{"id":25521,"date":"2014-05-06T08:30:31","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25521"},"modified":"2014-05-06T08:30:31","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:30:31","slug":"climate-change-and-positive-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/06\/climate-change-and-positive-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change and positive<\/em> effects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley<\/a> explains that according to the experts, it’s believed that ongoing climate change actually provides net benefits<\/em> for most of this century:<\/p>\n

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don\u2019t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.<\/p>\n

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.<\/p>\n

There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today \u2014 and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies<\/a> [PDF] of the effects of future climate trends.<\/p>\n

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2\u02daC of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3\u02daC from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8\u02daC of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century \u2014 if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it\u2019s a long way off.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley explains that according to the experts, it’s believed that ongoing climate change actually provides net benefits for most of this century: Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,65,28,16],"tags":[245,240],"class_list":["post-25521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-media","category-science","tag-climatechange","tag-globalwarming"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6DD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25522,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25521\/revisions\/25522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}