We should all be dead by now, thanks to overpopulation and resource
depletion. The few of us remaining should be scavenging a landscape denuded of
life by acid rains and UV rays. Thankfully, we are not. Also still standing are
the scientific institutions and the global bureaucracies that predicted our
premature demise. One of those is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).
The job of the IPCC is to provide a review of climate-change research to policymakers. The bulk of
climate policymaking occurs under the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), which meets yearly to try to wrangle a global
agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the 2015 UNFCCC meeting in
Paris, a loose deal was struck. It aimed to limit global warming to 2°C, with a
looser agreement to aim to limit it to 1.5°C. Subsequently, the UNFCCC asked
the IPCC to compare global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C for a report to be
published this year. So far, so boring.
But before the report was even published, it began to excite
climate alarmists. In September, the Guardian reported leaked details from the report’s summary for
policymakers, claiming that government interference had forced scientists to
‘water down’ their findings and ‘pull their punches’. The claim that
‘temperature rises of above 1.5°C could lead to increased migrations and
conflict’ was cut from the final draft, it reported.
It is usually climate sceptics, not alarmists, who point out
that the IPCC’s summaries are subject to political interference. These
summaries tend to be much more alarmist than what the actual science says in
the reports’ technical chapters. In 2014, for example, the summary for
policymakers warned that climate change can increase the risks of conflict and
migration. But this was totally unsupported by the technical parts of the document.
This year’s IPCC’s report has been a disappointment to many
climate activists, including the apparent source of the leak, Bob Ward, policy
and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and
Policy (CCCEP) and the Grantham Research Institute (GRI). The GRI is named
after its billionaire benefactor, Jeremy Grantham. Both the CCEP and the GRI
are chaired by the world’s leading climate technocrat, Nick Stern, author of
the UK government’s review of the economics of climate change in 2007.
The problem for Stern, his financial backers, researchers
and PR men is that their political agenda depends on science identifying
dramatic risks, which can act as a spur to action: catastrophic increases in
the frequency and intensity of storms, flooding and drought, devastating
changes to agricultural productivity, increases in diseases and poverty,
impacts across society that could lead to civil conflict and war for resources.
But so far, signs of these dramatic consequences have not materialised. As a
result, these activists, researchers and technocrats are now at odds with the
science.
That’s not to say that this year’s IPCC report gives nothing
to alarmism. But it tells the alarmists that they will have to wait longer,
that the apocalypse has been delayed. It also adds important caveats. Take, for
example, the claim that ‘Any increase in global warming will affect human
health… Risks from some vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue
fever, are projected to increase with warming from 1.5°C to 2°C.’ At face
value, this appears to be a clear injunction from science that the 1.5°C target
is preferable to the 2°C target. However, digging into the technical chapters
of the report reveals that incorporating estimates of global adaptation to
climate change into projections of its future trajectory ‘reduces the magnitude
of risks’.
What this means is that these risks can be overcome by
‘adaptation’, even as the temperature rises. According to the two most
authoritative estimates, the number of deaths caused by malaria has fallen
dramatically in recent decades. While malaria has been eradicated from North
America and Europe, it remains in Africa. Vulnerability to malaria remains
strongly correlated with poverty, not meteorology. This ought to be read as an
argument for development. It is ideology, not science, which turns the
IPCC statement of risks into an argument for emissions reductions.
None of which is to say that global warming does not create
risks. It does. But they are not the risks that climate technocrats have hoped
to capitalise on. There are no immediate, looming catastrophes that can easily
be detected in statistics which can provide unambiguous instruction to
governments. Climate activists and technocrats need this threat of catastrophic
risks to sustain their political arguments in lieu of any positive agenda.
Though the most alarmist edges have been smoothed out of the IPCC’s output, it
is still very much driven by ideology.
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