(via the GWPF) Matt Ridley, Financial POst
The IPCC produced two reports last year. One said that the cost of climate change is likely to be less than 2% of GDP by the end of this century. The other said that the cost of decarbonizing the world economy with renewable energy is likely to be 4% of GDP. Why do something that you know will do more harm than good?
The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable.
In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century.
After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic for various media organizations, and having started out alarmed, that’s where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this view. I share it with a very large international organization, sponsored by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the world’s governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself.
The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.
Now two degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn dangerous, according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my children’s children are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any harmful warming, let alone catastrophe.
But what about the fourth scenario? This is known as RCP8.5, and it produces 3.5 degrees of warming in 2081-2100. Curious to know what assumptions lay behind this model, I decided to look up the original papers describing the creation of this scenario. Frankly, I was gobsmacked. It is a world that is very, very implausible.
For a start, this is a world of “continuously increasing global population” so that there are 12 billion on the planet. This is more than a billion more than the United Nations expects, and flies in the face of the fact that the world population growth rate has been falling for 50 years and is on course to reach zero – i.e., stable population – in around 2070. More people mean more emissions.
Second, the world is assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario to be burning an astonishing 10 times as much coal as today, producing 50% of its primary energy from coal, compared with about 30% today. Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable technologies contribute little, because of a “slow pace of innovation” and hence “fossil fuel technologies continue to dominate the primary energy portfolio over the entire time horizon of the RCP8.5 scenario.” Energy efficiency has improved very little.
These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas displacing coal on a huge scale in the United States today, with the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources being discovered on the seabed, with energy efficiency rocketing upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast in virtually every country in the world, the one thing we can say about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.
But there’s an even more startling fact. We now have many different studies of climate sensitivity based on observational data and they all converge on the conclusion that it is much lower than assumed by the IPCC in these models. It has to be, otherwise global temperatures would have risen much faster than they have over the past 50 years. As Ross McKitrick noted on this page earlier this week, temperatures have not risen at all now for more than 17 years. With these much more realistic estimates of sensitivity (known as “transient climate response”), even RCP8.5 cannot produce dangerous warming. It manages just 2.1C of warming by 2081-2100.
That is to say, even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption till you have an edifice of vanishingly small probability, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone catastrophe. That’s not me saying this – it’s the IPCC itself.
But what strikes me as truly fascinating about these scenarios is that they tell us that globalization, innovation and economic growth are unambiguously good for the environment. At the other end of the scale from RCP8.5 is a much more cheerful scenario called RCP2.6. In this happy world, climate change is not a problem at all in 2100, because carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted thanks to the rapid development of cheap nuclear and solar, plus a surge in energy efficiency.
Humans can affect local weather but climate, which is regional, NO. Climate is solar driven because the sun is the only energy source available with enough energy to do this.
It is not the scientific paper that is the cause for gobsmacking. That merely lays out a series of assumptions and extrapolates them to what one hopes are, within the boundaries of those assumptions being true, realistic conclusions.
What is gobsmacking is that the Press does not report on the assumptions behind the work, blithely implying to the non-expert layperson that the assumptions are reasonable, rather than highly unlikely and wacky.
The correct Press reporting on this should be: ‘in the highly unlikely scenario of these postulates being accurate, we have something to worry about’.
To me, the current reporting standards are rather like saying to parents: ‘a small minority of children are born with genetic defects, therefore none of you should have children’.
Absolutely ridiculous advice, isn’t it??
The sane reality is that the medical profession recognises that small numbers of abnormalities is the price of sexual reproduction and therefore, monitoring developing foetuses and newborns is the appropriate way to deal with it.
One does have to ask where the 5th scenario is, namely: ‘the Sun goes into a Maunder-style minimum from 2030 onwards, causing a loss of northern corn belts due to shortening of the growing season and an adapational need for an alteration of the latitudinal patterns of agriculture. Insulation technologies allied to solar capture technologies reduce net carbon emissions outside heavy industry by 50% and areas of subtropical desert return to green cover, further reducing carbon outputs due to greater global foliage cover. Humanity overcomes the multinational dependency generation culture, leading to nations, continents becoming self-sustaining in agricultural, population and energy generation terms.’
