ACCENTUATING THE NEGATIVES: THE IPCC WORKING GROUP II SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS (SPM)

By Indur M Goklany

Although the SPM has some useful and apt things to say about the need for adaptation, it is flawed by the fact that it: * Overstates negative impacts and understates positive impacts of climate change. * Overstates the level of confidence that should be attached to the impacts on both human systems as well as "natural" systems (because the latter are also affected by human actions). * Fails to examine the impacts of climate change in the wider context of other stresses affecting humanity and the rest of nature, which would allow us to gauge the importance of climate change relative to other stresses. * Fails to examine the relationship between climate change and sustainable economic development more fully, which could mislead policymakers into opting for policies that would divert scarce resources from dealing with today's urgent problems in favor of policies to pursue longer term, and more uncertain, problems. Among the several problems regarding the SPM are the following:

1. Once one gets past the opaque verbiage of the SPM, it is clear that most of the negative impacts listed in the SPM are overstated, while the positive impacts are understated. This is particularly true for impacts that human beings can directly or indirectly alleviate through adaptation. The SPM implicitly acknowledges this by stating in the captions for Tables SPM-1 and SPM-2 (which cover pp. 15-17) that they do not account for adaptation and "changes or developments in adaptive capacity". This is also generally true for the impacts listed on pp. 7 through 14, as is implied by the sentence in the preamble to Section C that states, "The magnitude and timing of impacts will vary with the amount and timing of climate change and, in some cases, the capacity to adapt." Note that Part C, which includes the abovementioned tables, covers virtually all the material in the SPM that speaks to future impacts.

2. Overstatement of negative impacts and understatement of positive impacts occurs because the methodologies generally used in the impact studies do not account fully, if at all, for increases in "adaptive capacity" (i.e., the ability to adapt) that should occur if the world gets wealthier, as is assumed by the IPCC's emission scenarios. An increase in adaptive capacity would translate into greater "autonomous" (or "automatic") adaptation that would occur in the absence of explicit policies, because under a "business as usual" world, i.e., in the normal course of things, humans (as well as other species) will take steps to reduce harm to themselves, take advantage of any new opportunities that may come along, or both, regardless of whether anyone gives them the green light that it's OK to adapt.

3. A corollary of this methodological oversight is that most of these impacts studies are inconsistent with the level of economic development assumed by the IPCC's emission scenarios and, therefore, with their estimates of climate change. So we have the curious situation where high economic growth drives large emission estimates but the same level of economic growth is overlooked in estimating impacts. All the IPCC emission estimates assume that the world will become significantly wealthier between 1990 and 2100. Under the poorest scenario (the A2 scenario), the average GDP per capita in developing countries will be nine times higher in 2100 than in 1990 (in real dollars), while under the richest-but-warmest" scenario (the A1FI scenario), it will be 70 times higher than that for the average inhabitant of developed countries in 1990, i.e., she would be wealthier than her U.S. and Luxembourg counterpart in 1990).

This means developing countries should have much greater access to available technologies to cope with climate change than they have today. Equally important, technology would have advanced - existing technologies would be replaced by new and improved technologies and they will also be cheaper (in real dollars). But generally these developments are not fully considered.

4. In the few cases where they consider that existing technologies will be adopted more widely because of increasing wealth, these studies don't generally allow for new technologies. This is the case for some of the studies of agricultural production and hunger, for example. These studies estimate impacts for 2085 using technologies from the 1990s or earlier. This is like estimating today's food production and levels of hunger using technologies from the 1910s! You are bound to underestimate food production and overestimate hunger.

In developing countries prevalence of chronic hunger declined from 37% to 17% between 1970 and 2001, despite an 83% increase in population, in substantial part because of new technologies. These improvements would not be captured using the above methodologies had they been applied in, say, the 1960s to estimate hunger in the 2000s. [This view -- that adaptive capacities and technologies are static -- was exactly why Paul Ehrlich's predictions in the Population Bomb, for example, bombed in reality.]

