Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
I have a new paper in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, which asks the question, Is Climate Change the Number One Threat to Humanity? This is threshold question to which many who believe global warming constitutes an existential threat to humanity would answer in the affirmative, although as the paper points out, there is no analysis that supports that conclusion. This paper provides an analysis that attempts to answer this question. It is built on previous efforts that have tried to answer this question.
The paper has been peer reviewed even though it’s labeled as an opinion piece. Unfortunately, the published version requires a subscription. An earlier draft can be found here.
It was written at the invitation of Professor Mike Hulme, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Myanna Lahsen, another editor, and, I presume, the Editorial Board. It was to be paired with a paper by Tim Flannery, which would take an opposing viewpoint. [I don’t know when, or if, Dr. Flannery’s paper will be published.]
Considering the tribal nature of much of the debate surrounding global warming and the general unwillingness of, for lack of a better word, “warmists” to engage in a dispassionate exchange of views, it was very courageous of the editors not only to invite me but, what’s more, to actually publish my contrarian piece after they had read it!
There were at least three reviewers, and the process itself was very fair and professional. The exchanges with reviewers did, indeed, help sharpen the basis for my conclusions. Also, Mike and Myanna, recognizing that I was offering a perspective contrary to most of their readers’, allowed me more space than probably would have been afforded to others. To me, this indicates a genuine desire for a discussion of a contrarian viewpoint as opposed to a cosmetic, pro forma effort, which is what the IPCC process sometimes seems to resemble.
I thank Mike, Myanna, the Editors, and the reviewers for their professionalism, open mindedness, and, in fact, the entire experience. Although I’m no longer unbiased, they have, IMHO, done themselves — and their journal — proud.
ABOUT THE PAPER
Abstract. This paper challenges claims that global warming outranks other threats facing humanity through the foreseeable future (assumed to be 2085–2100). World Health Organization and British government-sponsored global impact studies indicate that, relative to other factors, global warming’s impact on key determinants of human and environmental well-being should be small through 2085 even under the warmest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario. Specifically, over 20 other health risks currently contribute more to death and disease worldwide than global warming. Through 2085, only 13% of mortality from hunger, malaria and extreme weather events (including coastal flooding from sea level rise) should be from warming. Moreover, warming should reduce future global population at risk of water stress, and pressures on ecosystems and biodiversity (by increasing net biome productivity and decreasing habitat conversion). That warming is not fundamental to human well-being is reinforced by lower-bound estimates of net GDP per capita. This measure adjusts GDP downward to account for damages from warming due to market, health and environmental impacts, and risk of catastrophe. For both developing and industrialized countries, net GDP per capita—albeit an imperfect surrogate for human well-being—should be (a) double the current U.S. level by 2100 under the warmest scenario, and (b) lowest under the poorest IPCC scenario but highest under the warmest scenario through 2200. The warmest world, being wealthier, should also have greater capacity to address any problem, including warming. Therefore, other problems and, specifically, lowered economic development, are greater threats to humanity than global warming.
Approach Used. The paper:
(a) Compares the global impacts of global warming through the foreseeable future against the impacts of other factors on key determinants of human and environmental well-being in order to gauge whether the negative impact of warming on these determinants exceeds that due to the other factors.
(b) Checks whether human well-being, as measured by net GDP per capita for developing and developed countries through the foreseeable future (and beyond) is projected to be lower under the warmest scenario (per the IPCC’s Special Report on Emission Scenarios, SRES) than under the cooler scenarios.
Foreseeable future is optimistically considered to be 2085-2100 — “optimistic” because future impacts depend upon emission scenarios which are driven by socioeconomic assumptions and projections which arguably “cannot be projected semi-realistically for more than 5–10 years at a time.”[1]
The key determinants of human and environmental well-being that I examine are:
(a) Human health, based on impacts on mortality via hunger, malaria (a proxy for tropical vector-borne diseases), and extreme weather events,
(b) The global population at risk of water stress, and
(c) Ecological impacts, based on net biome productivity (a measure of carbon sink capacity), habitat lost to cropland, and loss of coastal wetland.
The future global impacts of global warming on key determinants are derived from the Fast Track Assessments (FTAs) sponsored by the British Government.[2],[3],[4] Most of the FTA authors also co-authored various chapters of IPCC’s Second, Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. They include, for example, Martin Parry (Chairman, IPCC Working Group II during the preparation of AR4), Nigel Arnell (lead author, LA, water resources chapter, AR4), Robert Nicholls (coordinating LA, coastal systems, AR4), and Sari Kovats (LA, human health, AR4). Not surprisingly, the FTA reports get substantial play in the IPCC reports. I note all this only to emphasize that, from the perspective of those enamored with the consensus, the provenance of my estimates ought to be impeccable.
Net GDP per capita for each IPCC SRES scenario is estimated by subtracting from the GDP per capita in the absence of any global warming the equivalent losses in GDP per capita from warming due to market, health and environmental impacts, and risk of catastrophe. The specifics of these calculations are detailed here. I have attempted to be conservative at each step:
(a) Through 2100, the GDP per capita in the absence of warming is taken directly from the assumptions used to construct each IPCC scenario. Undaunted by the fact that the IPCC scenarios only extended to 2100, the Stern Review provided estimates through 2200.24 [An obvious example of economists treading where even fools would not dare.] My estimates for the unadjusted GDP per capita, however, assume lower economic growth than the Stern Review.
