Climate turning point

By John Cochrane. He summarizes recent work by Koonin and Lomborg. Excerpts:

"Koonin

There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself.

Koonin’s stock in trade is reading the actual science. Not the “summary for policymakers,” the tables and charts. Koonin, past president of Cal Tech and undersecretary for science in the Obama Department of Energy, is not easy to dismiss as a partisan crank.

Koonin reminds us that there are some benefits as well as costs from carbon dioxide emissions

Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.

Greenhouses use 1,000 ppm CO2; the atmosphere has 420, up from 280 in pre-industrial times. It is interesting that CO2 reduction is called “green,” as despite its many other potential effects, literal green is not among them.

Koonin reminds us that in the actual science,

• Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.

The claim repeated over and over that climate impact is here now in the form of more severe weather (also including wildfire) is simply not scientifically true.

• While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.

The units are millimeters per year.

• The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.

And, moving to economic policy,

• Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

If the problem is 5% of GDP in 100 years, don’t spend 10% of GDP on it now. More generally, the policy decision to subsidize battery powered EVs, windmills, and photovoltaics does not help at all. Every gallon of petroleum not burned by you is burned by someone else over the next decades. See corn ethanol, switchgrass and biofuels for the last generation of such enthusiasms.

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Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg serves up a steady diet of uncomfortable truths, also coming from actually reading the science and deconstructing how it is misleadingly spun. For this month’s trio, check out his New York Post oped.

It’s a nice summary of how the extremes of the enviromental movement have been catastrophising and fear mongering for 50 years. While, on the other hand

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and then through regulation. Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing, as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world.

Instead,

The first well-known environmental scare story was the 1968 book “Population Bomb.” which warned that the global population was out of control, and argued for widespread, forced sterilization. Given the inevitability of hundreds of millions of hunger deaths, the book also argued we should just stop food aid to basket-cases like India.

Thankfully, the world mostly ignored this misanthropic and amoral advice. Instead, scientists spearheaded the first Green Revolution that led to much higher crop yields and more than a billion more people being well fed. Today, India is the world’s leading rice exporter.

In 1972, “Limits to Growth” projected that food scarcity and pollution would cause global collapse. …

This was the mood that shaped the world’s first UN Environmental Summit in 1972, when chairman Maurice Strong declared that the world had only 10 years to avoid environmental catastrophe. He became the first director of the UN Environment Program and argued that Doomsday was “very probable” unless we ended destructive economic growth. Thankfully, we didn’t heed his advice.

Instead, persistent economic growth means more than 3 billion people — 41% of the world’s population — don’t live in extreme poverty….

The simplistic, alarmist predictions of the 1970s set the tone for decades… Climate change is definitely a real challenge, but just like before, the scares are exaggerated.

… despite fearmongering about weather disasters, the hard data shows that the death toll from floods, droughts, storms and wildfire has declined dramatically over the past century from half a million each year in the 1920s to less than 9,000 annually over the past decade — a 98% reduction….

It is striking to note that the fearmongers’ proposed solutions today are much the same as they were in past decades: repent and turn away from progress. Ivory tower, rich world academics advocate degrowth even as the vast majority of the world is dependent on economic growth to get out of grinding poverty.

…Climate economics clearly tells us that the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest significantly in research and development for low-CO₂ energy. By boosting innovation, we can achieve technological breakthroughs that will eventually make green energy more affordable than fossil fuels. Instead of just rich countries buying expensive green energy to feel virtuous, that can help the whole world to eventually switch because green is cheaper"