This will be a top sticky post for a day, new stories will appear below this one.
Climate Forecast: Muting the Alarm
Even while it exaggerates the amount of warming, the IPCC is becoming more cautious about its effects.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists’ accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come.
But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.
The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.
Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.
It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government. (See WUWT report about Stern who gets asked some tough questions by Australia’s ABC)
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In climate science, the real debate has never been between “deniers” and the rest, but between “lukewarmers,” who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming. Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Richard Lindzen of MIT have moved steadily toward lukewarm views in recent years.
Even with its too-high, too-fast assumptions, the recently leaked draft of the IPCC impacts report makes clear that when it comes to the effect on human welfare, “for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers,” such as economic growth and technology, for the rest of this century. If temperatures change by about 1C degrees between now and 2090, as Mr. Lewis calculates, then the effects will be even smaller.
Indeed, a small amount of warming spread over a long period will, most experts think, bring net improvements to human welfare. Studies such as by the IPCC author and economist Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in Britain show that global warming has probably done so already. People can adapt to such change—which essentially means capture the benefits but minimize the harm. Satellites have recorded a roughly 14% increase in greenery on the planet over the past 30 years, in all types of ecosystems, partly as a result of man-made CO2 emissions, which enable plants to grow faster and use less water.
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I liked this part the best:
Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population “bomb,” pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.
Full article here:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303725404579460973643962840?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303725404579460973643962840.html
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Indeed, so many environmental scares have gone the way of the dodo, and yet here we are again, watching some people freak out about another one, and with wholesale planetary warming not cooperating as predicted, they are starting to see climate bogey-men in every weather event. It seems the fear of weather from the dark ages has returned to the mindset of some irrational thinkers.
This one little fact though is a deal breaker for alarm:
It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century.
Hang on to that thought, James Delingpole writes:
Previous reports – notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review – have put the costs to the global economy caused by ‘climate change’ at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.
But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.
If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it’s around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.
Ouch. Game over for climate alarm.
On the subject of unfounded scares, add swine flu and bird flu to the list.
Every time there is a scare, someone benefits. Someone makes lots of money out of us. Like the Tony Blair crony who became seriously wealthy as a result of his successful, not-competitive tender for vaccines, which have never been used.
He has an enviable life-style now, travelling the world with his sports car racing team.
Thank you Dr. Matt Ridley!
CAS
Alberta
“Indeed, a small amount of warming spread over a long period will, most experts think, bring net improvements to human welfare” What??? But the IPCC has been telling me for years that warmer than normal weather is leading to a world catastrophe! I haven’t been able to enjoy the great weather here in Southern California for years because I thought it was a sign of impending global doom! Who at the IPCC can I sue?
Thanks all for the articles and ideas on phosphorus. P ends up being bonded to iron in our high Ph soils and we do lose some due to this but most is exported with production. Acidifying agents will help but the cost of organic manures on large acreages is prohibitive and in a dry Mediterranean climate we struggle to get enough rain for high biological activity.
On the news earlier this week, they said that the cherry blossoms in Washington DC are late this year. Here is a live cam:
http://www.earthcam.com/usa/dc/cherryblossoms/
Here is a page with a photo of the trees under similar cloudy conditions:
http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/North_America/United_States_of_America/Washington_DC/General_Tips-Washington_DC-Jefferson_Memorial_Tidal_Basin-BR-1.html
Hahahahaha.
Warmer Is Better.
Been saying so since 1996, which is when I first became aware that some folks were claiming warmer would be worser. Fiddlesticks!
The whole harum scarum dire report was/is based on cognitive dissonance. That warmer is better is obvious, indeed self-evident to any thoughtful person. The alarmists had to convince millions of people to deny their own common sense world experience. Hence the CAGW dire report was doomed from the getgo.
Warmer Is Better. I should trademark the phrase and sell t-shirts.
What’s the type of color blindness that can’t distinguish between Green and Red? That’s what we have in the radical environmental movement — a bunch of Reds masquerading as Greens.
Did I say radical environmental movement? Maybe I should say mainstream environmental movement. While nearly everyone claims to care about the environment and many good people proudly where the environmentalist label, how many of them believe in free markets, free enterprise, individual choice and property rights (you know, that “freedom” thing)? How many of them will gladly impose their values using the force of the state?