(b) Damages from warming are based on the Stern Review’s 95th percentile (upper bound) estimate. But the Stern Review’s central estimate “lies beyond the 95th percentile—that is, it is an outlier.”[5] That is, the damages of warming that I have used are based on an upper bound estimate from an outlier. Moreover, the Stern Review’s central estimate, like other studies, overestimates the costs/damages from global warming partly because it does not fully account for increases in future adaptive capacity (see below).
Thus, the net GDP per capita estimates used in the paper should be lower bound estimates.
This paper does not address hypothesized low-probability but potentially high consequence outcomes such as a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation or the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica Ice Sheets, which have been deemed unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future by both the IPCC and the US Global Change Research Program, among others.[6],[7],[8]
Systematic Biases In Global Warming Impact Studies. The paper notes that global warming impact studies systematically overestimate negative impacts while simultaneously underestimating positive consequences. The net negative impacts, therefore, are likely to be substantially overestimated. This is because these studies fail to consider adequately society’s capacity to adapt autonomously to either mitigate or take advantage of climate change impacts.[9],[10]
This violates the IPCC’s methodological guidelines for impact assessments, which require consideration of autonomous or automatic adaptations. These adaptations depend on, among other things, adaptive capacity, which should advance with time due to the assumption of economic growth embedded in each IPCC emission scenario (see Figure 1).9,10,[11],[12] However, these advances are rarely accounted for fully in impacts assessments. For example, the FTA’s water resource study totally ignores adaptive capacity while its malaria study assumes no change in adaptive capacity between the baseline year (1990) and projection year (2085) (see here).9 Consequently, the assessments are internally inconsistent because future adaptive capacity does not reflect the future economic development used to derive the emission scenarios that underpin global warming estimates.
Figure 1: : Net GDP per capita, 1990-2200, after accounting for the upper bound estimates of losses due to global warming for four major IPCC emission and climate scenarios. For 2100 and 2200, the scenarios are arranged from the warmest (A1FI) on the left to the coolest (B1) on the right. The average global temperature increase from 1990 to 2085 for the scenarios are as follows: 4°C for AIFI, 3.3°C for A2, 2.4°C for B2, and 2.1°C for B1. For context, in 2006, GDP per capita for industrialized countries was $19,300; the United States, $30,100; and developing countries, $1,500. Source: Ref. 42.
Another source of systematic overestimation of net negative impacts is introduced because impact assessments generally ignore increases in adaptive capacity because of secular technological change. Secular technological change results from the fact that over time:
(a) Existing technologies becomes cheaper (or more cost-effective), and
(b) New technologies, that are even more cost-effective, become available.9,10,12
Long-term projections that neglect economic development and secular technological change often overstate impacts by an order of magnitude or more.12,[13]For example,the FTA’s malaria study assumed static adaptive capacity between baseline and projection years (1990–2085).[14] Applying the same assumption to project U.S. deaths in 1970 from various water-related diseases—dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid, other gastrointestinal disease, malaria—using data from 1900 implies freezing death rates at 1900 levels. But, in fact, from 1900–1970 they declined by 99.6%–100.0%.12 Similarly, because of the increase in adaptive capacity globally, global death rates from extreme weather events have declined by 98% since the 1920s.[15]
Despite the systematic overestimation of net negative impacts, my paper uses the FTA results without adjusting them downward.
RESULTS
Results of the analyses are summarized in the last two subsections of the paper. Following is a lightly edited version of these. Note that footnotes have been dropped, figures have been renumbered, and I have “bolded” certain words and phrases.
Synthesis of impacts on key determinants of human and environmental well-being
Regarding human health, the World Health Organization’s latest (2009) study on Global Health Risks provides estimates that indicate that global warming is presently outranked by at least 22 other health risk factors (Figure 2).[16] By 2085, despite using impacts estimates that tend to overestimate net negative impacts, warming is projected to contribute less than one-seventh of the total mortality from hunger, malaria and extreme weather events even under the warmest IPCC scenario (Figure 3). Thus, global warming is unlikely to be the most important health risk facing mankind through the foreseeable future notwithstanding claims to the contrary.[17],[18]
With respect to water stress, despite massive population growth, the share of global population with access to safe water and improved sanitation currently continues to increase, and deaths from drought have declined by 99.9% since the 1920s. In the future, water-stressed populations may increase, but largely due to non-climate change factors. However, warming, by itself, may reduce net water-stressed population (Figure 4). Aggressive mitigation to limit the global temperature increase to 2 °C, may, moreover, increase net water-stressed population, relative to either the “unmitigated climate change” case.[19]
Figure 2: Ranking global public health priorities based on mortality (right hand panel) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost prematurely (left hand panel) in 2004 for 24 health risk factors. The total length of each bar indicates the magnitude of deaths or lost DALYs globally to the specific health risk factor. For developing countries, the ranking of global warming is unchanged, whereas for industrialized countries, it would rank second last on the basis of deaths, and 4th last on the basis of lost DALYs.
Figure 3. Deaths in 2085 due to Hunger, Malaria and Extreme Events, With and Without Global Warming. Only upper bound estimates are shown for mortality due to global warming. Average global temperature increase from 1990-2085 for each scenario is shown below the relevant bar.
Figure 4. Population at Risk (PAR) from Water Stress in 2085, With and Without Global Warming. The vertical bars indicate the PARs based on the mid-point estimates of several model runs, while the vertical lines indicate the range of estimates.
