Book Review -- Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Deep Future's goal is to create a science-based, reasoned context by which to evaluate the consequences of our burning the planet's reserves of hydrocarbons and injecting them into the atmosphere and oceans. It aims to inform and condition a reader's point of view to the question, How should we respond to our carbon crisis? Stripped down to its essence, Carl Stager's answer to that question is a simple “don't panic.” But this conclusion is, for me, unsatisfactory because I, unlike Stager the Earth scientist, am a stakeholder in the world we've yet to lose.

Not yet two centuries into a process of grossly overloading the planet's carbon cycle, Stager shows us an Earth that has already begun to manifest physical changes that will, according to the laws of physics, inexorably play out in coming millennium (assuming no artificial draw-down of atmospheric carbon, something Stager doesn't take up). He takes measure of that future in successive chapters on the rainforest, the temperate latitudes, the coasts, the poles, always with an eye to balance the good perturbations with the bad. In doing so he models outcomes based on a moderate carbon emissions scenario of 1000 gigatons and an extreme scenario of 5000 gigatons. To me this is where Stager shines. Earth is incredibly plastic in the author's prose, which mirrors the plasticity of rock, ice, and life over deep time as a point of natural fact. A future Earth will be utterly transformed by today's anthropogenic warming. It will be almost or entirely devoid of ice, with coastlines vastly altered by rising seas, oceans acidified, and profound changes to contemporary biota, much of which either will be extinct or will be well on the way. But Earth has seen this kind of warming before with all that it implies, including an epic warming event 800 million years ago when the north pole was a balmy shallow ocean ringed by conifer forests teaming with life. If we burn all our oil and coal in the coming centuries the planet will return to that state.

Stager assess his own canvassing of these transformations cautiously. For future human communities and natural communities there will be winners and losers, of course, but who are we to judge that? As Stager puts it, “How can we tell which changes are truly 'bad' for all or most of the parties involved, and which ones might simply come to seem normal or even desirably later on?”
Framed over at least 800 million years, huge swings in climate regimes are the norm. Ice ebbs and flows, seas rise and fall, life adapts. Because these changes are gradual and have happened before, Stager believes man will adapt to even the scariest sounding alterations ahead. In fact, if we keep our heads, which means for Stager, heeding the wisdom of impartial scientists for policy proscription, people are likely to do just fine. Stager's closing chapter really makes the case for this “don't panic” approach to climate change. In the long run it will all work out.

The problem for me, I guess, is that “just fine” is somebody's else new climate normal. It's not my Earth, nor yours for that matter. And while a person 10,000 years in the future is entitled to their own opinion, I'm wondering at the end of the book why Stager's preference for natural variability is any more valid than my preference for natural stasis, for polar bears and everyone living in Bangladesh. By my measure the big fat comet of carbon (Stager's favorite metaphor) that we're thrusting into the planet's carbon cycle is going to wreak havoc with the planet that I know and love over the coming centuries. It deserves to be called a carbon crisis. Stager counters that most of these dramatic changes are gradual on the human scale. For example, where I see flooding of a lot of coastal real estate and the resulting dislocation of a quarter of humanity Stager sees “zones of anticipation” where people adapt in intelligent, perhaps even beneficial ways to gradually rising seas. As they have done many times in climates past, animals and plants will also attempt to relocate but will find themselves hemmed in by man's presence and agenda. In this profound way climate change of the Anthropocene is truly novel. Eventually, many tens of thousands of years hence, the fossil-sequestered carbon that we are prodigiously liberating today will be cycled out of the atmosphere. Humanity then will be riding down the tail of the carbon comet. The earth will inexorably cool and dramatic changes to geology and ecology will proceed. Stager imagines future human communities, thriving in a much warmer climate regime in Greenland and the Arctic Circle, fretting over their own crisis of diminishing carbon that threatens to return biting cold to an ice-free planet.

The upshot of all this? Humans will survive. The Earth will endure. The next scheduled ice age will not occur, perhaps not the one after that. We have bequeathed to our progeny in Greenland an interior, highly productive deglaciated ocean and bountiful mineral wealth. Should you want to dispense real estate advice in your will that would be it. What happened to the 7-9 billion people in the 21st century and their companion lifeforms along the way? Deep Future doesn't say much about that because in the sweep of eons the big picture of process is the protagonist. One is tempted to call this callous but then that's not adhering to the rules of perspective. So I'll say that Stager's book is informative, entertaining, and provocative. Provocative books are worth reading and natural perturbations are in the eye of the beholder.





