Press release by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL)
Essay “Undue Climate Haste”
21 April 2021
Optimum economic outturn is seen at 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2100
Mortality due to extreme weather decreased spectacularly
Why did the EU invite the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg to speak in Brussels instead of the Nobel Prize winning climate economist William Nordhaus? That question is answered in an essay entitled Undue Climate Haste, which the CLINTEL Foundation is publishing today. The essay concludes: “The main message of this essay is that we are in no hurry and that panic is unwarranted. Climate change always deserves our attention, but the idea that we need to turn our energy supply upside down right now appears to be driven by emotion rather than reason.”
The EU has decided it wants to achieve net zero carbon emission by 2050. If they succeed, Europe will become the first ‘climate neutral’ continent. The media have mainly welcomed this ambition. Politicians claim that there will be many benefits of this policy: they say it will make the economy stronger and create jobs. But are these claims justified, by a cost-benefit analysis for example?
They are not, states the essay Undue Climate Haste. Remarkably the Nobel Prize (2018) winning climate economist William Nordhaus showed in his Nobel lecture in Stockholm that the ‘economic optimum’ for climate policy is to allow 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2100. Economically, it is better to accept a certain amount of climate damage and to limit the cost of mitigation than the other way round: ambitious goals such as staying below 2 degrees or even 1.5 degrees are extremely costly.
Unfeasible
The climate goals of the EU are not only very costly, they are unachievable in practice. A simple calculation shows that in order to reach net zero emissions in 2050, the EU will have to deploy a new nuclear power station every week, from now until 2050. In total, 1650 new nuclear power stations would be needed. Yet today, 60 years after the first nuclear power plan went into production, there are only 450 such plants across the world.
The EU has a strong preference for ‘renewable’ energy sources, such as wind and solar, instead of nuclear. Achieving net zero with wind would require 450 new 2.5-MW turbines to be installed every two days until 2050; 82,000 windmills a year! Where would you place them all?
Unnecessary
The last part of the essay explains the EU’s haste towards its climate goal is totally unnecessary. Almost all important parameters indicate that climate change is a manageable phenomenon. We now have the technology and the wealth to cope.
The number of victims of extreme weather has decreased over the past century by more than 95%. Damage from such phenomena, corrected for the growth of the economy, has also declined slightly. Sea-level is rising, but very slowly and, moreover, no acceleration is apparent in long tide-gauge records.
Meanwhile there are strong indications that climate models, on which climate policy is largely based, are ‘oversensitive’, i.e. the real climate is less sensitive to CO2 than the climate models say it is. This means less future warming, and that CO2 reductions needed to stay below the 2 degrees target do not need to be so aggressive. Even if emissions stay above the 2020 level for the rest of the century, the 2-degree target remains in sight. Unfortunately, the climate science community rarely tells policymakers about these relatively new insights, preferring to discuss scenarios based on climate models.
The essay Undue Climate Haste was commissioned by the ECR Group of the European Parliament in Brussels.
You can read the essay here.
CLINTEL Foundation
The Climate Intelligence foundation (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. CLINTEL’s main objective is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change as well as the effects of climate policy.
For more information contact Marcel Crok, marcel.crok@clintel.org
Website: https://clintel.org
HOW DARE YOU?!!!!
“… the ‘economic optimum’ for climate policy is to allow 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2100.”
It’s not merely the economic optimum, it’s the biological optimum, too. Better for plants and animals, including humans — if it happens, which is doubtful. More likely the average global temperature will drop 3.5°C by 2100.
Either way, the largest effects will be at the poles with decreasing change at lower latitudes. Tropical regions will experience no temperature changes at all.
If the IPPC Worst Case Scenario occurs, Europe might get greener. In Canada average winter lows would go from -12°C to -6°C, summer highs from 21°C to 27°C (80°F). It would be a good thing.
In any case, there is nothing humanity can do to make global temps go up or down. No amount of political fiddling short of Nuclear Winter will alter the climate. Planet Earth is going to do what she does regardless of oil wells or wind mills. The tempest is in the teapot. Brussels is irrelevant, except for the sprouts.
“Brussels is irrelevant”
To Nature yes, to us that have to abide by it’s diktats, not so.
Why, or why is 1.5 degrees C the magic number? Are we doomed if its 1.51 C or 1.499 C? Why this cultish harping on this one number that will save the planet?
Can someone in the climate change cult please explain.
And what does 1.5C even mean when the Earth has such temperature extremes?
Outside the cult explanations.
1.5C number is a chosen number.
The higher affordable one,
in consideration of predicted temp due to AGW.
Any lower and that becomes an empty non horror AGW story.
Any higher and the risk of the “prediction” becoming
falsified due to a detrending or decoupling from reality increases considerably and quicker.
The 1.5C is the UN’s Paris agreement or accord “devine” number consisting as the achivable aim to have the world economically crippled…
and in the same time wholly justified.
Some thing same as with “rona”.
And the most hilarious thing there is that all this “saving the world by destroying it”, is based in the experimental sciency part,
“the models”, which actually do not do any lower than 2.6C, at the very lowest;
as according to the models, which are the very base of this stupidity,
“the warming is already locked and can’t be any lower than what is going to be.
The lower value there is approximately 2.6C,
and the most possible and reasonable according to models is approximately 3C.
I know is all a messy mesmerising stupidity.
well
cheers
Honestly, 1.5 degrees C doesn’t sound scary at all. What’s the fuss?