MojoMojo says:
March 28, 2014 at 1:24 pm
Perhaps the fear of the industrialized world ,being forced to pay reparations for the past 100 years of damage ,is the motivation for the toning down.
How much reparations should the 3rd world demand?
100 years x a few $ trillion per year?
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In what currency would it be paid ?
Political stability, technology, food supply, or just cash.
@The Pompous Git and Farmer Gez
>>As a farmer, I’m far more worried about the world supply of Phosphorus than I am about climate change.
Only 40% of the P in super is used by the crop on average; the remainder is “locked-up” by the chemistry of the soil. You can “unlock” the P by stimulating the soil biota (earthworms, bacteria, actinomycetes etc). It’s called organic farming. Stimulating the soil biota is simple: feed it protein (fish emulsion, animal manures, composts etc).
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This can be unlocked by simply putting sugar water on the soil. Bacteria that can liberate the Phosphorus are starved of energy. They eat, liberate, then die leaving the Phosphorus available to plants. This technique is used by many thousands of Indian farmers who no longer buy fertilizer. The technique was discovered by Prof A K Prasad at ARTI in Pune India. The sugar application level is about 25 kg per acre. You can read about it on their website. It is very easy idea to test.
“It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century.”
Thats already the case now with Carbon Taxes, ETS/Cap n Trade, diverted monies from real Environmental problems, Eco-Entrupenurial scams such as tax payer financed whirly gig turdbines, ethanol, solar feed in tariffs, grants for research into ‘Carbon storage’ etc, Research grants for ‘science’ (and I do use the term loosely) into ‘Climate Change’ (but only from the homocentric fetish perspective), IPCC and Governmental scientific body financing, e.g CSIRO, EPA ….. ad infinitum.
It’s an Industry, a parasitical one perhaps, but an Industry nevertheless.
Reblogged this on Flying Tiger Comics and commented:
Fear is the essential ingredient of communist enslavement. Where there is fear in the people, there is a government of scoundrels trying to put unbreakable chains on the free.
Would you post the link? TIA.
Didn’t Animal Farm go back to being called Manor Farm in the end?
Not perfect, but at least better than slaving away at windmills, having to praise the pigs every other day and wondering whether things were ever better or worse in the past without access to information.
I visit the Aurora Australis webcam everyday. They are at 67 S with surrounded by serious ice.
Thank you, Matt Ridley. Your article deserves links from my climate and weather pages.
A lot of good common sense!
Cherpa1 says:
March 28, 2014 at 7:03 pm
I visit the Aurora Australis webcam everyday. They are at 67 S with surrounded by serious ice.
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And you are holding back the link, because …………
The Pompous Git says:
March 28, 2014 at 7:41 am
Gidday PG. I don’t hate you at all, and I’ve been an organic farmer since the late 70s , before organic certification even existed.
Nobody in the know believes that “organic” farmers don’t apply fertiliser.
Organic certification requires testing, at least every three years, to prove that no depletion of necessary elements is occurring.
But you knew that 🙂
So let me get this straight…. The CAGW charlatans want to waste $76 TRILLION over the next 40 years (UN estimates) to keep global warming below 2C by 2100, when business as usual will only generate around 1.35C of GW by 2100 based on empirical evidence, and not completely invalidated climate model projections….
I have a better idea… Why doesn’t the world spend roughly $25 trillion building LFTRs, and generate 100% of its energy from thorium and produce near ZERO CO2 emissions by 2100…
Thorium energy would be roughly 1/3rd the cost of conventional fossil fuel energy and these savings alone would finance depreciation/replacement expenses of building a LFTR infrastructure… Mo’ bedda..
The geo-political and socio-economic ramifications alone of switching our energy production from fossil fuels to thorium would more than pay for the transition..
The Thorium Age officially starts from next year, when China throws the switch on their first test LFTR…
Meanwhile there is a new exaggeration for the White House according to Daily Caller: Flatulence from cows!
“As part of its plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama administration is targeting the dairy industry to reduce methane emissions in their operations”.
“This comes despite falling methane emission levels across the economy since 1990”.
“The White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25 percent by 2020. Although U.S. agriculture only accounts for about 9 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes up a sizeable portion of methane emissions — which is a very potent greenhouse gas.”
Methane emissions have largely been reduced because of the incentive for companies to capture it and sell it for monetary gain. Oil and gas companies, for example, have been looking for ways to increasingly capture methane leaked from drilling operations which they can then sell.