Not allowing for secular technological change or for technologies developed specifically to alleviate any impacts of climatic changes does not reflect "business-as usual" as the IPCC scenarios claim to do. One should expect the greater the potential food shortfall, the greater the adaptive response. It means that net negative impacts for the future are overstated. Similarly, human health impacts are often estimated assuming that adaptive capacities are fixed as of the start date of the analysis. Under such a methodology the mortality and morbidity rates from water related diseases in the U.S., for example, would be the same in 2000 as in 1900. But in fact, these rates have declined by 99% or more during the 20th century for disease such as typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, malaria, etc. (Goklany 2007c). This indicates that because of such methodologies, the potential for error is very large indeed especially for analyses that span several decades.

5. Because increases in adaptive capacity with increasing wealth and technological development have been largely ignored, the confidence levels attached to numerical estimates of the impacts on human-affected systems are exaggerated.

6. Ignoring adaptation overstates impact estimates not only for so-called human systems (e.g., food production, hunger, water resource management, human health, etc.), it also overstates the adverse impacts on the "rest of nature." This is because the most important current-day threats to ecosystems and species are loss of habitat, and overexploitation of biological resources. Consider terrestrial ecosystems and species. The most significant threat for them is conversion of land for agriculture and timber. But if we produce more food or timber per acre of land that means we can reduce or relieve these threats on ecosystems and biodiversity. And, in fact, over the past century, we have been producing more food per acre. Today worldwide we feed almost twice as many people on an acre of land as we did in 1900, and we feed them better (as witnessed by the drop in chronic hunger, see above). This is a trend that should continue unless we reject technologies, such as bioengineered crops, that will help produce more food on less land and with fewer chemical inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides.

Moreover, some studies indicate that global requirements for cropland may indeed decline in the future (at least through the 2100) because of a combination of technological change, carbon fertilization and climatic changes. But less cropland means more land for the rest of nature. None of this is accounted for in the estimates of species extinction, as far as one can tell. Thus, those estimates should be viewed with suspicion on that basis alone, and the notion that we know the effects of climate change on species with "medium confidence" (p. 8) verges on the ludicrous.

7. In addition, as evidenced by the environmental initiatives that have been undertaken over the past decades not only in the US but also around the world (e.g., restoration of habitats, reductions in hunting and fishing quotas, reserving land for conservation purposes, agreement to manage or restrict fishing and hunting of various species etc.), other efforts will be made, even in the absence of climate change policy, to reduce pressures from non-climate change related threats to ecosystems and species which would, then, reduce the vulnerability of these systems to climate change. But none of these are factored into these analyses either.

8. There are additional reasons for skepticism regarding the level of confidence attached to estimates of impacts on ecosystems and species. First, impacts on species and ecosystems have to be based on local climatic changes. But the uncertainties in changes in temperature and precipitation increase as we go from the global to the regional to the local scales. Second, many of the estimates regarding shifts in ranges and species extinction are based on studies that employ the modeled association between current climates and present-day species distributions to predict future ranges and extinction risks under radically different climatic regimes where atmospheric CO2 concentrations are much higher, and rates of plant growth, water use efficiency, energy requirements of species, predator-prey relationships and, possibly, species-area relationships would all be different from what they are today.

Future outcomes may also be confounded by unanticipated evolutionary changes. There is also the possibility that species have broader climatic tolerances than indicated by their observed ranges would indicate. Moreover, with respect to vegetation in particular, species, once established, may not be easily moved or pushed aside.

9. Impacts assessments generally employ a series of models in which the uncertain output of each model provides the inputs for the next model. To compound matters, each model is itself based on uncertain assumptions and is necessarily a simplification of reality. Usually the series of models starts with assumptions of population growth, economic growth and technological development from 1990-2100 in order to generate emission scenarios. These emission scenarios then are used to generate atmospheric concentrations of the various greenhouse gases (ideally based on models of the global cycles involving each of the greenhouse gases). Next, these concentrations are used to calculate radiative forcing to estimate temporal and spatial changes in climatic variables. These variables are then fed into biophysical models to estimate location-specific biophysical changes (e.g., changes in the distribution of vegetation and species, sea level, timber and crop yields, etc.). Then depending on the system under consideration, these outputs may be used to drive socioeconomic models to estimate impacts on human beings, e.g., food production, hunger, etc. And, as noted previously, there are egregious oversimplifications and systematic errors in this step which overestimate net negative impacts.

Thus, we have a system where uncertainties build on each other. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, analyses that show how these errors and uncertainties propagate through the system of models. Given this, the SPM's characterization of the level of confidence attached to impacts estimates is overstated. It's hard to see how one can with a straight face claim that we have anything other than low confidence in the estimates.

