The study, undertaken by Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria – a former lead author with the IPCC and probably Canada’s most prominent climate scientist – and his student, Neil Swart, crunched the numbers on future greenhouse gas emissions from various fuel sources. The researchers arrived at some sums that surprised them, particularly regarding the climate impact of Alberta’s oil sands, which have lately been characterized by NASA’s James Hansen and other opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline as a “carbon bomb” whose full development would spell “game over” for the biosphere.Weaver and Swart found that even if every drop of sludgy bitumen beneath Alberta’s boreal forest were mined, upgraded, piped and pumped, it would only add at most 0.6 degrees F to global warming. Since even the most ambitious scenarios for the growth of Alberta’s oil industry would see just a fraction of that total mined over the next 20 years, the study concluded that the actual impact of the oil sands is more likely to be less than 0.1 degree F. The real carbon bombs, they found, were coal and unconventional natural gas (the stuff “fracked” out of solid rock in places like the Marcellus Shale deposit in Pennsylvania and upstate New York).“Our overarching conclusion,” Weaver wrote in a clarification at the Huffington Post, “is that as a society, we will live or die by our future consumption of coal.”
via www.mnn.com
That can't be good for Ohio.
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