C limate-change models have played a highly influential role in frightening developed countries into slowing their economies.
Now, we have a new prediction. Rather than forecast an environmental apocalypse, an attempt is being made to convince us that climate change would reduce future global income by about 19 percent over the next quarter century compared with a hypothetical non-warming world. The financial losses by the year 2100 could be double that. It won’t surprise you that the poorest people on the planet and those least responsible for carbon emissions would suffer the most.
The study was released in the journal Nature by modelers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Scientists Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann, and Leonie Wenz have calculated that the U.S. and Germany would each suffer a projected, median income loss of 11 percent, with France losing 13 percent.
The losses would largely stem from damage to crops and disruptions in the supply of labor. In the United States, the worst-hit states would be Arizona and New Mexico. Worldwide, only areas close to the Arctic Circle — Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland, and Sweden — would see any economic benefit from warmer temperatures.
But all is not lost. If the world could only contain carbon emissions within the upper limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial temperatures), the loss to global income could be held at the 20 percent level. In the worst-case scenario, the world could see a 60 percent loss in global income.
Such “measurements” are all preposterous; nonsense on stilts. Marshall Burke, a Stanford University climate economist who wrote a 2015 paper predicting a dramatic loss of global income because of climate change, told the Associated Press that he thinks the study is “basically right.” Nonetheless, even he admitted: “I wouldn’t put a ton of weight on their specific numerical estimates.”
It’s become obvious to climate-modelers that their apocalyptic predictions of doom haven’t moved most people or even policy-makers into panic mode. So they are now switching gears and using the language of cost–benefit analysis to sound like economists pitching drastic climate regulation as a good business model.
What this is really doing is dragging economic analysis down to the level of throwing darts at a target. No wonder the Chinese and Indians, the world’s biggest carbon-emitters, quietly snicker at Western statisticians.
Have you ever wondered where all the scary models that warn that we are close to the “tipping point” come from?
Roger Pielke Jr., a former director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, has diligently dug into their origins with the fascinating story of the few billionaires behind what he calls “an extraordinary corruption of the true scientific process.”
In 2012, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer, and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson each gave $500,000 to fund a project “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world.” The result was a report, titled “Risky Business,” that estimated temperature rises of up to 39 degrees Fahrenheit in fewer than 80 years unless there was “concerted action to reduce future warming.”
Pielke does a brilliant job exposing the logical fallacies of “Risky Business,” but sadly admits that it was incredibly successful at being injected into mainstream scientific literature, where it took on a life of its own.
The paper passed peer review with little or no criticism and, to date, has been cited more than 1,100 times. Billions were then spent pushing subsequent papers based on it. “It was a formula that would be repeated time and time again,” says Pielke. “Like the introduction of a virus, the misleading reinterpretation of climate scenarios expanded throughout climate science.”
Sketchy models that warn of climate-change doom were then heavily promoted in the media. They ultimately shaped a new policy discussion that has allowed elites to push for dramatically altered lifestyles and curbs on economic growth.
“It’s a story of privilege and conceit — the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy, and the conceit that climate policies can best be pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change,” Pielke warns.
He says the narrative can be altered but only if we have the courage to fight back with sound analysis and facts. And that must start with our challenging the accuracy and scientific integrity of the current climate models.