The article in the url below offers a critical look at the knee-jerk reactionism to much of the uncertainty and confusion around climate change (Issues: Environmental Sustainability, p171):
“The majority view among climate scientists, as set out in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that "most" of the slight (0.5Degrees C) warming in the last quarter of the 20th century was "very likely" caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. On that basis, and relying on computer models, its "best guess" of the likely rise in mean global temperature over the next 100 years is between 1.8Degrees C and 4Degrees C. These projections were made, incidentally, before the recent acknowledgement that so far this century there has been no further global warming at all - in spite of a continuing rapid rise in carbon emissions.”
Nigel Lawson, who was the UK’s Chancellor during much of the 1980s and is promoting his recent book on the subject of climate change, focuses his argument on counteracting the economic assumptions contained within the IPCC report of climate change and the corresponding potential costs of solving the associated problems. Chief among Lawson’s points is the IPCC’s “self-evidently absurd” assumption that future solutions are constrained by current knowledge levels:
“Even if that were so, what would it mean? Suppose the loss to the developing world were as much as 10 per cent of GDP, then - given the IPCC's economic growth assumptions, on which its emissions assumptions, and hence its warming assumptions, are based- it would imply that, by 2100 or thereabouts, people in the developing world, instead of being some 9.5 times as well off as they are today, would be "only" some 8.5 times as well off - which would still leave them better off than people in the developed world today. This, then, is the scale of the alleged threat to the planet - based, to repeat, on the IPCC's grossly inflated estimate of the likely damage from further warming, arising from its absurdly gloomy view of mankind's ability to adapt.”
I forward this article not to challenge global warming as a fact, but to suggest that there is still much that we do not know about the implications of climate change and our best possible response. This is not to make the case for inaction (the potential costs of which vastly outweigh the potential costs of doing nothing), but, instead, to argue that our “best” policy responses need to be founded on as much information as possible and assumptions that enjoy broad support.
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
Stop this foolish overreaction to climate change
By NIGEL LAWSON
887 words
7 April 2008
Financial Times
London Ed1
Page 13
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d19321e-043a-11dd-b28b-000077b07658.html
