ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

The most important contributors to the world’s total oil production are the giant oil fields. Roughly 500 (about 1% of the total number of world oil fields) are classified as giants. Their contribution to world oil production was over 60% in 2005, with the 20 largest fields alone responsible for nearly 25%. Giant fields represent roughly 65% of the global ultimate recoverable conventional oil resources. The overall production from giant fields is declining, because a majority of the largest giant fields are over 50 years old, and fewer and fewer new giants have been discovered since the decade of the 1960s.

In roughly mid 2004, total world oil production ceased to expand. Instead, new production has only succeeded in keeping world oil production relatively flat. We have since been running faster and faster just to stand still.

Mikael Höök, Robert Hirsch, and Kjell Aleklett have written a study to be published in the journal Energy Policy, titled Giant oil field decline rates and their influence on world oil production, that estimates the decline rates of the world’s giant oil fields. Their conclusion: the struggle to maintain production and compensate for the decline in existing production will become harder and harder.

Here are excerpts from the conclusion of their study.

Based on a comprehensive database of giant oil field production data, we estimated the average decline rates of the world’s giant oil fields that are beyond their plateau phase. Since there are large differences between land and offshore fields and non-OPEC and OPEC fields, separation into different subclasses was necessary. In order to obtain a realistic forecast of future giant field decline rates, the subclasses were treated separately to better reflect their different behaviours.

Thus, our average total decline rate for post-plateau giant fields of 6.5% and CERA’s overall 6.3% are in good agreement, and our 5.5% production-weighted giant field decline rate compares reasonably with IEA’s 6.5% and CERA’s 5.8% (Table 10). Offshore fields decline faster than land fields, and OPEC fields decline slower than non-OPEC fields. There are small differences in the data sets and definitions between the studies, but the results from these three studies can be considered approximately equivalent.

* * *

Future decline rates of giant fields that have not yet left the plateau phase can be expected to be higher than those that are now in decline. This is in line with a recent statement about a decline of 10% in mature fields from Petrobras downstream director Paulo Roberto Costa (2008). The crash of the Cantarell field in Mexico and the experiences of the North Sea giants are a vivid example of what can happen to other giant oilfields in the future.

These findings have large implications for the future, since the most important world oil production base – giant oilfields – will decline more rapidly. In the extreme, a potential 10% annual decline in Ghawar would be very challenging to compensate and would create severe problems for Saudi-Arabia and the world. The future behaviour of the remaining giants, especially in OPEC, will be a key factor in future oil supply.

Based on the decline behaviour of giants, decline rate estimates for world oil production are possible because of the large influence of the giants. Many studies have shown that smaller fields, condensate, and NGL will decline at least as fast or faster than giant oilfields, once the onset of decline is reached (CERA, 2007; Höök and Aleklett, 2008; IEA, 2008). Consequently, we believe that there is a strong basis for believing that giant oilfields can be used to set a floor for future decline rate assumptions.

In conclusion, this analysis shows that the average decline rate of the giant oil fields have been increasing with time, reflecting the fact that more and more fields enter the decline phase and fewer and fewer new giant fields are being found. The increase is in part due to new technologies that have been able to temporarily maintain production at the expense of subsequent more rapid decline. Growing average decline rates have also been noted by IEA (2008). The difference between using a constant decline in existing production and an increasing decline rate is significant and could mean as much of a difference of 7 Mb/d by 2030 (Figure 13).

By 2030 the production from fields currently on stream could have decreased by over 50% in agreement with IEA (2008). The struggle to maintain production and compensate for the decline in existing production will become harder and harder. Our conclusion is that the world will face an increasing oil supply challenge, as the decline in existing production is not only high but also increasing.

Sharon Astyk in a post titled City, Country, Suburb? It isn’t Where You Live, But How You Live There offers what I think is sound advice. Railing on about the foolish investments in infrastructure we’ve made since the beginning of the oil age doesn’t get us very far. Rather, as Astyk says:

“I think it is most important to talk about how to live in the suburbs, or the city, or the country in a low energy future.  I think that may be more productive than extended screeds against one model or another.”

Rural areas are likely to suffer first and deepest from the shortage of fuels. As we’ve talked about before here and here, hardships are already being felt.  Property values are falling more the farther away you get from urban cores. High fuel prices are likely to drive commuters – those with no real ties to the countryside – back to urban areas, leaving the countryside to those who have the abilities, inclinations, and family and social connections that will enable them to scratch out a living there. Astyk throws out a vision of what rural life might look like – and while it’s different from what we’re used to now, it’s not all bad.