10. Although the SPM notes that vulnerability to climate change will be exacerbated by other stresses, it fails to note that by the same token relieving these other stresses will increase the resilience of systems to climate change itself. Examples of this are furnished in paragraphs 6 and 7. 11. Although the SPM notes that vulnerability to climate change will be exacerbated by other stresses, it neglects literature that shows that through much of the rest of this century the contribution of climate change to the combined stresses on various systems is smaller than the contribution of other factors. [Some of this literature is summarized in Goklany 2005, 2007a, 2007b].

Consequently, the SPM fails to inform policymakers that through the foreseeable future dealing with these other factors could be more important - and could provide greater benefits in terms of advancing human and environmental well-being (Goklany 2005, 2007a).

12. Likewise, it fails to inform policymakers that dealing with these other stresses that climate change would exacerbate could help society deal with the additional stresses caused by climate change more effectively and possibly at lower costs (Goklany 2007a, 2007b).

13. The SPM obfuscates on the relationship between climate change and sustainable development. It suggests that climate change could impede nations' abilities to achieve sustainable development pathways. While this might be true in the longer term, over the foreseeable future it is lack of sustainable economic development that hinders their ability to cope with and alleviate the impacts of climate change. The failure to acknowledge that the lack of sustainable economic development constitutes a larger and more immediate problem than climate change (see paragraph 11) is potentially misleading in that policymakers may divert resources to solve longer term problems while ignoring current-day problems that are and will continue to be more urgent than climate change in the foreseeable future and which may actually be easier to solve (Goklany 2005, 2007a).

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Look who's letting ideology overrule science

(See the original for links)

Environmentalists constantly reference the scientific consensus that human activity is changing the global climate. "You have the strongest consensus we have seen in the science community about global climate change since the conclusion that tobacco caused lung cancer," asserts Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) president Kevin Knobloch. Greenpeace also argues, "There is, in fact, a broad and overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, is caused in large part by human activities." And Friends of the Earth has gone after Exxon Mobil because it "has repeatedly attempted to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change and actively resisted attempts to limit carbon dioxide emissions through law."

Clearly when it comes to climate change, environmentalists righteously wrap themselves in the cloak of scientific "consensus." They excoriate scientists and others who doubt that man-made climate change will necessarily be disastrous, accusing some of being essentially paid liars for the fossil fuel industry. But for many environmentalist groups not all scientific consensuses are equal. Consider the case of genetically enhanced crops.

"GMOs [genetically modified organisms] should not be released into the environment as there is not adequate scientific understanding of their impact on the environment and human health," warns Greenpeace. "Genetic engineering is imprecise and unpredictable. But most testing is carried out by the very biotech companies that have the most to gain from results that say GM food is safe," says Friends of the Earth. The Union of Concerned Scientists acknowledges that "there have been no serious environmental impacts-certainly no catastrophes-associated with the use of engineered crops in the United States." In addition, the UCS admits, "No major human health problems have emerged in connection with genetically modified food crops, which have been consumed by significant numbers of U.S. consumers." In fact, no--not just "no major"--human health problems have emerged. Nevertheless, the UCS concludes "the scientific evidence available to date, while encouraging, does not support the conclusion that genetically modified crops are intrinsically safe for health or the environment." What does "intrinsically safe" mean? On what evidence can the UCS conclude that even conventional crops are "intrinsically safe"?

The scientific consensus about current varieties of genetically improved crops stands in stark contrast to these dire environmentalist assertions. As evidence, consider a recent report issued by the International Council for Science (ICSU). The ICSU is an organization whose membership consists of 111 national academies of science and 29 scientific unions. In 2005, the ICSU issued a report based on a comprehensive analysis of 50-science based reviews of genetically modified crops. The ICSU concluded: "Currently available genetically modified foods are safe to eat." Some environmentalist critics claim that genes from genetically modified crops will "contaminate" the natural environment and conventional crops. The ICSU found, "there is no evidence of any deleterious environmental effects having occurred from the trait/species combinations currently available." The World Health Organization agrees that current varieties of GM foods "are not likely to present risks for human health. In addition, no effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved."

