Stuart Staniford

Over the last eight years, the predictions of the "moderates" in the peak oil debate came closest. We certainly don’t live in the pre-2004 world any more. Oil prices are high, and there seems little prospect that they will ever fall below $100/barrel for any sustained period. Furthermore, the situation remains very vulnerable to disruption.

Nate Hagens draws my attention to this recent interview with Dennis Meadows, lead author of the famous Limits to Growth series of books. Meadows is very pessimistic. I was particularly interested in his views on oil production and peak oil, in which he states positively that peak oil is in the past (which is very arguable at best, given that oil production is still making new monthly highs), and also that "Oil production will be reduced approximately by half in the next 20 years, even with the exploitation of oil sands or shale oil."

In Friday’s post, I argued that the likely pattern of human response to climate change would be characterized by very limited action until manifestly serious consequences were clear by looking out the window; then, and only then would serious action ensue. In other words, the pattern would be one of panic and repentance.

So to say "we must adapt to some climate change" is not at all to imply "so we might as well give up the struggle".

So, we are a long way from Sharon Astyk’s Nation of Farmers, but it certainly looks like the giant loss of US farm count in the mid twentieth century has stabilized and perhaps now begun some kind of bounce back.

I wanted to cross-check for myself some of the work Chris Reynolds has done looking at changes in weather patterns since 2007 (the beginning of the recent sea ice collapse)…So, it does rather look like an abrupt shift in the early summer northern hemisphere circulation has occurred since 2007 and is having multiple effects – poor summers in the UK, melting sea ice – and presumably accelerated warming of the Greenland ice sheet also.

The obvious questions are: why? and will it continue?