Figure 3 summarises key aspects of what is unfolding in the Arctic. The diagram in the bottom right corner traces the ongoing decline of Arctic sea ice volume. The trend is an Arctic largely free of ice by about 2022; possibly sooner. Ice-free Arctic sea is dark and absorbs the solar influx readily while white ice reflects it. The diagram above the sea ice volume diagram shows the extreme temperature anomaly (in dark read) that has emerged in recent years. Arctic warming leads to permafrost thawing on land and on the oceanic margins. This leads to enhanced methane releases. The diagram on the left of Figure 3 depicts the series of feedback loops presently destabilising the Arctic. The danger is a falling domino effect that runs away disastrously.

Under lower latitudes methane is 72 times more potent as a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) than carbon dioxide (CO2) over the first 20 years after release (as it gets progressively degraded into CO2). However, under Arctic conditions methane is up to 120 times more potent than CO2 over the first 20 years after release. In terms of global warming impact, the relatively small present releases put Arctic methane on a par with methane emissions from forest fires, fossil fuels and biomass burning. However, as shown on Figure 3, the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than the lower latitudes. In consequence there is an increasing danger of abrupt gassing to the atmosphere of large amounts of Arctic methane at some stage in the not too distant future. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is one of the potentially critical regions. Dr Natalia Shakhova (University of Alaska) considers that some 50Gt of methane could potentially be released abruptly from the ESAS (less than 2.5% of the 2,200Gt possibly stored in the ESAS).[9]

A substantial abrupt release would have major global warming implications, in that 2oC of warming could take place over a decade or so instead of gradually over 50 to 100 years as currently expected. Such an abrupt pulse of warming could lead rapidly to runaway global warming of over 6oC in the ensuing decades.

In the absence of abrupt methane release, it appears that the present progressive Arctic release is accelerating and is bound to speed up global warming. The more gradual warming progresses the higher the probability of a sudden release being triggered.

Presently not enough is known to assess the extent of the dangers. There are intense debates among Arctic specialists and between them and the broader climate change scientific community. Research is expanding rapidly to differentiate between methane seepages that may have been ongoing for more than 500 years, for example, in deep waters off the Svalbard archipelago, north of Norway, from potentially anthropogenic emissions in shallow waters such as in the ESAS, and to assess the dangers.[10] The literature has become extensive over the last five years.

Based on what is presently known, a number of Arctic experts have become so alarmed at the magnitude of the dangers and global implications that they have taken the initiative of calling for an immediate emergency response, including geo-engineering focused on rapid cooling of the Arctic and an accelerated phasing out of all fossil fuel uses.[11] Unsurprisingly their call remains unanswered. There is a knowledge gap between those Arctic experts and the remainder of the climate and more broadly ecology and Earth System science communities. To date, the IPCC, global organisations like the G20, individual governments, industry, and most of the main media have remained largely impervious to initiatives like Arctic Methane Alert.

It’s not that “powers-that-be” are unconcerned; they are to some extent. However, none of the authorities with some form of dominion on the Arctic has the slightest idea on how to address this kind of matter. In consequence, under the sway of the Tooth Fairy, they end-up following Shadok-like policies… “if there is no solution…”

Unaware of OFDK already underway, in 2014, facing the eerie climate change situation Paul Beckwith, part-time professor in climatology at University of Ottawa, Canada, noted:

“As crazy as things are now, clearly they are not bad enough to wake up the general population enough to vote down denier politicians and demand extensive governmental action on the problem. Not to worry, that action is a sure bet in the near future, the only question is will it happen next year, or in 3 years?”[12]

It remains to be seen how far the global situation has to degrade before people in “the general population” realise that they have no longer any other option but orient to something else than the present “ever more of the same” within the GIW.

Then add a big GHG “burp” under OFDK

The review of global warming perspectives to this point has ignored OFDK. Presently all institutional perspectives (i.e. by national or transnational governmental bodies and large business corporates) concerning climate change and how to address it (or not) take place under the sway of the Tooth Fairy, that is, under both the 2oC warming limit and carbon budget myths and economic, growth, BAU mythology. This is also the case of most researchers, even those who know about the mythical character of the 2oC limit and conduct rigorous climate research, as all, as far as GB can see, dutifully believe in economics, that is, remain under the sway of the Tooth Fairy.

In actual life though, OFDK is in full swing. The Petroleum Production System (PPS) and the GIW are in BigMES mode (big mad energy scramble) to try and cope with the loss of access to oil as a key primary energy source. They do so largely flying blind.