With respect to ecological impacts through 2100, global warming might (a) increase net biome productivity, which translates into greater vegetation and net carbon sink capacity; and (b) decrease the amount of habitat converted to human use, which would reduce pressures on biodiversity and ecosystems (Table 1). However, coastal wetlands are projected to be further reduced, but more because of non-climate change factors than climate change (Table 1).
Table 1: Ecological indicators under different scenarios, 2085-2100.
These results also indicate that if climate were to be rolled back and frozen at its 1990 level—something that is infeasible with current technology without also risking rolling back economic development and increasing poverty to levels corresponding to pre-World War II levels—then in 2085, mortality from malaria, hunger and extreme weather events would be reduced by no more than 13%, the net water-stressed population might increase globally, and threats to biodiversity and ecosystems might, likewise, increase.
Thus, in aggregate, while global warming may be important, other factors would have a much greater net adverse impact on human and environmental well-being through the foreseeable future.
Future net GDP per capita and human well-being in a warming world
The above conclusion is reinforced by estimates of future net GDP per capita. Figure 1 [derived using the results of the Stern Review] indicates that net GDP per capita in both developing and industrialized countries should be highest under the richest-but-warmest (A1FI) scenario and lowest under the poorest-but-most-populous (A2) scenario at least through 2200.
It has been shown elsewhere, that improvements in a variety of direct or indirect indicators of human well-being are correlated with GDP per capita.10,12,13 These indicators include life expectancy, infant mortality, food supplies per capita, absence of malnutrition, educational attainment, access to safe water and sanitation, health expenditures, and research and development expenditures. For most of these indicators, the relationship is logarithmic in GDP per capita. Notably, the UN Development Program’s (UNDP’s) most commonly used Human Development Index (HDI)[20]— which was developed as an indicator of human well-being that would supplement, if not supplant, GDP per capita[21]—is also correlated with (a) GDP per capita with a correlation coefficient of 0.74, and (b) logarithm of GDP per capita with a coefficient of 0.94 (based on cross country data for 2009).[22] This is to be expected because not only is the logarithm of per capita GDP (or income) a component of HDI, the other two components are life expectancy and an educational factor, both of which are themselves correlated with the logarithm of GDP per capita.10,13
Accordingly, GDP per capita should itself serve as an approximate indicator for human well-being. And since the Stern Review estimates include losses from market effects, non-market effects from environmental and public health impacts, and the risk of catastrophe, the net GDP per capita shown in Figure 1 should also serve as a useful but imperfect indicator of human well-being that fully considers the effects of unmitigated warming.
In any case, because climate change impacts assessments as a rule do not provide projections of life expectancy and educational factors that could be employed to estimate HDI, future net GDP per capita, despite its imperfections, is perhaps the best one can do for an indicator of future human well-being that also accounts for the impacts of warming.
Figure 1, therefore, indicates that if humanity has a choice, it ought to strive for the developmental path corresponding to the richest scenario notwithstanding any associated global warming.
This should, moreover, have additional knock-on benefits. First, adaptive capacity should be highest under the wealthiest scenario, ceteris paribus.10 Thus, society’s ability to cope with (or take advantage of) any global warming ought to be highest under this scenario. [Note that the upper bound estimates of damages from unmitigated climate change are already factored into the derivation of net GDP per capita.] Second, the health impact of global warming should be least under the richest scenario because this impact is related to poverty, and poverty is most likely to be eliminated—and eliminated sooner—under this scenario. Third, many health risks that currently rank higher than global warming are also poverty-related (Figure 2). More importantly, the cumulative contribution of various poverty-related diseases to global death and disease is 70–80 times greater than warming. But these diseases are also most likely to be eradicated under the wealthiest-but-warmest scenario. Fourth, mitigative capacity should also be highest under the wealthiest scenario.10
Finally, the wealthiest scenario should also have the highest adaptive and mitigative capacities to address not just climate change but any other problem. As shown elsewhere,10,12,13 the determinants of human well-being improve with economic and technological development. The relationship is somewhat more complex for environmental determinants: initially these determinants deteriorate, but then go through an environmental transition after which they begin to improve, with development.12,13 This is why the wealthiest countries generally have a cleaner environment, greater reversion of agricultural lands to nature and, de facto, more stringent environmental protections than developing. Given the projections of net GDP per capita (Figure 1), all countries are more likely to be on the right side of the environmental transition by 2100, particularly under the warmest scenario.
A corollary to this is that if greenhouse gas policies effectively increase poverty, e.g., by slowing economic growth or increasing the prices of basic needs (such as food to adequately fulfill the body’s energy requirements or fuel to maintain safe ambient conditions) then the resulting mortality increases might, given the climate system’s inertia, exceed any reductions in these health effects due to GHG reductions for decades.
A case in point is biofuels. Much of the increase in biofuel production is the result of policies designed to displace fossil fuel consumption, partly due to the perceived need to limit GHG emissions. This has had the unintended consequence of increasing food prices and, indirectly, hunger and poverty in developing countries. The increase in poverty due to increased biofuel production since 2004 in response to such policies is estimated to have increased deaths in 2010 by 192,000 and disease by 6.7 million lost DALYs[23] which exceeds the 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost DALYs attributed to warming.16
To summarize, climate change is not the world’s most important problem. Other problems have a larger negative impact on human and environmental well-being. Reduced economic development, in particular, would be a bigger problem, especially for developing countries. And if climate change policies compromise such development, they too can become problems despite the best of intentions. On the other hand, greater economic and technological development would help society deal not only with climate change, but other, higher priority problems simultaneous3ly.