Doesn’t sound very likely does it??
But probably as likely as the scenario you have analysed.
I wonder whether net cooling would occur by 2100 on my scenario description??
And if so, why is that not included in the scenario planning models??
Arno Arrack: I haven’t heard any mention of Ferenc Miskolczi for years. I wish I knew enough about thermodynamics to really understand his theory. The idea that additional GHG causes an equivalent amount of water vapour to rain out of the atmosphere has always seemed overly-convenient to me, except that we have what may be a real-life example on hand. The 1998 El Nino increased humidity and raised temperatures all over the world, causing the famous 1998 “spike”. It was followed by world-wide rainstorms, which purged the water vapour and brought everything back to normal.
Miscolczi never showed sign of being a world-class genius before, and his equations fit on a single sheet of paper. Much of the climate alarmism of the past 30 years has had an air of “deliberate mistake” about it, as if the people involved knew something obvious that invalidated what they were saying, but expected to get away with it so long as they didn’t say too much. I wonder if Miskolczi’s principle could be what they were keeping quiet about…
Regarding an earlier comment to the effect that “even the military has their hands in our pockets for green energy!”-
I don’t mind the DOD investigating alternative energies. Seems one of the few areas where it might be quite useful & have a good return. I remember reading that when you factor in all the costs of transport and defense of supply chain, gas at the battlefront runs something like $100 per gallon. More efficient heating/cooling/ & miserly fuel use would actually have pretty good bang for the buck from the military perspective (and hence from the prospective of the tax paying public). Plus, I’m generally in favor of efficiency and alternative energy research and deployment, provided it makes fiscal sense and isn’t wasteful. If the above numbers are correct, I think the military SHOULD be very interested in these matters, regardless of the probability of dangerous global warming.
(p.s. Not to mention all the soldiers and contractors who die or are injured transporting fuel for the troops. If you could get super reliable hybrid vehicles up to 60-100 MPG, you could directly save lives and money. I’m sure this has occurred to the .mil….and once again, wouldn’t it be great to have that technology available if it improved to the point that it became cost effective for the general public?)
AGW got hit badly today in Australia http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/australia-in-danger-of-being-left-out-in-cold-over-global-warming/story-e6frgd0x-1226962987316#
johnmarshall:
At June 22, 2014 at 1:22 am you say in total
Sorry, but no additional energy is needed to alter both regional and global climates.
Regional and global temperatures would both alter substantially if there were an alteration to the rate of transfer of energy polewards from the tropics. Whether human activities could affect such an alteration is mute, but there is no reason to suppose that only solar activity could do it.
Richard
Why continue to play that game and say there is some component of warming caused by humans? There is still zero verifiable evidence. Sure we make some local climate impacts. But you lose the debTe once you even admit 0.01 degree change attributed to man
From the article:
“The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.”
I was wondering . . . does anybody know where this comes from? I presume IPCC AR5? Chapter, verse?
Thanks!
“The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions…” says Matt Ridley
This confuses two issues. “Catastrophe is inevitable” is a scientific hypothesis. The “hoax” argument is about the politics of climate change. How dangerous global warming really is is completely independent from whether or not the IPCC lead authors make stuff up.
The debate is not “horribly” polarized. It is quite rightly polarized. Climategate showed the lead authors advancing their careers by undermining peer review, massaging data, covering up contrary evidence, and conspiring to destroy the evidence that they had done so. They oppose the scientific method. One’s attitude to these hoaxers should be as polarized as a polar bear.
