Hubbert's Peak and Climate Change - David Rutledge

There is a vigorous debate now about fossil-fuel production, and whether it will be sufficient in the future. At the same time, there is an intense effort to predict the contribution to future climate change that will result from consuming this fuel. There has been surprisingly little effort to connect these two. Do we have a fossil fuel supply problem? Do we have a climate-change problem? Do we have both? Which comes first? I will consider the possibility that the time constant for exhaustion of fossil fuel is an order of magnitude smaller than the time constants for temperature and sea-level change. This means that policies aimed at slowing down consumption of fossil fuels are likely to have little effect on the ultimate temperature and sea-level rise, and it suggests a policy with the goal of leaving fossil fuels in the ground as preserves for our descendants.

Professor Rutledge is the Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech and Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering. His research has been in microwave engineering, and he is the author of the textbook Electronics of Radio, published by Cambridge University Press, and the popular microwave computer-aided-design package Puff. He is a winner of the Teaching Award of the Associated Students at Caltech, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

The first few minutes of the talk are cut due to technical difficulties.

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• Hubbert's
• Peak
• and
• Climate
• Change
• David
• Rutledge

[LamperOne]

Absolutely brilliant about peak oil !

[brscorgie]

haha, fiction? Be serious.

[shithead300]

I like this of that above film the peak and what about other?