James Hansen on Canada's Tar Sands: Game Over for the Climate

[GliderGuider]

Game Over for the Climate

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

As a Canadian, what can I say to Gaia? Maybe just this:
"I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you."

[Jim__]

1. Unfortunately, the "insights" of Inhofe are far more influential in the US. - n/t

[GliderGuider]

2. Yeah, I know. It is what it is. nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. The time may come when I believe violent opposition is called for.

I can’t help thinking of the end of The Sheep Look Up.


At this point, I’d still like to think that we (humanity) have enough sense not to exploit this entire resource.

I explain it to people this way:

• We didn’t just discover the “tar sands” in Canada, it’s just never been profitable to use them before. Other oil was easier/cheaper to get. We’re mining the “tar sands” because the easier/cheaper oil is running out.


• We didn’t just discover that there are oil deposits two miles deep under the ocean. We haven’t gone after them before, because there has been easier/cheaper oil to get. We’re going after them now, because the easier/cheaper oil is running out.


• We didn’t just discover that there is natural gas bound up in shale deposits. We didn’t just discover hydraulic fracturing. Up to now, we haven’t bothered to produce “shale gas” using hydraulic fracturing because there was easier/cheaper gas to get. We’re doing it now, because the easier/cheaper gas is running out.

The “low hanging fruit” has been picked.


All of these measures demonstrate a sort of “quiet desperation,” an effort to squeeze every last bit of fossil fuel out of the Earth that we can, rather than pursuing alternatives. These measures can only be justified financially by shortages and the resulting price increases.

Clearly, we cannot continue on this path, we need to find a different path to follow, and quickly.

The one bright spot is that as fossil fuel prices increase (which clearly they will) alternatives become more and more competitive. I am hopeful that we won’t fully exploit all of these unconventional sources, if for no other reason than that we realize that it is cheaper not to.

[GliderGuider]

4. I'm currently reading a book called "Too Smart for Our Own Good"

The author, Craig Dilworth, describes how humans deal with resource shortages in a very particular way that he calls the "Vicious Circle Principle" or VCP. It works this way:

The vicious circle principle is that humankind’s development consists in an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion, to scarcity once again, and so on.

He shows how this VCP has acted numerous times across all hunter-gatherer, horticultural, agrarian and industrial societies. Basically, the idea is that humans are phenomenally good at adaptation, especially when faced with scarcity. We develop new technologies, new behaviors, and new cultural attitudes in order to solve the immediate problem of scarcity, whatever it may be. This "solution" typically leads to s state of surplus instead of scarcity, which in turn leads to larger populations and other, deeper scarcity later on. In the words of an evolutionary psychologist friend, we are "adaptation executors" rather than "fitness maximizers" - we solve immediate problems in preference to long-range ones.

Dilworth also claims that we don't develop new technologies or exploit unneeded existing ones until we encounter the need to do so. I can't help but be struck by the similarity of Dilworth's VCP to the "low hanging fruit" scenario you describe.

This is both good and bad. We will of course keep working to adapt our way out of our current instance of the perennial crisis of energy and food shortage. The good news is that based on past performance we may succeed. The bad news is that, also based on past performance, our efforts will simply create larger problems we will have to solve later on.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Here's where I believe things may be different

We moved (for example) from burning whale blubber to burning petroleum (which was easier to get, and more plentiful, and helped with our current climate crisis.)

Moving to an alternative (renewable) source of energy will have less of a negative impact on the environment, and will not necessarily lead to an population explosion (so called “Developed” nations tend to have lower fertility rates than the so called “Developing” nations, partly because when parents believe their children will survive them, they tend to have fewer of them.)

So, potentially, we may have energy sources with fewer negative effects on the environment, while helping the “Developing” nations accelerate more rapidly through or skip entirely some nasty, dirty developmental stages.

[joshcryer]

6. Hansen is a modern day...

...scientist that is awesome.