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IPCC: NO 'consensus' on Unmitigated Disaster

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Junk Science Week: IPCC commissioned models to see if global warming would reach dangerous levels this century. Consensus is ‘no’

Matt Ridley, Special to Financial Post | June 19, 2014

Even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage

The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century.

After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic for various media organizations, and having started out alarmed, that’s where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this view. I share it with a very large international organization, sponsored by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the world’s governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself.

The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.

Now two degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn dangerous, according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my children’s children are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any harmful warming, let alone catastrophe.

But what about the fourth scenario? This is known as RCP8.5, and it produces 3.5 degrees of warming in 2081-2100. Curious to know what assumptions lay behind this model, I decided to look up the original papers describing the creation of this scenario. Frankly, I was gobsmacked. It is a world that is very, very implausible.

For a start, this is a world of “continuously increasing global population” so that there are 12 billion on the planet. This is more than a billion more than the United Nations expects, and flies in the face of the fact that the world population growth rate has been falling for 50 years and is on course to reach zero – i.e., stable population – in around 2070. More people mean more emissions.

Second, the world is assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario to be burning an astonishing 10 times as much coal as today, producing 50% of its primary energy from coal, compared with about 30% today. Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable technologies contribute little, because of a “slow pace of innovation” and hence “fossil fuel technologies continue to dominate the primary energy portfolio over the entire time horizon of the RCP8.5 scenario.” Energy efficiency has improved very little.

These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas displacing coal on a huge scale in the United States today, with the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources being discovered on the seabed, with energy efficiency rocketing upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast in virtually every country in the world, the one thing we can say about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.

Notice, however, that even so, it is not a world of catastrophic pain. The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is three times what it is now. Poverty would be history. So it’s hardly Armageddon.

The answer to climate change is, and always has been, innovation. To worry now in 2014 about a very small, highly implausible set of circumstances in 2100 that just might, if climate sensitivity is much higher than the evidence suggests, produce a marginal damage to the world economy, makes no sense. Think of all the innovation that happened between 1914 and 2000. Do we really think there will be less in this century?

As for how to deal with that small risk, well there are several possible options. You could encourage innovation and trade. You could put a modest but growing tax on carbon to nudge innovators in the right direction. You could offer prizes for low-carbon technologies. All of these might make a little sense. But the one thing you should not do is pour public subsidy into supporting old-fashioned existing technologies that produce more carbon dioxide per unit of energy even than coal (bio-energy), or into ones that produce expensive energy (existing solar), or that have very low energy density and so require huge areas of land (wind).

The IPCC produced two reports last year. One said that the cost of climate change is likely to be less than 2% of GDP by the end of this century. The other said that the cost of decarbonizing the world economy with renewable energy is likely to be 4% of GDP. Why do something that you know will do more harm than good?

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, a columnist for the Times (London) and a member of the House of Lords. He spoke at Ideacity in Toronto on June 18.
Matt Ridley is a member of the House of Lords in the UK. He has recently been appointed to the Science and Technology Committee.

Due to usage rights, I have only put up a portion of the article. The entire piece may be found here business.financialpost.com/201…

Matt Ridley speaks of climate sensitivity. I had already put together a piece upon that, here Climate LESS Sensitive to CO2 than IPCC Claims by Kajm

You know there is something wrong when a dozen (now, over a score) of studies, have all found climate sensitivity to be well below the numbers the IPCC and others use in their prognoses' for the future.

Over the past few months I have come to understand something: even IF you agree with a portion of what proponents of the UNproven theory of 'man-made' global warming believe, IF you do not believe that the future is going to be one huge, unmitigated disaster- for the human race, for the climate, for all life on Earth - then you are a 'climate denier' who doesn't give a damn about pollution and wants to destroy the world for profit.

I can only say that a lot of people living in Germany in the 1930s, must have felt much like I do now, whenever the Nazis walked down their streets. Yes, I said that. If you have not been following this as closely as I have, you have no idea just how ugly these people have gotten towards YOU. I'll be following up with an article on that, soon.
© 2014 - 2024 Kajm
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SingABrightSong's avatar
Matt Ridley is in the House of Lords? I wonder if he'll get into an argument with that House of Lords guy(name escapes me) who dogmatically enforces the "consensus" on Wikipedia articles. Considering the insults slung around in the Canadian Parliament, I imagine the British one would be similar.