COROLLARY
Although the paper doesn’t explicitly address the issue of whether the global temperature increase (∆T) ought to be limited to 2 °C above pre-industrial, the analyses presented in the paper indicates that human well-being under the warmest scenario (which is projected to increase ∆T by 4 °C above 1990 by 2085) is higher than under the cooler scenarios, despite substantially overestimating its net negative impacts (at least through 2200). Note that the net GDP per capita analysis on which this is based does consider environmental impacts and the risk of catastrophe, courtesy of the Stern Review.
NOTE TO READERS
Finally, I have a request for the reader who my wish to post a question on this blog entry, please read the whole thing, because I’ll only be available sporadically to respond to questions. Thanks.
REFERENCES
[1] Lorenzoni I, and Adger WN. Critique of Treatments of Adaptation Costs in PAGE and FUND Models. In: Warren, R. et al. eds. Spotlighting Impacts Functions in Integrated Assessment Models, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Working Paper 91, Norwich, 2006, 72–79. See p.74.
[2] Parry ML, Livermore M., eds. A new assessment of the global effects of climate change. Global Environmental Change 1999, 9:S1–S107.
[3] Arnell NW, Cannell MGR, Hulme M, Kovats RS, Mitchell JFB, Nicholls RJ, Parry ML, Livermore MTJ, White A. The consequences of CO2 stabilization for the impacts of climate change. Climatic Change 2002, 53:413–46.
[4] Parry ML, ed. Special issue: an assessment of the global effects of climate change under SRES emissions and socio-economic scenarios. Global Environmental Change 2004, 14:1–99.
[5] Tol RSJ. The Social Cost of Carbon: Trends, Outliers and Catastrophes. Economics—the Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal 2008, 2(25):1–24.
[6] US Global Change Research Program. 2009. Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, page 18.
[7] Goklany IM. 2009. Trapped Between the Falling Sky and the Rising Seas: The Imagined Terrors of the Impacts of Climate Change. University of Pennsylvania Workshop on Markets & the Environment, December 13 2009.
[8] IPCC. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, page 17.
[9] Goklany IM. Is a Richer-but-warmer World Better than Poorer-but-cooler Worlds? Energy & Environment 2007, 18 (7 and 8):1023–1048.
[10] Goklany IM. Integrated strategies to reduce vulnerability and advance adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 2007;doi:10.1007/s11027-007-9098-1.
[11] Goklany IM. Discounting the Future. Regulation 2009 (Spring) 32:36-40.
[12] Goklany IM. Have increases in population, affluence and technology worsened human and environmental well-being? Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 2009, 1(3).
[13] Goklany IM. The Improving State of the World. Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2007.
[14] van Lieshout M, Kovats RS, Livermore MTJ, Marten P. Climate change and malaria: analysis of the SRES climate and socio-economic scenarios. Global Environmental Change 2004, 14(1):87–99.
[15] Goklany IM. Deaths and Death Rates from Extreme Weather Events: 1900-2008. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2009, 14 (4):102–09.
[16] World Health Organization (WHO). Global Health Risks. Geneva: WHO; 2009. http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/global_health_risks/en/index.html (accessed May 8 2011)
[17] Costello A, and University College London-Institute for Global Health and Lancet Commission. Managing the health effects of climate change. Lancet 2009, 373:1693–1733.
[18] McMichael AJ, Woodruff RF, Hales S. Climate change and human health: present and future risks. Lancet 2006, 367:859–869.
[19] Arnell NW, van Vuuren DP, Isaac M. The implications of climate policy for the impacts of climate change on global water resources. Global Environmental Change 2011, 21:592–603.
[20] UN Development Program. 2011. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the Human Development Index (HDI). http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/FAQs_2011_HDI.pdf (accessed December 23 2011).
[21] Sen A. Assessing Human Development: Special Contribution In: United Nations Development Programme (1999). Human Development Report 1999. New York: Oxford University Press, 23.
[22] UN Development Program. International Human Development Indicators, 2011. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi/ (accessed November 26 2011).
[23] Goklany IM. Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries? Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 16 (1):9–13.
24 Stern N. The Economics of Climate Change. Her Majesty’s Treasury, London, 2006.
iimoblok says:
October 18, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Being a cross disciplinary student in both social and environmental sciences this paper is both heartening and disheartening at the same time. As social science student, it is good to see that the stressors that affect people such as disease, poverty, shortages of water, economic development issues etc. take precedence over climate change. However, this piece of work is disheartening in that is shades climate change in such a way that it almost makes it seem irrelevant and almost more of a slight issue instead of a real problem. This article, in a sense, seems to sweep climate change under the carpet.
The article also seems to take the good that people are doing in terms of trying to offset emissions and making them seem worse than what they are. Case in point is the biofuel debate, yes it might increase the price of food, but it will lower the amount of GHG’s emitted and it may teach people not to waste the food that they have. A couple of months ago I read that in the UK, almost 4 slices of bread is thrown away everyday simply because the people do not eat the end slices of the bread once its cut. Also we find that certain farmers and corporate will rather dump produce instead of sell it at a discounted rate simply because the produce is not the correct shape, so I think we should be looking at corporate and asking them what they are doing to try and minimalise the wastage of produce as well as what they are doing to offset emissions as well as how are they helping to improve the underprivileged that live in degenerated areas.