Astyk also speculates on the future of urban and suburban life – but if  you’ve read her stuff before, you know that she’s verbose.  Rather than attempt to summarize what she has to say, I recommend that you read it yourself.

This week oil prices reached record highs, almost touching $124/barrel. Yet when it comes to the presidential campaigns, complacency rules. Peak oil simply isn’t on any candidate’s radar.

David Cohen at ASPO-USA points out that mitigating anthropogenic climate change is central to all the presidential candidates’ campaigns, and their primary energy initiative is a carbon emissions cap & trade system. While a carbon tax or cap-and trade may be laudable, we have argued that a moratorium on and phase-out of coal would be a better, more effective policy option.

Problems arising from our oil dependency take a backseat to climate change. But unfortunately, given the urgency of the need for action, these are not perceived as urgent – the climate problem is seen as one that can be solved gradually. This approach to our “oil dependency” only makes sense from a climate perspective, which requires us to change our energy consumption and infrastructure over several decades.

John Michael Greer remembers that around 1980 we (and other industrial nations) made a fateful decision to turn back from promising steps toward sustainability made in the previous decade – steps that could have led to a non-disruptive transition to a post-petroleum world. We’ve wasted a quarter century. Now, the chances of transitioning to a non-fossil fuel economy without massive disruption are remote.

The future is uncertain. Constructing a strategy for coping with our future is equally fraught with uncertainty. Relocalization – retooling lifestyles to rely more on local resources and less on a far-flung and increasingly fragile global economic system – is likely to a pretty good strategy to deal with the cascading series of crises that are already unfolding around us (Greer lists “the peak of conventional petroleum production worldwide, soaring prices and incipient shortages in other commodities, spiraling breakdowns in the international debt market, and the fraying of America’s global empire.”).

The one reality that seems clear is that the days of cheap and abundant transportation fuels are over. A rational response to that reality is to begin now to build local economies that minimize the need for transportation, both of goods and people. Resources poured into more infrastructure to support the automobile and the auto-dependent way of life are surely being poured down a rat hole. And we don’t have time, money – or precious energy resources – to waste.

What could be more rational than a moratorium on road building and other automobile-supporting infrastructure such as bridges and parking garages? Our planning needs to be immediately retooled to accommodate development without the automobile rather than requiring accommodation for the automobile.

Truck gardens and organic food production on the outskirts of small and mid-sized cities may be well-positioned to thrive in a world where transport costs have become a major limiting factor. The growth of farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, and direct sales of local produce to local restaurants have laid the foundations upon which local and regional food production networks can grow.

We can be certain that planning for a future as a continuation of our extravagant energy-wasting lifestyles will lead to disaster.

The House Energy and Environment Committee will be meeting at the
LeSells Stewart Center on the OSU Campus, Friday, April 4, starting at
2:00 PM. The committee will focus on climate change and will be taking
testimony from a number of OSU faculty members.

There is opportunity for public comment. The committee asks that you provide 25 copies of any written materials. If you plan to use video, DVD, PowerPoint or
overhead projection equipment please contact Committee Administrator Beth Patrino 24 hours prior to the meeting: beth.patrino@state.or.us

Committee members are: Rep. Jackie Dingfelder, Chair; Rep. Chuck Burley, Vice-Chair; Rep. Ben Cannon, Vice-Chair; Rep. E. Terry Beyer; Rep. Bill Garrard; Rep. Tobias Read; and Rep. Greg Smith.

Russian oil output are expected fall this year for the first time in a decade as rising costs and harder-to-reach fields are making it difficult to maintain production levels.

Output fell 0.7 percent in January and 0.9 percent in February, to 9.79 million barrels a day, compared with the same months last year, according to Energy Ministry data.

The Bloomberg article refers to Russia as the “world’s second-biggest supplier.”  As these charts from The Oil Drum: Europe show, for the last couple years Russia has displaced Saudi Arabia to become the world’s top supplier of crude – although the picture isn’t quite so clear when it comes to all-liquids.

Dan Armstrong has posted a great piece at his Mud City Press site (also at Energy Bulletin) titled “Relocalizing Eden.”

He waxes eloquent about the Willamette Valley:

“The bioregion defined by the Willamette River watershed is one of the most bountiful in the United States. The Willamette Valley is a hundred mile long, two-million acre stretch of prime cropland bordered by a dense, eco-rich coniferous forest. The climate is mild; wet in the winter, dry in the summer. It is excellent for raising livestock and farming, with soil particularly suited for many types of grasses and legumes. There is tremendous flexibility in what can be grown and the way that the various field crops can be rotated for the health of the land.