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Slip slidin' Away

The race isn't being won and one fears it's almost beyond winning.

"Don't Give up Because I believe There's a Place Where we Belong." Peter Gabriel

On the optimistic side Justin Wu, lead wind analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance gives voice to the industry consensus that wind and solar are poised to break out in grid utility electric generation within the next five years.

"The press is reacting to the recent drops in solar equipment as thought they are the result of temporary oversupply or of a trade war. This masks what is really going on: a long-term, consistent drop in clean energy technology costs, resulting from decades of hard work by tens of thousands of researchers, engineers, technicians, and people in operations and procurement. And it is not going to stop: In the next few years the mainstream world is going to wake up to wind cheaper than gas, and rooftop solar power cheaper than daytime electricity. And in the same sort of deep long-term price drops for power storage, demand management, LED lighting and son on -- and we are clearly talking about a whole new game.

"You know the Near Your Destination the More Your Slip Slidin' Away." Paul Simon

Now, the more sobering news for Texans from Dr. Bob Rose, a meteorologist with the LCRA.

"This is the worst drought on record, worse than the drought of the '50s. From Oct. 1, 2010 to Sept. 31, 2011, the state of Texas only received 11.8 inches of rain, Rose said. That beats the previous low-rainfall record of 13.9 inches. Central Texas only got 8.4 inches of rain in the last 7 months; 42.74 is the normal amount." And data and modeling suggests more of the same for the near term. "Next summer could resemble the summer of 2011."

And very disheartening news this month on global emissions.

Why not be more sanguine? 80 percent of the world's carbon output is generated from existing infrastructure. In the absence of coordinated global leadership to design a low-carbon world, the fossil fuel era marketplace continues to prefer carbon-intensive infrastructure, the buildup of which continues to accelerate. This "lock-in effect" of new investment in carbon intensive buildings and infrastructure is the "single factor most likely to produce climate change" worries the IEA's Fatih Birol. Birol estimates we have maybe five years to reverse this before the opportunity to avoid the wost outcomes have passed us by. "I'm very worried," says Birol. "The door is closing."

Economic Growth: It's Effectively Over Says Richard Heinberg

The End of Nature

When I was a grade student at KU I read Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. This book was probably my first introduction to the idea of anthropogenic climate change. However, that wasn't the book's main thrust and it wasn't what I took away from it at the time. I was very interested in the history of the American construction of nature as an ideal. The ideal of nature as wilderness was still very potent culturally, McKibben acknowledged, but, he argued, wilderness in nature was thoroughly extinct. It had gone the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon and wasn't coming back. I don't think McKibben used the term Anthropocene. Don't hold me to that. But he was contending a variation of that notion, the idea that history has seen a breaking point where natural systems, even at basic levels of earth chemistry, have been so profoundly impacted by human activities that one could no longer speak of a separate nature, a first nature if you will. Everything on Earth was now in some sense unnatural, or part of what historian Richard Wright called a Second Nature, living things and physical systems in varying degrees separate form culture, but now no longer entirely autonomous from it.

I've returned to thinking about this book because of what Bill had to say about climate. It's interesting to hear his future as a climate activist already well articulated. As my climate activism picks up pace, I'm reading it again to see if I can remember why I put climate on the backbench of my own attention at that time in my life.

http://books.google.com/books?id=q0aM5t5GMpsC&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20end%20of%20nature%20bill%20mckibben&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false

Energy: As it Looked Back in the Day

The Archdruid Report: On Catabolic Collapse

The Archdruid Report: On Catabolic Collapse: A couple of years ago I wrote an article titled " How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse " -- quite the cheerful topic, gran...

On a Bad Day in the Anthropocene

Next budget-slicing hostage drama only seven weeks away | Remapping Debate

Next budget-slicing hostage drama only seven weeks away | Remapping Debate

Atop the Energy Caprock

The above chart is courtesy of Matt, a poster at TOD. Using EIA data, the chart shows that global oil production has plateaued since 2005. Notably, production has stayed essentially flat irrespective of price and consumption signals. (Classical economists might be scratching their heads now). Veteran energy analysts, like Tom Whipple, believe we've reached the historic terminus of peak oil -- the point in time where the maximum production capacity for oil is reached.

