Abstract

This seminar answers the following question: What are the appropriate initial conditions and minimal set of global data that give truthful historical temperature anomalies (ΔT) to-date and enable the high-fidelity predictions of ΔT 80-100 years into the future using a simple algebraic model and uncertainties associated with it? This minimal set consists of the global land and sea surface temperatures, cumulative total emissions (CTE) of CO2 from agriculture and land-use change (AL), burning fossil fuels (FF), and a realistic projection of future FF production based on geology and petroleum engineering. Auxiliary information about air quality improvements since the 1970s, and about seawater levels and polar ice cap melts quantifies other aspects of climate change. If the Global Climate Models did not exist; these data and a simple model that converts CTE into the global and land ΔTs would suffice to quantify the most likely trajectories of climate change over land and globally and their 2σ uncertainties. The conversion of CTE into polar ice cap melts, and global seawater rise can also be obtained. The link between CTE and ΔT are conditioned by our physically and politically plausible scenario of future FF production is close to IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)2-4.5. Given our scenario, we predict with 95% confidence that the global temperature anomaly will be 2.0°æ0.15° C by 2050 and 2.9°æ0.27◦C by 2100; and over land 2.9°æ0.28°C and 4.3°æ0.49°C, respectively. These predictions agree almost exactly with the SSP2-4.5 scenario.

Biography

Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek is a professor of petroleum and chemical engineering at KAUST. Until December 2014, he was the Lois K. and Richard D. Folger Leadership Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He held the distinguished Cockrell Family Regents Chair #11. Between 1990 and 2008, he was a Professor of Geoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was a Senior Reservoir Engineer at Shell Western E&P in Bakersfield, CA (1989‐1990) and a Senior Research Scientist at the venerable Shell Development Bellaire Research Center (BRC) in Houston, TX. (1983‐1989). 

Patzek is also a Presidential Full Professor in Poland (highest honor) and a Distinguished Member of the SPE. By education, he is a chemical process engineer and physicist trained in catalysis and computational fluid mechanics. In 1983, at Shell, two UT professors, Larry Lake and Gary Pope, introduced Patzek to petroleum engineering, and his life was never the same. 

Patzek has engaged in the studies of complex systems, focusing on the human factors in ultra‐deepwater offshore operations. He briefed Congress on the BP Deepwater Horizon well disaster in the Gulf and was a frequent guest on NPR, ABC, BBC, CNN, and CBS programs. In 2011, Patzek became a member of the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee for the Department of Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). He co‐wrote a popular book with a famous historian, Joseph Tainter, "Drilling Down: The Gulf Debacle and our Energy Dilemma." 

Patzek, Michael Marder, and Mr. Frank Male received the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences for the best paper in engineering in 2013, "Gas production in the Barnett Shale obeys a simple scaling law." 

Since 2003, Patzek has engaged in the studies of sustainability and industrial agricultural and agrofuel systems, all viewed through the lens of ecology and irreversible thermodynamics. Patzek's papers in this domain are among his most cited. In 2007, Patzek participated in the OECD ministerial meetings in Paris that coped with the new biofuel mandates established in the US. In 2006 and 2007, Patzek and his son Lucas argued in vain against the irreversible damage of the tropical ecosystems in Indonesia, Malaysia, equatorial Africa and Brazil. Since 2006, Patzek has been teaching a thermodynamically and ecologically rigorous class, "E4: Earth, Environment, Energy, and Economics." Many of his best students at UC Berkeley and UT Austin took this class. At KAUST, students in Patzek's E4 created the Students for Sustainability organization in 2019. These days, climate change and global warming occupy Patzek's attention. 

For his work, Patzek received the Desiderius Erasmus Award from EAGE in 2020 and the SPE IOR/EOR Pioneer Award in 2022. Over the last decade, Patzek has maintained a blog, LifeItself, about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity, and human activities with some 870,000 unique readers. Patzek coauthored over 400 papers and reports.