“Home to a variety of fish and other wildlife, the Willamette River basin is essentially a garden valley, Oregon’s own little piece of Eden.”

He points out that the region has the capacity to feed itself – and fifty years ago, it largely did. But this agricultural picture has been turned inside out. The centralization and globalization of food distribution means that now, nearly everything we eat comes from some place else – most often far away.

This graph in his article is stunning.

More than half of this prime Oregon farmland is being used to grow grass seed – a non-edible luxury item – instead of food.

Armstrong points out that we have lost more than agricultural production in the Willamette Valley. We’ve also lost the capacity to process or distribute what is grown. This means:

“At a very basic level, we are losing the ability to feed ourselves. Again, this is nonsense if not suicide.“

The solution? Relocalization:

“Thus the solution, and the target of food related relocalization efforts in the valley, is changing how and what farmers grow–specifically transitioning to organic techniques and converting grass seed acreage to wheat or other grains and legumes, rebuilding food industry infrastructure, and creating more markets to link buyers, growers, and distributors.”

Armstrong isn’t a relocalization extremist:

“It should be noted that a fully local food economy is not the goal. That would be impossible. But local food buying whether by individuals, food markets, restaurants, or processors needs to be stimulated beyond today’s five percent range to something more like twenty-five or thirty percent. This level of relocalized economic involvement could engender the kind of balance and stability that is needed to bring a modicum of food security to the populace and also a degree of sustainability to Willamette Valley agriculture.”

Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute estimates that we could reverse global warming – and at the same time wipe out world poverty, provide universal health care, and stabilize population growth – for about $190 billion a year, or the equivalent of a third of US annual military expenditure.

The $190 billion price tag compares with $1.2 trillion that world governments spent on military budgets in 2006. The United States splurged the most with $560 billion.

Brown told an interviewer from Planet Ark:

“Once you accept that climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages, rising food prices etcetera are threats to our security, it changes your whole way of thinking about how you use public resources.”

The $560 billion figure for U.S. “defense” spending does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120 billion in 2007). In addition, the United States has black budget – military spending which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures. – Ed.

Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights reminds us that human history

“is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.”

Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. We’re now witnessing the collapse of the world’s fisheries, the loss of billions of tons of topsoil to erosion each year, the over-exploitation of water supples, the destruction of vast tracts of forests in the tropics and temperate zones alike. Yet we call it “progress.”

Cobb calls this unquestioned belief in progress a “cult of continuity”:

“The word “cult” in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.”

This blind faith is dangerous because it relieves us of the responsibility to make wise decisions, decisions which might enable us to avoid disaster and actually achieve a sustainable civilization.

HB 3610 would authorize DEQ to adopt rules requiring the registration and reporting of anyone importing, selling, or distributing greenhouse gas generating fossil fuels or electricity. While the bill was passed out of the Committee on Energy and the Environment with a “do pass” recommendation, it was directed to Ways and Means where it is expected to die.

Why? Opposition from utilities and industry interests, who are concerned that any reporting scheme would surely be followed by regulation. And of course that’s the purpose of the bill – to set the stage and gather the information necessary to implement the Western Climate Initiative and adopt a cap-and-trade scheme.

This lack of recognition that we’re in a crisis that requires drastic and immediate action is evidence that we’re still in the “denial” stage of our response to climate change. And here in Oregon, peak oil – outside of Portland and its Peak Oil Task Force – isn’t even on our radar.

John Michael Greer in an article at the Energy Bulletin (and his own Archdruid Report) comparing our response to peak oil with the five stages of grief outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

We can’t expect to arrive at acceptance – of either global warming or climate change – all at once. Individually and as a society, we’ve got to work our way through, step by step, all the way to acceptance.

We still fantasize that we can figure out a way to continue living our lives in something like the way we do now. This refusal to let go is the single largest obstacle in the path of a reasoned response to the predicament of peak oil and global warming. The hard reality we have to face is the fact that the extravagant, energy-wasting lifestyles of the recent past have led us to the brink of climate catastrophe. And the realities of peak oil, soon to be followed by peak gas and peak coal, combined with the EROEI and scaling realities of alternatives, dictate that our profligacy cannot be sustained by any amount of bargaining or any number of grand projects.