What lies on the other side of the energy plateau is the second half of the Hydrocarbon Era. The world will still have oil producers, but the rules for distribution and consumption will fundamentally change. Tourism, the big box retail store, bunker-fueled cargo ships, air freight, suburban housing, "fresh" out-of-season produce, imported coffee (arghh!), indeed, most everything you can think of about globalization is a product of the age of cheap energy. What will the architecture of life resemble in an age when we have oil, but we find that we cannot afford to burn it?

Budget Hero From American Public Media

Jeff Rubin Explains Why Globalization is Over

"The U. S. recovery is over. Rest in peace" headlines CNN Money. An economist at UCLA used the "pulse of commerce index" of domestic fuel as a primary indicator that there's no forward momentum left to the post-09 rebound. For their own reasons, lots of other economists, like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Jeff Rubin, are all saying the same thing.

Was it ever a recovery, though? Did we really escape the gravity-well of the 2008 event, the world's first peak global oil shock? Or was this just a brief rebound off the mat before the global economy continues its uneven but inescapable slide down the entropy slope?

If you're at all like me, an irrelevant bystander to history, it's just an idle question. But what if you're someone important in the world today? Or more seriously, (since brain wattage and political power have little necessary correlation that I can see) what if you're someone being well paid to advise important someones in the world today? And of course we include corporations as important personages because the SCOTUS decrees it so. If you're an adviser to the House of Saud, or to Exon, or you report to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, or one of his global counterparts, you might just have some leverage on decisions that direct real money and resources. So where you come down on the question might matter.

The question again is: Are we at a production bottleneck now, in late 2011 or 2012, or, do we have longer? If it is the latter that means that, somehow, as improbable as it sometimes seems, and despite all that's vexing central bankers in Europe, the U. S., China, Japan, and all points in between, the world still has time to invest in a future that runs on something other than hydrocarbons. So do we have until 2018 to double the average fuel economy of the U. S. fleet, to make improvements and cost reductions in electric vehicles, to build mass transit and boost the generating capacity of the grid, and all the million and one other incremental steps necessary to live in a world of declining hydrocarbons? It might just come down to the question, does the global economy have one more good recession left in it?

I'm reading a couple of books right now that I hope will help me understand if such a future is more than chimerical. The one I'll talk about today is Jeff Rubin's, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. I was extremely fortunate to get a copy of the book at Half-Priced books on South Lamar. Rubin's blog is, in my view, a must read for anyone serious about keeping up with energy news. I learn something new there most every post. For example, I have been repeating what I've heard J. H. Kuntsler and lots of others say about the Saudi's being the only entity on the planet with the spare capacity to boost global oil production on short notice. That probably was the case not many years back. But all the data in 2011, says Rubin, suggests that the Saudis are not able to play the role of central bank to global oil liquidity. It's not that they are choosing to stand pat on exports. It is that they are steadily consuming more of what they pump out of the ground each year while their existing fields are steadily declining. The muscular player in the oil patch today is Russia. Russian oil production rose to a near post-Soviet high of 10.26 million barrels a day in May, says Rubin, making Russia the most important oil producer. Indeed, with Saudi either unable or unwilling to increase production, the world would already have been at peak production were it not for Russian exports. And who else is saying Saudi and OPEC have plateaued? Well, when Jim Rogers is saying it on CNN the meme has gone mainstream.

How to Score this Disaster Flick?

Last post made a stop by Club Pigou. This round of clubbing takes me by Club Orlov where the idea struck me that, if you're going to play a Cassandra, be self-aware about the tenor of one's presentation. There's the pedantic, scientist approach of people like Lester Brown at Earth Watch. Not really good for a diverse audience that would like bad news to be at least entertaining. There's snarky and combative, but that's entirely cornered by the cultural right. There is a kind of oblique, scene-painting-of-disquiet approach that the National Geographic uses. Beyond the pretty pictures and going on decades of excellent articles about the degradation of the terrestrial biosphere is the single subtext message: "Heh! Stupid! Figure this out while you still can do something about it."

