George Will is afloat in a sea of fuel

Last Sunday George Will wrote about the abundance of fossil fuels in his column for the Washington Post. He began by surmising that Titusville, PA might have a claim to being most responsible for the modern world through the contribution of oil to world wealth. He then went on to list some of the many folk that have predicted (falsely) the arrival of a peak in oil production and the amount of reserves that are available.

In 1977, scold in chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.

He does not see that America, or the world for that matter, can wean themselves from a dependence on hydrocarbons, and quotes Keith Rattie, the chief executive of Questar, from a commencement speech as well as Edward Morse, from a story in Foreign Affairs in which Morse states that there is plenty of natural gas available – perhaps a hundred years at the present rate of consumption, and that the deep water fields just beginning to be exploited are significantly larger than thought. And he includes Daniel Yergin as stating that" the resource base of the planet is sufficient to keep up with demand for decades to come.”

From all this he concludes that it is only the environmentalists that are going to ensure scarcity for the planet. So where does one begin to disassemble what would appear, at first sight, to be a rational argument based on the utterances of three prominent individuals?

To pick the last first, it has unfortunately not been that long since I last wrote about Dr Yergin and CERA. Earlier this month I noted, after giving a number of occasions in the past that CERA had been wrong, that some of the assumptions that they were currently using to project future oil production were likely to be wrong also.

The most obvious immediate reason is the collapse of the oil industry in Mexico. Having fallen from the projected 4 mbd to potentially only 2.7 mbd next year, global supply is going to have to find another source for that 1.3 mbd. Bear in mind that Mexican production has been falling as fast as 100,000 bd per month at Cantarell and the magnitude of this problem becomes apparent. The current hope of seeing 10 mbd from Iraq by 2020 is, I would suggest, also perhaps more than a little optimistic.

So let’s tick Dr Yergin from the list, and move on to Edward Morse and the prediction of natural gas production from fields such as the Marcellus and from the deep waters of the world. This case is a little more tricky to argue, but only in the sense that there are considerable resources in both these regions of the world and that they will continue to produce significant quantities of fuel for some considerable time. The questions that are being raised are, however, more along the lines of how much and for how long will they produce and at what cost?

Evidence to date (that I am trying to explain in the tech talks, but haven’t got to the downside talks yet) is that by using new technologies these fields can be produced with very high initial yields from slickwater, multi-frac’ed horizontal wells, but that these wells have a much shorter life and faster decline rate than was predicted when the production from these fields were estimated. The deepwater fields require dramatically higher investment costs and while the technology and equipment is available, to some limited degree, there aren’t that many rigs that can be mobilized to drill in these conditions. Further continued production from some of the weaker rocks that the oil lies in, at these depths, is going to continue to be a technical challenge, driving costs higher and higher and further limiting levels of production available. Yes there will be oil, but it will be more expensive and there won’t be nearly as much as one might think at any one given time (the production rate) to even maintain current levels of production very much longer.

Which brings me to look at Mr Rattie’s speech, which is one that I have considerable agreement with. Except for the assumption that we can continue to grow our way into the future in terms of increasing supplies to meet an increase in global demand for energy that will increase by 30 – 50% over the next two decades. He lists some of the anticipated growth:

The Salt Lake Tribune recently celebrated the startup of a 14 MW geothermal plant near Beaver, Utah. That‟s wonderful! But the Tribune failed to put 14 MW into perspective. Utah has over 7,000 MW of installed generating capacity, primarily coal. America has about 1,000,000 MW of installed capacity. Because U.S. demand for electricity has been growing at 1-2 % per year, on average we’ve been adding 10-20,000 MW of new capacity every year to keep pace with growth. Around the world coal demand is booming – 200,000 MW of new coal capacity is under construction, over 30,000 MW in China alone. In fact, there are 30 coal plants under construction in the U.S. today that when complete will burn about 70 million tons of coal per year.

Mr Rattie also points out something that is sometimes missed in the debate about coal and natural gas fired power plants:

America has about one million MW of installed electric generation capacity. Forty percent of that capacity runs on natural gas – about 400,000 MW, compared to just 312,000 MW of coal capacity.