In Post 6 — How is an OFDK created?, Figure 5, we noted that the PPS actually began to draw from other primary energy sources around 1997. In Post 5 — The end of the Oil Age as we know it, we saw that since 2012 oil is ceasing to be a primary energy source. On average, from around 2022 onwards, oil-derived molecules, aka transport fuels, TFs, are becoming mere energy carriers, on a par with hydrogen (that has to be manufactured using some primary energy source, typically natural gas, solar or hydro) or electricity (generated from coal, natural gas or so-called “renewables”). We also noted that those high energy density oil-derived molecules remain precious to the GIW. It can’t do without them for nearly all its transport activities. So, the BigMES is to a large extent about using other primary energy sources to power the PPS and enable it to keep using oil to produce TFs — this is the focus of all the XTL processes we considered in earlier posts (anything, X, to liquids, L). We have noted that electric vehicles can have at best a limited market niche. Research is underway to produce TFs similar to oil-derived TFs from direct and indirect solar sources (Solar to Liquids, Wind to Liquids, Biomass to Liquids, etc.). These avenues are still in their infancy. The timeframe to full industrialisation on a global scale is over 20 years. In short, under BigMES, the main short- to longer-term avenues are to use fossil fuels (coal and gas) to augment the PPS and keep using oil no matter what.

Given that oil-derived transport fuels are required to access coal and natural gas and that XTL processes are thermodynamically less efficient than what the PPS used to be, overall, BigMES unavoidably entails a considerable increase in the total energy used to produce TFs, substantially above current PPS levels as assessed in Post 5, which, as we know, are already ceasing to be viable. Currently BigMES as well as most of the PPS are financed thanks to “debt-that-cannot-be-repaid”. How this may pan out in the longer run, currency-wise is something we will consider in a subsequent Post. For now, let’s just stress that BigMES, although not thermodynamically viable beyond the very short-term, is a sheer necessity for the GIW and is underway.

In other words, BigMES is most likely to translate into a large additional greenhouse gas (GHG) “burp”, a burp big enough to tip planetary climates into abrupt change with or without the Arctic. We say burp because this sudden increase in GHG emissions is likely to be short lived. In the absence of a shift to something else, BigMES is most likely to result in an abrupt disintegration of both PPS and GIW — the last “fireworks” before the fall of an eerie silence; recall Post 6 — How is an OFDK created?, Figure 9, we are at the beginning of the downside of the “mother of all Senecas”, sliding down a precipitous thermodynamic cliff. Unless enough of us engineer something else while we are still in the Gold Spot, just past the cusp, everyone is most likely to keep sliding all the way to Olduvai…

So, how about a Pascalian wager?

Many colleagues involved in energy transition work are acutely aware of the disconnect between what science uncovers on the one hand and on the other hand what people believe and what decision-making elites do. Nearly all are blissfully unaware of OFDK; instead, all are awfully worried about global warming.

To be fair, some see that “our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom” and recognise that “systemic change… is our only hope”.[13] They remain a tiny minority though and place their fate in the hands of an elusive “moral awakening”. We don’t. On the downside of Senecas, moral awakenings have little purchase. What usually work are entrepreneurial initiatives by people who have the required expertise and have seen how to engineer something else. This is all the more the case when, under OFDK, the timeframe is at best some 15 years.

In all cases, as far as we can see, whether focused on climate change or seeing the need for something else beyond combating climate change as one tilts at windmills, most see that current action, under the Paris Agreement of CPO21 or otherwise, is woefully insufficient to successfully address the climate change challenge.

However, most do not take into account such matters as Arctic-accelerated warming or the fact that the 2oC limit is pure myth and that the GIW is in a huge carbon deficit. That is, the energy transition models that they are considering or producing unfold rather smoothly over some 50 to 100 years — they mostly assume a still existing (but mythical) “carbon budget” and do not consider abrupt climate change dynamics that could unfold over a couple of decades or even less, from around 2030 onwards. Of even greater concern, they remain largely blind to an OFDK that is nonetheless unfolding under their very eyes.

Summarising numerous comments they make, it appears that many consider that “most people lack the courage to face up to [scientific findings] because that could trigger a moral crisis”, current politicians all around the world “are not at all keen that this should become widely known”, “it is too complicated for people and politicians to understand”, scientists “have failed to communicate to the world”. In GB’s view, this is a mistake. It is not that scientists “have failed”. Instead, the matter is that it is impossible to convey anything of what we are discussing here, or about OFDK, to people remaining cosily under the sway of the Tooth Fairy. Only when the Tooth Fairy begins to loosen her grip can anyone begin to open one eye, stop sleepwalking, and face the situation they are in…

So, instead of placing one’s hope in a moral awakening or instead of trying to be better at communicating or convincing, maybe, we could venture a simple wager of the Pascalian kind…

