Top Kill

I like this cartoon by Ed Stein on the failed efforts to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I got it through the Peak Oil Review mailings of ASPO. Enjoy, even if the essence of it isn't really funny!

Greenpeace Report on Sponsors of Climate Change Deniers

Greenpeace has issued a report that seems to provide a thorough reality check on the background of the climate change denial propaganda in the US: "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine". They also have an interesting interactive graphic that allows you to check out some details directly.
Amazing that Koch Industries, the company that Greenpeace exposes as a major sponsor of the climate sceptics, is little known in the public although, as they claim on their webpage, it is one of the largest private companies of the world. Obviously they know about doing things secretely. The company has issued a statement on the report, however.
This reminds of the Exxon Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, on which I have blogged before. Apparently, Koch Industries easily out-spent Exxon Mobil in the area of political sponsoring. Interesting indeed.
Other blogs such as Climate Progress or ClimateScienceWatch have more details on the story. I wish I had time to study and cover this report in more detail.

Clean Coal and Sparkling Water

This is the title of a News & Views article of mine that just appeared in Nature. I had the opportunity to comment on a paper by colleagues from the noble gas and isotope community on the long-term fate of CO2 in natural gas fields. This is a hot topic because it relates to carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that may become important in fighting climate change.

Actually I don't think that the paper will or should have any great consequences with regard to CCS applications, but the media seem interested. I got several calls yesterday and for example the German magazine SPIEGEL has an article in its online issue today.

Natural Nuclear Fusion in the Earth’s Interior?

Here comes the promised funny story about real junk science. Recently, the following article was published in the Journal of Fusion Energy:
Jiang et al., 2008. Tritium Released from Mantle Source: Implications for Natural Nuclear Fusion in the Earth’s Interior. J. Fusion Energ. 27:346–354. DOI 10.1007/s10894-008-9149-y.
As usual, the entire article is not freely available, but you can get at least a free preview of the first page here.

What's so funny about this article? Well, first of all, the hypothesis that nuclear fusion takes place in the deep Earth (geo-fusion) is quite unusual, but more on that later. The point that raised my interest (after being tipped-off by a colleague, thanks Rainer!) is that this article cites no less than 5 papers which I have (co-)authored. Ok, on three occasions my name is misspelled in the citation, but still they must mean those papers. Up to now, I did not know I was into fusion research. How come I get cited in the Journal of Fusion Energy?

I have been involved in some research on tritium and He isotopes in volcanic lakes, together with my former Swiss colleagues from Eawag. The authors of the current article heavily rely on our papers dealing with Lake Nemrut (Turkey) and Laacher See (Germany). There we found clear evidence for the presence of gases (He) from the Earth's mantle, which is not too surprising in volcanic areas. The lake water also contains some tritium (3H, radioactive hydrogen). Tritium is a product of fusion reactions, but other sources are prominent in the environment. The proponents of geo-fusion now look for evidence of tritium fluxes from the deep Earth to support their idea. And Jiang and co-authors think they found it in our old papers! Gee, if these guys win the Nobel Prize with this discovery, they owe me something!

Have we been stupid not to see the signs of geo-fusion in our data? I don't think so. I rather think that the claims made by Jiang et al. are pure fantasy. They interpret small increases of tritium concentrations with depth in these lakes as evidence for a flux of tritium from the lake bottom. But there are much simpler explanations, most importantly that the surface water is being diluted by the recent input of low-tritium water. The data are from the 1990s, when tritium in precipitation was clearly decreasing with time, so many lakes would show such "reversed" tritium profiles. And the one volcanic crater lake where there is an isolated deep water that shows the signature of the subsurface input, Lac Pavin in France, actually shows very low tritium in that deep water. Jiang et al. even cite one of our papers on Lac Pavin, but they do not mention the low tritium there, as it does not fit their theory.

