CSPP reports on story by Rob Lyons, Spiked-Online
The IPCC 4th Assessment Parts I, II, III is available on the IPCC Home Page.
An Australian academic, Aynsley Kellow, the head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, who worked on the latest IPCC report says it overstates scary weather scenarios and understates man’s ability to adapt. According to the scenarios on which the climate models are based, the developing world will go through an enormous economic leap forward over the next century - and apparently this will have many deadly consequences. Kellow is not convinced by such claims: ‘The IPCC is assuming rates of economic growth that dwarf the nineteenth-century success of the USA, the twentieth century in Japan and so on. The USA experienced, I think, a ninefold increase in GDP per capita; these are making assumptions about 30-fold increases. So you can question their credibility. But if you do that, you’re questioning the emissions scenarios that are driving the climate models.’
Even though he has participated in the IPCC process (he was a referee for Chapter 19 in the IPCC’s report, which covers ‘Key Vulnerabilities and Risk Assessment’), Kellow is exasperated by the way in which critical responses to chapters are dealt with. Now, even though Kellow has expressed public disagreement with the summary for policymakers, and the chapters that it flows from, he will still be listed as having taken part in the process - with the implication that he agrees with the final reports and is one of those thousands of experts who have apparently shown beyond all doubt that climate change will wreak havoc on the world. See full story here
By Henry Payne, The Politics Weblog, Detroit News
In the third in a series of reports, the IPCC said that keeping the rise in temperatures to within 2 degrees C would cost only 0.12 per cent of annual gross domestic product if governments exploited new technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
So who authored this rosy, “scientific” scenario? “It’s a low premium to pay to reduce the risk of major climate damage,” Bill Hare, a Greenpeace adviser who co-authored the report, told Reuters news agency after the culmination of marathon negotiations. That’s right - Greenpeace. One of the world’s leading proponents of climate change. Would the MSM declare a report written by Exxon-Mobil to be the definitive report on global warming?
Needless to say, Greenpeace’s - er, the IPCC’s - conclusion is nonsense. As a Wharton Business School of Economic study found, implementing Kyoto would cost the US about 2.3% of its GDP - or about 20 times 0.12%. And that’s just to comply with Kyoto, which doesn’t come close to lowering emissions by the 85% that the IPCC claims is required to keep temperature increases below 2C. See full weblog here
By Alan Zarembo, LA Times Staff Writer
A United Nations panel on Friday released its m ost comprehensive strategy to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming, but experts said political and economic realities likely doom it to failure. Although more than 100 countries backed the report, experts said its call for a global, multi-trillion-dollar effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is unrealistic. The strategy to cap greenhouse gas emissions could cost 3% of the world’s GDP.
“It’s not realistic from a political standpoint, and it’s not realistic because those targets are incredibly expensive,” said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University. The Bush administration quickly denounced the restrictions as too expensive. “It would cause a global recession,” said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Our goal is reducing emissions and growing the economy,” he said during a news conference in Bangkok. See full story here