Ugo Bardi: Climate change: Confessions of a Peak Oiler
By Ugo Bardi
13 December 2012
In 2003, I attended my first conference on peak oil, in Paris. Everything was new for me: the subject, the people, the ideas. It was there that I could meet for the first time those larger than life figures of ASPO, the association for the study of peak oil. I met Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Kenneth Deffeyes, Ali Morteza Samsam Bakthiari, and many others. It was one of those experiences that mark one for life. In Paris, I learned a lot about oil depletion, but also about another matter that was emerging: the conflict of depletion studies with climate change studies. That ASPO conference saw the beginning of a contrast that was to flare up much more intensely in the following years. On one side of the debate there were the “climate concerned” people. They were clearly appalled at seeing that their efforts at stopping global warming were threatened by this new idea: that there won’t be enough fossil fuels to cause the damage that they feared. On the other side, the “depletion concerned” people clearly scoffed at the idea of climate change: peak oil, they said, would make all the worries in that respect obsolete. My impression, at that time, was that the position of the climate concerned was untenable. Not that I became a climate change denier; not at all: the physical mechanisms of climate change have been always clear to me and I never questioned the fact that adding CO2 to the atmosphere was going to warm it. But the novelty of the concept of peak oil, the discovery of a new field of study, the implications of a decline of energy availability, all that led me to see depletion as the main challenge ahead. That belief of mine would last a few years, but no more. The more I studied oil depletion, the more I found myself studying climate: the two subjects are so strictly related to each other that you can’t study one and ignore the other. I found that climate science is not just about modern global warming. It is the true scientific revolution of the 21st century. It is nothing less than a radical change of paradigm about everything that takes place on our planet; comparable to the Copernican revolution of centuries ago. […]
Desdemona is a routine read of mine. So is Cassandra's Legacy (Ugo's blog). So it was a pleasant surprise when both came together in one post. Keep up the good work.