We Are Living in the Pyrocene—At Our Peril

[comrade simba]

This is crucial - no, I don't KNOW when I'm right. As long as my viewpoint holds water I operate as if that's reality. Just like playing Cops and Robbers if you get a hole in you and fail to admit it no one will want to play with you after a while. On the webz and in meatspace I try to keep three maxims in mind:
I don't know.
I don't care.
It doesn't matter.

Few things cannot honestly be put in at least one of those categories. It helps me stay polite ;-)

[RE]

I try to keep three maxims in mind:

I don't know.
I don't care.
It doesn't matter.

Interesting set of maxims to live by.  I'm not in this club, as anyone who has read my material for a while knows.  Let me address them each in turn.

#1- I don't know.

What is knowable and what is not?  Can you know that 1+1=2?  If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't there, can you know if it made a sound?  If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, do you know it's a duck?  You could make philosophical arguments that show you can't know these things for sure, but my POV is they all reach my test of being beyond reasnable doubt.  So my POV is I know them as true, and you would need to present some really good arguments to convince me otherwise.

Of course, most things aren't quite so clear cut, but for every question out there, at a certain point I have enough evidence to make my own determination of the truth, and that's what I know.  To change my mind, you have to present arguments that show me why I am wrong.  I'm always interested to hear such arguments and examine them.  At least as long as the arguments are presented respectfully without insults, obfuscation, ad hom attacks, strawmen, appeals to authority and bad faith.  There are other things people will do in an argument to get it off track too, but those are the main ones I don't tolerate.

The Diner is supposed to be a place where people with a genuine interest in topics related to the collapse of industrial civilization can present their viewpoints and discuss them, in the effort to ferret out The Truth from the vast quantity of misinformation ejaculated on the net.  So I welcome members who enjoy telling me what they know also.  Then we can compare the differences to get a better understanding and hopefully get closer to the truth.  At the end of the process, hopefully everyone knows a little more than when we began.

#2 I Don't Care

I have spent the last 15 years digging into this subject and written reams  of material to examine what is going on.  You don't spend that much time on something you don't care about.  Kdog also has spent a long time immersed in the topic, he cares about it also.  It's probably the most important question of our time, so it's hard for m to understand how so many people don't care about it.

#3  It doesn't matter

If the future of the planet and of the civilization of homo saps doesn't matter, what does?  We may just be a fly speck in the universe and when we're gone nobody will be around to care, but WE ARE THE FLIES.  So what happens does matter to us.  Does what we say here matter?  Well, since so few people read it, it doesn't matter to the vast majority of the global population, but it DOES matter to those of us who are members of this flyspeck on the internet on the flyspeck of the planet.  If the Diner doesn't matter to you, why bother spending time chatting here?

RE

[TDoS]

You are in the cooler for 24 hours for being an idiot.  You posted something that was drawn 75 years ago and you presented it as absolute fact.  Deliberate obfuscation violates Diner rules.

Jesus K-Dog you've got to be kidding.

While I understand that in this place I am stuck with the audience I got, I've taken EE classes and I know damn well people who can do that can at least THINK.

You asked for something and I damn well provided it. Hubbert's graphs of US and World oil ARE quantatative, and they are absolute fact, published in science journals, and his estimates are his estimates and if you don't like them that's fine. But you ASKED for his quantative and I provided it.

You don't like him having drawn them up in 1956? Not my problem. You don't like that those quantatative numbers don't match reality? Not my problem. He drew his line in the sand, and it worked in the US, through 1970. And then one day it didn't. This isn't political theory and relative concepts....he posts volumes and years. Compare those for the US or World to reality and there is only one conclusion that can be drawn. Once you get there, you can then "but but but" all you'd like, any way you'd like.

[TDoS]

Hubbert's graph peaks at 12.5 billion barrels a year. He just stopped the upward slope of the bell curve too soon.

He did. But he did it because, using the method he used and outlined in that paper, he HAD to. The volume output was the result of his independent variable, which was the presumed oil reserves and resources available. Without it being larger than it was, he couldn't get the peak higher.

