UGO BARDI

Maybe there will be a peak in the coming years, but cement is a form of "persistent pollution." Reducing its production - or even stopping it - won't automatically return built environment to fertile soil. But we can't eat concrete. Will we ever get our land back?

Recently, the web has been abuzz over an MIT study predicting 'global economic collapse' by 2030. Ugo Bardi, who recently published the book The Limits to Growth Revisited, shares his views on this study and its implications.

Here is a little Easter post where I try to model the Easter Egg hunt as if it were the production of a mineral resource. A simple model based on system dynamics turns out to be equivalent to the Hubbert model of oil production. We can have "peak eggs" and the curve may also take the asymmetric shape of the "Seneca Peak." So, even this simple model confirms what the Roman Philosopher told us long ago: that ruin is much faster than fortune.

Fusion based on hot plasmas - the "tokamak" technology - is progressing at a very slow rate: the first energy producing plants are planned to appear not earlier than in several decades from now (if ever). There is an unwritten law that rules industrial research and development. It says that you have to demonstrate that your idea can work in no more than three years. If a project produces no useful results in five years, then there are good chances that it never will.

Coal seemed to have peaked in 1990, but it was an illusion. The growth of coal production during the first decade of the 21st century has been impressive; never seen before in history. So, King Coal is coming back and he may soon reclaim the title of ruler of the energy world that it had lost to crude oil in the 1960s.

The propaganda technique of the repeated lie has been applied obsessively, against the "hockey stick," the reconstruction of past temperatures on which Michael Mann and coworkers had been working from the 1990s.

It is rare in the history of science that a single piece of experimental evidence has been the object of so many attempts of demolition. Yet, all the serious reviews of the original data have basically confirmed the initial results. Being unsuccessful in demolishing the science, the attacks have moved against the scientist, Michael Mann himself, who has been subjected to an unbelievable denigration campaign, defamed, insulted, and even physically threatened.

With the publication of a prominent article on "Nature" in January 2012, the concept of "Peak Oil" has made another step forward in the debate on resource depletion. This article has made me rethink of the past ten years of work that I did as a member of ASPO, the association for the study of peak oil. Were we right with our prediction of impending peak oil? In a sense, yes, but the crystal ball is always foggy and it cannot be otherwise. The ASPO predictions were basically right but, as all predictions, they were approximate.

Methane hydrates are a true climate bomb that could go off by itself as the result of a relatively small trigger in the form of a global warming. Sufficient warming would cause the decomposition of some hydrates to release methane to the atmosphere. This methane would create more warming and that would generate more decomposition of the hydrates.

The effects of the rapid release of so much methane would be devastating: an abrupt climate change that could bring a true planetary catastrophe.

Scientists seem to be discovering that they can't stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn't reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in "open access journals", which just didn't exist up to not long ago. There is now an "open science movement", and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.

Occasionally, the troubled story of Alfred Wegener's theory has been perversely appropriated by climate deniers to claim that they are discriminated by the scientific establishment. But that only shows that climate deniers don't understand how science works.