The renowned 17th century philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal, was a staunch Christian. Maybe somewhat naively, he imagined a wager, that soon became famous, to try and convince people to adopt Christian lifestyles. He suggested that people bet with their lives that God either exists or not, arguing that any rational person would chose to bet that God exists and would behave accordingly. Pascal’s reasoning was that under the God-exist option, gamblers would incur only a finite loss during their lifetime (e.g. some forbidden pleasures), whereas they stood to receive infinite gains and avoid infinite losses (in post death eternity) — which, of course, presupposes that one believes in some form of post-death existence… Let’s not enter such a debate and consider instead Pascal’s pragmatic logic with respect to the present situation.

Concerning global warming, large numbers of people still deny that they face any serious danger notwithstanding any evidence presented to them. Most of them are also blind to OFDK.

On the one hand, if current research is correct, they trade the (rather constrained and limited) advantages they already benefit from in the short to medium-term against a hellish long-term future or even a highly painful death (such as cooking from the inside in sweltering heat). If by any remote chance current research turns out incorrect, then they would benefit from present advantages and similar long-terms ones and get to live a wee bit longer.

Now, on the other hand, an increasingly large body of research we will come back to in subsequent posts shows that addressing issues such as climate change (whether real or not is not the matter) or the broader issues of OFDK would actually unleash unprecedented prosperity not only for those presently affluent but also for all those opting for something else than the present mess. In this latter case, one trades a limited present affluence for a few (and a great deal of negatives for most as well as large, negative, existing and recognized ecological impacts for all) against a vastly expanded affluence for most and the prospect of substantially improved ecological conditions.

This is an inverse Shadok wager. It is GB’s wager — never mind whether climate change is for real or not, never mind OFDK, why live as we do presently, in hard, complicated, often dangerous, expensive, insecure, polluted conditions, when we could live prosperously in vastly improved, safe, secure, inexpensive, enormously simplified fashion?

In our next posts we will pursue the review of some of the main impacts that OFDK is precipitating, highlighting for each how they shape effective responses to OFDK and ways to address the corresponding demand for something else concerning new means to access and use energy, new class of networking and new means of transacting value in cryptocurrency mode, all sustainably.

* * * * * *

If you have followed our posts to this point, a reminder:

This series focuses on the emerging global demand for something else than what we currently have concerning energy and all other aspects of living in the globalised industrial world (the GIW). Most importantly it concerns money, the end of fiat currencies over the next few years and their unavoidable replacement with cryptocurrencies backed with sustainable energy supplies.

The posts gradually explain the rationale for the solutions that we are developing to address that global demand for something else. A subsequent series will explain our solutions themselves and our entire approach to creating a sustainable and scalable energy backed cryptocurrency.

GB’s next post will focus on OFDK’s causes and internal dynamics in order to refine further our something else specs concerning new means of access to energy, new class of networking and new means of transacting value.

GB’s previous posts in the demand for something else series are:

Post 1: Hello, this is GB…

Post 2: Elephants in the cryptocurrency room — current fiat currencies have no future; however, cryptocurrencies can’t scale to the global demand for something else; in particular they require far too much energy and are overlaid on top of an Internet also requiring far too much energy; and, like fiat currencies, they are also disconnected from the sole reliable and necessary anchor of value into the thermodynamics of any social activity.

Post 3: Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy and the Dragon-King; Part 1: Loss of access — humankind is rapidly losing access to all the sources of energy it depends on; the threats are dual, loss of access to bioenergy and loss of access to net energy from oil; those losses translate into loss of access to all other energy forms; Post 3 focuses on the loss of access to bioenergy; this loss will be complete by about 2030; this loss frames in stringent ways how to address the demand for something else, not just concerning energy but also all economic activity and all the way to finance and all currency matters.

Post 4: Looking down the barrel — Part 2 — The threat of an Oil Pearl Harbor — the oil price crash of late 2014 onwards marks the entry on the world scene of the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King (OFDK), a high probability, high impact process that almost no one saw coming; at the heart of OFDK is the rapid fizzling out of net energy from oil; net energy in the form of transport fuels is what enables the entire economic activity of the globalised industrial world (GIW); by about 2022 net energy per average barrel is expected to be about nil — zero net energy means zero value; in consequence oil prices are highly unlikely to ever recover durably; instead they are in the process of crashing to the floor — a kind of protracted Oil Pearl Harbor heralding the disintegration of the oil industry as we know it; which sets out the time frame for addressing the demand for something else.