Eventually we’ll have to face up to the reality that our way of life is over – and that the alternative will be okay. As Greer points out, if we redefine the situation in terms of managing a controlled descent from the giddy heights of the late industrial age, the range of technological options widens out dramatically.

There are still many (like CERA) who are in denial of peak oil. Anger is seen in our invasion and occupation of the remaining vulnerable oil producing provinces. How dare terrorists and Muslim fanatics deny us of our oil?

We see anger in the climate change context as soon as anybody actually proposes to do anything meaningful. Why do you suppose a carbon tax, the preferred tool of global warming activists and economists, isn’t even on the table? Because it could actually be implemented quickly and comprehensively, without offering the opportunity for entrenched interests to game the system. A carbon tax would actually force us to do something meaningful, now – it would actually accomplish something. We’re not quite ready for that, yet. Bargaining? We can begin to talk about that.

In the energy context, Greer sees bargaining in our rush to futile and destructive projects, like biofuels and nuclear. I would add tar sands and the chimerical “clean coal” to that list.

Given the political impasse, we cannot stand by helplessly.

We can make immediate changes in our own lives to minimize energy usage. Change our light bulbs. Insulate and seal our homes. Drive less. The list is endless. Tiny actions, multiplied many times, add up to something that matters. while saving money.

Even more importantly, the actions of individuals send critical messages to others and help to establish new social norms that tell everyone around us (our neighbors and our children) what “good” or “ethical” environmental behavior is. Social norms are powerful.

It’s critical that we push from the bottom up to get something happen at the state and federal levels. Governments set regulations and policies that affect what we all do in our individual lives. Doing something about global warming requires not just a rational, cognitive response. It needs an emotional response, even a spiritual response, certainly a deep shift in our values. The deeper the social change, the harder, and the longer it will take to bring about. Values and social and cultural norms take generations to change.

And herein lies our dilemma: we don’t have generations, or even decades. If we are to avoid climate catastrophe, if we are to transition to a low-carbon economy, we have to act now. Even tomorrow is too late.

Over the last few days I’ve listened to an impassioned discussion about reaching out to or engaging in a dialogue with “faux environmentalists” or those who engage in “greenwashing.” I share dismay at measures to “mitigate” the damage from environmentally destructive projects. I share disdain for programs such as carbon credits and cap-and-trade schemes, which have proved nothing more than means to postpone or avoid effective action, than ways to continue business as usual while feeling or appearing to be virtuous. I share wholehearted contempt for international agreements such as Kyoto or Bali that are known to be inadequate even if they were to be taken seriously by all of the world’s governments and were to be successfully implemented.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.

Biodiverse has a post at Gristmill with this image of a solar home:

Here’s the pitch:

“Picture the north face with fancy wood and slate trim, a deck off of the loft doubling as a carport, double French doors, and lots and lots of windows (and window plugs). Essentially, this is a well insulated 10 x 40-foot park model trailer stocked with highly energy efficiency dual mode gas/electric appliances, and lots of diode lighting under a standardized solar energy system optimized for a given area of the country. Picture an entire neighborhood (or trailer park or commune) of these all facing south.”

What’s wrong with this picture? The building design and orientation is exactly wrong for passive solar design. Passive solar would have the large glassed surface facing south to maximize solar gain in the winter, with thermal mass to store the heat. An overhang sized for the latitude would shade the south surface from the high summer sun, minimizing solar gain. The wall and window surfaces on the east, west, and north faces would be minimized.

We retrofitted our house along these lines. It’s less than ideal, as the concrete floor that doubles as the heat sink isn’t insulated from the ground. But it’s still extremely efficient and comfortable in both summer and winter. We heat entirely with a wood stove. Even without the stove, the inside temperature never drops below 55°, even in the depths of winter.

I found this posting by Hans Noeldner in The Oil Drum:  Local worth repeating in its entirety.

What is your environmental “footprint” on Earth? You can find calculators online and worksheets in study guides, but there is a far simpler, more direct way to comprehend it. Just look at what is below you during your day.

Do you see your feet walking in the grasses and forbs of a meadow, or stepping through the undergrowth of a woodland, or pacing the rows of crops in a farm field?

Do you see a floor, beneath which there is the foundation of a building that precludes natural life and water infiltration? Is the building yours alone, or do you share it with others? Does it extend upwards to accommodate its occupants, or sprawl laterally to maximize the amount of Earth that is suffocated per square foot of interior space?

