Good Climate-Change News Is Fit to Print

Slowly it’s percolating into the journalistic mind that recent research is upbeat

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts: 

"New York Times writer, David Wallace-Wells, in his customary excess of words, reprised his own concession since writing a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” He now says: “Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic.” He acknowledges a new consensus that has reduced expected warming to “between two and three degrees” Celsius, or less than half the forecast of, say, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment."

"a worst-case emissions forecast, known as RCP 8.5, that everywhere was presented as the objective climate future."

"Mr. Wallace-Wells attributes half of the improved picture to abandonment of the faulty RCP 8.5 and half to technological advance, but this is problematic at the very least. Technological advance is usually assumed. A quirk of RCP 8.5 was that it specified stagnating technology except, strangely, for the technology to allow a sextupling of global coal consumption."

"The consensus-bearing U.N. climate panel, after 40 years, modified its all-important “climate sensitivity” estimate, using real-world temperature trends to corral its discordant and unreliable computer simulations. Result: lower expected warming and lower estimated risk of worst-case warming."

"For years the late Martin Weitzman of MIT and Harvard insisted the known unknowns were our real concern. The problem with outlier climate scenarios, however, is the problem with all uncertain end-of-the-world scenarios, like those usefully listed by Richard Posner in a 2004 book that reports that “the number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great, and their variety startling.”

Which of these low-probability, high-consequence disasters should we spend resources preparing for at the expense of things people need and want now?"