Articles Tagged "Tim Worstall"

This seriously astonishes me.

Just a little bit of background.

So, we’ve two things we want to know about climate change.

1) What are the effects of emissions?

2) How many emissions will there be?

Obviously, we can get more complex than that but that’s the basic couple of questions at the root of it all.

The answers to 2) that we have all been working to came from the SRES, the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. A report I’ve had great fun with as it shows that globalisation reduces emissions for any given level of population or wealth. Entirely contrary to the bleatings of every damn greenie on the planet.

The SRES families and scenarios were based on a pretty obvious methodology. Work out how many people there are going to be, how rich they’re going to be and which technologies they’re going to use and this will tell you what emissions are going to be. You can then plug those numbers into your climate models and Bob’s your parental sibling of choice.

The SRES was getting a bit old, probably is/was right to update it.

It’s difficult to deny that large areas of the US are undergoing drought conditions at the moment. But should we be assuming that this is a portent of climate change? Or even that it is a harbinger of a new Dust Bowl, as in the 1930? We cannot completely rule out either of those possibilities but the correct answers as yet are no and no.

That there are drought conditions in many places is not in doubt:

In a monthly report to be released Monday, the National Climatic Data Center is expected to announce that this year’s drought now ranks among the ten largest drought areas in the past century.

Preliminary data computed from the Palmer Drought Severity Index shows that 54.6 percent of the contiguous 48 states was in drought at the end of June, the highest percentage since December 1956, and the sixth-highest peak percentage on record.

Monday’s State of the Climate drought report from NCDC is expected to show that since 1895, only the extraordinary droughts of the 1930s and 1950s have covered more land area than the current drought.

We’ve been told often enough that climate change is going to mean the disappearance of many or even most of the tropical forests. Something of a problem: although it seems that this might not be entirely true. At least one paper is arguing that an increase in CO2 will increase the size and land area of those tropical forests:

“Experimental studies have generally shown that plants do not show a large response to CO2 fertilisation. “However, most of these studies were conducted in northern ecosystems or on commercially important species” explains Steven Higgins, lead author of the study from the Biodiodversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe-University. “In fact, only one experimental study has investigated how savanna plants will respond to changing CO2 concentrations and this study showed that savanna trees were essentially CO2-starved under pre-industrial CO2 concentrations, and that their growth really starts taking off at the CO2 concentrations we are currently experiencing.“

It’s seems a fair enough observation: if tree growth is currently being limited by atmospheric CO2 then more of it will increase tree growth. And the implication is that what is currently savanna will become forest: we might assume that what is currently grasslands will become savanna as well.

This is an interesting paper in Nature on the uncertainty we have about the future of the environment and ecosphere. A short description here and the full paper here. I doubt very much that this is what the paper’s authors would say is the correct interpretation but what they’re really saying is that climate change is less important than we previously thought. In fact, we can quite plausibly say that their results are such that we should do less about climate change than we currently do.

All the usual caveats apply: this is one paper, it is indeed a speculative paper and so on. Also, my apologies that this is necessarily rather geeky about the economics of climate change, inevitably so.

The argument put forward is that there are things other than climate change which might cause the entire breakdown (or less emotionally, substantial and unpredictable change in) the environment and ecosphere that supports us all. This isn’t controversial at all: we’re all aware that a decent sized asteroid strike, an outburst of vulcanism like the Deccan, a nuclear war, these could mean more than just that the daffodils flower a little earlier each year.

There’s a nice little collision going on in the UK between two groups or people: or perhaps two different visions of the good society. This is between the concept of fuel poverty and the legislation being used to try and deal with climate change.

"Figures show a huge rise in UK households in fuel poverty, even before expected rises in the price of gas and electricity, and charities predicted that this winter would see millions more people struggling to keep warm at home."

The concept of fuel poverty itself isn’t all that bad: it’s defined as having to spend more than 10% of household income to heat (both the house and water etc) to what is considered an acceptable level.

There’s also not much wrong with the idea (although I snarl about the specific implementations at times) of using leguislation, taxation, to try to deal with climate change.

I find myself in an uncomfortable position over this climate change thing. I've no problem with the existence of man-made climate change, no problem with the idea that we ought to do something about it. But what we are actually trying to do about it seems bonkers, counter-productive even. So how did we get into this mess?

To start with I'm entirely happy to accept the output from the IPCC: the globe is warming, it's all us doing it. Perhaps I shouldn't be happy to do so but that's a very different argument. Similarly I'm happy to accept that the possible outcomes are sufficiently terrible that we really ought to do something about it.

Again, perhaps I shouldn't be but just, if you don't accept either of those two, bear with me anyway. For what really confuses me about what's going on is that even if we do accept those two points, what we're actually trying to do about it all doesn't seem to solve the problems identified.

I've argued at length, elsewhere (even in a book), that the very IPCC assumptions about the economy that are used to prove that we do have this climate problem that we must do something about, also show us that globalisation is part of the cure. So why are all those using the existence of climate change to tell us we must change our ways insisting that we must reverse globalization in order to do something about it?

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