News from the New Party

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Environmental hysteria makes for bad policy

The hysterical response to the recent policymakers' summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the fourth such report produced by this committee, is strange when set beside the actual content of the report. In fact, the report itself is rather odd, being a summary for policymakers (i.e. a document written by officials for politicians), with the full report not due until May. Christopher Monckton points out some salient facts:

Figures in the final draft of the UN's fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches. It suggests that the rate of sea-level rise is up from 2mm/yr to 3mm/year - no more than one foot in a century.

UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.

The Summary for Policymakers was issued February 2, 2007, but the report on which the Summary is based will not be published until May. This strange separation of the publication dates has raised in some minds the possibility that the Summary (written by political representatives of governments) will be taken as a basis for altering the science chapters (written by scientists, and supposedly finalized and closed in December 2006).

The draft of the science chapters, now being circulated to governments for last-minute comments, reveals that the tendency of computers to over-predict rises in temperature and sea level has forced a major rethink.

The report's generally more cautiously-expressed projections confirm scientists' warnings that the UN's heavy reliance on computer models had exaggerated the temperature effect of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Previous reports in 1990, 1995 and 2001 had been progressively more alarmist. In the final draft of the new report there is a change in tone. Though carbon dioxide in the air is increasing, global temperature is not.

The implication is, therefore, that the predictions of previous reports have been exaggerated, and that there is, if anything, less reason to worry than previous IPCC reports have suggested. Part of the reason for the increased public alarm is that the IPCC has changed its assessment that climate change is the result of human activity (in other words carbon emissions) to a probability of 90% or greater. This is all well and good (or rather bad), but even if the cause if more probably due to anthropogenic causes than not, if the consequences are not as severe as previously feared, then surely this should still be good news? Certainly not cause for global panic.

Melanie Phillips suggests that the IPCC may be attempting to manipulate the forthcoming full report:

The IPCC has said that the authors of the scientific papers will have to change their findings if they depart from the summary in order to bring them into line with it. In other words, research which apparently shows that the panic over man-made global warming is exaggerated misleading and wrong is to be altered to support the summary's view that man-made global warming is even worse than previously thought.

This kind of manipulation would, of course, amount to a falsification of the scientific evidence. One can only speculate as to what the motivation behind such nefarious activity might be, but it has to be said that it would be entirely consistent with other areas of public life in western countries today, in which the holders of any opinion or inconvenient evidence in contradiction to the prevailing politically correct view are undermined, ridiculed or shouted down.

To return to a point we have made previously, knowing the cause of climate change is one thing, understanding the consequences of it is something else, and knowing what remedial action to take, if any, is an entirely separate problem. The political and economic problems of engineering a global reduction in carbon emissions sufficient to avoid the most pessimistic scenarios predicted by IPCC reports of yesteryear are vast, and the costs of any meaningful action are certain to far outstrip any conceivable benefit that may be delivered. Panic is a poor basis on which to build sensible policy, particularly on an issue where unprecedented global cooperation is likely to be required. We need to be able to have confidence in the science and the way that the science is presented. At the moment it is doubtful whether we can have such confidence.

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Environmental hysteria makes for bad policy