The New York Times reports on a draft report from thirteen federal agencies that is not yet public. The news is not good- “The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years.” This of course suggests the direct connection between emissions and climate change.
How to mitigate climate change? That “depends on future emissions and the sensitivity of the climate system to those emissions.” This report is part of the National Climate Assessment which the U.S. Congress requires every four years. the National Academy of Sciences has reviewed it-the White House (and President Trump) would release it.
It’s no surprise that this report confirms what people in the northwest have already been experiencing-there is confidence that the frequency and severity of warm days has dramatically increased since the 1960’s. “With a medium degree of confidence, the authors linked the contribution of human-caused warming to rising temperatures over the Western and Northern United States. It found no direct link in the Southeast.” The report also noted that temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic are warming at twice as fast as the global average.This rapid warming will contribute to accelerated land and sea ice melting that will impact sea level rise along coastal cities and communities.
There are several concerns, some political with this report-one, the Environmental Protection Agency must approve it, despite the fact that the current agency’s administrator does not believe there is a causal impact between carbon dioxide and global warming. Secondly, there is a concern that the “Trump administration could change or suppress the report. And lastly “those who challenge scientific data on human-caused climate change say they are equally worried that the draft report, as well as the larger National Climate Assessment, will be publicly released.”
How will this report will be translated with a lack of political will and direction into policy and programs? “The National Climate Assessment seems to be on autopilot because there’s no political will that has taken control of it,” said Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
Doomsday scenarios have come and gone.
Of course, releasing global warming scenarios during a hot summer is good timing, as opposed to an unusually cold winter that will surely follow a hot summer in a few short months !
In the 1970’s the Club of Rome peddled “we are running out of oil & other resources by 2000” and started energy savings programs and a sub-sequent vast increase in energy costs in Europe. Of course, they were wrong as we have vast oil and resource supplies.
Man made global warming needs to be seen in light of the benefits of cheap energy in terms of life expectancies, levels of wealth increase, increase in food production and food distribution .. especially to the poor and we have seen a substantial increase in wealth overall worldwide and a substantial reduction in food prices and poverty throughout the world.
This nuanced debate about benefits and costs of cheap energy is missing. We cannot just lament the costs (say higher temperatures by 2 degrees) but need to also assess the benefits. This is usually missing. Yes there are costs.
==> Are higher energy costs beneficial to 8-9B people if food costs triple and its distribution 4-8 fold if we replace all tractors, combines, ships and trucks with e-combines, e-tractors, e-trucks and e-ships ? Where are those articles ?
To quote from this report https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-will-be-much-harder-now-world-has-made-great-progress
” .. In 1981 some 42% of the world’s population were extremely poor, according to the World Bank. ..Since then the number of people in absolute poverty has fallen by about 1bn and the number of non-poor people has gone up by roughly 4bn. By 2013, the most recent year for which reliable data exist, just 10.7% of the world’s population was poor .. it took Britain about a century, from the 1820s to the 1920s, to cut extreme poverty from more than 40% of its population to below 10% ..”
This is a smorgasbord response to a simple fact. Typical. Why don’t you throw in dog breeding and paragliding too?
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.