Don’t forget Lord Monckton’s video at Idea City, Toronto
18th June 2014
4:36PM – Global Warming is a Hoax – Lord Christopher Monckton
http://www.ideacityonline.com/video/global-warming-hoax-lord-christopher-monckton/
This Radio Podcast is also worth hearing :
British Lord Christopher Monckton, a guest at Idea City,
comes to “Goldhawk Fights Back” to share his views on
global warming, or more accurately, a lack of global warming.
http://www.goldhawk.com/2014/06/20/lord-christopher-monckton/
The other [IPCC report] said that the cost of decarbonizing the world economy with renewable energy is likely to be 4% of GDP.
Try 100%. The world economy simply will not run on “renewable energy”.
Wasn’t there an iron fertilization experiment in the South Pacific – one which failed miserably? What made Alaska different?
Uncle Gus says on June 22, 2014 at 6:55 am:
“Arno Arrack: I haven’t heard any mention of Ferenc Miskolczi for years. I wish I knew enough about thermodynamics to really understand his theory. The idea that additional GHG causes an equivalent amount of water vapour to rain out of the atmosphere has always seemed overly-convenient to me, except that we have what may be a real-life example on hand. The 1998 El Nino increased humidity and raised temperatures all over the world, causing the famous 1998 “spike”. It was followed by world-wide rainstorms, which purged the water vapour and brought everything back to normal.”
You are absolutely right Unc to look at the real world happenings because these warmists distort what science has to say. Among the real world observations most directly relevant is the warming pause I discussed because their theory utterly fails to account for it while Miskolczi correctly predicts it. As to his equations fitting on a single sheet of paper, I have trouble with that. I do have a draft paper on his work which is more than one page long and which is not published yet. If you are interested I can send you an advance copy. In a blog comment you can’t really document everything but there is one reference you ought to look up. It appeared in E&E volume 21, issue 4, pp. 243-262 (2010). What Miskolczi did there was to use a NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 to study the absorption of IR by the real atmosphere, over time. What he found was that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time increased by 21.6 percent. This is an exact parallel to the pause-hiatus or whatchamacallit, the cessation of warming we have today. He further subdivided the data into seven subgroups and analyzed these groups separately. His results were presented to the EGU meeting in Vienna in 2011. These subdivisions all showed an optical depth extremely close to the theoretical value his theory predicted. The present cessation of warming has lasted 17 years by now but what is completely off the radar is that a similar standstill took place in the eighties and nineties. There was an eighteen year pause just before the super El Nino arrived. You don’t see it because of fake warming shown there by all major ground-based temperature sources. You can see it yourself by comparing their output with UAH or RSS satellite data. I determined it while doing research for my book “What Warming?” and even put a warning about it into the preface. Some of them quietly retracted it but I don’t see the new version in most publications. During this pause in the eighties and nineties ENSO was active and produced five El Nino peaks there but the mean temperature remained a straight horizontal line. One of these El Nino peaks corresponded to Hansen’s 1988 high temperature peak. I guess it would have been embarrassing to point out that what to him was a high temperature peak was one of five near-identical peaks in a row. The super El Nino and its accompanying step warming are wedged in between this warming standstill and the 21st century warming standstill. This of course means absence of any greenhouse warming since 1979 and makes a strong case that it does not even exist, quite independently of what MGT has to say about it. As you may recall, the IPCC got started when Hansen reported that he had actually observed the greenhouse effect. This was such a sacrosanct event in 1988 that nobody has dared to question it. But if you go and study the Congressional Record for that day you find out what he actually did. What he did was to show a rising temperature curve that went from a low in 1880 to a high in 1988. There was only a one percent probability that its high point could have happened by pure chance, he said. And since it could not be chance, it had to be the end product of the 100 years of warming that preceded it. And this is what proved that the greenhouse effect is real. Unfortunately his own graph shows that included in his 100 years of warming was a non-greenhouse warming that lasted from 1910 to 1940. You cannot use a non-greenhouse warming to prove that the greenhouse effect exists, and that is the point overlooked by all who babble about Hansen having discovered the greenhouse effect. He has been getting away with this for 26 years by now. All the IPCC claims about anthropogenic global warming can be traced back to this one claim by Hansen which is not true. As a result, there is no experimental proof today that the greenhouse effect even exists. Their only argument for the existence of greenhouse warming now is the greenhouse theory of Arrhenius which I have already shown to be false. I agree with your observation that much of the climate alarmism of the past 30 years has had an air of “deliberate mistake” about it, as if the people involved knew something obvious that invalidated what they were saying, but expected to get away with it. Miskolczi could well have been their hidden danger, even more so now that his work is being experimentally verified.