A 2003 position paper by the Society of Toxicology found, "The level of safety of current BD [biotechnology-derived] foods to consumers appears to be equivalent to that of traditional foods." In 2002, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed the scientific literature and sought expert advice about the safety of genetically modified foods. The GAO concluded, "Biotechnology experts believe that the current regimen of tests has been adequate for ensuring that GM (genetically modified) foods marketed to consumers are as safe as conventional foods." The experts with whom the GAO consulted also pointed out "there is no scientific evidence that GM foods cause long-term harm, such as increased cancer rates," and that "there is no plausible hypothesis of harm." GM foods might have adverse effects if they produced harmful proteins that that remained stable during digestion. However, the GAO noted that the proteins produced through genetic enhancement are in fact rapidly digested.

In 2000 the report Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture, issued under the auspices of seven national academies of science, including U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Academy, found that "no human health problems associated specifically with the ingestion of transgenic crops or their products have been identified." Also in 2000, a American Medical Association report noted, "Worldwide, many people are eating GM foods with no overt adverse effects on human health reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and according to regulatory agencies."

Almost all of the previously analyses cited do suggest that more stringent regulations might be necessary if future genetic modifications significantly change the nutrition of foods. But here are a couple of rules of thumb for reasonable regulation of genetically improved crops. If a regulatory system would cover a specific trait were it in a conventionally bred crop, then it should also regulate that same trait in a GM crop. If not, then it should not be regulated in a GM crop either. Secondly, once a trait has been approved, it should be approved for all varieties and all crops. There is no need to make a trait that already been scientifically determined to be safe go through the regulatory system again and again and again.

In any case, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that current varieties of genetically enhanced crops are safe to eat and don't pose unusual risks to the natural environment. But that isn't stopping Greenpeace from waging a global "Say no to genetic engineering" campaign or the Friends of the Earth from demanding a GM Freeze. Perhaps the idea of scientific consensus is not all that it's cracked up to be. After all, scientific consensus does not mean "certain truth." Whatever the current consensus of any scientific issue is can change in the light of new research. Nevertheless, environmentalist ideologues accuse those who question the climate change consensus of bad faith and worse. But aren't they exhibiting a similar bad faith when they reject the broad scientific consensus on genetically modified crops?

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MILTON FRIEDMAN AND "CONSENSUS"

Friedman is now accepted as having been right but he was for many years a lonely voice against a mistaken consensus

Milton Friedman died November 16, 2006, at the age of 94. Any attempt to put his contributions to economics into perspective can only begin to suggest the vast variety of ideas he discussed. Burton (1981, 53) commented that "attempting to portray the work of Milton Friedman . . . is like trying to catch the Niagara Falls in a pint pot."

At the beginning of his career, Friedman adopted two hypotheses that isolated him from the prevailing intellectual mainstream. First, central banks are responsible for inflation and deflation. Second, markets work efficiently to allocate resources and to maintain macroeconomic equilibrium. Because of his success in advancing these ideas in a way that shaped the understanding of the major economic events of this century and influenced public policy, Friedman stands out as one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century.

1. FRIEDMAN'S INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION

Until the 1970s, the economics profession overwhelmingly greeted Friedman's ideas with hostility. Future generations can easily forget the homogeneity of the post-war intellectual environment. Friedman challenged an intellectual orthodoxy. Not until the crisis within the economics profession in the 1970s prompted by stagflation and the failure of the Keynesian diagnosis of cost-push inflation with its remedy of wage and price controls did Friedman's ideas begin to receive support.

More than anyone, over the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Friedman kept debate alive within the economics profession. Because economics is a discipline that advances through debate and diversity of views, it is hard to account for the near-consensus in macroeconomics in the post-war period and also the antagonism that met Friedman's challenge to that consensus.

In order to place his ideas in perspective, this section provides some background on prevailing views in the 1950s and 1960s. The Depression had created a near-consensus that the price system had failed and that it had failed because of the displacement of competitive markets with large monopolies. Intellectuals viewed the rise of the modern corporation and labor unions as evidence of monopoly power. They concluded that only government, not market discipline, could serve as a countervailing force to their monopoly power....

FULL PAPER here





Greenies Fight To Stop Green Energy

Post below lifted from Cheat-Seeking Missiles -- which see for links

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had great, green ideas for his sprawling burb: He envisioned "the greenest city and cleanest city in America," with 20% of the city's power to be renewable by 2010.

