Combustion of known reserves of oil and gas would be immaterial to climate
Why is the AGW cult obsessed with attacking oil?
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Administration (IEA) the world’s reserves of oil comprise about 1.7 trillion barrels conveniently summarized by Worldometer. I don’t think this is controversial.
Complete combustion of a barrel of oil will produce about 432 kilograms of CO2. Obviously kilograms is a measure of mass, not volume but I will deal with volume later.
Complete combustion of all know oil reserves is not likely, since a lot of oil goes into petrochemicals, asphalt, and non-fuel uses, but for the purposes of this article, assume all known reserves of oil were completely combusted overnight. How much CO2 would be produced and would it matter on anyone’s theory of climate change?
The “how much” is easy. 1.7 x 10^12 barrels x 432 kg/barrel is 734,000,000,000,000 kilograms of CO2. There are 1,000 kilograms in a tonne and 1 billion tonnes in a gigaton, so the complete combustion of all the oil would produce 734 Gigatons of CO2.
The mass of the Earth’s atmosphere is estimated to be 5.146e18 Kg. Again, I don’t think this estimate is the subject of any controversy. Divide by 1 million and express the result in gigatons and 1 ppm (by mass) of Earth’s atmosphere is about 5.2 gigatons. I am rounding up since it is conservative with respect to the point of this article and the data are estimates, not so precise as to warrant more than 2 significant digits. I think it should be obvious that the mass of the atmosphere varies slightly based on how much water vapour is in the atmosphere at any given point of time, but for the purposes of this article, the variability is not important.
The point is that the complete combustion of all know oil reserves would yield CO2 equal to only 734/5.2=141 ppm of Earth’s atmosphere by mass. Since CO2 is ~1.5 times denser than air, that would approximate 211 ppm by volume.
I don’t think there is any theory that suggests an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels of 220 ppm by volume would cause any harm. In the case of oil, about on third of oil goes into non-fuel end uses so the amount available from combustion of all oil reserves known to exist adjusted for non-fuel uses falls to about 140 ppm by volume. This is surely not alarming to anyone.
So why is the CO2 alarm so pervasive? Margaret Thatcher may have had the answer - political science, not climate science.
Natural gas is even less offensive. Complete combustion of the world’s natural gas reserves would create less than 30 ppm of atmospheric CO2. I won’t bore you with the math on this since it is trivial and you can do your own.
Even more interesting is the arithmetic on current emissions of about 35 gigatons per year, equivalent to ~7 ppm of atmosphere by mass and about 10 ppm by volume. But despite 10 ppm of fossil fuel emissions, atmospheric CO2 levels measured at Mauna Loa are increasing by about two or three ppm by volume annually. Burn all oil & gas known to exist on Earth over the next century and atmospheric CO2 levels will rise by less than 170 ppm from the emissions and decline by 60 or 70 ppm from the natural forces already removing CO2 from atmosphere at a rate of 6 or 7 ppm by volume each year for a net increase of ~100 ppm.
Why should anyone care? Because there is political capital in pretending this is a threat and leftists can use that capital to rally support for their socialist agenda. That is why.
I am sharing this article with friends. It should go to every TV & newspaper. Excellent