Best News On Climate Change
N.Y. Times 2-column lead, "U.S. CLIMATE STUDY HAS GRIM WARNING OF ECONOMIC RISKS: Reduction of Up to 10 Percent in GDP."
That is 10% reduction by end of the century. At 3% annual GDP growth, GDP will grow by more than 700% in the same time frame.
N.Y. Times 2-column lead, "U.S. CLIMATE STUDY HAS GRIM WARNING OF ECONOMIC RISKS: Reduction of Up to 10 Percent in GDP."
That is 10% reduction by end of the century. At 3% annual GDP growth, GDP will grow by more than 700% in the same time frame.
It seems President Trump may be the only sane person in government. See above tweet. There's nothing in the U.S. climate study which warrants the adjectives "dire" and "grim." It's unhinged alarmism designed to spook the ignorant.
1. Fourth National Climate Change Assessment: Case For Optimism
Ignore all the misleading headlines on the above government report and actually try to read it if you have the time. It actually is quite un-alarming. I am surprised at how much good news it packs, between the lines.
Ignore all the misleading headlines on the above government report and actually try to read it if you have the time. It actually is quite un-alarming. I am surprised at how much good news it packs, between the lines.
2. "The report largely attempts to remain soberly scientific. Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does." -- Bjorn Lomborg in New York Post
3. Let us go over a few highlights that Bjorn calls out in his article.
“Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”
“Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”
4. On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”
5. CNN’s headline screamed that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page.
6. Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today. A slightly smaller bonanza, in other words.
7. But the 10% figure is itself dodgy. It assumes that temperatures will increase about 14°F by the end of the century. This is unlikely. The report itself estimates that, with no significant climate action, American temperatures will increase by between 5 and 8.7 degrees.
8. Using the high estimate of 8.7 degrees, the damage would be only half as big, at 5 percent.
9. But even the 8.7-degree warming estimate is unrealistically pessimistic. This stems from an extreme high-emission scenario that expects almost the entire world to revert to using massive amounts of coal: a five-fold increase from today.
10. That, in turn, assumes a much higher amount of fossil fuels than are plausibly available for use, according to one study. So, even a 5% reduction in the U.S. economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.
11. Moreover, two-thirds of the purported 10 percent damage to the economy comes from just one category: heat deaths.
12. While it is true that more people die when it is unusually hot, it is not true that lives are shorter in hotter places. That’s because people adapt. And studies of migrants show people do so very quickly, within weeks.
13. Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous. People have been shown to adjust over time to temperature changes. Over the next 80 years, people can make many additional changes that reduce this risk,
14. So, the idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10% disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damage of the worst-case temperature the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.
15. While activists overstate the costs of climate change, they suggest its reversal is simply a matter of political will. In fact, there are significant costs to climate action: It often involves replacing relatively cheap fossil fuels with still-uncompetitive alternatives.
16. Climate economist William Nordhaus has shown that a globally coordinated and gradually increasing carbon tax could cut temperature rises to 6.3 degrees from 7.4 at a cost of $20 trillion in lost productivity.
17. Yet this requires a very well-designed, coordinated global policy. In the real world, climate policies are typically less effective and much costlier.
18. Nordhaus shows that more ambitious policies like the Paris Agreement target of 3.6 degrees would cost some $134 trillion, much more than the associated climate benefits. Such prescriptions for climate change are worse than the disease.
19. Yes, we need to speed up the transition from fossil fuels by investing in green R&D. Even so, reporting on climate change needs to be grounded in reality.
20. Exaggeration is dangerous, because it risks wasting resources on the wrong policy answers, and gives ammunition to those who would ignore this real challenge.
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