Climate bombs
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 & 14
After previous two posts on da awl bidness legacy in the current climate emergency (personal and news), lets look at how previous events presaged the current situation, and conclude with a list of effects to underscore their severity. Next in this series is Build your own climate bomb.
A recent article highlighted carbon bomb projects — go here for definition and statistics — in Russia alone, and that took me back to my petroleum days in Calgary, W Canada over 30 years ago. That was on the shoulder of the fall of Communism, but as Canadians — meaning non-USers — we had privileged access to Soviet Russian oil&gas projects: for example there was a bi-weekly charter flight from Calgary to Novosibirsk over the North Pole, linking two petroleum provinces quite similar to each other in climate, geography and geology. There was one clue however — and you had to live in Calgary to notice — it was mostly Russians coming to Canada not the other way around.
Did you know that five years earlier, my joint venture partner hosted Chinese officials when China was opening up? And no business ensued, as it turned out to be the Chinese researching western business practices… with no intent to invest!
Two anecdotes struck me then: Canadian FracMaster was the only company to succesfully do business in East Siberia, by trading services for a cut in the production rather than for cash. A modern form of barter worked better as the Rouble was a dodgy currency not officially traded by the Soviets, who also feigned ignorance of market rules & practices — again you had to be in Calgary to hear this joke that Soviets said “my money is my money, and your money is my money too” — we later learned that was a sham, as post-Soviet oligarchs proved they knew exactly how market economies worked… probably from studying it during visits like the Chinese cameo above!
The second anecdote is directly relevant to the climate issues we face together, and as the thrird-from-last post (here) shows these rooted in the previous generation. Gulf Canada was interested in exploring for oil&gas in the Komi Republic, immediately north of West Siberia whose oilfields are better known — the banner photo shows the Tyumen river crossing of the trans-Siberian pipeline around here, note the beautiful meandering streams and oxbow lakes — but they did a fast exit when it turned out he Soviet regime tried to saddle them with the environmental remediation costs! That far north is basically permafrost, and Soviet oil&gas exploration and exploitation sloppy practices were legend, again if you lived in Calgary to hear about it…
While recent and extreme climate warming is resulting in catastrophic melt of the permafrost and release of methane trapped in it on a continental scale, at a local scale that permafrost was severely damaged basically since WWII with the Soviet push to open West then East Siberia to oil&gas production and sloppy practices.
Again you had to live there and know a little about the Soviet regime — for disclosure, my parents fled Soviet-occupied Hungary in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 Uprising — to grasp where it all started. It was basically not a petroleum industry issue but industry-wide. Stakhanovism (Wikipedia) and the push to exceed industrial output of Communist five-year plans lead to numerous shortcuts being taken. Best known in Hungary, whose bus and truck manufacturing industries were legend, the balance of vehicle and spare parts production was tilted toward vehicles at the expense of spare parts, in order to have higher vehicle production numbers and more Communist Party rewards… except that the dearth of spare parts crippled the industrialisation of the entire Soviet subcontinent with irreparable equipment!
That was emblematic of the short-sightedness in petroleum practices, where shortcuts were taken in order to boost production numbers to gain Communist Party rewards — not that they were the only ones, with continental US and N African practices legend for their shortcuts no-one talks about — but the damages done to the environment via small yet pervasive ways over the past century and a half — Titusville US & Baku AZ started both in 1859 — are the dirty little secret no-one want to talk about, even in the light of climate change timelines as, say, here.
Witness the excitement my former employ showed at helping a N African country re-open its borders to western oil cos… We drew upon satellite imagery to cover as much ground as we could to assess the status-quo… except that as a petroleum geologist I had to alert innocent map-makers that the imagery displayed in glorious detail the dark oil slicks of poor oil practices in the tan open desert… oops!
In other words, carbon bombs are nothing new… and I like to expand this further to climate bombs: meaning issues lurking below the surface, just waiting to pass the tipping point, catch us unawares and create runaway combined irreversible climate breakdown, in no particular order :
- permafrost methane release
- sinkholes across all climate bands as water tables drop
- wild weather swings that exceed nature’s capacity to adjust
— including jet stream and polar vortex deep excursions
— including growing hurricane seasons in subtropics - same exceeding humans’, plants’ and animals’ ability to adjust
— including catastrophic erosion events across all climate bands
— or baking heat over monsoon season switch extending over a month - humans stripping equatorial forests, peatlands, mangroves etc.
— with governments’ blessing for over decades at places - Arctic and equatorial wildfires (story map and blog)
- 1000 year events becoming decadal
- spring blooming / insect / bird / leafing thrown out of sync
— including collapsing insect population especially pollinating bees
— including farming practices geared to mechanise not preserve - completely unknown ocean frontiers
— deeper & deeper offshore oil&gas production
— gas hydrates underneath continental margins
— ocan abyssal mining
— opening of the Northwest Passage & Arctic routes - changing ocean currents, esp. the Gulf Stream
— including polar ice melts decades ahead of schedule
These are well documented elsewhere, but collecting them in one place will emphasise not only the severity of the situation, but also the multiplicity of risks… AND we have neither touched nor have either science or history of these events combining into either constructive or destructive interference!
Look troublesome to you? Well it is… and it’s meant to!
