Forbes Calls BS on the latest Climate Economics Doomsday Prediction
A new study claims that loss of productivity because of climate change could result in a 19% reduction in the world economy by 2049. Despite the number being significantly higher than previous studies, the authors claim their numbers are conservative and could be as high 29% of the global GDP. Climate activists were quick to latch onto the study, calling for more aggressive measures to prevent climate change and fund mitigation efforts.
The study, The economic commitment of climate change, was published in Nature on April 17 by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also known as PIK, a non-profit organization funded by the German government.
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While I am not an economist, in my opinion the data seems flawed. According to a study published by NOAA in January 2024, the average temperature has risen 2° F since 1850. In that same period, the global GDP increased from $1.73 trillion to $134.08 trillion. If we accept the climate projection models used in the study, it dismisses the resiliency of human nature and our ability to overcome economic challenges.
The abstract of the study;
The economic commitment of climate change
Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz
Abstract
Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0
Spot on Jon McGowan – it’s near impossible to produce a scary projection without making some pretty questionable assumptions. From the study above;… Following a well-developed literature2,3,19, these projections do not aim to provide a prediction of future economic growth. Instead, they are a projection of the exogenous impact of future climate conditions on the economy relative to the baselines specified by socio-economic projections, based on the plausibly causal relationships inferred by the empirical models and assuming ceteris paribus. Other exogenous factors relevant for the prediction of economic output are purposefully assumed constant. …
Holding as many variables as possible static, while changing only those variables you want to study, is a time honoured method of analysing complex systems.
But as the authors admit, their study is not realistic. My understanding of the study is they are attempting to abstract the impact say more extreme weather would have on the economy, if nobody attempted to mitigate these problems, say by building better drainage and water management systems to manage floods, and bigger reservoirs to maintain agricultural output during severe droughts.
As Forbes author Jon McGowan rightly points out, there are good reasons to doubt the real world applicability of the predictions of the study, even if we pretend their admittedly unrealistic assumptions are realistic.
Why would the next 0.5C of warming be so much worse than the previous 0.5C of warming?
There is no historical evidence which suggests the next 0.5C of warming, if it occurs, would be any worse than what we have already experienced. There is no evidence extreme weather is getting worse, despite the predictions of climate models which were used as the basis of the study quoted above.
In fact there are good reasons to believe additional warming might produce a better climate for humans.
Global warming is not evenly distributed across the world. Polar amplification is the observed strong tendency for global warming to be pushed away from the equator to where it is actually needed.
If global warming continues, by 2049 there is a very good chance there will be more viable agricultural land available for our use, not less. Canadian Geographic admitted in 2020 that global warming is opening millions of square kilometres of new agricultural land, and will continue to do so if the world continues to warm.
I’m personally pleased Jon McGowan and Forbes published this rare criticism of alarmist global warming tropes. Let’s hope more news outlets and authors find the courage in future to question the steady stream of increasingly exaggerated and implausible claims of how doomed we all are.
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Saving Climate From the Greens
“It’s like we were an idiot country,” the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., once told me, referring to some systematically self-defeating policy out of Washington.
He raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts? It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs. They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.
And remember why we sold ourselves this bill of goods: to reduce emissions. It was always nonsense. When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.
A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.
Even Biden officials will say as much off the record. Yet look at the Washington Post’s recent contortions to let readers know the administration’s proclaimed U.S. “climate goals” are meaningless when the U.S. simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods. The Post could apparently publish these caveats only by attributing them to “big oil” lobbyists.
Or take the room where New York Times editors craft sentences to mislead readers. They say about Joe Biden’s EV policy: “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”
Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.
Do no harm, the most cited advice of the Hippocratic Oath, is also a pungent observation on human nature. People want to be seen helping even when they aren’t. Much self-interested mischief is advanced under the guise of helping.
In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy, testifying Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.
He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal, he tells me, is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.
“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant.
“Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.
“Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.
I’ve borrowed the term “sophisticated state failure” for the energy suicide of the West. Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016: “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”
I was referring to the green-energy elite.
Mr. Wright’s company provides fracking to North American oil and gas producers in ways that reduce their total effect on the environment. His real passion, though, has been carbon-free nuclear ever since his undergraduate days at MIT. He endorses the estimates of the U.N. climate panel, which weighs dozens of computer models, none of which seem to get the climate exactly right. If so, the coming century will see 1 or 2 degrees Celsius more warming and 8 to 17 inches of sea-level rise.