But unlike those coal plants, which run at an average load factor of about 75%, America’s existing natural gas-fired power plants operate with an average load factor of less than 25%. Turns out that the market has found a way to cut CO2 emissions without driving the price of electricity through the roof – natural gas’s share of the electricity market is growing, and it will continue to grow – with or without cap and trade.

That is surely true in the short term, but the questions about natural gas production, and the fact that if natural gas were, for example, to be used at double the current rate (i.e. to produce 50% of the nation’s electricity) then even if the current prediction of 100 years of gas at current levels of consumption were true, then at double the rate, the lifetime of the reserve would be cut to 50 years. Given the questions on production referred to above, it may, be quite likely that estimates are at about twice reality, and thus there might be 50 years of supply, but this is likely to be consumed at somewhat higher rates than current, so that the effective lifetime is going to be closer to 25 – 30 years, I would suspect. (And don't forget that Questar is one of the largest natural gas producers, who may be vulnerable in the fight to retain market share as the increased availability of natural gas from conventional sources struggles against supplies from the gas shales and from LNG supplies - in the short term).

Oh I anticipate that there will be adjustments in the fuel mix in the future, the decline in oil’s share of the market will have to be replaced with some alternate fuel, and natural gas will have to carry some of this burden. I tend to see that there will be problems in getting an adequate amount of energy supplied from renewable sources, as the scale of their use grows, and the realistic availability of good sites for development of new farms reduces. (It is all too easy to just say we need the equivalent of say half of Utah, without recognizing just what percentage of Utah is actually available – just to pick some numbers for the sake of discussion).

Put this all together, and in an ideal world, when gold, oil and natural gas production could continue to increase in availability every year, then George Will’s suggestions might well come to pass. Unfortunately when there is a realistic limit to the actual volumes available, as we are now seeing with gold, so shall we soon see with oil, and before then I would suggest that Mr Will seek additional advice from elsewhere – perhaps here?
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Saturday Pick Points

Normally this is the point every week where I wander around the Climate Change sites, just to see what is stirring them up. And the controversy continues over the statistics of the paper by Steig that I first mentioned back in January. There is a very well done dismemberment of the underlying statistics given at Watt’s Up With That this week. Basically part of the criticsm is based on the relatively obvious point that as you move two weather stations further apart, then the likelihood of them both having the same weather at the same time becomes less, particularly at greater distances. (For example the snow storm that will hit the East Coast Sunday night and Monday hit Missouri Saturday and was somewhat milder – we got 2 inches, Maine will get 12 inches. On the other hand Waynesville and Salem in Missouri both reportedly got the same amount). However when you look at the statistics that were used in the paper the likelihood of the weather being the same stays the same regardless of their distance apart. And it even stays the same when you consider satellite data. Which sadly implies that the results as quoted in Nature and given national prominence are in error and in fact where a more realistic model is used the continent returns to a largely cooling phase and the furor the paper raised is shown to be based on a false premise. (Not of course that this finding will get much mention in the MSM). Though the controversy may well continue, since the new story is that the speed of the glaciers is accelerating. There is very little data from down in the Antarctic and so it will be interesting if this particular study gets picked up.*
*Since this deals with a topic that I actually teach to students, I will have a small technical note at the end.


Speaking of furors the little tempest over the article that George Will wrote on Climate Change in the Washington Post two weeks ago continues to churn. I talked a little about temperature fluctuations last week, explaining the trends as to why it might have seemed that the world was cooling in 1975. The other major issue was:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

It is important to note (though it is rarely mentioned in the row) that satellite records have only been available since 1979, and that is why that particular date was chosen.

