The IPCC is rolling out its “Fifth Assessment” horse-choker Working Group papers and slim-line Summaries for Policymakers.
In this era where film stars with carbon footprints 100 fold those of common folk exhort us to reduce consumption levels to save the world, the fascinating question is ‘How much damage does the IPCC think a doubling of carbon dioxide levels brings and what is the cost of measures to prevent this doubling’?
The IPCC puts the warming from the anticipated doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide at between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees (perhaps in response to 17 years of the planet refusing to warm in defiance of the climate models, the lower boundary was reduced in the present Assessment). The most respected of all climate scientists, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, estimate the maximum warming possible for human induced greenhouse gases is 1 degree.
The IPCC lists only three post-2008 studies that attempt to estimate the net losses from global warming as a result of doing nothing.
- (Nordhaus 2008) estimates a loss over the next 50 years of 2.5 per cent with a 3 degree warming.
- Bosello et al have a 0.5 per cent loss with a 1.9 degree warming.
- Rosen and van der Mensbrugghe have a 1.8 per cent loss for a 2.3 degree warming and a 4.6 per cent loss for a 4.9 degree warming.
There is also a lot of guff in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment about some possible scenarios where much higher warming takes place but this is about as likely as little green men being sighted in a Mars probe.
The hysterical Summary for Policymakers glosses over the numbers and concentrates on the scary rhetoric, an outcome that led to the resignation of Richard Tol, co-chair of a key Working Group and one of the few non-socialist economists involved in the IPCC. This was followed by the predictable green left’s spleen-venting reaction to an apostate.
So, the angst and tens of thousands of scientists, politicians and other green warriors jetting from world city to world city to mingle, trumpet and convive is all about preventing a loss over 50 -100 years of about half to one year’s annual growth in world income levels. And the calculus of doom massively overstates the losses from warming (magnifying ocean rises, the need for new infrastructure, losses from tourism, the great rainfall shrinkage, inventing dengue fever outbreaks, new security scares, etc.) while downplaying plant and food growth from more atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Having been forced to acknowledge that the much feared global warming has only a trivial effect on real levels of human welfare, the IPCC has to ensure that its estimates of the costs its pursuit of the New Jerusalem are not too great. Forcing a radical transformation of society by banning the use of oil and coal and demanding that we reduce energy consumption and shift to horrendously expensive renewables and mythical technology like carbon capture and storage is depicted as a cake walk, made difficult only because myopic politicians fail to recognize that industries and consumers can do without low-cost energy.
But even in the heroic assumptions about shifting to the mythical low-cost new energy technologies and saving energy by using less of it, the researchers are unable to torture the data to reveal the same level of trivial costs of forced emission restraint as are evident in the costs of doing nothing. It turns out that the costs of policies like forcing Australia and other developed nations to reduce carbon emission to 20 per cent of current levels does not come cheap, even though the modelers gloss over the fact that the replacement for fossil fuels is horrendously expensive and would bring de-industrialisation. Economic modelers can only bend facts so far and, even with an optimistic gloss on taxes and regulations, they cannot avoid coming up with an emission suppression cost of 2.7 per cent in 2050, a cost that is amplified threefold if the carbon capture and storage does not work, nuclear is phased out and the renewables cannot take more than 20 per cent of world energy.
Bottom line. If global warming is taking place it will not be very harmful. If it is taking place, attempts to prevent it, even if politically feasible in a multilateral world of nations with different interests, would cost more than any damage the emissions may be causing.