Reminded by a 20-year anniversary post at RealClimate.org, that I’ve been blogging for 20 years + 6 months on topics of fossil fuel depletion + climate change. The starting point was at a BlogSpot blog I created in May 2004, where the first post set the stage:
Click on the above to go to the complete archives (almost daily posts) until I transitioned to WordPress and what became the present blog. After 2011, my blogging pace slowed down considerably as I started to write in more in more technical terms. Eventually the most interesting and novel posts were filtered down to a set that would eventually become the contents of Mathematical Geoenergy : Discovery, Depletion, and Renewal, published in late 2018/early 2019 by Wiley with an AGU imprint.
The arc that my BlogSpot/WordPress blogging activity followed occupies somewhat of a mirror universe to that of RealClimate. I initially started out with an oil depletion focus and by incrementally understanding the massive inertia that our FF-dependent society had developed, it placed the climate science aspect into a different perspective and context. After realizing that CO2 did not like to sequester, it became obvious that not much could be done to mitigate the impact of gradually increasing GHG levels, and that it would evolve into a slow-moving train wreck. That’s part of the reason why I focused more on research into natural climate variability. In contrast, RealClimate (and all the other climate blogs) continued to concentrate on man-made climate change. At this point, my climate fluid dynamics understanding is at some alternate reality level, see the last post, still very interesting but lacking any critical acceptance (no debunking either, which keeps it alive and potentially valid).
The oil depletion aspect more-or-less spun off into the PeakOilBarrel.com blog [*] maintained by my co-author Dennis Coyne. That’s like watching a slow-moving train wreck as well, but Dennis does an excellent job of keeping the suspense up with all the details in the technical modeling. Most of the predictions regarding peak oil that we published in 2018 are panning out.
As a parting thought, the RealClimate hindsight post touched on how AI will impact information flow going forward. Having worked on AI knowledgebases for environmental modeling during the LLM-precursor stage circa 2010-2013, I can attest that it will only get better. At the time, we were under the impression that knowledge used for modeling should be semantically correct and unambiguous (with potentially a formal representation and organization, see figure below), and so developed approaches for that here and here (long report form).
As it turned out, lack of correctness is just a stage, and AI users/customers are satisfied to get close-enough for many tasks. Eventually, the LLM robots will gradually clean up the sources of knowledge and converge more to semantic correctness. Same will happen with climate models as machine learning by the big guns at Google, NVIDIA, and Huawei will eventually discover what we have found in this blog over the course of 20+ years.
Note:
[*] In some ways the PeakOilBarrel.com blog is a continuation of the shuttered TheOilDrum.com blog, which closed shop in 2013 for mysterious reasons.