1 OIL vs. WARMING FOSSIL FUEL SCARCITY WILL NOT SAVE US FROM GLOBAL WARMING

The extent of global warming which will be experienced on the Earth in the next centuries will be constrained by the trajectories of the anthropic fossil fuel consumption as well as by geological fuel availability. An important paper by W. P. Nel and C. J. Cooper (Nel and Cooper, 2009) will appear in Energy Policy (already available online) attempting to connect the ongoing fossil fuels depletion and the greenhouse warming caused by CO2 emissions. Nel and Cooper conclude that even if all the available fossil fuels would be burned at the maximum possible rate during this century, the consequent warming would cap at less than 1 °C above the 2000 level. Since the conclusion is of outmost importance for policies which will determine the future of mankind, it is worth to investigate how the conclusions of Nel and Cooper disagree with the results of the IPCC reports. Here we will examine the part of Nel and Cooper paper regarding the physics of the climate system. We will not deal with Nel and Cooper evaluations about resources/reserves of fossil fuels. We will use throughout the paper their evaluations in order to make easier the comparison with our results. At the end of this writing we will give a short comment only on the resource evaluation and on the economic part of the paper. We anticipate here that Nel and Cooper calculations do not deal correctly with three aspects of the climate system. This leads to underestimate the global warming by a factor possibly larger than 1.5. Their conclusion “that the extent of global warming may be acceptable and preferable compared with the socio economic consequences of not exploiting fossil fuel reserves to their full technical potential ” is strongly misleading