Good News and Bad News on Global Warming
The good news:
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change…
The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.
…According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.
It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government.
The bad news:
Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population “bomb,” pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.
About a hundred years ago, the environmental problems were caused by mass production in most industrialized countries. Over the last decade, these countries, usually called developed countries, have already completed industrial reform occupying the prerogative positions in global economy so they usually do not suffer from the severe environmental problems. Some emerging economies, however, start to take over the industrial productions which cause a large amount of pollution. Therefore, in the foreseeable future, the environmental problems will not be easily solved worldwide. To solve the problem, we’d better help these new economies to develop their own sophisticated technologies.
Yeah and stop dumping technologies on them that are way too advanced
Maybe we can send a training corp there to teach them how to operate the sophisticated technologies.
Yeah, the World Bank spends billions on technologies that end up decaying because they break and no one can fix them
Interesting. Do you have a link of the news? The World Bank one.
“It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade”
This is still roughly 320 billion dollars.
Everyone could have healthcare for that price! haha…
We may see farming go up, so at least more people will be fed
It’s still provided by the government.
“The forthcoming report apparently admits that climate change has extinguished no species so far and expresses “very little confidence” that it will do so.”
We get to keep the polar bears!
Thankfully they will continue to exist in life rather than just coca cola commercials
yes, gotta wuv the polar bears
“Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Richard Lindzen of MIT MITD +6.45% have moved steadily toward lukewarm views in recent years.”
So essentially, it’s there but who cares?
It’a basically the equivalent of saying you’re agnostic
Which is copping out.
The NIPCC has a great report that counters the IPCC claims – http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/04/08/comprehensive-report-documents-beneficial-impacts-global-warming