http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/02/global.warming/index.html
World
oil and gas 'running out'
By CNN's Graham Jones
Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 1245 GMT (8:45 PM HKT)
LONDON, England --
Global warming will never bring a "doomsday scenario"
a team of scientists says -- because oil and gas are running out
much
faster than thought.
The world's oil reserves
are up to 80 percent less than predicted,
a team from Sweden's University of Uppsala says. Production levels
will peak in about 10 years' time, they say.
"Non-fossil fuels
must come in much stronger than it had been hoped,"
Professor Kjell Alekett told CNN.
Oil production levels
will hit their maximum soon after 2010 with
gas supplies peaking not long afterwards, the Swedish geologists
say.
At that point prices
for petrol and other fuels will reach disastrous
levels. Earlier studies have predicted oil supplies will not start
falling until 2050.
Alekett said that his
team had examined data on oil and gas reserves
from all over the world and we were "facing a very critical
situation
globally."
"The thing we
are surprised of is that people in general are not
aware of the decline in supplies and the extent to which it will
affect production.
"The decline of
oil and gas will affect the world population more
than climate change."
According to the Uppsala
team, nightmare predictions of melting
ice caps and searing temperatures will never come to pass because
the reserves of oil and gas just are not big enough to create
that
much carbon dioxide (CO2).
Alekett said that as
well as there being inflated estimates, some
countries in the Middle East had exaggerated the amount of reserves
they had.
Coal-burning could
easily make up the shortfall. But burning coal
would be even worse for the planet, as it would create even more
CO2,
he said.
Predictions of global
meltdown by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) sparked the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an agreement
obliging signatory nations to cut CO2 emissions.
The IPCC examined a
range of future scenarios, from profligate burning
of fossil-fuels to a fast transition towards greener energy sources.
The Uppsala team say
the amount of oil and gas left is the equivalent
of around 3,500 billion barrels of oil -- the IPCC say between
5,000
and 18,000 billion barrels.
Alekett said his team
had now established what they called the
"Uppsala Protocol" to initiate discussion on how the
problems
of declining reserves could be tackled -- protecting the world
economy but also addressing the problem of climate change.
The conclusions of
the Uppsala team were revealed in the magazine
New Scientist Thursday, and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, of the University
of Vienna who headed the IPCC team said it was standing by its
figures.
He said they had factored
in a much broader and internationally
accepted range of oil and gas estimates then the "conservative"
Swedes.
A conference in Russia
this week heard a warning that global warming
kills about 160,000 people through its effects every year. The
numbers
dying from "side-effects" of climate change, such as
malaria and
malnutrition, could almost double by 2020, the climate change
conference
in Moscow was told.
"We estimate that
climate change may already be causing in the region
of 160,000 deaths... a year," Andrew Haines of the UK's London
School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said. (Full story)
Most deaths would be
in developing nations in Africa, Latin America
and Southeast Asia, says Haines. These regions would be worst
hit
by the spread of malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria as a result
of
warmer temperatures, droughts and floods.
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