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Hubbert's
Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change Division of Engineering and Applied
Science California Institute of Technology Currently there is a vigorous debate about
fossil-fuel production, and whether it will be sufficient in the future. At the same time, there is an intense
effort to predict the contribution to future climate change that will result
from consuming this fuel. There has
been surprisingly little effort to connect these two. Do we have a fossil-fuel supply problem? Do we have a climate-change problem? Do we have both? Which comes first? We will see that trends for future
fossil-fuel production are less than any of the 40 UN scenarios considered in
climate-change assessments. The
implication is that producer limitations could provide useful constraints in
climate modeling. We will also see
that the time constants for fossil-fuel exhaustion are about an order of
magnitude smaller than the time constant for temperature change. This means that to lessen the effects of
climate change associated with future fossil-fuel use, reducing ultimate
production is more important than slowing it down. Power-Point
Slides (4MB) Excel
Workbook (4MB) Video from
the Watson Lecture at Caltech, October 2007 (1 hour) |