Well there were the usual diatribes, with ad hominem attributes – “Is George Will the Most Ignorant National Columnist” is a good example, and the controversy ran for a week, so that George Will’s column a week later also dealt with the subject. It pointed out that, within a reasonable scale of accuracy, what he had said was correct. Which, of course, led to a second set of diatribes . After another week of comments the Post Ombudman wrote a column this weekend. Basically it said that the facts that George Will used were accurate, but that since there had been a big change in the relative volumes of ice (the Arctic had lost a lot which growth of ice in the Antarctic had almost offset) this should have been brought out in the article. And just to emphasize this, Real Climate, in writing "the article that Will should have written", notes

The source of the original quote was a Daily Tech blog post published in early January. While that post itself was heavily criticized as being misleading, it did use data from a reliable scientific source which was technically accurate at the time. My error was in assuming that scientific 'facts' don't change over a month or two and thus it was not necessary to revisit the source of the original data before writing my column. What was true in January would still be true in February, right? Wrong.

Of course that does not mention that the sensor doing the measurement went wonky. Now it turns out that the folks gathering the data have given a very rational explanation at WUWT about all this, and why they are now catching on to to demands of the internet, but still.

Well that has not quieted the complaints, though it is interesting to note from the ombudsman’s column

Although I didn't render a judgment, my response was understandably seen as an institutional defense and prompted an orchestrated e-mail campaign in which thousands demanded that The Post correct Will's "falsehoods." Like they say when the pro football rookie gets clobbered: "Welcome to the NFL."

The messages, often identical in wording, were soon countered by waves of e-mails defending Will and attacking what many labeled "global warming alarmists" trying to muzzle him.

It is the “often identical in wording” which shows the footprints of the thought police. Sadly it is almost impossible to have a reasoned debate on this issue, since any attempt to bring up the topic either gets this treatment (as I noted earlier) or is ignored, as the testimony by Professer Happer before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Senator Barbara Boxer, Chair has largely been.

Similarly John Tierney wrote about Climate Change in the New York Times noting that scientists are tending more to Apocalyptic statements, and urging instead that they behave as honest brokers. Since the scientists who get quoted most often are those who are promising that the conditions are getting worse rather than better and this does help to sell newspapers and air time, he has a point. Needless to say he is not popular with those that advocate AGW. showing their desire to keep the debate at a sophisticated level they have opening statements such as

Tierney is easily the worst science writer at any major media outlet in the country. Pretty much every energy or climate piece he writes is riddled with errors and far-right ideology, including this one.

. And then you get the latest, after Tierney’s recent column

The backlash from George Will's disinformation rightly grows each day that the Washington Post stands behind his lies (see here). Media Matters has samples of widespread outrage in the country here, and a new report [PDF] from CAPAF challenges the WP to issue a correction.

Now it is time for outrage over John Tierney, who not only makes stuff up just like Will, but is actually on the New York Times staff as their 'science' columnist. When we last saw Tierney, he was spreading lies and disinformation about science adviser nominee John Holdren (see here).

Today, the NYT not only let him print more egregiously made up stuff to smear Holdren (and Energy Secretary Steven Chu). But they actually published an article "Politics in the Guise of Pure Science" (see here) under the heading "FINDINGS" about Chu, Holdren, climate science, and climate solutions with precisely one source -- Roger Pielke, Jr. That would be like publishing an article critical of Obama's handling of the financial crisis and only citing Bernie Madoff.

Sigh! At the risk of being repetitive, the Senate Committee took testimony this past week, from Chris Field (pdf) and (among others) Professor Happer as cited. They hold strongly different views, yet are the two positions debated in the press, or in Congress as they should be, or are we still being subjected to the “ad hominem “ types of attack that seems to be the fall-back position of what, sadly I am beginning to truly think are those setting out to be thought police for this nation. The Bernie Madoff case illustrates the need for open debate and making this whole debate more open, and more based on science. What Joseph Romm and his ilk seem bent on doing is to have us instead behave as Bernie Madoff sycophants and not ask questions.

The abuse that I have seen showered on articles that raise technical and scientific questions is clearly an attempt to shout them down. It has been my experience and that of others. With the numbers of identically worded letters going to the WP Ombudsman it is clear that these are orchestrated campaigns.

