Hearken Sinners: The End Is Near

Dog bites man. Baby cries. Water flows downhill. And the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says climate catastrophe is imminent. The new “Summary for Policymakers” of Global Warming of 1.5°Celsius, a “special report” from the IPCC, makes the following central arguments:

The world has only 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe.
The safe limit for anthropogenic warming through 2100 now is 1.5°C rather than the long-argued 2°C.
The midpoint of the taxes on conventional energy required by 2030 to avoid severe climate impacts is $3,156 per ton of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or more than $29 per gallon of gasoline. Those required taxes rise rapidly over the course of the century.
Such sharp increases in the cost of conventional energy would have positive net impacts on almost all dimensions of 17 sustainable development goals, such as “gender equality.”

The new tipping-point year of 2030 is only the latest of a long series of deadlines for avoiding climate apocalypse, and the reasons that this latest deadline should be taken more seriously than those past and forgotten remain entirely obscure. The report ignores important parts of earlier IPCC climate analysis as well as the most recent findings in the peer-reviewed literature, and in any event, there is little actual evidence of a crisis in terms of climate phenomena. The argument that unconventional energy is “clean” is inconsistent with the evidence, even in terms of the emission of conventional pollutants and GHG.

The explicit energy taxes advocated in this IPCC analysis are so preposterous that it is easy to conclude that they are intended actually to justify vastly more power for the international climate industry to allocate resources directly. The asserted relationships between reductions in GHG emissions and the various socioeconomic sustainable development goals outlined in the report are implausible, to say the least, and represent an obvious attempt to facilitate coalition building among the proponents of climate policies; the deeply dubious outlook for the Green Climate Fund is only one source of that political dynamic. This latest IPCC “analytic” work can be ignored safely.

The new IPCC report

The central message in the new IPCC report is that the world has only 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe:

There are multiple lines of evidence that since the [2013 IPCC climate change assessment report] the assessed levels of risk increased for four of the five Reasons for Concern (RFCs) for global warming to 2°C. The risk transitions by degrees of global warming are now: from high to very high between 1.5°C and 2°C for RFC1 (Unique and threatened systems); from moderate to high risk between 1.0°C and 1.5°C for RFC2 (Extreme weather events); from moderate to high risk between 1.5°C and 2°C for RFC3 (Distribution of impacts); from moderate to high risk between 1.5°C and 2.5°C for RFC4 (Global aggregate impacts); and from moderate to high risk between 1°C and 2.5°C for RFC5 (Large-scale singular events).

Pathways that limit global warming to 1.5°C . . . show clear emission reductions by 2030 (high confidence). (Hyperlink and italics added)

A short history of climate alarmism

Before I return to the deeply politicized analytics of this new IPCC report, it is appropriate to review a small sample of past climate alarmism from experts and nonexperts alike, with an emphasis on the many and evolving last chances for mankind to avoid the ravages of anthropogenic climate change. In 1989, the director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program argued that rising sea levels might cause entire nations to disappear if the global warming trend were not reversed by the year 2000: “Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?”

In 2007, the then-IPCC chairman gave the world two to five years: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” In 2009, Prince Charles asserted that we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” So spoke the man with multiple palaces, endless world travel, fleets of automobiles, a large and permanent entourage, and all the other trappings of royalty: “Our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the Earth and we must face up to the fact that the Earth cannot afford to support it.”

James Hansen, a NASA scientist and prominent climate scientist, argued in 2009 that President Barack Obama “has four years to save the earth.” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius asserted in 2014 that the world has “500 days to avoid climate chaos.” The director general of the World Wildlife Federation argued in 2007, “We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and that is the next five years.” The International Energy Agency argued in 2011 that the opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change would be “lost forever” if serious actions to limit GHG emissions were not implemented within the ensuing five years.

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore made it clear that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” In 2017, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and several coauthors argued — amazingly, in the science journal Nature — that “should emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable.”

I discussed here Figueres’ applause in 2015 for efforts “to intentionally transform the economic development model . . . that has been reigning for, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution . . . for the first time in human history.” Had she never heard of the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent attempts by various communist regimes to transform the international economic development model? The central fruits of that ideology were 100 million or more deaths, vast and ghastly systems of prison camps — the unwashed proletariat and peasantry can be so unenlightened — and untold misery for many millions more.

