Hector Drummond indulges in a proper “Fisking” of a recent column in the Telegraph:
We don’t have to buy into the apocalyptic angst of Greta Thunberg, on show again in Davos yesterday, to recognise that something has to be done.
He actually said “Something Has To Be Done”. How about we do a snow dance, Philip? That’s “something”.
Whether or not you are a sceptic about the impact of CO2 on the climate or question man’s involvement in producing the greenhouse gas, our energy future is a non-carbon one, like it or not.
Our energy future involves a lot of talk about non-carbon energy sources, while relying on “carbon” for a long time to come.
Virtually every government has committed to this as an overt aspect of public policy and those that haven’t, like China or the US, have a rapidly growing green energy sector poised to exploit the move to a carbon‑free future.
You mean the China that’s building coal-fired power plants at a rate of knots? That China?
Later on, the column invokes Pascal’s Wager, which Hector finds both amusing and irritating:
Seriously? Pascal’s Wager, which has been long ridiculed by most scientists and philosophers and thinkers, is now the basis for the largest and riskiest economic and political transformation in human history?
Pascal’s Wager justifies any proposed change in response to any possible threat. It’s possible that all the ducks in the world are really super-intelligent and they’re about to launch a takeover, so we need to kill them all. It’s possible that nylon stockings are eventually going to cause a nuclear explosion. Make your own ones up. The consequences of doing nothing, should these claims turns out to be true, are calamitous. In fact, they’re far more calamitous than most of the possible climate change scenarios.
Proper risk analysis, on the other hand, tells us to look at probabilities of the possible bad outcomes, not just how bad some possible bad outcome would be, were it true. The catastrophic climate change scenarios all have tiny probabilities. Even the IPCC admits that.
[…]
Then we have to look at the costs of the proposed action. The real costs, that is, not just vague claims like “Oh, moving everything to solar energy would be, like, you know, cool, my friend went to this talk once and she said that apparently solar works just as well as coal”. The costs – the real costs – are what needs be weighed against alternative courses of action.
The costs of abandoning fossil fuels are not zero. Not even remotely. Changing to renewables will be massively expensive, destroy jobs, and hinder prosperity, because they cannot provide anywhere near the energy we need. “Generate growth and prosperity” is nonsense, and Johnston should be ashamed of himself for falling for this.