Don’t get me wrong, the author of this piece has done a really good job in highlighting and interpreting the data from the ar4 and various other works from the IPCC. I also agree that climate change is not such an immediate problem such as reduced economic development; however climate change isn’t something that can be fixed or mended or put on the shelf because there are definite climate shifts. In Cape Town we are getting colder, dryer summers and hotter summers I mean in the next 20 or so years we should be expecting 40 degree Celsius summers which is very uncomfortable and will definitely hinder economic development then.
It all comes down to how can we adapt or mitigate the effects of climate change now, so that when it does get worse we will have adequate contingency plans in place to help those who are the most vulnerable and those who will suffer the most i.e. the poor.
In my opinion this article highlights the contemporary issues that are plaguing mankind but it will get a lot worse if climate change is swept under the carpet.
This article, in a sense, seems to sweep climate change under the carpet.
Sigh!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/09/18/climategate-star-michael-mann-courts-legal-disaster/
Humans with no education, no technology, and no written language survived climate change that put this cave entrance well underwater: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/cosquer/index.php
Those people not only survived, their descendants went on to create even greater works of art:
http://www.museetoulouselautrec.net/
Climate change is not a threat. It has always been inconvenient and will continue to be so. We have not, in my lifetime, experienced climate change. You will know when it happens, and it won’t be measured in tenths of degrees and millimeters of sea level change.
JennyR at October 18, 2012 at 2:10 am says:
RESPONSE: We are much less dependent on climate and weather (C&W) today than in times past. For example:
(a) In 1800, about 80-90% of the U.S. working population was engaged in agriculture. This had dropped to 41% by 1900, 16% by 1945, and today it is 1.5%. This shrinkage occurred despite the increase in agricultural production because other sectors grew more rapidly. In 1900, agriculture accounted for 23% of U.S. GDP; today it is 0.7%. So the dependence of economic well-being on climate and weather has is much less dependent on C&W.
(b) Because of global trade, crop failures in a region of the world don’t condemn that region to starvation as in times past. Thus, deaths from drought have declined by 99.9% since the 1920s, as noted in the post (above).
(c) As also noted in the above post, deaths and death rates from extreme weather events have declined by 93% to 98% since the 1920s.
Also, I am not sure where you get the notion that Britain’s economy may fail due to a catastrophic hurricane. I think it is much more likely that its economy will fail due to misguided energy policies that push up the price of energy (including electricity).
imoblok at October 18, 2012 at 2:11 pm claims I am trying to sweep climate change under the rug. By this, I presume you mean that I am trying to ignore climate change.
RESPONSE: On the contrary, what I’m trying to do is shine a light not only on the impacts of global warming but simultaneously on the impacts of other factors on key determinants that GW might influence. Having done this, it seems that the former is not as big a deal (as other factors). You may not be happy with this conclusion but it’s not the result of ignoring global warming. In fact, it’s the result of giving (more than) due consideration to global warming, as explained in the post (and in greater detail in the underlying paper).
If AGW causes climate changes, i.e., the world gets to hot to handle, then we have to acknowledge that before industrialization the world managed to survive and prosper when the climate generally became warmer i.e the MWP and Roman Warm Period. Populations displaced and increasing from what ever causation factor will have an impact on survival. However, climate change happens, but it is the weather and natural seismic activity that kills us off. The next is wars and disease. One heat wave in France caused deaths and most was from heat exhaustion. The temperature was 42 C, not all that hot really by Australian standards, but with millions of people turning on air conditioners or not drinking enough, one nuclear reactor was about to shut down. It spelled out a potential human disaster, such as a tsunami, volcanic eruptions, & earthquakes. Our biggest problem is if it becomes really colder, and parts of the world can’t feed themselves. An interesting observation, famines like those experienced in Ethiopia decades ago, but were not caused by climate change, but civil strife and wars and displacing people from their normal place of abode. As far a human population sizes, some nations without welfare, cannot survive well. Never have either, and that is due to their overall political management and internal strife. Oh isn’t it easier to blame western and richer countries causing their environmental problems, rather than poor agricultural practices and governments hungry to make money out of the subsistence, hunter and gatherer, people that stand in their way of so called profits. i.e. Palm oil profits, oil, burning down rainforest, gas exploration, and mining ventures?
What Climate Change? The natural climate change, or the imaginary Anthropogenic Climate Change (AGW)? If you mean the AGW, isn’t that like you asking what is going to be done about someone beating their wife, before producing evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the accusation has any truth to it?
RichardCourtney
‘Mickey Mouse is anthropormophic.
The AGW hypothesis is about anthropogenic global warming…’
Excellent pick up. I enjoyed a rueful laugh at myself there.
Wouldn’t it have been appropriate if both papers were to be submitted before one was published? This seems like an invitation for Prof Flim Flam (as he is fondly known) to merely respond to your paper rather than put forward an original argument of his own.
Four questions of Indur Glokany
(1) What happens to your analysis if you stretch the timeline to 2200?
(2) What cost you put on a price on the loss of around one third of biodiversity?
(3) How would you factor in the Netherlands example, provided upstring, in your analysis?
(4) How did you factor statistics for child starvation into your famine percentages?
http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm
Frankly, your questions appear to be quite bizarre considering the Earth’s past and its inevitable future. Consider the following facts, and then compare your questions to those facts. The Earth’s sea levels in the past have been as much as nearly 600 meters higher than the present sea level, and the future sea levels will also be some hundreds of meters higher than they are at the present time. In the coming decades and centuries the sea level will continue to rise a number of meters and tens of meters, until the next ice age lowers the sea levels to about 70 to 100 meters below the present sea levels. These changes in sea levels will occur whether or not humans are extinct or not. The Netherlands will have to do whatever it must do to adapt to this natural reality. Humans will be no more able to stop these natural changes than King Canute was able to order the incoming sea tide to halt its advance upon the beach to satisfy the King’s ministers.
