By Institute for Energy Research ——Bio and Archives--May 27, 2015
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We recently passed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; the status quo will take us up to 1,000 ppm, raising global average temperature (from a pre-industrial baseline) between 3.2 and 5.4 degrees Celsius. That will mean, according to a 2012 World Bank report, "extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise," the effects of which will be "tilted against many of the world's poorest regions," stalling or reversing decades of development work. "A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided," said the World Bank president. But that's where we're headed. It will take enormous effort just to avoid that fate. Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There's no sign of that happening, or reason to think it's plausible anytime soon. And so, awful sh*t it is.To repeat, it is not accurate in the above quotation for Roberts to say “the status quo will take us up to 1,000 ppm,” because that assumes the RCP8.5 scenario is the status quo—which it is not. More reasonable, middle-of-the-road projections would put the concentration in the year 2100 below that level, so that even stipulating everything else in the latest IPCC report, we would not expect the level of warming that Roberts proposes in his piece. However, let’s consider the next link in his argument. To show us just how unacceptable this stipulated status quo warming would be, Roberts doesn’t refer to the latest “consensus” science on estimated impacts from climate change in the AR5 Working Group II report—which came out in March 2014. Instead, Roberts refers to a 2012 report from the World Bank, and quotes from the president of the World Bank to get his money line on just how little hope remains for humanity. Now don’t get me wrong, the president of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is a really smart guy—he has an MD and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard. But it’s odd that the bulk of Roberts’ case comes from the summary provided by someone who is not trained in climate science, referring to a World Bank report from three years ago. In contrast to the horrible picture painted by Roberts in his Vox piece, one of the three computer models selected by the Obama Administration for modeling future impacts of climate change concluded that there would be net benefits to humanity from global warming, up through about 3°C. And let’s reproduce a chart from the latest IPCC report to summarize the literature on global analyses of impacts from climate change: SOURCE: Table 10.B.1, IPCC WGII AR5, p. 82. As the above table indicates, there really haven’t been many comprehensive studies estimating the impacts on humanity from warming above 3°C. There is a study by Maddison and Rehdanz (in 2011) showing a very large impact, but it is clearly an outlier, well beyond the rest of the literature. Furthermore, the last item in the table—referring to a 2012 study by Roson and van der Mensbrugghe—projects that 4.9°C of global warming would merely reduce global GDP by 4.6 percent. How should we think about that type of impact? Is that catastrophic? Is that worth mobilizing the entire globe to combat? Is such a threat one of the most important issues of our day? Well, the very same AR5 report from the IPCC estimates that to keep global warming contained to 2°C, governments around the world would need to implement policies that would cause economic damage of 4.8 percent of global consumption in the year 2100. (I give full citations and an explanation in this post.) To summarize, the latest IPCC report shows that in a middle-of-the-road outcome, the total damage to humanity from governments implementing a popular climate goal target (namely, limiting warming to 2°C) is greater than the total damage to humanity from unrestricted global warming. This is why I say the climate change debate feels like the Twilight Zone to me: The advocates for aggressive government intervention go through this whole production of soliciting input from various scientists and economists around the world, and when all is said and done their own report shows that the most likely outcome is that “doing nothing” stacks up nicely against other possible strategies.
The latest contretemps was sparked by a comment in Nature by Oliver Geden….Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they're out of office. Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They're worried that if they don't, if they come off as "alarmist" or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, "We're running out of time; we've only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it."Even though Roberts and I are (obviously) coming to this issue from completely different points, I respect his honesty in printing the above. (At least one leading alarmist climate scientist bit his head off for doing so.) Although Roberts, citing Oliver Geden, thinks the climate scientists are being pressured by politicians to paint a rosy picture that justifies aggressive government climate policy, the important point I want to emphasize is: Roberts in his Vox piece is claiming matter of factly that scientists keep tweaking their models to produce results that politicians want to hear. That’s part of the message we at IER have been telling Americans for years, and yet when we say it, we are called “deniers” who reject the “scientific consensus.”That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.
[David Roberts, bold added.]
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The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a not-for-profit organization that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets. IER maintains that freely-functioning energy markets provide the most efficient and effective solutions to today’s global energy and environmental challenges and, as such, are critical to the well-being of individuals and society.