“The industry has led efforts to reduce emissions of methane by developing new technologies and equipment, and recent studies show emissions are far lower than EPA projected just a few years ago,” said Howard Feldman, head of scientific and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute. “Additional regulations are not necessary and could have a chilling effect on the American energy renaissance, our economy, and our national security.”
“Methane is natural gas that operators can bring to the market,” he added. “There is a built-in incentive to capture these emissions.”
Environmentalists have been pushing the Obama administration to crack down on methane emissions for some time, arguing that they drive global warming and pollute the air and water. Activists have argued that the methane leakage rate from natural gas operations is 50 percent higher than the EPA estimates.
“President Obama’s plan to reduce climate-disrupting methane pollution is an important step in reining in an out of control industry exempt from too many public health protections,” Deborah Nardone, campaign director of the Sierra Club’s Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground campaign. “However, even with the most rigorous methane controls and monitoring in place, we will still fall short of what is needed to fight climate disruption if we do not reduce our reliance on these dirty fossil fuels.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/28/white-house-looks-to-regulate-cow-flatulence-as-part-of-climate-agenda/#ixzz2xKEioF4R
This of course will ultimately lead to controlling fracking and other essential energy sources in keeping with the overall plan. If the impending Supreme Court on controlling power plant CO2 emissions goes in the Administration’s favor, the Administration will be emboldened to go even further.
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Johannesburg said @ur momisugly March 28, 2014 at 5:34 pm
@ur momisuglyThe Pompous Git and Farmer Gez
Indeed and I will be testing it. Sounds even cheaper than 10-20 litres/Ha of fish emulsion (application rate per hectare). Many thanks 🙂
Meant to say application rate for pasture in that last comment.
These records have enabled scientists to work out the impact of global warming on the trees: In recent years they’ve been blossoming about four days earlier than the long term average.
Inconvenient question: Anyone have a standard deviation on that?
farmerbraun said @ur momisugly March 28, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Farmerbraun, I wrote “Greens” who by and large know about as much about farming as they do climatology. Greens told me when I was working in the industry that farmers were our enemy and it was evil of me to spend so much time hob-nobbing with them. The Git had difficulty understanding their attitude given that farmers generate our food, fibre, and landscape. But you probably already knew that 🙂
This is where we can pinpoint the key error in the radiative greenhouse conjecture promulgated by the IPCC, NASA et al …
In the energy budgets (such as NASA’s here) they combine “Sunlight absorbed + IR back radiation” with components of 47.9% and 100% respectively. In other words, they are assuming that there is not only a warming effect from back radiation, but it is also just over twice the warming effect of the Sun. Hence, somehow the atmosphere supposedly multiplies the effect of the Sun by more than a factor of three.
Now, they actually need to work with this combined amount of radiation (147.9% of incident solar radiation at top of atmosphere, or more than double the 70.3% that is not reflected) because that’s the only way they can get a realistic surface temperature when they use the total radiation figure in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation.
However, the Stefan-Boltzmann equation is based on the assumption that the target (in this case the internal surface) acts as a true black or grey body which is not transparent to radiation and can only have its temperature raised if the radiative flux is sufficient and the source is hotter than itself, because otherwise entropy would decrease.
Sadly about two-thirds of this combined radiation comes from a much colder atmosphere, and so doesn’t count in the process of raising surface temperatures.
And even more sadly, the real surface that we are talking about, and which affects our temperature records, is a thin layer of less than 1 centimetre in depth which, for about 70% of Earth’s surface, is water. That 1cm thin layer of water is almost completely transparent, unlike a black or grey body, so most of the solar radiation (the only radiation that can warm) is passing straight through that thin layer. The weak back radiation doesn’t make it past the first molecule it strikes, from which it is immediately re-emitted.
What it is really being warmed (to a much lower mean temperature) is the ocean thermocline which (as you can see here) extends quite a few metres beneath that one centimetre thin surface layer, and has a mean temperature roughly 8 to 10 degrees cooler.
So if you get a gut feeling there’s something wrong in the NASA calculations, let me assure you that you are right.
Andres Valencia said @ur momisugly March 28, 2014 at 7:19 pm
I’ll drink to that! And especial thanks for The Rational Optimist, one of the most important books in my collection.