If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.
Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/opinion-saving-climate-from-the-greens/ar-BB1llIhA
**************************************************Former Auto Exec Exposes ‘Colossal Mistake’ In America’s EV Push
According to Experian data, as of the third quarter of 2023, only one percent of all registered vehicles in the U.S. are electric.
Former Big Three automotive executive Bob Lutz explained why the EV push isn’t resonating with buyers or suppliers to Fox News Digital.
“The idea of EVs, gradually, adoption over time, with ever longer battery range, ever quicker recharge time, so that over the next couple of decades, EVs take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that’s fine. But trying to get it done overnight was a colossal mistake, and it just plain is not going to work,” Lutz said.
Keeping in mind that the EV debate has become a “politically charged” subject, Lutz argued that legitimate pros exist in terms of driving an electric car, but there seems to be more cons in today’s market.
“We’ve had 125 years to perfect the internal combustion engine, and we’ve had roughly 15 years so far on doing modern electric vehicles with modern batteries,” Lutz said. “Electric vehicles are fun, they drive well, they’re silent, they’re fast.”
EVs also have fewer moving parts, their brake systems are more durable and, overall, it’s intelligent technology, according to Lutz, but they’re expensive and unreliable when it comes to charging.
An energy report released last October by the Texas Public Policy Foundation concluded that EVs would cost tens of thousands of dollars more if not for generous taxpayer-funded incentives: the average model year 2021 EV would cost approximately $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without the staggering $22 billion in taxpayer-funded handouts that the government provides to electric car manufacturers and owners.
Additionally, as of December, only eight EV chargers were reportedly being built with funds from President Biden’s infrastructure law that earmarked $7.5 billion for 500,000 chargers nationwide.
“Tesla and many other electric vehicles nowadays, as far as design, road behavior and so forth, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that the American public is stubborn, and they happen to like gasoline engines,” Lutz said. “It’s just a question of convenience and infrastructure.”
Just over one year ago, Toyota’s president and chairman was forced to resign after telling the Wall Street Journal that he questioned whether the push for the auto industry to phase out gas-powered vehicles was the right decision.
“Turns out he was right,” the former Big Three exec reacted. “So all we’re seeing is that everybody is pulling back on their EV programs. And both Jim Farley of Ford and I believe Mary Barra of General Motors have said: we have to admit, we were all consumed in this wave of EV euphoria, and we all thought it was going to happen much faster than it actually did.”
“But they’re flexible. They’re still making predominantly internal combustion engines. So, as long as production facilities are still there for internal combustion vehicles, which they manifestly are, they’ll still keep producing gasoline-powered Explorers and Equinox,” Lutz expanded, “despite the government’s best efforts to make these things go away as fast as possible, which is not going to happen.”
The former exec also made the distinction that a liberal, environmentally focused crowd is “pushing the heck out of” EVs, while conservatives typically “reject” EVs as another example of government control.
“A lot of it’s become like Second Amendment gun rights, you know, ‘Nobody is going to take my gasoline powered pickup truck away from me, and they’ll have to come and get it at the same time that they pry my shotgun out of my cold, dead hands,’” Lutz said.
“One of the reasons why EV sales are down is because center-right conservative America is beginning to see them as a political statement, that if you buy an EV, it kind of means that you’re siding with the Biden administration on their environmental and social policies,” he emphasized. “And many Americans don’t want to do that.”
Pointing to a “long-term positive trend,” the self-deemed “father” of the first extended range EV believes the solution includes segmented improvements when it comes to mileage and charging supply over the next 10 years.
He also advised current and future executives and CEOs to use their resources and look ahead three to four years to consumer demands, but admitted “nobody is very good at that.”
https://principia-scientific.com/former-auto-exec-exposes-colossal-mistake-in-americas-ev-push/
************************************************What The Media Fails To Tell You About Coral Bleaching
Jennifer Marohasy
There was significant coral bleaching this last summer. It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands
But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory.
It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.
If we deny when there is bleaching, and claim bleaching when there is none – it is impossible to know the cycles and their causes.
Last Sunday morning, at Secret Cove, I watched the turtle come out from under a stand of stark white coral – bleached coral – and swim towards me.
The turtle was not bothered by me and seemed oblivious to all the coral bleaching.
