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.

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.