To end with a slight technical comment, that I will expand into a Tech Note one of these days. For my sins I am one of the few people I believe that has videotaped a landslide from in front and beneath it, and got away with it. I have used that video in a class I teach on the movement of geotechnical material and the forces that drive that movement. As part of the class the first homework assignment begins "Take a can of your favorite beverage, drink it. Now fill it full of water and place it on a flat surface. Slowly tilt the surface and note the angle at which the can slides. Now poke a small hole in the bottom of the can and repeat." The class has been doing this and reporting the results for decades, they vary quite considerably, depending on the nature of the surface, its roughness and a number of other factors (and in the course of those decades the favorite beverage has undergone a number of changes). The assignment is not original, but it has shown that there are a number of factors that govern block movement - about which more anon.

Saturday Pick Points

On Saturday evenings I like to take a stroll around some of the Climate sites to see what is new and interesting in the discussion over the past week. Climate Audit is unfortunately down at the moment, so we'll have to give it a pass. At Real Climate there have only been a couple of posts this week.

The first was on the fires in Australia and the premise that global warming is intensifying tragedies of this type. After initially taking a stance that AGW didn’t cause the fires, the article then quotes an article from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology issued this month, that points to the number of record temperatures recorded in the continent. It also indicates that the low humidity is expected due to AGW, and droughts are likely to be a result of AGW. The more recent post deals with tree growths and deaths in the Pacific Northwest and California and ties, through global climate models (GCMs) which not unsurprisingly find that the models, as built, cannot account for the change in conditions wholly from natural change, and that therefore it has to be due to human forcings. The item that they key on is the Snow Water Equivalent number which relates to water year precipitation and they find that April snow is a key variable. Given that California already has a big water problem this year, I suspect this may be only the first of many articles.

And so on to Anthony Watt’s pages where equipment failure reports continue, with there currently being a problem with the estimates for the Ice Melt in the Arctic. One of the satellite sensors has apparently failed. This problem first cropped up last week, and which has led to a discussion on the reliability of the data at The Cryosphere Today site (CT), someone even picking up on the George Will debate

In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts. ”
Thing is, the article was written January 1st, not Feb 15th, and Mr Will was comparing the END OF 2008 with the END OF 1979. Not Feb 15th of each year (which was still a month and a half away from happening when he wrote it).
Why did Cryophere Today blatantly misrepresent what the author was writing about?

In other posts from the past week, there is another weather station improperly located (I need to send our data in), a little more controversy over an elementary school text and the one that caught me for an hour this afternoon is a link to the debate between William Schlesinger and John Christy on Climate Change. If you have an hour its worth a listen. (Lots of scare from Schlesinger, lots of facts from Christy).

Over on Gristmill they are still upset with the Will column and obviously did not see, or agree with the quote I inserted above. There apparently has been a miniature firestorm about it on the internet and I missed it all. There is another post on mountaintop coal mining at Coal River and, just for the record, if the writer’s home is shaking as much as he implies, he should get records that will stand up in court. Because the rules on how much blasting is allowed, and the impact it can have on local residences are very well and pretty restrictively defined. (My colleague who is currently doing "The Detonators" can give you bible and verse on it). Similarly there are other regulations that, if properly enforced, should quiet a lot of the arguments in the piece – but when folk get emotional about their property it is difficult to make those arguments. I do wonder though what is to stop Coal River from putting in the wind farm after the mine is finished, Access will be a lot easier, and with a large flat area then the winds should work a lot better.

Oh, and this week they didn’t like hydrogen either, and one gets the idea that if you live where there is neither the option for wind or solar, then you had better move!

Honesty in Climate Reporting and Discussion

I am a fan of Edward Tufte’s work. For most of you I suspect that will inspire nothing more than a Huh? But I want to use an example from the global warming debate to show how, by manipulating graphics, you can sell opposing messages with the same set of data. It is this subject (that of graphic manipulation) and the need for honesty in data presentation, about which I feel rather strongly as an academic, that has made me a fan of Edward’s writing.