One could go with the Chicken Little, Hair-on-Fire, approach. I tried this early on in a lot of posts at Grist.com but moved away from it since Joe Romm helped me realize that there's little margin of error between being highminded and being vainglorious. Alternatively, there is the low-key, understated approach of someone like Dimitri Orlov. He makes impending catastrophe sound almost banal. For example, this passage from his blog, ClubOrlov:

Although a complete and instantaneous collapse of global industry doesn’t seem particularly likely just at this very moment, its likelihood begins to approach 100 per cent as we move through the 21st Century. The opposing view – that industrial civilization can survive this century – comes up rather short of facts to support it and rests on an unshakable faith in technological miracles. In an echo of medieval alchemy, the hopes for technological salvation are pinned on some element or other: yesterday it was hydrogen; today it’s thorium. Fusion reactors are currently out of fashion, cold fusion doubly so, but who knows what new grand proposal tomorrow will bring?

Whether it's the Russians or the British (The Pythons to Dr. Who,) apparently one gains the craft of gallows humor at the price of losing a global empire. Not a fair trade off perhaps, but nice consolation nonetheless.

Here is an echo of the same from Jeremy Grantham, a Brit., in his April 2011, GMO 2nd quarterly letter to investors.

"Now no one, in round numbers, wants to buy into the implication that we must rescale our collective growth ambitions. I was once invited to a monthly discussion held by a very diverse, very smart group, at which it slowly dawned on my jet-lagged brain that I was expected to contribute. So finally, in desperation, I gave my first-ever “running out of everything” harangue (off topic as usual). Not one solitary soul agreed. What they did agree on was that the human mind is – unlike resources – infinite and, consequently, the intellectual cavalry would always ride to the rescue. I was too tired to argue that the infinite brains present in Mayan civilization after Mayan civilization could not stop them from imploding as weather (mainly) moved against them. Many other civilizations, despite being armed with the
same brains as we have, bit the dust or just faded away after the misuse of their resources. This faith in the human brain is just human exceptionalism and is not justified either by our past disasters, the accumulated damage we have done to the planet, or the frozen-in-the-headlights response we are showing right now in the face of the distant locomotive quite rapidly approaching and, thoughtfully enough, whistling loudly."

The whistle, for Grantham, is the data from commodity prices, which for him resound the clarion call to consider just what kind of a pickle we all will be in if we do not swiftly make alternative arrangements to hydrocarbons and other vanishing critical resources. One hopes that it's a little harder to shoot the messenger when it's one of capitalism's titans. We'll see.

But whatever one's station, the parting thought for the moment is that Cassandra sounds best when she's holding up a graphic of the Hubert Curve, or the Keeling Curve, (insert other favored iconic representation of FUBAR) while tunefully whistling, "Always look on the Bright Side of Life."

Gas Price Video Out of Taiwan is Pretty Slick

A rap-video discourse on the existential conundrum of our times, courtesy of James Fallows at the Atlantic.

Should Obama Give a "Hair-on-Fire" Speech on Climate?

Joseph Romm is editor of the online web site Climate Progress. He is also someone I consider to be a friendly fire recidivist. He comes from the long Left tradition of unconstructive criticism. He's now called for Obama to be primaried because of what Romm perceives as his lack of leadership on GHG reduction. When he said recently on Grist that "Science-based (dire) warnings are an essential part of good climate messaging," I felt moved to pen the following response about where I think pinning our hopes on scientific authority is likely to get us.

"In yesterday's America, sure. Maybe in tomorrow's America again, after heat-laden oceans begin to dictate terms and Americans are hungering to make sense of what's impacting their lived experience. Who can say? But in today's America, where un-reality is normative on NBC, not just Fox, it seems naive to expect Americans to rally to something abstract when they're struggling with the exigencies of daily life.

Not that all the effort at polls and messaging is un-important, but is it not more important to be frank about the larger culture and how ideas get propagated, or throttled? As a nation we once shared common stories about events. Half of all Americans once watched the same evening news broadcasts. Today, we have a buffet of choices to describe reality, most of them with corporate underwriters. Why should Americans, busy with life, busy being entertained, want to select from the dystopian, climate story when the utopian story of business as usual is so much more attractive? "Scientific authority" doesn't come from Olympus any longer.