The creatures under-the-water last Sunday morning, they seem oblivious to the colour of the coral that was mostly stark white, some healthy chocolate brown (replete with symbiotic zooxanthellae/good microalgae), and some brown from infestations of macro algae smothering the corals.
To my eye, the fish and other creatures seemed randomly distributed, which is to say they could be found across the reef irrespective of the colour of the coral.
It was not at all how the BBC have described coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef – they have recently been using the terms ‘ghostly white’, ‘spooky white’, ‘like a graveyard’. These journalists are clueless (CLICK HERE).
Secret Cove a week ago was badly bleached – and it was teeming with life. But to know this, it is necessary to get under the water.
A big shout out to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive on Great Keppel Island (CLICK HERE). Thank you for the opportunity to dive so many coral reefs last weekend – thank you for your care and for finding the Epaulette shark at Secret Cove.
To know that many of the stark white corals are still alive it is necessary to observe them up close. For example, the brain coral (perhaps a Lobophyllia sp. or Caulastrea sp.) did look ‘ghostly white’ from a few metres away.
But up close – after I reset my camera to take a macro – you can see that the polyps are still very much intact, that the polyps have a carpet-like texture concealing separate corallites.
Secret Cove fringes Great Keppel Island, reportedly with some of the worst of the coral bleaching, considering the entire Great Barrier Reef this last summer.
The BBC also mentioned ocean acidification and high temperatures – unprecedented they claim. Again, they are just making stuff up.
I’ve noticed that the journalists and the scientists, from all sides of the political divides, increasingly just add to the established narratives rather than checking the data, or even visiting a coral reef.
This makes me an outlier – relevant only because you are reading me. (For sure the institutions and sometimes even my colleagues and even social media want me cancelled so be sure to subscribe at my website for weekly e-news: CLICK HERE)
It is the case that our oceans are not acidic, not at all. I wrote about this in a chapter for ‘Climate Change, The Facts’ back in 2017
As for the water temperatures, this last summer was hot, but not exceptionally so.
I write this, not with reference to the wholly contrived coloured maps they show you on the nightly news often for the whole Earth and always showing continuous increase (as though there is never winter), but rather with reference to more reliable location specific temperature data for the Keppel Islands.
For example, considering Australian Institute of Marine Science data for Square Rocks, and Bureau of Meteorology data for Rosslyn Bay, we can see that there is still a strong seasonal component to the temperature data and that this last summer temperatures were well within the expected seasonal cycle.
So, what caused the coral bleaching this last summer that has been so severe, particularly at the southern Great Barrier Reef, and particularly at the Keppel Islands?
The Moon has a particular influence on sea levels.
We see this not just in the daily and monthly cycles, but the Moon also causes the less well understood 18.6-year declination cycle.
The Moon takes a month to complete a revolution around the Earth. But it doesn’t follow the same path, moving above the Earth’s equator for two weeks and below the equator for two weeks of each month.
The distance above and below the equator changes with this 18.6 year cycle.
This is because as the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun causing the seasons, the Moon is tilted at 5 degrees relative to the Earth, and every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum that is the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27′) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09′) to the ecliptic.
This is called major lunar standstill, and I define it as occurring when the distance that the Moon travels south is more than 28 degrees south each month.
While we may intuitively expect larger sea tides as the Moon approaches its maximum declination considering this 18.6-year cycle, because the gravitational forcing of the Moon is less well aligned with the gravitational forcing of the Sun on the Earth at this time, we see on average lower sea tides at least in the data for the nearby Rosslyn Bay gauge for the last few months.
I suspect that the bleaching at the Keppel Islands this last summer can be blamed on the Moon; specifically that the lower tides caused by Maximum Lunar Declination combined with a short period of clear skies and no winds caused the water to stay continuously warm for a longer period than usual, in a way that was catastrophic.
That is my hypothesis.
The popular claim, the consensus claim consistent with anthropogenic global warming theory that the atmosphere replete with ‘greenhouse gases’ has been warming the ocean is not credible, at least not considering the location specific data for Square Rocks between North Keppel Island and Great Keppel Island.
The available Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data shows that the water is consistently warmer than the air above it. As the water is consistently warmer than the air, it is not logical to suggest that the air is warming the water.
https://principia-scientific.com/what-the-media-fails-to-tell-you-about-coral-bleaching/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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