During a week where wild fires have spread across Greece, literally unprecedented rain has affected England and killed four and where Italy and the surrounding area have experienced unusual heat, it is difficult to avoid the suggestion that climate change is having an effect. I still have a nagging doubt, but it’s meaningless to debate anyway in my opinion.
Interestingly, though, June’s Scientific American magazine has a passage which I think presents the barrier to solution quite clearly:
To accomodate the economic aspirations of the more than five billion people in the developing countries, the size of the world economy should increase by a factor of four to six by 2050; at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases will have to remain steady or decline to prevent dangerous changes to the climate. After 2050, emissions will have to drop further, nearly to zero, for greenhouse gas concentrations to stabilize.
Assuming the scientific community’s poor understanding of the climate is accurate then it is reassuring that the solution (technology) as proposed by the author (Jeffrey D. Sachs) costs approximately 1 penny per kilowatt hour. That’s on top of a current electricity price of approximately 8.1 pence.
I have long said that environmental-socialism is not the solution and I am heartened to read the technological-solution being espoused.
July 7th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I am not a climate-sceptic - in fact I run a renewable-energy business. But this summer’s rains are absolutely not evidence of climate change. Just because morons like Rosie Boycott, the anti-buggering Bishop of Carlisle, and a host of other environmental ignoramuses say so, doesn’t make it so.
Have a look at the map of projected precipitation under climate-change scenarios, which I posted at pickinglosers. It is produced by the Met. Office’s Hadley Centre, The UK Climate Impacts Programme, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and DEFRA - in other words, the great and the good of British climate-change research. And it shows clearly that less precipitation in summer in England is a strongly-predicted effect of climate-change. If you read the report from which it is drawn (linked from that post), you will find no more support for the claim that heavy rainfall in summer is a possible effect of climate-change, quite the reverse. Rather more scientific than Rosie’s “weird weather”, which nevertheless seems to be catching on because of it’s ability to explain anything that happens in terms of climate-change.
As for the suggestions that the way to deal with climate-change is to hold global emissions steady to 2050 (which means us dramatically reducing ours), and then cutting global emissions to zero after that, this sounds like a combination of the IPCC’s politically-motivated projections, and Aubrey Meyer’s well-meaning but utterly unachievable Contraction & Convergence model. If we are going to grow the developing-world economies, which is a worthy ambition, it is daft to help them to grow in a carbon-intensive manner for 40 years, knowing that we will then tell them they have got to change their economy completely. This approach is just silly.
So is the suggestion that the solution will cost about 1p/kWh. That’s not the Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who is every wet’s favourite development economist, is it? Whoever it is, when did you last hear a scientist correctly estimate the real cost and economic potential of the project they are working on? This field is full of fantasists. It may not be necessary to act as drastically as some people predict (see Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels for reasons why), but if it is, it will be a lot more expensive than that.
Come on. You seem to be sensibly sceptical (in the good sense). Go with the facts, not the propaganda.
July 8th, 2007 at 2:26 am
I think I found that Jeffrey Sachs article in Scientific American. He is the Jeffrey Sachs I thought you meant, this year’s Reith Lecturer and beloved of Third-Way governments, who thinks the solution to any problem, particularly in the Third World, is to throw more money at it. He’s a pal of George Osborne’s, I believe. His advice to your party on malaria is to pledge more money to distributing mosquito nets, when it is becoming increasingly clear and accepted even by groups like the WHO that the answer is DDT-spraying, and that the panic about this chemical after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was yet another exaggeration by environmentalists, one which in this case has cost millions of lives.
As for Jeffrey’s article in SA, his figures for the supposed low cost of acting are nicked from the Stern Report. That report was intended from the start to justify government action on climate change, in which the comparison of the costs of action and inaction played a major role. You notice that Jeffrey wants not just a carbon price (justified in my opinion, though I would discover the cost in a market, not pluck a figure out of thin air), but also lots of government intervention to hamper competition (through further extension of patent rights) and pick winners (through funding of RDD&D). He has already picked his winner - CCS - which is ironic because most of the European energy companies talking about it, which is where he is taking his lead from, are using it mainly as an excuse for inaction. Plenty of them are proposing “CCS-ready” power stations, which means little more than that it would hypothetically be possible to collect and process the gases coming out of the exhaust. In the case of some of them, such as that proposed by RWE for Tilbury, they are “CCS-ready” but there is no obvious place nearby to put the carbon once they’ve captured it. It’s mostly a way of getting permission to build new coal-fired power stations (a balance of coal and gas hedges their risk on fuel- and carbon-prices) without looking really dirty.