All the green groups combined cannot outspend the disinformation from the petroleum sector, let alone the Chamber, etc. We experienced the Inside Job of 2008 and instead of getting Wall Street reform we got the Tea Party. How did that happen? The thesis of climate candor is a counter-factual and hence cannot be disproved. But if there were a contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville amongst us, I don't think he would give much for its chances."

QE2, CO2, $200 oil: Take Your Pick of Uncontrolled Experiments

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…”
—Winston Churchill, November 1936

What is Demand Destruction?

What is demand destruction? Why is this term meaningful in context of rising energy costs?

From Wikipedia

Demand destruction is an economic term used to describe a permanent downward shift in the demand curve in the direction of lower demand of a commodity such as energy products, induced by a prolonged period of high prices or constrained supply.

In the context of the oil industry, "demand" generally refers to the quantity consumed (see for example the output of any major industry organization such as the International Energy Agency), rather than any measure of a demand curve as used in mainstream economics.

The term has come to some prominence lately as a result of the growing interest in the peak oil theory, where demand destruction is the reduction of demand for oil and oil-derived products. The term is used by Matthew Simmons, Mike Ruppert and other prominent proponents of the theory. It is also used in other resource industries such as mining.

A familiar illustration of demand destruction is the effect of high gasoline prices on automobile sales. It has been widely observed that when gasoline prices are high enough, consumers tend to begin buying smaller and more efficient cars, gradually reducing per-capita demand for gasoline. If the price rise were caused by a temporary lack of supply, and the price then subsequently goes back down as supply returns to normal, the quantity consumed in this case does not immediately go back to its previous level, since the smaller cars that had been sold remain in the fleet for some time. Demand thereby has been "destroyed"; the demand curve has shifted.

Solution to Energy Crisis; Use Less Energy

"The average American, it bears repeating, uses something like three times as much energy each year as the average European, to support a standard of living that by most of the usual measures isn’t nearly as high." -- J. M. Greer

The End of Cheap Oil

If you'd said back in 2006 or 2007 that oil would be trading at $70 a barrel you'd have been laughed at. Yet here we are with oil trading at just under $100 a barrel in January 2011. Historically, this is a very high price. It reflects the fact that the oil the world is now consuming, 86 million barrels in 2010, is increasingly hard to get, from deep water reserves, the Canadian tar sands, etc. Just at the moment the mainstream market is treating this as the new normal, not seeming cognizant of 2008 when high energy prices caused the aviation and auto industry to tank. However, there are people like veteran commodities trader Jim Rogers who are injecting the new reality into mainstream coverage. Another is Tom Whipple, cited below.

http://www.postcarbon.org/article/231815-the-peak-oil-crisis-it-s-not

The Peak Oil Crisis: It's not Adding up!
The official bottom line is that IEA's conservative estimate says the world will be consuming 89.1 million b/d this year, while currently producing 88.1. There are only two places the extra oil can come from if we are not to have another damaging and demand killing price spike. Either we draw down global stockpiles or the Saudis increase production. Presently both of these phenomena are underway - OECD stocks fell by 8 million barrels in November and another 33 million in December, not to mention a substantial fall in unofficial floating storage held by speculators. Without fanfare, the Saudis seem to be slowly ramping up production - at least for now.

There are two obvious holes in this rosey scenario that has oil creeping past $100 a barrel this year (It is currently only a couple of dollars away), but not so high as to stunt global growth. First, the problem is whether demand growth this year will be constrained to only a 1.4 million b/d increase vs. the 2.2-2-7 million b/d increase we witnessed last year and near-universal estimates of economic recovery. The other is whether the Saudis really are able or willing to push up production by a million or more b/d to keep prices under control.

Unless these questions are answered in the affirmative, the prospects for a price-spike free year do not look good. The IEA says that China's oil consumption climbed to pass the symbolic 10 million b/d level to 10.2 million b/d in November as Beijing shut down power plants to reach year-end efficiency goals. While everyone seems to be predicting some sort of drop in the torrid pace at which China's demand for oil has been increasing, the question is whether it be as much as the IEA and EIA are forecasting. The Agency's director recently said that OPEC must continue to be alarmed that the recent ascent to near $100 oil is more than just a cold winter as speculators. We all should be alarmed too.

$200 per barrel oil in 2011-2012?

20 January, 2011: The BBC's Justin Rowlatt talking with energy analyst Jim Rogers, posted at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12235196