In any event, it is not quite clear whether Figueres means by “the temperature goals set in Paris” an effort to limit temperature increases during this century to the familiar and now discarded 2°C or the newer 1.5°C. It is very likely to be the latter, which was adopted at the Paris (COP-21) negotiations, beginning the process by the proponents of international climate policy of blatantly moving the goalposts:

The universal agreement’s main aim is to keep a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5 degree Celsius limit is a significantly safer defense line against the worst impacts of a changing climate.

The 1.5°C goal

The “Summary for Policymakers” begins with the subtitle: “an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.” That last nostrum about “efforts to eradicate poverty” while increasing energy costs massively — the latter is an explicit policy recommendation in this new IPCC report — is rather amusing, as it refers in part to the discussion in the report of the relationship between the 1.5°C limit and 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). I return to the SDGs below, as they reveal much about the deeply politicized proposals of the UNFCCC proponents of international greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions policies and far less about the evidence on anthropogenic climate phenomena and alternative policy choices.

Let us begin briefly with the central focus in the new IPCC report on limiting temperature increases to 1.5°C instead of 2°C. I have discussed this shift in some detail elsewhere, but the central point here is that, if we average the temperature increases projected by the IPCC for its atmospheric GHG concentration paths closest to the historical averages, we get 2°C — that is, a figure exactly equal to the former purported goal of international climate policy. (Attainment of the 2°C goal under the higher GHG concentration paths would require emissions cuts impossible to achieve without massive impoverishment of hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the globe.) Accordingly, the new 1.5°C goal is a tacit admission by the UNFCCC that the 2°C limit will be achieved even without any international climate policies at all.

The new IPCC report relies on the IPCC (CMIP-5) climate models that as a group have overpredicted actual warming by a factor of about two, as well as the higher two-thirds of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) estimated range (1.5–4.5°C) of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS — crudely, the predicted warming by 2100 caused by a doubling of the atmospheric GHG concentration) at the earth’s surface. The median of that range is about 40 percent higher than the average reported in the recent peer-reviewed literature; the latest research reports an ECS of about 1.6 degrees. Climatologist Judith Curry notes: “Much of th[e] problem [projected in the new IPCC report] goes away if ECS is actually 1.5 to 2 C.” Curry asks as well: “What evidence is there of potential catastrophes? An observed increase in extreme weather events is not well justified, if you correctly account for the influence of multi-decadal ocean oscillations.”

With respect to the evidence on climate phenomena: Anthropogenic warming is unquestionably “real” in the sense that some predicted effects of increasing GHG concentrations are observable in the data. But there is little evidence — thus far — of serious climate impacts attendant upon increasing GHG concentrations. There is little trend in the number of “hot” days for the period 1895–2017: 11 of the 12 hottest years occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; it may or may not be accelerating; and even if the latter, the degree to which this phenomenon is anthropogenic is unknown, particularly given that the Little Ice Age ended only around 1850. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea ice changes tell very different stories. US tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of US wildfires shows no trend since 1985. The Palmer Drought Severity index shows no trend since 1895. US flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations.

The IPCC in the AR5 is deeply dubious (Table 12.4) about the various severe effects often hypothesized or asserted as future impacts of increasing GHG concentrations. The one exception is the disappearance of the summer Arctic sea ice, which IPCC views as “likely,” with “medium confidence,” but only under the most extreme GHG concentration path (RCP8.5). Under RCP8.5, GHG concentrations through 2100 rise at 11.9 parts per million (ppm), over six times faster than the average (1.9 ppm) for 1985–2017, in a world in which natural gas use is growing relative to coal use internationally, however slowly and unevenly.

Buried in the supporting documentation for the new IPCC report is a discussion (page 2–79) of the taxes (in 2010 dollars) on GHG emissions that would be needed to limit warming in this century to 1.5°C:

estimates for a Below-1.5°C pathway range from 135–5500 USD [per] tCO2-eq in 2030, 245–13000 USD [per] tCO2-eq in 2050, 420–17500 USD [per] tCO2-eq in 2070 and 690–27000 USD [per] tCO2-eq in 2100.

The midpoint of the range for 2030 is $3,156 per ton in year 2017 dollars. That works out to a tax of over $29 per gallon of gasoline. (Combustion of a gallon of gasoline/ethanol 10 percent blend emits about 18.9 pounds of CO₂.) Put aside the higher figures among the ranges and the upward shifts as the end of the century approaches: Can anyone believe that such taxes on conventional energy are feasible politically anywhere in the world?

