Turns out the giants of science - whose climategate emails reveal their unacademic tribalism - demand our belief in their global warming religion without allowing us to see the temperature data it's based on. It defies common sense that voters would agree to turn their society upside down to make life harder for themselves on the basis of secret information; yet that is what politicians think we should do.
No thanks.
While those in favour of open science (aka sceptics, for what else should a scientist be?) chip away at the fortress walls of secrecy about temperature data, Terence Corcoran refers to the second leg of the IPCC thesis - that is after the physical science was supposedly settled. This focused on social and economic solutions to the supposed global warming problem, and required wider scientific expertise to formulate and validate models whose complexities and unknowns rivalled those of trying to predict the weather decades hence.
Only four scenarios were developed, called A1, B1, A2, and B2.
In the 1998 draft, the A1 scenario is called the Golden Economic Age. It describes a period of “rapid and successful economic development,” brought on by the economic structures that have been successful in the past: free markets, global free trade, innovation. “Free trade enables each region to access knowledge, technology, and capital to best deploy its respective comparative economic and human advantages.” By 2100, it said, the developed world under free global trade, would have annual per capita income approaching $100,000 and the developing world $70,000.The upshot of these scenarios, writes Corcoran, is a deck stacked against free markets and globalization.
The trouble with this Golden Economic Age, a name that was dropped in the final IPCC report on scenarios in 2001, is that it produced a lot of carbon emissions — thus making free trade, open markets and globalization a non-starter. The alternatives were variations on slower growth. Scenario B1, called Sustainable Development, involved “high levels of environmental and social consciousness” along with reductions in income and social inequality. Average per capita income would rise only to $40,000 by 2100. But the good news, from the IPCC perspective, is that carbon emissions were a lot lower.
Emails cataloguing the weaknesses in the scenarios project are numerous. ... While the scientists balked at simple numbers and sought qualification, the IPCC wanted precision. Geoff Jenkins, a former head of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, where CRU is housed, wrote to Mike Hulme: “Getting away from single number answers is very laudable scientifically, but it presents policymakers (for whom the whole IPCC exercise is undertaken) with a problem.” ...The economic analysis by the IPCC was as - um - questionable as their physical science. The underlying assumptions were gently but devastatingly exposed by Lord Lawson in his book An Appeal to Reason.
The IPCC’s 2001 Synthesis Report concluded that carbon concentration in the atmosphere could rise to 1,250% above the pre-industrial year of 1750 under the free market A1 scenario, with temperatures rising as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius. Capitalism clearly ruins everything.
As Richard North chases down Pachauri, and the physical scientists worry away at the global temperature data, don't forget that the economic and social changes being pushed are as rickety as the physical science.
Truly castles built on sand.
1 comments:
Oh dear me. Oh dearie, dearie, me.
He's got hold of the wrong end of the stick there that's for sure.
The SRES is where the A1B1 etc comes from. This does not come after the IPCC. It comes before it. You use the economic models to determine how many people there will be and how rich they'll be. This gives you some idea of what emissions will be. These you then plug into climate models.
However, A1 etc are not scenarios. They are families of scenarios. There are 40 scenarios, all of which sit in one of four families, A1, A2, B1 or B2. From the family we get wealth and population: from the scenario we get the technological path (more coal, more solar PV etc) and this gives us emissions.
So, he clearly hasn't actually bothered to read the SRES.
What's much, much worse is that he's completely garbled what the four familes are based upon.
A means capitalism, B means a more caring sharing world (I call it the "kumbaya" economy). 1 means globalisation and 2 means regional and local economies.
Now it's true that A has higher growth and thus higher emissions (although there is one A scenario which actually has the *lowest* emissions). But we know that, there's no nonsense going on here. The defining feature of capitalism is that, uniquely among economic systems, it provides high growth in average living standards.
Where he's got himself entirely garbled is that 1, globalisation, always produces better results than 2, regional and local economies. Globalisation (ie, free trade, the very thing he says the SRES is biased against) produces fewer, richer people than not globalisation and also produces fewer emissions than not globalisation.
A1 is better than A2 in every way. B1 is better than B2 in every way.
Capitalism or kumbaya is a choice, sure, but globalisation or not globalisation isn't. Globalisation wins every time.
Far from the SRES being biased against free trade and the like it's actually proof perfect that they're great things. When the Greens start saying we should all live locally we can just point them to the IPCC: nope, sorry, you're wrong, the scientific consensus is the other way. Globalisation gives us richer people with fewer emissions.
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