Dork Scratchings

I just read this fascinating book by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz .  The premise is that there has never been a transition from one energy source to another (e.g. wood -> coal, or coal -> oil) and that, by contrast, novel sources of energy have simply piled up on top of each other.  Worse still, each new form of energy - and also each new material - has simply enabled increased consumption of each other form of energy and form of material. The conclusion is stark, supporting renewables will not be enough to avert a climate catastrophe.  As the book says: it may be a necessary condition but it is not a sufficient one.  For me, the most interesting part of the book was this diagram, taken from a 1983 Environmental Protection Agency report titled "Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?"  which used an energy model developed by Oak Ridge Laboratories:   The graphic shows how different scenarios and policies affect the date at which +2C warming is breached.  Not...

Nearly two weeks into the US-Israeli war on Iran many commentators have drawn attention to the climate cost of war.  But whether it's the BBC's Climate Question  on Radio 4, or Covering Climate Now's Press Briefing , they all ignore the elephant in the room: the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz.  So, what is the effect on the climate of this blockade? Saving Lives at Sea I made a meme, plz share... How many lives are saved by stopping a single tanker?  Estimates of the number of climate deaths this century vary enormously, with some sources saying around 10 million and others many billions.  There are plenty of serious climate scientists who believe most lives on Earth are at risk.  But let's follow this study  which says "The number of caused deaths will likely lie between a tenth of a person and 10 people per 1,000 tons." A typical tanker carries 1,000,000 barrels of oil, which when burned will create 430,000 tons CO2.  If we treat all anthropo...

  I've been thinking a lot about the limits to growth recently.  If you look up the non-renewable resources that our economy depends on it quickly becomes apparent that all of them, whether they be fossil fuels or metals like copper , are somewhere between 30% and 70% exhausted.  And the exhausted part is invariably the easiest to get to.  However, it has only recently occurred to me that land is also a non-renewable resource:  they're not making any more of it.... Checking out Our World in Data  one can see that nearly 5 billion hectares are currently in use by humans.  That compares with a total available of 13 billion hectares, if you discount the ice covered land.  So, in fact land falls into the same 30-70% exhausted range as everything else. I downloaded the data and produced a smoothed graph of growth (%) vs year and found something interesting: growth grew more or less exponentially until about 1956 at which point it fell sharply to zero....