What price do you place on the pursuit of a fantasy climate hoax at the expense of destroying the economies which support human lives?
But we do! We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Indur Glokany
Thank you for your response.
When I read your last couple of lines, I realized that we were engaging on the basis of a different set of assumptions and a different set of assessments about the risks and probabilities involved. These differences render it virtually certain that our policy discussions will whistle past each other in the dark.
There is one point that I believe we can continue to discuss, usefully.
(4) How did you factor statistics for current child starvation into your famine percentages?
A core methodological issue in addressing your set of statistics in relation to starvation and well-being is to disentangle what might be called the climate signal from the ‘noise’ of war and other forms of general human bastardry to other humans.
One example will demonstrate my meaning. Around 3 million Indians died in a single famine in India during the Second World War. There was a bad monsoon in southern India. In one way, it could be argued that the death of 3 million Indians was, therefore, climate-related. On the other hand, it could be argued, and has been argued cogently, that there were ample food stores available in India at the time, that there was a railway system with the capacity to transport the food stores, and not one person need have died in that famine. The deaths were, therefore, the consequence of deliberate colonial administrative decisions in full knowledge of the consequences. You can see what I mean about the difference between climate ‘signal’ and human ‘noise’.
There were other starvation spikes from the 1920’s on. Collectivization in the Soviet Union and the consequent mass starvation is another example.
However, these were events, and spikes in a background where people did not starve to death in ‘normal’ years. Currently perhaps 15 million children under the age of five die of starvation every year. (The statistics are, I believe, open to considerable challenge). I am particularly interested in how you sieve out the political, war and adminstrative noise that has killed so many people by starvation in order to make a valid comparison between climate-related starvation in the early part of last century and the first decade of this century such that you can reach the conclusions you do.
You end by asking what I take to be a rhetorical question of your own:
‘What price do you place on the pursuit of a fantasy climate hoax at the expense of destroying the economies which support human lives?’
To which the rhetorical answer would be, ‘No price at all. But then, why write your paper at all? Why are we having this discussion at all?’
I believe I understand your response to my questions – bizarre – now. You are a supporter of the theory that climate variability is totally natural and that humans have no impact. From such a position, my questions might appear ‘bizarre’. (I trust I have not misrepresented your position here.)
For me, an assessment of prevention versus adaptation is far more nuanced, far more uncertain, and far more difficult than a simple, axiomatic resort to a theory that several thousand individuals from dozens of nations and hundreds of institutions and through dozens of languages, the editors of all major scientific journals, and (almost all) major science academies, have been engaged in a giant global conspiracy for nearly three decades to perpetrate a hoax. On this, we differ.
For me, assuming there is some sort of probability that athropogenic global warming is real, the policy discussion between prevention and adaptation depends on a complex assessment, not only of the degree of probability, but a keen assessment of the risks and costs of alternative policy responses. National-level responses include tough policy issues relating to the prisoner’s dilemma, etc, etc. I am intensely interested in the policy settings surrounding whether to ‘prevent’ or not. At the same time, adaptation is more and more interesting to me, not because it is unavoidable, but because, IMHO, H. sapiens is highly unlikely to avoid prevention, whether the latter is required or not.
What I find puzzling, given your views, is why have you written your paper at all. Is it not, in your own terms, a waste of effort in the face of the inevitable?
Howskepticalment:
In your post addressed to Indur Glokany at October 19, 2012 at 4:20 am you say
It is a fact – NOT a “theory” – that there is no evidence of any kind to suggest, imply and/or indicate that global climate variability is other than totally natural.
That is reality.
Humans do affect local climates in a variety of ways; e.g. a city is warmer than its surrounding countryside. But that is not relevant to the subject of this thread.
The reason your comments are ‘bizarre’ is because they do not pertain to reality. Instead, they assume an AGW effect exists which has no supporting evidence but is refuted but much evidence.
If I were to complain to Indur Glokany that he does not consider the effect of the fairies at the bottom of my garden then my comments would be as ‘bizarre’ as yours and for the same reason.
Richard
I have not yet heard anyone mention that if the climate mongers get their way and CO2 is actually reduced we will all starve to death. This is not a war on capitalism or the like, it is a war against all living things.
Joseph
Richard
In the broad there are two theories for explaining climate. One theory is that climate is subject to signficant anthropogenic forcing and the other theory is that climate is subject only to natural forcings. What is at dispute is not whether either or both are theories.
What is at dispute is which theory is better at explaining climate.
Trying to censor debate about other theories by claiming that your theory is the only correct theory and that other theories are ‘bizarre’ is, IMHO, not dispassionate scientific discourse but emotive religious dogmatism.
BTW, I am still waiting to see Mr Glokany’s explication of his starvation figures. With between 50 and 150 million children, depending on how you do the stats, under five having died of starvation in the 21st Century, I believe the known statistics cannot support his conclusion. The theory that things are getting better all the time does not appear to apply to them, at least.
Thank you Indur for some fine gems of logic that I have come to expect and look forward to in your articles:
“Consequently, the assessments are internally inconsistent because future adaptive capacity does not reflect the future economic development used to derive the emission scenarios that underpin global warming estimates.”
That is rich. Indeed, if rising CO2 is going to bring economies to wrack and ruin, they would certainly result in reduced CO2.
and:
“And if climate change policies compromise such development, they too can become problems despite the best of intentions.”
