Why climate change is good for the world
Don’t panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm
By Matt Ridley:
Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.
At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.
There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.
To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensus, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it’s a long way off.
[Note as seen on WUWT before, here is the graph – Anthony]
Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.
You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.
Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.
Read the full article here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9057151/carry-on-warming/
That’s all very well but the TREND line for Central England has been negative since 2003!
Present evidence from the sun is pointing not to global warming but to a new ice age. The bicenntenial component of the total solar irradiance is declining rapidly. This points clearly to a new ice age in which case climate change will have devastating effects throughout the world.
“a eucalyptus forest tends to promote fire because of the volatile and highly combustible oils produced by the leaves, as well as the production of large amounts of litter which is high in phenolics, preventing its breakdown by fungi and thus accumulates as large amounts of dry, combustible fuel.[19] Consequently, dense eucalypt plantings may be subject to catastrophic firestorms. In fact, almost thirty years before the Oakland firestorm of 1991, a study of eucalyptus in the area warned that the litter beneath the trees builds up very rapidly and should be regularly monitored and removed.”
This from Wikipaedia on the subject of Eucalypts. We suffer from the Eucalyptus forests, which every few years burst into flame, sometimes idiots with matches or cigarettes, sometimes glass bottles discarded, sometimes lightning, sometimes high wind on power lines. The original Australians used “firestick farming” where they set light to a suitable bit of ground litter, set off a fire, and then caught the kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, etc, that were chased out or cooked by the fires. The trees then regrew, and the young trees were good for koalas. Firing the litter every few years kept it down, and prevented huge fires. Present day ‘environmentalists’, who deprecate and if possible ban fuel reduction burning, make sure that litter accumulates till something ignites it, and then if people have built houses amongst the trees, find that their houses and possessions have gone, but if lucky they save their lives. If not …
NSW is a large area, 800 642 km2, it is, as the saying goes, bigger than Texas (696,241 km²). Our local weather varies as much – from desert inland, to ice covered hills in the south, to lush semi-tropics in the north, where it has been raining very slightly all day, after quite a few weeks of no rain. When litter accumulates for many years, the fire storms can be very intense, even burning the roots off so that the trees cannot regenerate, till seeds blow in.
Houses in fire-prone country should have wooden shutters over the windows – the intense heat of a bushfire can raise the temperature inside a room by heating through a glass window so auto-ignition temperature is reached in a few seconds – and then, as bystanders were saying today “The house just exploded.”
“James Allison says:
October 17, 2013 at 11:25 am
Matt – Don’t panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm
======================
Try telling that to the Australian NSW people about now.”
Just like the Greens Party Adam Bandt the parliamentarian claimed yesterday that it was the fault of the Abbott Government who have been in office for ONE MONTH. Both bandt and Allison are obvious from the same uncaring club of fanatics who use the potential of a disaster and the loss of life to promote their distortion and misinformation. That attitude is an absolute disgrace and past despicable. But then again, what else would one expect from those pariahs, something sensical perhaps ?
Then listen to Richard Tol?
Attack the ball and not the man.
UK ENERGY BILL PRICING
As detailed by the BBC and others…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03dv3tv/Newsnight_17_10_2013/
Every British consumer is paying excessive “green” taxes on their electricity bills.
GREEN TAXES ARE CURRENTLY (ONLY!) 9% OF THE TOTAL BILL
Average Annual Charges
£47 INSULATION FOR SUBSTANDARD HOMES
£11 THE WARM HOUSE DISCOUNT
£7 WIND AND SOLAR INSTALLATION
£8 CARBON PERMITS
£5 CARBON “FLOOR PRICE” (A TAX BY ANOTHER NAME)
£3 SMART METERS
£30 RENEWABLES OBLIGATION – TO SUBSIDISE WIND TURBINES AND SOLAR PANEL FARMS
NUCLEAR POWER SUBSIDIES
CURRENT PRICE £52/MWH
BY 2018
2018 PRICE £93/MWH — Nearly double the market price!
EFFECT OF GOVERNMENT POLICIES ON UK BILLS
2013 +13%
2020 +33%
2030 +41%
The EU adds even more to UK bills…
EU CLIMATE CHANGE LEVY
EU CARBON REDUCTION COMMITTMENT
EU EMISSION TRADING SCHEME
etc…
Rate of inflation UK 2008-2013
2013 : 1.96%
2012 : 2.07%
2011 : 3.16%
2010 : 1.64%
2009 : -0.34%
2008 : 3.05%
SSE Price rises 2011 : Electricity 11% Gas 18%
SSE Price rises 2013 : Electricity and Gas 8.2 – 9% (depending on area)
British Gas Price rises 2008 : Electricity 9% Gas 35%
British Gas Price rises 2011 : Electricity 16% Gas 18%
British Gas Price rises 2012 : Electricity and Gas 6%
British Gas Price rises 2013 : Electricity 10.4% Gas 8.4%
Anyone want to follow our insane energy policies?
Thank your lucky stars if you live elsewhere.
If we continue to throw out our co2 (business as usual) I don’t know what the climate will be like in 2100 and I have no idea what the biosphere will be like. The IPCC says we will be at around 850ppm. All I can do is look at the effects of warmer periods in the past and look at the present.
1) Our biosphere in general has been greening in recent decades including arid areas such as the Sahel.
2) During the very, very localized Medieval Warm Period
[Dr. Michael E. Mann – PDF paper]
“Agriculture was possible at higher latitudes (and higher elevations in the mountains) than is currently possible in many regions”…”especially bountiful harvests”….”Grapes were grown in England several hundred kilometers north of their current limits of growth”…..”fig trees and olive trees grew in regions of Europe (northern Italy and parts of Germany) well north of their current range”…..”mountain glaciers throughout Europe retreated substantially”…..”severe winters were less frequent and less extreme”…..
3) Neo tropical forest thrived in a much warmer past climates increasing co2 which boosted diversity etc.
4) The Eemian interglacial in North Greenland showed an 8 ± 4 degrees Celsius above the mean of the past millennium. There was apparently only a modest ice-sheet response.
Q) Given man’s ingenuity and technological advances, how likely is it that we will ever reach the IPCC’s high end projections for co2 by 2100? It only takes ONE innovation / invention / discovery to change things around. See horse manure calamity in New York late 19th century and the invention of the motor car. See predictions of mass starvation in the 1960s and the agricultural revolution. Can windmills and solar cut it? See power outage in ‘Green’ Scotland in winter of December 2010.
You do realise that if we are plunged into another Little Ice Age they will blame co2. They have already tried it for the recent harsh winters. Would you be willing to bet they won’t blame any natural climate change pattern causing another LIA on man’s climate disruption? Anything and everything must point to their religion.
Did you lose any of your bank cash Margaret Hardman? It may explain your persistent attacks on Matt Ridley.
I am a VERY lucky 53 year old Englishman living in Southern California for the past 10 years so I have a good perspective on 43 years of English weather and the last 10 years of sunny, warm SoCal weather . In the winter of 1963 as a young child of three I was taken by my parents down to the river at Walton-on-Thames Surrey where as a family we walked on the FROZEN THAMES.
I was sixteen during the HOT English summer of 1976 which was wonderful …….. I was also very lucky to have parents who took us on terrific summer camping holidays from the middle 1960’s to the late 1970’s so I was exsposed to the best of the WARM parts of Europe.
WARM is better than COLD …………….!!!
I’m drinking a beer – it’s nice to know that I am helping to stave off an ice age and increase worldwide agricultural productivity! 😉