My blogging has almost dried up. It will be back, but maybe not yet.

Meanwhile, I was reading Michael Tobis’s excellent presentation on ethics, when I found buried in the comments a link to another fascinating and scary presentation (3 MB pdf) at brave new climate.

Do look at it, and especially the very last slide, but if you’re lazy, the bottom line is:

  • there isn’t enough coal and oil for CO2 to exceed 460 ppm,
  • there may not be enough phosphorus for western agriculture to survive either …

Clearly I don’t know anything about the reliability of the material, but when i get my head above water (one day …), I’ll go looking …

(p.s: well done America, maybe this time they really have elected someone who could become a leader of the free world)

trackbacks (1)

Peak Everything revisited (from “Bryan’s Blog” on (on Tuesday 09 June, 2009))

Despite appearances to the contrary, I’m not planning on disappearing down a computing geek hole, and forgetting about climate and the environment, it’s just that the day-to-day problems on the top of the list at the moment are “informatics” related.

comments (2)

William (on Wednesday 05 November, 2008)

“there isn’t enough coal and oil for CO2 to exceed 460 ppm,” - doesn’t sound very plausible. Unless you assume all the IPCC scenario builders are stupid.

Bryan (on Thursday 06 November, 2008)

No, and that’s one of the reasons why I put my qualification about reliability. Nonetheless, the source doc asserts that the IPCC scenario builders didn’t take into account the idea that there might not be enough stuff under the ground to support their various scenarios.

Now, remembering the antecedents of those scenarios, which are getting on some (and new ones are due this time round), it might be possible that they weren’t taking “peak” anything into account. I simply don’t know. I’d like to know … hence my comment that I’ll go looking when I can.