You are of course right with regards to the early earth; I had in mind the time frame during which plants were converted into oil, or other hydrocarbons. And yes, it is expensive,
but there are places where the Earth’s crust is relatively thin, like the Gulf of Mexico for example, and look at what fun you can have when you have all that pressure from the weight of
the water above.

We wouldn’t be able to see anything if those surfaces weren’t reflective.

Because the bulk of sodium vapors light output is in a very few narrow spectral lines, there are filters available for telescopes that greatly reduce their effect.

But the spectrum of the LED lamps is much more broadband. That makes them visually much more pleasant but I do worry about the light being reflected back into the sky.

I wonder why nobody has considered street lights with motion sensors so they come on when there is a car or pedestrian but shut off when there is no movement.

That would seem to address light pollution issues as well as save energy and extend the life of the LEDs.

I agree with your emphasise on people knowing the truth and not just what you hear from the politicians and salespeople. This is the sort of informative posts a like to read. I’ve bookmarked your blog and I hope to hear more from you in the future.

Peter

Graham Slane
Visual Network Solutions Ltd (UK)

I am troubled by how little attention these other issues are getting.

We could improve life on Earth greatly with adequate clean renewable energy supplies, not just for humans but for all life.

dmcmeon@yahoo.co.uk

http://www.gasresources.net/Mafoud-91.htm

This details a case in which solid hydrocarbons were produced in the upper mantle abiotically.

And you are incorrect regarding the atmosphere always being oxidizing, in fact the early atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere, but that wasn’t the context I was referring to.

I was referring to the mantle conditions, not the atmospheric conditions.

You may also want to see this article:

http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/oil_origin.pdf

It explains some of the issues with plants being the source of hydrocarbons.

There are many reasons for differences in oil besides differences in biological feedstock.

In the case of mantle created abiotic oil, that oil which is capped by non-porous capstone will contain a mixture with many light hydrocarbons, where as oil capped by more porous material will contain heavier hydrocarbons. The difference has nothing to do with feedstock, it has to do with the lighter smaller molecules being able to get through the porous material and evaporate leaving behind only longer heavier molecules.

While it’s true that many a dry well has been drilled, it’s also true there have been some real successes, such as in Russia, Viet Nam, and China, as well as here in the United States, Wolverine Oil drilling deep in land that Exxon-Mobile had given up on. Certainly many dry wells have been sunk looking for oil in conventional places too.

Oh, here is another excellent article:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Biogenic%20and%20Abiogenic%20Petroleum.pdf

One thing worth noting, oil has been found as deep as 30,000 feet, but no fossil has been recovered past 16,000 feet.

All in all though, if people want to believe you that is ok because I’d just as soon see the oil companies price their product out of the market and dirty oil be replaced with clean renewables.

And in all fairness, it is expensive to drill down deep enough to tap oil closer to the mantle.

Our atmosphere is an oxidizing environment, and it has been for the last 3.9 billion years. Global warming is not going to change this.
Yes global warming may make things warmer, the flow on from this will probably throw us into a climate similar to the Eocene, which was 10 degrees warmer. It will mean a mass extinction, we may have palm trees in Antarctica again, but that was one of the worlds most oxidizing environments which can be seen by the size of insects like dragon flies during that time.

The cost of most renewable energies is cheeper in the long run, but that is not the problem, the problem is the energy required to switch over and the materials required.
Investment for return is basic economics and if the investment is too high, the returns aren’t as viable. solar farms may produce lots of energy, but remember again, this is scaring the landscape, energy which some of it normally gets reflected back out of the atmosphere. And it requires oil to create solar panels.
Wind farms require lots of metal, plastic and scar our landscape in other ways, in open pit mines, in huge factories, nothing has no flow on effect unless if you want to go back to living in a cave and hunting for food.
And quite frankly i like it how you haven’t mentioned the humanitarian side of the argument at all, should we keep exploiting oil for fertilizers or should we let the population starve? should we stop making medicines? how about plastic insulators for cables? power switches? etc
Should we stop using oil to pump and purify water for those in third world countries which can’t afford the investment to change?
Maybe we should go nuclear but again, that is a bigger investment and cant be started on a small scale.

No pretty much we are screwed, either way, when peek oil hits, people will forget about global warming. Global warming is only something people will care about when they have food on the table.

I will leave you with this fact, Every calorie of food you buy, has required between 5 and 500 calories of oil to get it there. Whether in transport, fertilizer,
or what ever. The large range is due to over seas imports, packaging, and all sorts of small details things.

Also can you cite a scientific paper to back up “The mantle conditions have been replicated in the laboratory and a mixture of hydrocarbons closely matching natural crude is created.” because the closest i can find is one about methane which has been well known for decades, in fact methane has been found in meteorites too, but any crude oil contains a far vaster range then one molecule, usually around 50,000+.
Also why don’t we get vast quantities of Ar (argon) He (helium) which are other gasses often formed in the mantle from the decay of radioactive isotopes which are enriched in the mantle in larger abundance’s in the hydrocarbon reservers? since these are released in any other system which releases gasses from the mantle (volcanic degassing etc)

However, I would suggest that you do a bit more research, particularly with respect to chemistry.

What is true at one atmosphere in an oxidizing environment is not true at 1000 atmospheres in a reducing environment.

The mantle conditions have been replicated in the laboratory and a mixture of hydrocarbons closely matching natural crude is created.

The point is really moot; whether we burn up all the oil or ruin our environment, the end result is the same.

Either way we need to go to renewables. And they aren’t all expensive as you claim. Wind in particular is now less expensive than the least expensive fossil fuel, coal.

second your arguments about ancient oil are geologically flawed. First oil is destroyed when it gets too hot, there are very few places in the world where it can exist below 10km beneath the surface. Second, biological material must be buried below a depth of between two and five kilometres to be turned into oil, then before it migrates it has to be trapped by a non porous unit.

Your assumption that all carbon dioxide must have been removed from the atmosphere by now is flawed as you are assuming all biological matter has been buried for good, erosion and plate tectonics make this a flawed argument, i have seen enough natural oil seeps in my life to know this for a fact. Also you mentioned volcanic activity relating to the Permian extinction, this is called Volcanic degassing and is another way CO2 gets into our atmosphere.

Your point about Iraq is bullshit, to produce renewable energy is extremely expensive, it also requires a investment of energy, your average wind farm or solar panel takes between 5 and 10 years to make up the energy it took to produce it.

I’m not saying global warming isn’t happening, i defiantly agree it is, but this article is misinformed about all the geological facts.

I have to ask, why did you go for the Permian extinction? i would think a far more relevant one would have been the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which has in common a release of green house gasses, this one from methane hydrate deposits in the ocean.

Although it is a smaller extinction it is similar to what’s happening now, and depending if we act or not it is on a bigger scale then what we have now.

Also what would you suggest we do towards global warming? stop using oil? that would have even worse results. you are likely to kill off 2/3 of the earth’s population through not being able to provide food, clean water, medicine, there is no quick solution, to a problem as big as this.

I find it strange that almsot everyone who speaks against peak oil, or against global warming or anything along those lines is usually written by people with no geological knowledge, or by people ignoring a huge pile of geological knowledge. My advice for anyone reading up on peek oil to know a bit about the requirements for oil generation/migration/trapping. If you are going to quote other websites, double check your facts first on the companies own website, then on something along the lines of wikipedia you may still by writing crap occasionally, but at least not many people will be able to point it out to you.