It needs catastrophe scenarios to sell their ideas
By Rupert Darwall (writing at NRO)
With the clock ticking toward December 2015 and the last chance to conclude a global treaty at the Paris climate conference, the job of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to ratchet up the alarm. This it did in its report, released at the beginning of the week, on the impacts of climate change. It scored a bull’s-eye in the Financial Times: “Climate change harms food crops, says IPCC,” the headline ran. “Climate Signals, Growing Louder,” the New York Times opined, though the reality is that the volume is being turned up by the IPCC, not the climate itself. For the IPCC, this is mission accomplished — at considerable cost to the body’s residual credibility and integrity.
The IPCC’s Working Group II, tasked with assessing the risks and impacts of climate change, could have chosen to make amends for its previous effort in 2007, which was widely panned for bias and numerous errors. Such was the outcry over the 2007 report that the Dutch parliament ordered the country’s Environmental Assessment Agency to carry out an audit. It found that the working group was dismissive of the potential benefits of climate change, and it criticized the group’s process for being insufficiently transparent.
…
Its most eye-catching claim (in the new WGII report) is that negative impacts of climate change on crop yields are more common to date than positive impacts are. [Note: covered here at WUWT -Anthony]
This improbable claim finds only the weakest support in the main body of the report, with its qualification that climate change played a “minor role.” It is, the report states, “extremely difficult” to define a clear baseline from which to assess the impact of climate change, and many non-climate factors are often difficult to quantify.
More egregiously, the summary speaks of rapid price increases following climate extremes since the 2007 report. This negligence amounts to downright dishonesty, as the summary omits mention of one of the principal causes of the 2007–08 spike in food prices, which is highlighted in the main body of the report. It was not climate change that increased food costs, but climate policies in the form of increased use of food crops in biofuel production, exacerbated by higher oil prices and government embargoes on food exports.
In attempting to attribute changes in farm output to climate change, the IPCC makes heavy use of models linking climate to agriculture, most of which assume that farmers don’t change their behavior as the climate changes.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/374742/why-ipcc-report-neglects-benefits-global-warming-rupert-darwall
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Rupert Darwall is the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History.
Having read it, I highly recommend it. – Anthony
And just what Global Temperature do the cretins in the IPCC think is best?
Today’s?
That 200 years ago?
At the Holocene Optimum?
In the middle of the last Ice Age?
The Earth’s bioproductivity at these different times should give these numpties a clue.
I think it’s time to remind the IPCC about the disadvantages of one cold climate period. Would you want to be around at this time or during the “hottest decade evahhhhh?”
SOME EFFECTS OF THE LITTLE ICE AGE.
Soured from Google Scholar and Google search engine.
Rupert Darwall (at NRO),
Your article begs a most fundament question; why did the IPCC charter exclude the assessment of benefits from anthropogenic CO2 from burning fossil fuels?
That is the key question that needs to be answered.
My thought leads me to answer that question not in a trivial political context but a broader context of the philosophy of science. The charter for the IPCC seems to be based on a postmodern philosophy concept of science along with post-normal science view. I think those two theories have created a new prototype of science process and purpose which I think is embodied in the IPCC assessment process and goals. The new science they emulate is for science to serve as compliant handmaiden to ‘prove’ a desired ‘a priori’ premise. The new science concept is not to understand reality objectively; it is to provide only research that proves a desired predetermined view.
To remove the subjective and myopic new concept of science from the IPCC then there needs to be a new charter for the IPCC based on the traditional theory of science as objective finder of reality with total openness and transparency.
John
On food to fuel here is corn: “40 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes into ethanol”, yet the IPCC misses this.
Higher food prices and possible starvation are the remedies for the global warming disease. The ‘cure’ is worse than the disease without actually curing it!
Blatant misrepresentation with clear intent that in a just world would throw the perpetrators in prison for the harm caused.
Not just to the minds of the brainwashed and the trillions of dollars flushed down the toilet to hijack science and put it into the hands of zealots with a fraudulent cause but to the lives of those that will suffer in measurable ways from ruinous policies that they are trying to force on the world…….ironically, for the false claim that they are trying to save that world.
Increasing CO2 is the best thing that has happened to the biosphere and vegetative health of this planet in the last 200 years.
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/co2benefits/MonetaryBenefitsofRisingCO2onGlobalFoodProduction.pdf
Just like the Fire triangle:
http://www.timcorubber.com/images/resources/fire-triangle.gif
there’s a Photosynthesis triangle:
http://oi62.tinypic.com/2f0al9s.jpg
Photosynthesis triangle update:
http://oi61.tinypic.com/2hcgvgi.jpg
The thing is the more trees and plants that grow the more CO2 they absorb but also throw out oxygen. It’s a natural cycle, but they need rain and nitrogen too. If the balance is right they grow better or if it is lacking in some element, they don’t grow as much. Such as in winter deciduous trees go dormant when they lose their leaves, and even evergreens don’t grow much either till the soil warms up in spring. I know folks I grow bonsai.
Jimbo says:
April 2, 2014 at 1:44 pm
On food to fuel here is corn: “40 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes into ethanol”, yet the IPCC misses this.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Did they? What makes you think that isn’t part of the plan? An unintended but beneficial consequence to their stated mandate (from their perspective)? Dunno. Just speculating.
Some have suggested IPCC and their directors have that much forward thinking. I doubt it since reading the previous two SPM’s and AR’s, I believe they don’t think that people will see the disconnect. Con men like Maurice Strong however, do have the ability to think long term big picture.
