Today, as I drove into work, I found myself listening to “Coast to Coast AM“, a radio program which seems to be entirely devoted to pseudoscience, superstition, and conspiracy theories.
However, this evening they were discussing the topic of the world’s oil supply. With the recent release of a book called “Black Gold Strangleold”, the authors were on the program to discuss the oil situation. While some of their points held water, one of their assumptions stood out to me as anti-science superstition that I felt it was important to debunk.
Myth 1: Oil Reserves
The Myths:
- The world’s oil supplies are dwindling rapidly as fossil fuels are depleted, and we should prepare for an economic disaster within the next 20-40 years,
- the contrary myth: the world’s oil supplies are generated via abiotic processes; the “oil shortage” is an invention of oil companies to keep prices artifically high.
THE REALITY: Whether oil is abiotic or organic in origin, the fact remains that it is produced in large quantities only on geologic scales of time: millions of years. Both myths are wrong: we neither seem to be facing an imminent oil shortage within our lifetimes, nor do we have a virtually limitless supply of petroleum available within human-scale timeframes. We have a very large, but limited supply, of oil available to drill out. This oil will become increasingly expensive to access as existing wells refill more and more slowly as the overall pressure drops. What conclusions you draw from that are up to you in regards to conservation and other topics, but it’s a foregone conclusion that demand will continue to grow, while access to easily-pumped oil will continue to diminish. Simple economics dictates that the price will continue to rise. However, pumping technology seems to be working in our favor to keep the costs of drilling increasingly-difficult wells within reason, so it may be that the overall amount of oil drilled continues to rise for many decades.
Myth 2: Global Warming
The Myths:
- Human emissions have caused greenhouse gasses to increase, resulting in global temperature increases. These temperature increases cause stronger hurricanes and rising ocean levels, resulting in massive natural disasters.
- The Contrary Myth: Human emission have nothing to do with the rising temperatures; they are merely part of a regular cycle of rising and falling average temperature.
THE REALITY: Both human emissions and natural cycles are at play here. The question is really: how much does each account for? This isn’t something we’ll have enough hard data on to answer within the next decade, but it’s a pretty good guess we’ll have an answer within two. In geologic time, that’s a tiny sliver. Attempting to gauge long-range weather patterns by the short time frame of human experience and ability to measure the weather is not very useful. More useful are the tree-ring analyses currently underway to determine historic weather patterns from ancient trees and gauge the extent of the warming. So far, the results are still indeterminate. That we are experiencing a global warming trend is indisputable fact at this point: the poles are melting, and billions of acre-feet of water are being dumped into the oceans from the antarctic ice shelves. The ocean level is rising, hurricane ferocity is increasing, and other residual effects from a rising ocean are being felt. That reducing human emissions will also reduce the greenhouse effect is also indisputable… the question is just whether or not that reduction will be statistical noise in the overall warming trend.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Sick Building Migration: The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome. — Douglas Coupland, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”