Do you see a sidewalk or a bike path? Are you alone or amidst a busy throng? Will fifty paces bring you to your next destination? Will 100 revolutions of the pedals fetch you home?

Do you see the floor of a bus or train? Are the other seats mostly full or mostly empty? How many miles of track or lane must the train or bus traverse to convey you to your daily and weekly destinations?

Do you see a runway, and then the whole landscape below wincing from the deafening blast of the engines that thrust you skyward? Can you envision thousands of miles of carbon dioxide contrails in your wake?

Do you see the seat of a car? Do you sit alone or share it with others? Is it a small vehicle, or a big one that projects its mechanized menace far beyond its bumpers? How many lane-miles of asphalt and concrete do you pass over as you go? How many lifeless parking stalls do you occupy when you stop?

If you are going far, going often, and most importantly, going so fast that everything in your way seems an obstacle, stop and ask yourself, “MUST I go where I am going? Can I choose smaller ‘shoes’? Can I occupy smaller spaces? Can I tread shorter, narrower paths?

Can I walk in the footprints of others, and can others walk in mine?

Analyst Jim Kingsdale identifies trends in oil that he believes will be sustained over the coming years:

1. The natural rate of decline in old fields will grow slowly every year.
2. Enhanced Oil Recovery [EOR] methods for improving the recovery of oil from old fields will continue to improve, thus tending to reduce the actual rate of declining production from the old fields to which EOR is applied. But the impact of EOR is already part of the existing 3.3% global decline rate. Improved EOR technologies will not reduce the global decline rate but will keep the rate from rising faster than it would otherwise.
3. Once a given field to which EOR has been applied begins to decline, its rate of decline will be much faster than that of a field to which EOR was not applied since EOR leaves less oil in the ground to be recovered during the extended final life of the field. Cantarell’s 15% decline rate is a paradigm example. At any point in time, this phenomenon could have a substantial impact on global oil supply. If Ghawar were to start to resemble Cantarell, for example, one could see a doubling of the oil price in short order.
4. Rapid growth in oil demand from countries that have high exports of oil or other goods will continue for decades to come. Therefore, global demand growth of roughly 1.5 – 2 mb/d from developing economies will continue for the foreseeable future.
5. Most future new production will come from either deep offshore or from alternative sources such as oil sands. Such resources require long time frames to develop and very high costs to recover. Therefore, new source oil is inherently limited in the rate at which it can be brought on stream and will require increasing marginal oil prices to be feasible.

His conclusion:

“The logical conclusion from these trends, I think, is that oil production beyond 2009 is likely to fall well short of the sum of growing demand and increasing declines in old fields. They lend credibility to the statistical analysis done by Chris Skrebowski that indicates we will see the benefits of numerous new, primarily land-based projects scheduled to come on stream in 2008 and 2009, after which supplies will become significantly tighter, falling off a cliff by 2014.”

And his “fearless prediction” for prices:

2008: $80 – $140
2009: $105 – $195
2010: $150 – $250
2011: $175 – $325
2012: $275 – $500

A new report called The Age of Consequences has just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. The report uses the social sciences – in particular history, geography, and political science – to develop scenarios visualizing the consequences of climate change in the coming century.

The Report imagines three potential scenarios, labeled expected, severe, and catastrophic. The scenarios are not forecasts exactly, since forecasting society is even harder than forecasting climate, which is itself pretty dicey on a regional spatial scale. Rather, the scenarios flesh out plausible possibilities – they are a story-telling, visualization-type exercise.

The “expected” scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally. Changes in precipitation and sea level prompt migration at a scale sufficient to challenge the cohesion of nations. The potential responses to this scenario are broken down into specific regions with their particular historical and political settings.

In the “severe” scenario, the globe warms by 2.6 °C by 2040 and sea level rises about a half a meter. Scientists in 2040 conclude that the eventual collapse of Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets has become inevitable in the centuries that follow. Agricultural production declines in the arid subtropics and in increasingly flooded river deltas. To pick a random example from the report: the river systems in the American Southwest collapse, leading to impoverishment of Northern Mexico and increased migration pressure in the U.S.

The “catastrophic” scenario assumes positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle to warm the planet by 5.6 °C by the year 2100, and sea level has risen by 2 meters. But this may dramatically understate the worst-case scenario, for example in terms of sea level rise.

One important ingredient in the prognosis for the catastrophic scenario is the migration of millions of people, a scale unprecedented in human history, potentially enough to undermine the stability of civilized governance.

Kudos to RealClimate bringing this report to wide public attention.