Post 5: Looking down the barrel — Part 3 — The end of the Oil Age, as we knew it — this post examines the dynamics of the oil industry and of OFDK; it explains how and why the GIW entered the end of the Oil Age in about 2012 and how this process will be complete by about 2030; it then shows that an increasing number of industry and finance players have begun to intuit the dire situation and what are the implications for the GIW at large; it concludes in stressing that the oil industry is not going to vanish, as the GIW will keep requiring high energy density molecules for transport, and instead will have to transform drastically; which frames further the demand for something else. We also noted that under OFDK we cannot see how fiat currencies as we know them could survive much beyond 2022, which translates into a huge demand for cryptocurrencies able to scale past the size of fiat ones.

Post 6: Looking down the barrel — Part 4 — How is an Oil Fizzle Dragon-King created? — this post shows that the GIW is presently “running on empty”; it examines why, in consequence, while oil prices are crashing to the floor transport fuel prices can be expected to increase substantially and supply of transport fuels be increasingly erratic; examines how OFDK was engendered, where the present terminal dynamics lead and what are the defining energy characteristics of the demand for something else in response to ODFK. In short, OFDK forces a re-think of everything we do, especially what we take for granted, and most specifically a re-think of money, finance, currencies, investments and cryptocurrencies. In this matter we are not commenting from the sideline. We mean business… The opportunities at the heart of this re-think are simply huge. Just past the cusp of the “mother of all Senecas” we call this set of opportunities the Gold Spot.

Post 7: Looking down the barrel — Part 5 — The Tooth Fairy versus Thermodynamics — this post examines the Big Question of not only how but also why we came to fall into the present OFDK mess. We find the answer in the weird mix of magical thinking, belief in myth concatenated with bits and pieces of science that still prevails over two hundred years after the beginning of an Industrial Revolution based on thermodynamics = the same kind of mix that prevailed in preindustrial societies continues in ours. We call it the Tooth Fairy syndrome after Bedford Hill who exclaimed: “It is interesting that not one analyst has yet come to the very obvious conclusion that it requires oil to produce oil. Perhaps they think it is delivered by the Tooth Fairy?” (B.W. Hill, 9–3–15). We examine the growing gap between Tooth Fairy myth and OFDK reality to conclude that it is high time to orient towards something else focused on novel means to access and use energy, a new class of networking and new means of transacting value in cryptocurrency mode, all sustainably and completely outside magical and mythical thinking — leading to novel ways of sustainably living and doing business, highly profitably; the kind GB is involved in.

Post 8: Looking down the barrel — Part 6 — OFDK’s falling dominos — previous posts have shown how the rapid fizzling out of net energy from oil is the trigger for OFDK and how this affects all other energy sectors, the whole of transport and all domains of economic and social activity. This posts shows that OFDK is not just about oil. It has many ramifications and is triggering further, largely unexpected, disruptions globally in falling domino fashion. In fact those disruptions interlink under OFDK’s impulse to form an almighty avalanche that has already become unstoppable. The matter is no longer to try and stop it or even change its course. Instead, the matter is to use its momentum and extricate ourselves from it. As investors, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, this is what we focus on. We are intent on changing the global game by redefining how we access and use energy… and thus money.

[1] Hansen, James, Sato, Makiko, Kharecha, Pushker, Schuckmann, Karina von, Beerling, David J, Cao, Junji, et al. People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions. Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss. 2016. Available from: doi:10.5194/esd-2016–42. See also, for example, Victor, David G. and Kennel, Charles F., 2014, “Ditch the 2°C warming goal”, in Nature, Vol. 514, 2 October; Lindorff, Dave, 2015, Forget About a 2oC Future; It Will be 4oC-6oC, and Soon http://thiscantbehappening.net/, 20 May; New Scientist’s editorial of 11 July 2015; Schleussner, Carl-Friedrich and Hare, Bill, 2015, “The world’s false 2-degree faith”, Climate Analytics, http://www.businessspectator.com.au, 14 May 2015; Fawcett, Allen A. Iyer, Gokul C., Clarke, Leon E., Edmonds, James A., Hultman, Nathan E., McJeon, Haewon C., Rogelj, Joeri, Schuler, Reed, Alsalam, Jameel, Asrar, Ghassem R., Creason, Jared, Jeong, Minji, McFarland, James, Mundra, Anupriya, Shi, Wenjing, 2015, “Can Paris pledges avert severe climate change?” Sciencexpress, 26 November; and many more…

[2] Spratt, David, 2014, The real budgetary emergency and the myth of burnable carbon, http://www.climatecodered.org/2014/05/the-real-budgetary-emergency-burnable.html; Spratt, David and Sutton, Philip, 2008, Climate Code Red — The case for emergency action, Scribe, Melbourne, Australia.