Then the Greenies got in the way. After the city let electricity producers in Utah know that LA would buy no more of their "dirty" electricity after the current contract expires in 2023, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drew up plans for an 85-mile-long "Green Path" energy corridor that would bring electricity generated from solar, geothermal and nuclear power sources in southeastern California and Arizona.

Knowing they had to get started now because the clock was ticking for the 2023 deadline when the cheap electricity would have to be replaced with something, LA started the environmental review for its environmentally friendly, greenhouse gas-snuffing Green Path. Such a nice name! So mild and pleasant.

Unless you're the Center for Biological Diversity, a group who's founder has said his goal was no less than the depopulation of the American West; then you see the Green Path as a warpath. The LA Times quotes the CBD:

"Not only is such energy consumption not 'green,' it is unacceptable under any name.. The ends cannot justify the means," Justin Augustine of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a letter to Villaraigosa last week.

CBD doesn't want any energy coming from anywhere. No grid; just self-sufficient mud huts will do -- or better yet, just go back to wherever your ancestors came from and leave the West to the staff of the CBD, who knows how to appreciate the land and deserves to be on it, unlike us.

Other Greenies are less radical than the CBD, but are opposed to the Green Path nonetheless, because cuddly as the name is, it's really just power lines -- power lines that cut through the Big Morongo Wildlife Preserve, the Pipes Canyon Wilderness Preserve and a corner of the San Bernardino National Forest.

DWP officials said they decided on a "preferred alternative" in December after studying possible routes for more than a year. They said the route they chose would be the least intrusive to existing homes, tribal lands, national parks and wilderness areas. Environmentalists scoffed at that claim. "We were just shocked," preservationist David Myers said of his reaction after looking at a map of the route.

Presumably, since he would agree with the protection of tribal lands, national parks and wilderness areas, Myers was shocked because the protection of homes was a factor in determining the best route.

So we have the Big Monster of global warming battling against the Local Bugaboo of power lines, and in this epic battle, the very Greenies who fret for the future of the planet are taking the Little Bugaboo's side. Here's the LAT again:

"People do not like the way power lines look," said George Douglas, spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Energy.

He said vast amounts of renewable resources exist across the country. Enough wind turbines could be built in North Dakota to power Chicago. One hundred square miles of desert solar panels in California, Nevada or New Mexico could power most of the United States.

But, Douglas said, "the chances it's going to happen are zero, because nobody's going to build the transmission lines. They're great big things that cost a lot of money, and people don't like them. They are unsightly - there's no two ways about it - and when you build them, they definitely disturb the land."

DWP officials are soldiering on, saying failure is not an option. But they don't understand. When you're up against Greenies, you have to understand that success is not an option. No matter how much they influence your idea to make it smaller and less harming to the environment, no matter how many court cases they win, no matter how much the drive up the cost of housing or energy, they can never accept success.

You don't believe me? Well here in OC, they fought for 30 years to stop the redevelopment of an old, dirty coastal oil field, so they could see the land converted into wetlands. They won, totally. The water in this photo was supposed to be close to 14,000 homes and a marina. The Greenies fought until no development at all was allowed in the lowland areas, and funds were found to restore it to wetlands. But boo-hoo, 500 or so homes will be built on the mesa above the land. What a tragedy! What a defeat!

And that's not all -- the wetlands victory is nothing the Greenies can take for granted. In a big confab a couple weeks back, reports an email making the rounds through the local environmental community, one of the leaders of the preservation group had this view:

He listed several continuing threats to Bolsa Chica, including sea level rise due to global warming, urban runoff, oil spills, invasive species, misguided restoration efforts, vandalism, pets and over usage.

Never be satisfied! Never relax in the glow of victory! The Greenies of the world are alone in their struggle to save the planet, so every effort is vital and any loss will plunge the orb into ecological chaos! So they must fight on, they must fight everything, they must never yield, never give up! Never! NEVER! So they must fight LA's Green Path, and keep it from transporting the very renewable energy they want us to use. Don't worry. They know what's right for us, and they will fight us until we stop knowing what's right for us.

(And I am sure that the electricity producers in Utah sleep well at night - JR)

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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