That question answers itself, for the obvious reason that policies yielding (implicit) energy-supply constraints and attendant increases in energy costs simply are inconsistent with reduced poverty and enhanced wealth, and a fortiori for large energy cost increases in the developing world. The simple correlation between global primary energy consumption and global real gross domestic product (GDP) is 0.992. For annual changes in primary energy consumption and real GDP, the simple correlation is 0.656. For the respective percent changes, the figure is 0.690. Yes, correlation is not causation, but would anyone argue seriously that substantial increases in energy costs caused by (artificial) reductions in supplies would not be recessionary?

It is that prospective loss of wealth imposed disproportionately on the world’s poor by climate policies that induced the climate negotiators at COP-16 in Cancun in 2010 to establish the Green Climate Fund. The fund is intended to raise “$100 billion per year by 2020,” with an “initial resource mobilization period” of 2015 to 2018, for the costs of climate change mitigation and GHG reduction policies borne by the developing economies. The various political leaders in the developed economies in 2010, including then-President Obama, were all too willing to push the effective beginning of the annual $100 billion promises to 2020, obviously because by then most or all of them would be out of office and thus relieved of the responsibility actually to produce the promised funding. Thus far a total of $10.2 billion has been “pledged,” and the just-concluded climate talks in Bangkok were dominated by vociferous complaints from the intended beneficiaries about the prospective failure of the developed economies to deliver the promised funding. It is very far from obvious that the hoped-for annual $100 billion in donations will materialize beginning in 2020.

The 17 sustainable development goals

The unreality and politicization of the new IPCC analysis are illustrated by its discussion (pp. 27–28) of the relationships between policies driven by the 1.5°C warming limitation objective and 17 SDGs. The asserted relationships can be negative (“trade-offs”) and positive (“synergies”) for the SDGs in energy-supply, energy-demand, and land[-use] dimensions. The discussion has to be seen to be believed, but it is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. 1.5°C limit and sustainable development goals: Net impacts

Source: Derived from IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 27–28.

So there we have it: The IPCC has convinced itself, or wants to convince us, that vastly higher energy costs — recall those recommended taxes discussed above — will engender positive net impacts for “gender equality”; “peace, justice, and strong institutions”; and virtually all the other SDG dimensions under consideration. Wow.

And about that “affordable and clean energy”: Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom, it is far from clear that wind and solar power systems actually reduce emissions of GHG or conventional pollutants, as the unreliability of such unconventional electricity requires the use of backup generation units that must be cycled up and down depending on wind and sunlight conditions. Accordingly, the backup units must be operated inefficiently so as to avoid blackouts, yielding an increase in emissions rates and perhaps total emissions measured absolutely.

More generally, there is nothing clean about renewables. The production process for wind turbines causes heavy-metal pollution. Wind turbines cause noise and flicker effects. There are the large problems of solar panel waste and the wildlife destruction caused by the production of renewable power. And the land use made necessary by the unconcentrated nature of renewable energy is both massive and unsightly.

It simply is a reality that renewables are more costly than conventional energy, in large part because the energy content of sunlight and wind flows is unconcentrated, unlike the case for fossil fuels. This is separate from the theoretical limits on the energy obtainable from those sources. Except perhaps for specialized and highly limited applications in localized contexts, higher costs are an inexorable outcome of GHG policies, notwithstanding ubiquitous assertions to the contrary.

Conclusion

It is difficult to see how anyone attempting to maintain an objective stance on climate policy choices can take this latest IPCC report seriously. The shift from the long-advertised 2°C limit to the new 1.5°C limit is an obvious admission, however tacit, that the climate “crisis” is nothing of the kind. The new tipping-point year of 2030 is only the latest of a long series of deadlines for avoiding climate apocalypse. The explicit energy taxes advocated in this IPCC analysis are so large, and so impossible economically and politically, as to be preposterous. The relationship between reductions in GHG emissions and the various socioeconomic sustainable development goals are implausible, to say the least, and represent an obvious attempt to facilitate coalition building among the proponents of climate policies; the deeply dubious outlook for the green climate fund is only one source of that political dynamic. This latest IPCC “analytic” work can be ignored safely.