[3] Adrian E. Raftery, Alec Zimmer, Dargan M. W. Frierson, Richard Startz and Peiran Liu, 2017, Less than 2◦C warming by 2100 unlikely. ww.nature.com/natureclimatechange, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3352.

[4] The thermodynamic wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that may be achieved by evaporative cooling of a water-wetted (or even ice-covered), ventilated surface (Wikipedia).

[5] Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber, 2010, An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress, PNAS, 9552–9555, vol. 107, no. 21. Hazel Muir, 2010, Thermogeddon: When the Earth gets too hot for humans, New Scientist, issue 2783, 26 October.

[6] Camilo Mora, Bénédicte Dousset, Iain R. Caldwell, Farrah E. Powell, Rollan C. Geronimo, Coral R. Bielecki, Chelsie W. W. Counsell, Bonnie S. Dietrich, Emily T. Johnston, Leo V. Louis, Matthew P. Lucas, Marie M. McKenzie, Alessandra G. Shea, Han Tseng, Thomas W. Giambelluca, Lisa R. Leon, Ed Hawkins and Clay Trauernicht, 2017, Global risk of deadly heat. www.nature.com/natureclimatechange, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3322.

[7] Im, Eun-Soon, Pal, Jeremy S., and Eltahir, Elfatih A. B., 2017, Deadly heat waves projected in the densely populated agricultural regions of South Asia, Sci. Adv. 2017;3:e1603322; Vinke, Kira, Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim, Coumou, Dim, Geiger, Tobias, et al., 2017, A Region at risk, The Human Dimensions of Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific, Asian Development Bank and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, www.adb.org, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.22617/TCS178839-2.; Bador, Margot, Terray, Laurent, Boé, Julien, Somot, Samuel, Alias, Antoinette, Gibelin, Anne-Laure and Dubuisson, Brigitte, 2017, Future summer mega-heatwave and record-breaking temperatures in a warmer France climate, Environ. Res. Lett. 12 (2017) 074025, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa751c (showing that “by 2100, the increase in summer temperature maxima exhibits a range from 6 °C to almost 13°C”); Giovanni Forzieri, Alessandro Cescatti, Filipe Batista e Silva, Luc Feyen, 2017, Increasing risk over time of weather-related hazards to the European population: a data-driven prognostic study, Lancet Planet Health 2017; 1: e200–08. www.thelancet.com/planetary-health Vol 1 August 2017 (showing that “weather-related disasters could affect about two-thirds of the European population annually by the year 2100”).

[8] See for example Tobias Friedrich, Axel Timmermann, Michelle Tigchelaar, Oliver Elison Timm, Andrey Ganopolski, 2016, Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming. Sci. Adv. 2016; 2:e1501923 9 November 2016 (showing that “within the 21st century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels reconstructed for the last 784,000 years”).

[9] Arctic Methane Emergency Group, 2011, Arctic Methane Alert, www.arctic-methane-emergency-group.org. http://arctic-news.blogspot.fr See also, for example, Vidal, John, 2013, “Rapid Arctic thawing could be economic time bomb, scientists say” in The Guardian, 25 July.

[10] See for example C. Berndt, T. Feseker, T. Treude, S. Krastel, V. Liebetrau, H. Niemann, V. J. Bertics, I. Dumke, K. Dünnbier, B. Ferré, C. Graves, F. Gross, K. Hissmann, V. Hühnerbach, S. Krause, K. Lieser, J. Schauer, L. Steinle, 2014, Temporal Constraints on Hydrate-Controlled Methane Seepage off Svalbard in Science, 343, 284 (2014), DOI: 10.1126/science.1246298; and Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope & Peter Wadhams, 2013, Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change in Nature 499, 401–403 (25 July 2013) doi:10.1038/499401a.

[11] Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) at http://www.ameg.me.

[12] Beckwith, Paul, 2014, Our new climate and weather, at http://arctic-news.blogspot.fr, 18 January.

[13] Richard Heinberg, 2017, Why Climate Change Isn’t Our Biggest Environmental Problem, and Why Technology Won’t Save Us. August 14, 2017. https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-heinberg-2471869927.html. See also as further exampes, Heinberg, Richard, 2011, The End of Growth, adapting to our new reality, New Society; Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Jäger, J., Tyson, P.D., Moore III, B., Matson, P.A., Richardson, K., Oldfield, F., Schellnhuber, H.-J., Turner II, B.L., Wasson, R.J., 2004, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany; Costanza, Robert, Graumlich, Lisa J., and Steffen, Will, editors, 2007, Sustainability or Collapse, an Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, U.K., in cooperation with Dahlem University Press.