Welcome to Global Cooling and the (Future) Renaissance of Fossil Fuels
By Heather Douglas
“Global warming has been an inescapable issue for our age. But 180 years ago, most scientists believed the Earth had been steadily cooling since it was formed. When Louis Agassiz presented the concept of a Great Ice Age to the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences in 1837, his suggestion that the planet had turned colder and then warmed up again was met with skepticism and even hostility, triggering years of fierce scientific debate before the idea was accepted.” Professor Franklin Hadley Cocks, Duke University, Energy Demand and Climate Change (2009).
Nature is as unforgiving to humans as it was to dinosaurs. The energy industry will soon need to ramp up the exploration for and production of energy-rich fossil fuels to stave off the inevitable return of huge glaciers. After all, ice ages last for a millennia and today’s proven coal, oil, and natural gas reserves probably won’t.
According to Professor Hadley Cocks, it took scientists about a century to correctly work out why our planet occasionally cools down. “Now we know that cyclic gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Saturn periodically elongate Earth’s orbit, and this effect combines, from time to time, with slow changes in the direction and degree of the world’s tilt, caused by the gravity of our large moon.”
Consequently, Hadley Cocks adds, “summer sunlight around the poles is reduced, and high-latitude regions such as Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia turn cold enough to preserve snow year-round. This constant snow cover reflects a great deal of sunlight, cooling things down even more, and a new ice age begins.”
The prestigious Russian Academy of Science agrees. Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, chief of space research at the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, says the next” little ice age” started in 2015 and will last somewhere between 45 and 65 years. “The average temperature around the globe will fall about 1.5 Celsius when we enter the deep cooling phase, expected by the year 2060.”
Abdussamatov believes that all available fossil fuels will have been consumed in about 300 years. “Deep cooling in the middle of this century would make it almost impossible to exploit offshore fields and pump oil and gas tens to hundreds of kilometres from the coast at depths of hundreds of metres.” Furthermore, he adds, “freezing conditions will also curtail energy developments elsewhere over many decades, elevating the need for energy conservation in a much more heat-needy world.” This means that advanced civilizations will be hit by a one-two punch that we’ve never seen.
As Columnist Lawrence Solomon wrote in the National Post (December 22, 2016), “An over-heated planet has never been a threat…not ever in human history. An under-heated planet, in contrast, is a threat humans have repeatedly faced over the last millennium, and now we’re due again.”
Isn’t it interesting that one of the world’s largest energy companies, Royal Dutch Shell, declared last summer it was walking away from a large swath of oil and gas reserves in the Canadian Arctic? It has relinquished 30 of its leases around Lancaster Sound – a region of the Arctic Ocean the government and local Inuit groups have long tried to protect as a vital habitat for narwhals, beluga whales, and polar bears – to save these mammals from global warming.
Ironically, in another attempt to save the world from over-heating, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama announced they would designate most of the North American Arctic waters off-limits to new activity (mid-December, 2016).
Five companies — Imperial Oil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron Corp, and Franklin Petroleum — all hold active exploration licences in the Beaufort Sea area, with most expiring within five years, when Trudeau has pledged to review this moratorium. Another group of operators, including Suncor Energy, Paramount Resources, Devon Energy, Nytis Exploration and others, hold non-expiring exploration permits in the High Arctic. While some multi-nationals are abandoning the north, other companies need to think about capitalizing on Canada’s well-deserved, global reputation for its expertise in finding oil and gas fields in harsh, unforgiving environments.
This is a challenge the rugged Canadian energy industry needs to ponder. It has a proven track record of locating the vast energy wealth buried below the Arctic Ocean. There are also fortunes to be made from inventing technology needed to keep us all going.
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