At the urging of the Advocate, I am going to use a post by Nate Silver (my turn for a Huh?) as my example, and will compare his selected use of segments with, an overall temperature plot from the British Climate Research Unit at Hadley (HadCRU) and with a plot from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York., which James Hansen heads. The initial period I am going to look at is from 1940 to 1975. This is the period that initially George Will wrote about, commenting that, in 1975, scientists were looking at the trends and he quoted nine articles from that time with discussions on this trend. So does our friendly critic look at that time period in his commentary – er, well, not exactly!. Here is the GISS plot for about that period:
Source GISS

and this is the more simplified segment of the HadCRU plot.
Source Hadley Climate Research Unit

They’re both small segment of larger plots I will get to in just a minute. And if you look at both you can see (you don’t have to be a rocket scientist) that the trend is down. That was what the scientists were talking about in 1975. So is that what our good friend showed – of course not that wouldn’t allow him to make his point, so he expanded the range, backwards from 1940, into the previous segment of time, including enough points to suggest that the overall plot was upwards (and ergo all those scientists, not to mention George Will, were idiots).

Source FiveThirtyEight

Now you should be able to see that if you knock the data off from before 1940, you will see the same trend as in the earlier graphs.

Now the next bit is a little more interesting, because he pulls back to show that there was a warming trend before 1940, and takes the curve back to about 1860, and, depending on where you define the end points he puts a single warming trend line through the data.


That simplifies what actually went on, looking at both the GISS plot and then HadCRU:

SOURCE GISS

And for the simpler HadCRU



You can see that the way in which the temperature was behaving was not quite the simple plot that has been suggested, but that it fluctuates up and down, and if we break the HadCRU plot into roughly 30-year bits, you can see it drops 1880-1910, then goes up, 1910-1940, then drops 1940 – 1970. So it was really not that easy, back in 1975, to decide where the temperature would go next.

Where it went is now well-publicized, and I will put all three plots up here in full for the next bit.

First the Silver plot:
Source FiveThirtyEight

Now the GISS plot:


and then the HadCRU plot (I showed their entire illustration, lest I be accused of cropping anything):


There are a couple of interesting things to the shape of the lower two curves, that are not clear if you just draw the simple line, that Mr Silver uses, through the data. The first is that it warmed about as much from 1910 to 1940 as it did from 1970 to 2000, in other words the rate of warming was about the same. Not much attention is usually paid to this part of the warming trend – well that is because of this other graph, which is the one that usually gets all the attention.
Source White House Initiative on Climate Change

Now we will forgo for now the discussion about measuring carbon dioxide over an active volcano but you will notice the different slopes for the curve back in the 1910 – 1940 period where we were getting the same rate as we have just recently – curious scientists want to know why? But actually, and more to the point, that graph is a very smooth curve from 1860, as you may note the real temperature data is not.

There are two final points to consider. The first is why I put up the HadCRU and the GISS plots. You may note that at the end of the HadCRU data the curve turns over and starts to go back down. That’s what the data shows. But the GISS plot does not carry the plot that far down. In fact earlier plots of data that just showed the last ten years of data (with 1998 at the peak) disappeared from the GISS site about the end of last year. The differences between the interpretations, and the fact that recent data (in the HadCRU form) does not allow the hysteria about the imminence of doom that comes from the GISS Head, is perhaps why Hadley are now starting utter some words of caution about this whole debate, and that we cannot make misleading claims.

I am going to close with a plot from the 1995 IPCC report that does not get a lot of attention these days, but might explain why the leveling off in global temperature is happening:
Source IPCC 1995 full report

I have written earlier about the Little Ice Age, and will again, and on not only the last warming period, but also the ones before it, for which there is much evidence. It turns out not to be as simple a temperature plot as the IPCC summarized in that plot, but the realities of this cyclic nature of global climate are recorded, not only in books and manuscript, but in archaeological sites, and beneath our feet.

So let's stop with the insults (if you attack a person rather than their science, it concedes the point that their science is stronger than yours) and discuss the volumes of real scientific data that make exactly where we are in the progress of global warming a whole lot more of a question that many people would like you to think.

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