It is one of the HUGE disadvantages of this method. Another is that a US free market development scheme is active, which is NOT the case for most countries.

The real thing to be argued is when the top of the curve is / will be reached.

It already has been, for the world anyway. Peak oil, the most current one, and #6 claimed or occurred this century, was 2018. We've been living in a post peak world for 7 years now. <yawn>

The record for the world living in the post peak era is closer to 15 years, as global peak oil in 1979 wasn't surpassed until somewhere in the 1993-1994 timeframe, if memory serves.

I personally figure the west's reserves will decline (frak magic no more) at the same rate arctic/Russian oil will come on line. Decay in the west, progress in the ROW for a generation (13 - 20 years)

Hubbert's method wasn't about reserves, those numbers are way too small to generate any of the peaks he claimed. He needed to start with resources, and then work backward into reserves+resource numbers. As peakers all know, part and parcel of this is the reserve growth problem. That was figured out by the USGS more than a decade ago now, so one of the new things needed to do when trying to figure out global oil production is the resource to reserve conversion ratio. That work was completed by the EIA in the late 201X's, and the USGS was already using it in a less granular leve in 2012 for their World Assessment update of that year.

[comrade simba]

RE - heh heh... I gotta make sure I don't get all heated up and start to ARGUE!
For my maxims, not everything fits into all three categories - I specifically said "Few things cannot honestly be put in at least one of those categories." Opinion and belief are not verified facts so the bulk of stuff never makes it past I don't know. That's just me, anyway.

IMO, for the record. #1 applies to AGW. Global warming trend is upward - no argument there. #2 applies here as in hey man, if I gotta move north so be it. #3, It doesn't matter, is also sort operative here in that it is subjective ie, I don't own coastal real estate. Rather than OMG hair on fire megaphoning from a soapbox I entertain myself looking at maps and speculating on what goes under, how it may affect populations of animals (including humans) etc. Being interested is different from "caring". After all, I'm just killing time 'till time kills me.

TDos - I can't find a simple chart showing production of crude and nat gas from say the 80's to current. You got something handy? "It's not real 'till you can graph it!"

Off to the Trumpi threads. Gonna be a fun week, heh heh.

[TDoS]

TDos - I can't find a simple chart showing production of crude and nat gas from say the 80's to current. You got something handy? "It's not real 'till you can graph it!"

Here is a link to the EIA international energy statistics.

https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world


Click on "Data" tab.
CLick on "Petroleum and other liquids" title.
CLick on "Annual Oil Production and Other Liquids"

Go down a few lines and select "Crude Oil and Lease Condensate"

That strips out all the HGLs and liquids that aren't oil at the well volumes.

Little slider bar at the bottom scrolls back and forth, back to 1973 anywhere. Units are million barrels per day.
2023 was about 1 million barrels a day light of the peak annual volume in 2018.

[RE]

#2 applies here as in hey man, if I gotta move north so be it. #3, It doesn't matter, is also sort operative here in that it is subjective ie, I don't own coastal real estate. Rather than OMG hair on fire megaphoning from a soapbox I entertain myself looking at maps and speculating on what goes under, how it may affect populations of animals (including humans) etc. Being interested is different from "caring". After all, I'm just killing time 'till time kills me.

So basically what you are saying is that since these effects don't appear to directly affect you and your life, they don't matter to you and you don't care about it very much because of that.

There are however secondary effects and repurcussions that will affect you, and much more affect your son who you cared enough about to pick up and move to find a decent school where he might learn something.

You may not own real estate on the coast, but millions of people do and as various disasters hit their stretch of coastline or their valley which flash floods from an atmospheric river or wildfire, they'll become more homeless refugees some of who will end up pitching tents around your neighborhood where the parks will then become either unsafe or at least unpleasant to picnic at with all the refuse and piles of human feces and the smell of stale urine  under the shade of the tree you liked to set up by.

Even if you don't get this particular blowback in your neighborhood because it's one of the ones with all the big houses with an HOA that employs private security to patrol and the cops  sweep away the homeless, you don't care because you don't empathize with their plight?

If I have a maxim I live by, it was expressed best by John Donne:



or more completely MEDITATION 17


PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

RE