But the MSM sure won’t see the disconnect and its been there in black and white all along. Trouble is, almost all the media just quotes the press releases, AP and Reuters and never read the original information. The SPM maybe, but surely not the WG’s. And given many of the elevated discussions on this site that include higher mathematics and statistics, there isn’t a snowballs chance in H that graduates from journalism will have a clue and won’t wade through the AR’s to see what they say compared to the SPM’s.
It’s been years since I used any higher level math or statistics so I trust that reading the reviews here will be sufficient. I have a decent B.S. meter so I can get a pretty good feeling of what is likely to work and what won’t along with 50+ years of engineering, construction and business experience.
I’m not big on conspiracy theories. But as Patrick Moore in his book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout” notes, a small group of dedicated people can indeed affect change. However as he also noted, it doesn’t matter if you are Castro, Mao, Che Guevara, Ghandi, Mandela or Greenpeace; success or perceived success changes what you are as new people join the group. Organizations become organic and take on a life of their own, they become “great machines”.
Love your detailed list of references, Jimbo. Thanks to you and many others here for my continuing education.
What the use of talking benefits of Global Warming when the warming doesn’t materialize.
Are we taking facts or are we in the business of making short stories long?
Just asking.
From GWPF April 3, 2014: Matt Ridley: The IPCC Just Agreed With Nigel Lawson
… But the document itself revealed a far more striking story: it emphasised, again and again, the need to adapt to climate change. Even in the main text of the press release that accompanied the report, the word ‘adaptation’ occurred ten times, the word ‘mitigation’ not at all.
…
Lawson pointed out that adaptation had six obvious benefits as a strategy, which mitigation did not share. [ I reformat to a list ]
It required no international treaty, but would work if adopted unilaterally;
it could be applied locally;
it would produce results quickly;
it could capture any benefits of warming while avoiding risks;
it addressed existing problems that were merely exacerbated by warming;
and it would bring benefits even if global warming proves to have been exaggerated.
…
It is remarkable how far this latest report moves towards Lawson’s position. Professor Field, who seems to be an eminently sensible chap, clearly strove to emphasise adaptation, if only because the chance of an international agreement on emissions looks ever less likely. ….
….
… Chapter 20 even acknowledges that ‘in some cases mitigation may impede adaptation (e.g., reduced energy availability in countries with growing populations)’. A crucial point, this: that preventing the poor from getting access to cheap electricity from coal might make them more vulnerable to climate change. So green policies may compound the problem they seek to solve.
…
In short, there is a great deal in this report to like. It has, moreover, toned down the alarm considerably. …. New Scientist noticed that ‘the report has even watered down many of the more confident predictions that appeared in the leaked drafts’.
Last night I caught on the Nat. Public Radio: The TED Radio Hour, the piece about Allen Savory: How Can Deserts Turn Into Grasslands? WUWT covered this last year (March 8, 2013 A Bridge in the Climate Debate: How to Green the Worlds Deserts and Reverse Climate Change
From the TED Radio Hour Blog: “[Desertification] is mostly caused by livestock. Everyone knows this, says Savory. Scientists have known it for decades. Livestock damage the land, leading to dry ground, leading to desert. This makes sense, and turns out to be quite wrong.
Juxtapose for a moment two euphonies:
1. Allan Savory once was responsible for causing a horrifying act of eugenics, the killing of 40,000 elephants and other pachyderms, in order to “save” the grasslands of the new African National Parks. But he found out the problem only got worse. It was the wrong solution. The proper course is to promote LARGER herds, greater density of foraging animals and carnivores, that migrate to keep from eating grass soiled by their own dung.
2. The shift from AR4 to AR5, as expressed above in the Matt Ridley GWPF piece today. The message of AR4 was to save the planet we must commit “before it is too late” to a ruinously expensive, totally ineffectual, steal from the poor to subsidize the rich, totalitarian, collectivist, world-government-necessary, kill-if-we-have-to, pipedream of climate mitigation via carbon pollution control and transforming society to renewable resources by force. AR5, according to Matt Ridley, is much more favorable to the idea that adaption is superior to mitigation because it is cheaper, more likely to work, requires less coordination, and works whether it will get warmer, colder, drier, or wetter.
Just as it was folly to decimate elephant herds to save the savannah despite the herds of environmentalists who felt it necessary if tragic, it was and is today folly to support the decimation of this planet’s human population and wealth in vain plans of mitigation to save the climate.
CAGW Skeptics should take this opportunity to embrace AR5 WGII, at least important parts of it, as a victory. “At last, some signs of intelligence and humanity emanating from the IPCC!” Adaption instead of mitigation. It’s what we have been saying all along.
The political jujutsu possibilities that arise by using the AR5 to support the Skeptic viewpoint could be powerful.
Here is the true UN/IPCC agenda:
“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
~Ottmar Edenhofer, Chair, IPCC WG-3
Science has nothing to do with it. Science is the false veneer laid over the UN’s intent to get it’s fingers into the pockets of ordinary citizens.
What we need are more honest scientists, who are willing to speak out. This is difficult, because as Upton Sinclair wrote:
It is difficult to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it.
Difficult, but not impossible. There are enough scientists involved with the IPCC that there must be a few who put honesty above their paycheck. Dr. Tol is one. There must be others. Because the entire carbon scare is based on pseudo-science. That has to bother scientists who were raised to be honest.
Errata to my 9:55 am above:
Juxtapose for a moment two
euphoniesepiphanies:One of the sotto voce admissions of the Warmists is that CC is likely to be beneficial up to some limit, and only then turn negative. The “limit” is pulled out of thin air, or rectally polluted air, and even then contains a fallacy. The cumulative benefits up to that flexion will, by definition, have fortified the economy and world to deal with any negatives that follow it. Possibly by a significant margin (ratios of 50:1 or more have been suggested).