Indeed, policies to save us from the horrors of Climate Change that curtail development are a case of the killing the patient with medication.
Howskepticalment at October 19, 2012 at 4:20 am said:
RESPONSE: First, I looked at “hunger”, not “famine”. Second, the methodology is laid out in the paper. I use estimates from the FTA study for hunger for the global population at risk of hunger in the absence of any climate change, and the increase in this population at risk because of climate change. This allows me to estimate the percentage increase in hunger due to climate change. For how I estimated numbers of deaths due to hunger, let me suggest you read the paper.
Howskepticalment at October 19, 2012 at 4:20 am said:
RESPONSE:If you go through the above thread, you’ll find that it wasn’t me who made that statement! It was D. Patterson on October 19, 2012 at 1:09 am. You also go on to state:
.
I don’t know about D. Patterson, but my paper does not assume that climate variability is “totally natural.” In fact, its estimates are taken from studies that use estimates of climate change based on Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (“global climate model” for short) that have passed muster with the IPCC. So, to the extent those models include (or not) natural variability, my analysis would automatically take that into consideration. However, none of those models assume that climate change is only due to natural variability.
Indur Golkany
My hearfelt apologies to you for misreading Patterson’s post as your own, and for drawing false conclusions about your position. It is just as well that I was polite about it or I would have been left looking doubly foolish!
I note in particular that you predicate your analyses on a significant anthropogenic contribution to climate change.
Assuming this as a starting point, In genera, the closer we get to the present, the less likely it is that prevention is a superior global option to adaptation.The further we get from the present, the more likely it is that prevention is a superior global option to adaptation.
Put simply the very short-term risks for doing nothing are low but the long-term risks accrue. I suggest that somewhere between now, and a long time from now, there is a switch where the benefits of prevention are less costly than the disbenefits of adaptation. The critical policy question is this: How long from now? It was this that I was trying to tease out with my questions in relation to stretching your analyses to 2200. This was also part of the background of why I raised the knotty examples of costing the loss of the Netherlands as well as the issue of costing biodiversity loss.
Howskepticalment says:
October 19, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Indur Golkany
My hearfelt apologies to you for misreading Patterson’s post as your own, and for drawing false conclusions about your position. It is just as well that I was polite about it or I would have been left looking doubly foolish!
As opposed to looking singularly foolish?
Howskepticalment: (October 19, 2012 at 5:53 pm)
And I suggest there’s benefit instead
In all this “global warming” that you dread
Back when it warmed, the 80s-90s time
Reduced the storms, while yields of crops did climb
We benefit today because it’s warm
We still see less of wild cyclonic storm
And crop yields staying higher, even here
In US lands, despite the drier year
The lands available for crops expand
As CO2 makes greater growing land
The “ocean acid” scare’s been shown a bust
And “drought!” has paled with 1930s dust
We know that CO2 adds much to crops
This feeds one-seventh of the planet’s pops
So all in all, the benefits outweigh
The “evils” warmists struggle to portray
And if you’d blame this climate change on Man
(Where in the main part, I don’t think you can)
You should be cheering! Make more CO2!
But I’d doubt this is what you’d like to do.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Keith
Good to see that the issues inspire good poetry.
I don’t think that any serious scientists are arguing that changes to climate, however forced, will only have either all benefits or all disbenefits. I believe that most serious scientists would also agree that the balance between potential benefits and disbenefits would vary over time.
By way of background, I have an extensive background in farming and, in retirement, still run a herd of methane farters. Scientists are working on food supplements and the like which reduce bovine emissions. I wish them well.
IMHO, the discourse around the food security implications of possible changes in climate are frequently very poorly grounded and very rarely comprehensive. As someone who has struggled with drought and flood, literally, and with good years and bad years, I often think to myself, ‘Hey, these guys just do not get it.’ Just to give you an example. In a recent bad drought in the Murray Darling Basin in Australia the rainfall was similar to rainfall in other bad historical droughts in the Murray Darling Basin. There was a bit of piffle around whether it was an AGW event or not. IMHO, this discussion was scientifically irrelevant given the time frames involved.
But there was a catch this time round. There was an exponential decrease in rainfall run-off with a linear increase in temperature during this drought compared with previous droughts. Apart from large losses in commodity production, there was a large shift in farmland equity to the banks. In my experience, bankers make poor farmers.
The discourse around food security and climate is rarely time-bound. It rarely raises the implications of the potential need for agricultural systems to adapt, and adapt again, and adapt again, as any potential climate changes progress. The discourse rarely raises the implications for new capital requirements to adapt agricultural systems to potential shifts in rainfall, temperature and potential shifts in the frequency of extreme weather events.
To take my Netherlands example, upstring, a step further, the Netherlands exports around $66 billion worth of agricultural products a year now, but will not do so if the sea level rises a couple of metres. If sea levels stay the same, no problem. If they rise 2 metres, which may be 200 years away, then that is not a long lead time to shift the world’s 16th biggest economy some place else. Agriculture production is driven by much more than by CO2 and the availability of farm land.
The food security discourse rarely focuses on the consequences of changes for the cost of food. The discourse rarely discusses issues like the social structure of the farming populations or the degree of indebtedness of farmers to banks. For example, if a nation has farmers who average 60 years old and who are highly indebted to banks, you can predict that the relevant agriculture sectors are not well-placed to adapt to any potential shifts in climate. There is only very rarely a comprehensive discussion which integrates the cost of capital, the cost of energy and the cost and availability of inputs. These three keys to farming out of a bag, super-imposed on climate, determine the number of people in any one year who will starve to death.
