The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, recently concluded in England, laid out a dire scenario that had to have Al Gore performing bizarre self-congratulatory gymnastics. The report included a brief executive summary (pdf), along with reams of additional analysis and data. It painted a bleak picture.
Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.
Using the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more.
Ugh. The concensus on global climate change had been conclusively reached, and it was not a pretty picture. We simply must act now.
Or, rather, had it, and must we? Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist stepped into the fray earlier this week in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and noted that far more cost effective - and effective - public interest measures could be found than the multi-trillion dollar sinkholes into which the global warming alarmists would place their bets.
The report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the U.K. government has sparked publicity and scary headlines around the world. Much attention has been devoted to Mr. Stern's core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.
Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.
You'll need to read the whole thing, but Mr. Lomborg provides a simple conclusion.
We all want a better world. But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.
Last week, in the UK Telegraph, Richard Lindzen of MIT wrote to quell some of the concerns.
Yes, there does appear to be warming, but the amount is hardly certain or indisputable. And the amount found does not appear that alarming.
The alarm, I would suppose, comes from the notoriously inadequate climate models.
As the primary "consensus" document, the Scientific Assessment of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes, modellers at the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre had to cancel two-thirds of the model warming in order to simulate the observed warming.
So the warming alarm is based on models that overestimate the observed warming by a factor of three or more, and have to cancel most of the warming in order to match observations.
Rather than entertaining the rather obvious possibility that the models are over-reacting to increasing greenhouse gases, advocates are assuming that the cancellation will disappear in the future. Why might models be over-reacting?
The answer is actually fairly simple. Carbon dioxide and methane are minor greenhouse gases (and methane has, for unknown reasons stopped increasing, during the last five years). Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would, all else held constant, only lead to about 1C of warming; quadrupling carbon dioxide would only add another 1C (there is a diminishing return in warming per unit carbon dioxide).
The greater response arises because in current models, the most important greenhouse substances, water vapour and clouds, act so as to amplify the impact of increasing carbon dioxide. But, as the previously cited IPCC document notes, water vapour and especially clouds are major sources of uncertainty in models.
Given the above, what is all the hyperventilating about? Personally, I don't know. It certainly can't be the temperature record. For the past five years, the global mean temperature has been flat to within a few hundredths of a degree (well within the measurement uncertainty); indeed, there has been no statistically significant change in 10 years.
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Under the circumstances, perhaps we should be suspicious of the dishonourable tradition of establishing the alleged truth of global warming by constant repetition, while ignoring reality.
Then this week, also in the UK Telegraph, Christopher Monckton dissects the faulty math in the Stern report. Here are the references and calculations (pdf). It's a rather lengthy and analytical piece, difficult to summarize. A couple of snippets may suffice.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe...
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist (ed: yes, that James Hansen), told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch)...
So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
So they did...
There's a lot of math there. If you have the patience and concentration, go ahead and read, it's worth it. Until the alarmists' arguments are a more honest and accurate and their models don't involve fudges like dividing by 3 to match observed data, I'll keep my feet firmly on the ground and off the global warming hysteria bandwagon.