Greta is a scared child who is prevented from recognizing the physical connections due to her mental handicap. It’s like a school of fish. They also swim after a brain-amputated fish.
“….82,000 windmills a year! Where would you place them all?”
hmmm… how about one in the middle of the Roman Coliseum? One on top of the British parliament building? Lots of room in the neighbords of the very rich- and some built over the homes of the green fanatics? Lots of golf courses where many could be installed. All along the Riviera! Probably 3-4 in the middle of Lake Como. Several in the Vatican. A couple on top of the palace of Versailles. Lots of places! And how about all the grave yards? Room for thousands in them. There you go- I’ve solved the problem. :-}
The scientists who live in their ivory tower laboratories constructing models and making predictions need to get out and live in the real world. We would currently welcome a 3.5°C temperature increase across Ireland. Having lived in a hot dry semi-desert area and seen how people and plants have thrived – with a reliable source of water – these scientist need to go and see and experience the “perceived threats.” Their fears are no different from a young child’s fear of the dark.
Because Saint Greta The Constipated spews the lies she is ordered to spew.
Funny the same people are pushing Zero Carbon and Zero Covid?
But…. but… then Greta would be out of a job. Playing truant is hard work. Guess she qualifies for a generous Swedish disability allowance though.
I would love (though will not live to feel it but so would my kids) a warming of 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2100. But where is it? Colder than ever here.
one thing I don’t get : Gretas mission is to stop fossil fuel use . there is only one major oil producer in Europe ; Norway . Gretas neighbor , with a huge fossil fuel industry which has allowed them to grow uber wealthy while rejecting the EU . and to pursue government subsidized whale slaughter . yet I have never heard greta say a single bad word about Norways fossil fuel industry . wouldn’t you think she might protest against next door Norway while traveling around the world to castigate everyone for their wealthy first world lifestyles ?
From the article: “Economically, it is better to accept a certain amount of climate damage and to limit the cost of mitigation than the other way round: ambitious goals such as staying below 2 degrees or even 1.5 degrees are extremely costly.”
Assuming that is even necessary.
The alarmists claim that the “hottest year evah!”, the year 2016, was 1.02C warmer than the average from 1880 to the present.
So, an increase of 0.5C from there would put the climate at the same temperature as was experienced during the 1930’s where Hansen says 1934 was 0.5C warmer than 1998, and that would make it warmer than 2016 by that much since 1998 and 2016 are tied for the warmest year since the Early Twentieth Century according to the UAH Satellite chart.
Currently, the temperatures have cooled since 2016 by about 0.7C, so we are now 1.2C *cooler* than at the highpoint of 1934.
We have a long way to go to get back up to 1.5C above the average.
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere continue to increase, yet the temperatures are falling. Instead of heading higher after reaching the 2016 highpoint, the temperatues are heading lower. The alarmists keep telling us that any minute now the temperatures will turn back up and go off the chart. But will they? It doesn’t look like it to me.
If climate change activists were serious about reducing CO2 emissions, they would be ardently pursuing the development of nuclear power, which has a much higher energy density than wind or solar power, particularly in Europe where sunshine is rare except in summer.
But “environmental” activists were frightened away from nuclear power starting in 1979. On March 16 of that year, the movie “The China Syndrome” (starring Hanoi Jane Fonda) was released, depicting a fictional meltdown of a nuclear power plant with catastrophic consequences. Twelve days later (on March 28, 1979), with many people having seen the movie, there was a real nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, whose consequences were well-contained and minimal, but the news media were quick to blow it out of proportion and consider Hanoi Jane a prophet, and she profited handsomely. There were even rock concerts in the early 1980’s to generate activism against “nuclear poison power” among young people.
These two events started a national movement against the construction of new nuclear plants in the USA, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in what is now Ukraine reinforced the movement, since most Americans did not realize that Soviet safety regulations on nuclear power plants were much less stringent than those of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the USA.
So when those Senate hearings were held in 1988 about global warming, public opinion in the USA had turned against nuclear power plants, and they were not considered a viable alternative to fossil fuel plants, due to “safety concerns”. Very few nuclear power plants have been built in the USA since 1979, despite the fact that there have been no accidents at existing nuclear plants in the USA in the 42 years since then.
The current fascination with Greta Thunberg shows that people who want to influence public opinion prefer using a young and ignorant person as a poster child for activism, to influence other young, ignorant people to follow them, since young people are more easily misled than more mature adults, and their votes can tip elections. For many young people, “if all my friends are saying something, it must be true”. Greta is to our times like the rock stars of the early 1980’s were to the anti-nuclear movement.
liberals are emotionally driven with a spectacular inability to reason, so all that is done by them must appeal to emotion, not reason…the mob, not the thinker…the kneejerk reactor, not the reasoning individual.
because of these factors, all they do WORSENS, not improves, whatever it is they are acting on.
Life on Earth is vastly more at risk with cold versus hot temperatures and quibbling over minute variations of temperature during the puny existence of human life is a fools errand given the far more devastating impact of the planet’s axis to the sun when the next Ice Age will occur.
Let’s see. EU politicians would rather listen to a mentally challenged teenager than credentialled experts. What does that tell you about EU politicians? It tells me that they are emotional chicken littles more interested in virtue signalling than formulating quality decisions. It also tells me that these politicians are growing morbidly obese, psychologically, feeding at the tax payers trough and are not accountable for their actions.
Why doesn’t Greta go lecture to China! They dump more carbon in the air than any other country.
It’s about feelings and not about science.