moon-forming impact.
On the other hand, Thomas Gold told an interesting story about how the major oil provinces are in rather narrow geographic regions that appear to have an association with tectonic rift zones. He also gave an accounting as to how hydrocarbons in the mantle could make their way into the crust — after his passing, his explanative Web site on this subject went dark.
So, oil may come from life-driven organic chemistry after all, that is, the role of living organisms in forming limestone (CaCO3). When that limestone gets subducted into the upper mantle, the right conditions occur to form the straight-chain hydrogen saturated goodness known as alkanes or parafins that power our cars, trucks, trains, and planes. This material only makes it back to the surface in some special and specific geologic provinces — wish I could show you Gold’s map, and how a narrow band of oil production extends from the Russian Caucuses region down into Saudi and the Gulf States — not much of the Middle East has any oil, and most Middle East oil is part of this one oil province that Gold reasoned produced oil from sedimentary basins of widely disparate geologic age.
In the ultimate irony, although oil may be essentially of biologic origin, the energy contained in oil may not be from the Sun but maybe geothermal — powered by the radioactive elements that supply heat to the deep layers of the Earth. The scarcity and limited geographic distribution of oil may have a completely different explanation than the conventional “fossil fuel” narrative, hence the scare quotes.
The person who I think has this better narrative pinned down is a petroleum industry consultant J. F. Kenney. I was thinking of inviting him to the “U” as a guest speaker to spark some discussion among Chemical Engineers on this subject. But the difficulty is that Mr. Kenney appears in his Web presence to be highly opinionated and quick to label as fools anyone who disagrees with the rather strident tone he takes, so for now, I have let this rest . . .
AS is typical, Delingpole describes the Climate Campaign scam best:
“…..that toxic combination of junk science and hysterical fearmongering….”