I do not want to write a review of the Jiang paper here. It would be devastating. I wonder, however, how such a controversial paper can be published apparently without proper review. The entire argument is based on data of our papers. It would be natural to invite one of us as a reviewer. I am quite sure this did not happen, as none of us would have accepted this manuscript. Obviously the authors have no expertise on lake physics and tritium in the environment. Otherwise, it would be clear that the presented evidence is extremely spurious, at best.

So, once again, my confidence in the quality of the scientific literature is shattered. This case is probably less severe (and certainly of lesser political importance) than that of the papers by Chilingar and colleagues, but is shows the same failure of the review system. So, yes, there is enough junk science out there to be debunked. But unfortunately, the one website that claims to do this in reality attacks serious science and only produces more junk.

I do my best to uncover some of the junk that falls along my way. But its a gigantic Sisyphus task. If this is the state of confusion humanity is into, then good night...

World Oil Crunch Looming?

This is the title of a recent news article in "Science", which comments on the IEA World Energy Outlook 2008. So in writing about this report, I am in good company. The tenor of the article by Science's news writer Richard Kerr is clear: Slowly the reality of limitations to the world's oil supply is sinking in. As far as I can tell, most scientists are still largely unaware that there is a huge problem approaching fast, so maybe this news piece will have some alarming effect. Of course, the experts have been playing the issue down for a long time, but recently the tone seems to be changing. Some excerpts from the article:

“It’s getting harder and harder to find an optimist” on the outlook for the world oil supply, says Beijing-based petroleum analyst Michael Rodgers of PFC Energy, a consulting company. Indeed, the IEA report as well as one coming from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA, confusingly enough) see hints that the world’s oil production could plateau sometime about 2030 if the demand for oil continues to rise. Unless oil-consuming countries enact crash programs to slash demand, analysts say, 2030 could bring on a permanent global oil crunch that will make the recent squeeze look like a picnic. [...]
“Non-OPEC conventional production is definitely at a peak or plateau,” says Rodgers. “That’s starting to make people nervous. It’s not what even pessimistic people anticipated.” Three years ago, analysts in and out of the industry predicted that projects under way or planned would dramatically boost world production during the second half of the decade, sending prices back down (Science, 18 November 2005, p. 1106). Only in the 2010s would non-OPEC producers—who had boosted their output 35% in 25 years—falter and level off their production, analysts thought. That predicted plateau may be here already. “Despite all the work,” says Rodgers, “we can’t grow non-OPEC.”

So the view of the issue has changed over the past three years, and the pessimists proved to be right. The IEA's new perspective is less optimistic than before, but what if the true pessimists are still right? Then, in fact, things may be a lot worse. The old, 2005, Science article ended with the following words: "The downside of the optimists being wrong is dire". It seems this is exactly where we are heading...

The final sentence of the recent article is also interesting, where an American energy analyst is cited saying "I just hope the Obama Administration doesn’t look at the [current] price of oil and shove the problem to the back burner." Very appropriate, as I find it hard to see any sign of the crash programs to slash demand that seem to be so urgently needed (unless crashing the economy was meant to be such a program).

Oh, by the way, crash programs are also needed to curb CO2 emissions. If properly planned, one may be able to tackle two big problems at the same time (incidentally, Climate Progress just has a nice outline of how to do that). If not, the looming oil crisis will force us into using more coal, which is a sure recipe for climate disaster.

IEA Calls for Energy Revolution

I have unfortunately no time to comment in any depth, but I think the newly released World Energy Outlook 2008 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) is a very significant and important document. It is unfortunate that the media hardly notice the substantial recent changes in viewpoint of these official "energy watchdogs" of the world. Because what they have to say is of enourmous importance for our future. Just a few citations from the executive summary:

"The world’s energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically, socially."

"It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to a low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply. What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution."

"Oil is the world’s vital source of energy and will remain so for many years to come [...]. But the sources of oil to meet rising demand, the cost of producing it and the prices that consumers will need to pay for it are extremely uncertain, perhaps more than ever."

"Preventing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonisation of the world energy sources."

"The consequences for the global climate of policy inaction are shocking."