Patrick Moore is absolutely right when he says that climate changes have no scientific basis to today’s claims that the changes are based on the consequences of human action and some kind of models that can spruce up the computers at will. The computer made films that were “revived” the dinosaurs.
It is rare that there is someone who uses his awareness when he wants to know the true causes of an event. All run to their computer to do such people without individual consciousness believe his “pet” more than all the things of which they are incurred but not yet aware of who they are and how else can create anything. The biggest fallacy to argue that the climate is changing, depending on what people are doing. There are many logical and influential factor that causes climate change and all the phenomena of the sun. Sunspot cycle of about 11.2 years (the average), the main indicator of change, but not the cause. There are a lot of cycles and sub-cycles generated by the interaction of celestial bodies in the solar system. The solution to this issue is the biggest challenge of science at all times. Why then there is no seriousness to invite those that offer a logical solution. I know from my previous offer, that many of you wonder how a stranger like me can give such explanations. Because I have a true indication of the solution of the enigma, and many do not believe that it is a matter of today’s level of consciousness of the majority, who only want to earn money on deception. This is politics, and even modern science.
To check all who read this, I ask: Does anyone on the planet knows that prove the true cause of the spin of the planet. I know one, and it seems that I am. Do you want to learn, provide a fair correspondence.
I will give a solution of 1% of the sum of 21,400 billion.
IIRC (I should google), the anticipated take-up along the food chain didn’t occur, or the “wrong” algae grew, in the failed experiment. It’s not too surprising that different results should occur in different environments.
reply to Jack Foster III:
The source of this information is Table 3 in Lewis and Crok’s report “A Sensitive Matter”:
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/02/A-Sensitive-Matter-Foreword-inc.pdf
I do not know how to import the table into the comments. Perhaps a moderator could do so?
Matt
I’ve been following the population debate for decades. In my opinion the UN is way to catastrophist in their projections. It is more likely that the world’s population will peak in the 2030’s or 2040’s.
@ur momisugly Matt Ridley
Table 3: Global warming up to the late twenty-first century
_________________________________________________________
Scenario Warming in 2081–2100 based on: Ratio of CMIP5-
CMIP5 models TCR of 1.35◦C to TCR-based
◦C ◦C ◦C ◦C warming
_________________________________________________________
Baseline 1850–1900 2012* 1850–1900* 2012 2012
_________________________________________________________
RCP2.6 1.6 0.8 1.0 0.2 3.4×
RCP4.5 2.4 1.6 1.6 0.8 2.0×
RCP6.0 2.8 2.0 2.0 1.2 1.7×
RCP8.5 4.3 3.5 2.9 2.1 1.7×
_________________________________________________________
*To minimise rounding discrepancies, 0.8◦C has been deducted from the CMIP5 global
mean surface temperature projected warming from 1850–1900 (taken as representing
preindustrial conditions) to obtain warming from 2012, and 0.8◦C added to the warming
based on TCR from 2012 to obtain warming from 1850–1900. But the unrounded 0.76◦C
temperature rise from 1850–1900 to 2012 per HadCRUT4 has been used to compute the
ratios of CMIP5 model to TCR-based warming.
oops, well that “table” didn’t work then, though I did spend ages arranging it all into colums, the wordpress has stipped out all the blank spaces and has created an indecipherable mess, sorry about that. I tried various ways to embed images in teh past that didn’t work on wordpress based blogs, and nothing has worked for me so far on wordpress dot com websites like this.
Still I did capture the table as an image and I proffer it here and you can see it at the link.
http://i.imgur.com/9Y24hKp.jpg