Financial Post
Even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage
The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is
conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that
the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact
there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I
hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do
much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind
this century.
After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic for
various media organizations, and having started out alarmed, that’s
where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this view. I share
it with a very large international organization, sponsored by the
United Nations and supported by virtually all the world’s governments:
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself.
The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st
century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain
assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three
of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of
which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in
2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.
Now two degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn
dangerous, according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in
three of the four scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my
children’s children are elderly, the earth will still not have
experienced any harmful warming, let alone catastrophe."
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