Peak Oil and Global Warming  

Tom Whipple's latest article explores some of the linkages.

A number of stories appeared in the press last week suggesting a discussion of the relationship between peak oil and global warming is in order. Most scientists believe that burning fossil fuels is the culprit behind global warming and if we don't get carbon emissions down soon, a lot more places will be under water by the end of the century.

Some believe peak oil and the resulting drop in liquid fuel consumption will be good for global warming. Others fear in the panic that will ensue from ever-higher oil prices, every environmental regulation on the books will be junked and a massive increase in the uncontrolled burning of coal will occur. Many are talking about the world going over a "tipping point" which would lead to the earth becoming barely habitable for thousands of years.

However, another way of looking at the relationship between global warming and peak oil is to ask what effect increasing temperatures might have on how soon peak oil comes and what happens after depletion sets in.

Last week NASA confirmed 2005 was indeed the warmest year ever recorded. One meteorologist pointed out it might have been the warmest year in the past 1 million years— impressive if true. Moreover, Accuweather reported that January 2006 is going to be the warmest January ever recorded in the US .

That warmest January ever, by the way, is the reason we aren't paying somewhere above $3 per gallon for our gasoline right now. It has been so warm since Christmas, that stockpiles of heating fuel in the US are building to well above normal. This in turn has kept the price of oil products down despite the fact that around the world nearly one million barrels a day of oil production has been shutdown for one reason or another.

New articles on RealClimate and The Oil Drum provide useful insights into the state of our current understanding of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- and what we need to do in order to forestall disaster.

Peak oil community website The Oil Drum is playing host to an absolutely terrific series of posts from Stuart Staniford, examining the prospects for reducing carbon emissions and avoiding dangerous climate disruption, all from a perspective informed by the current peak oil debates. Stuart is a physicist and computer scientist by training, and brings that quantitative analytic eye to his work on understanding the climate; although his posts are written for a general audience, they are fairly math-heavy -- but even if formulae make your eyes glaze over, I encourage you to make the effort to follow his argument. He's not a climate scientist trying to explain his findings to the lay person, he's an educated non-specialist trying to understand what's going on.