To give you an example of what I mean. The impact of fracking on gas prices will mean lower energy costs, lower fertilizer costs and lower pesticide costs such that tens of millions of people will be saved from hunger. Whether that makes fracking, on balance, good or bad, I don’t know enough about to say.
So, the general discussions about the nexus between food security and potential climate changes do not give me confidence.
In this particular case, the issue is the balance between potential benefits and disbenefits arising from the two major options – prevention and adaptation. One thing is clear: those who espouse one alternative and list only all the benefits or all the disbenefits arising from same, are almost certainly only painting half a picture. They may mislead by accident. Or they may mislead deliberately. I wouldn’t know. But they are misleading.
What H. sapiens needs to do is get as close as possible to the whole picture, dispassionately and rationally.
Clipe
As opposed to looking singularly foolish?
You earned a rueful smile for that one. A chap can’t be too careful around here.
Howskepticalment:
I refuse to believe you are sufficiently stupid as to be making an honest statement when you say to me at October 19, 2012 at 2:55 pm
No!
It is an hypothesis – n.b. NOT a “theory” – that human activities may be discernibly capable of affecting global climate. A theory has some supporting evidence but a hypothesis doesn’t.
It is a theory that climate may be subject to natural forcings.
There are several other explanations of climate variation, and natural climate variability is the one (i.e. neither of your suggestions) which parsimony implies is the best explanation. Richard Lindzen states the matter more clearly than I could so I quote his words from
http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=1450
So,
1.
you have attempted to elevate you evidence-free notion to the status of a theory
2.
you have attempted to pretend that there are two competing ideas worthy of consideration as explanations of climate variability
3.
you have attempted to rule-out of discussion other – and better – possible explanations climate variability.
The quality of as troll is not indicated by the troll’s verbiage: it is indicated by the validity of the troll’s assertions.
Richard
Dear RichardSCourtney,
May I agree and disagree, slightly?
Even science is not as strict as the ideal definition, when it comes to theory and hypothesis. In the ideal, both would have some supporting evidence, but a theory would be a hypothesis that has been tested by successful prediction. Unfortunately, various science disciplines use “theory” for notions that haven’t quite risen to the level of a proper hypothesis yet, such as “string theory.”
When one develops a hypothesis about observations of the world, that hypothesis must include testable predictions that would
(1) distinguish your hypothesis from other competing ones, and
(2) be capable of being falsified.
Otherwise, you’re just spouting philosophies, notions, hopes and beliefs, however well backed-up you might be by models and logic.
This is where climate science largely is at the moment. The Earth’s extremely complex climate system, hugely fed by input from the Sun and subtly modified by magnetic and other aspects of the surrounding space, is poorly understood. We don’t even understand the inputs, yet, let alone what happens after those inputs reach our biosphere.
And, of course, the predictions (invariably of gloom and doom) are either unable to be falsified, or unable to be told from natural variation, or both. If they predict that Antarctica will be colder, and it isn’t, well, they predicted that too. Oh, it actually is colder? Well, they said that all along!
Anthropogenic global warming would be falsified in five years. No, ten years. Twelve! Fifteen! Sometime in the ambiguous future! But in the meantime, Global Warming is Real!
No more snow! Ah, extreme snow? Well, that’s “not inconsistent” with our predictions!
In short, such guesses are worthless.
And positive indications, the actual increase in crops and so forth directly attributable to increases in CO2, get little airplay and little interest in the journals. The FACE (Free Air Carbon Enrichment) experiments have demonstrated great success from crops to trees, but they take these results and suggest that weeds will do better than edible crops, or that “popcorn will no longer pop and beer will be poisonous” as Nature reported in August of 2007.
The saddest part of all of this is that progress in some areas is being opposed and corrupted by the desire to come up with the “right” answer. Scientific American had an editorial a decade or so ago in which they said that if you offered a paper that suggested that global warming was not a crisis, they’d “laugh in your face.” We’ve seen, over the years, the selection bias that results from this distortion of the scientific method.
We have had models of physical systems for centuries, which are increasingly complex. In the process, we’ve gone from notions too simplistic to be useful (as improved observations showed) to models complex enough to no longer be understandable themselves, while still only a tiny sliver of the complexity of the real biosphere.
And we run those models, see if they produce the “right” answers, then tweak and run them again until we get what we want. All published models have gone through this; their “raw” output based on “logic” never sees the light of day until many (sometimes thousands of) iterations later, when the modelers like the result.
From this sort of filtered, distorted output, “howskepticalment” and others have gotten the idea that there is an impending crisis, that the reality of massive food increases (due in part to CO2) are harbingers of food shortage, and that the pleasant (for humans) biosphere of recent decades portends doom for us all. Earth’s billions of years of feedback be damned!
Much of climate science, while describable loosely as “theories” in the colloquial usage that has even been adopted by scientists of various disciplines, is still far from being constrained by proper testable hypotheses. And such constraints are actively resisted, for a variety of motivations.
In so many cases, a given climate scientist might get ambiguous results, but he has been told all his career that others show clear proof of global warming — so he interprets his own work that way, not realizing that so many of the others are in the same predicament. It’s not dishonest, but it is poor science. This motivated me to rewrite a poem from Geoffrey Saxe that originated as “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Keith DeHavelle:
Thankyou for your post addressed to me at October 20, 2012 at 9:19 am. I read it and I agree.
Richard