Adaptation as and if necessary would be vastly cheaper than mitigation. Even if the IPCC’s 3.3 C° climate sensitivity (down from 3.5 C° in 2001 and 3.8 C° in 1995) were right, the world would have to forego 2 trillion tonnes of CO2 emission to prevent 1 C° of warming (Flag 2) – a robust figure that has been kept out of the debate till now. The world emits just 30 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, so even if the entire carbon economy were shut down it would take 67 years to prevent 1 C° of warming. To prevent the 3.4 C° warming the IPCC predicts for this century, make that 227 years without any transportation or fossil-fueled electricity. Carbon mitigation would accordingly be the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money ever. Adaptation would be orders of magnitude cheaper, but still unnecessary.
World “government” is unnecessary and would destroy democracy and markets. Even if mitigation were needed and might work, the UN secretariat’s plan (Flag 3) to establish a world “government” – the Copenhagen draft names “government” as the first of three purposes of the unelected sovereign entity the UN wants you to subject Canada’s democratic constitution to – would subordinate our democracy to a complex, costly, multi-tentacled oligarchy which the UN says will rule governments, economies, and markets worldwide and pre-empt national taxes at will. A “facilitative” (i.e. enforcement) mechanism will include technical panels with the power to order governments how to conduct their economic affairs.
Lord Monckton’s remarkable, impeccably-referenced presentation provided a wealth of economic and scientific detail on which the media are silent. Recent peer-reviewed science and climate data have made the IPCC’s assessment reports out of date by establishing that – The oceans, where all parties agree 80-90% of all heat held in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases must go, show no net accumulation of heat energy in 70 years and slight cooling for 6 years, demonstrating that “global warming” is not manmade (Douglass & Knox, 2009).
Surface temperature is near-solely determined not by CO2 concentration changes but by how much sunlight actually strikes the Earth’s surface (Soon, 2009).
If the “global warming” that ceased in the mid-1990s resumes, the resulting increase in cloud cover will offset the warming, not amplify it as the IPCC had thought (Spencer, 2008). The tropical upper air, predicted by the IPCC to warm at thrice the surface rate if we caused “global warming”, has warmed no faster than the surface, because subsidence drying is carrying water vapor to lower altitudes where it causes less warming (Douglass et al., 2008). Measured climate sensitivity is less than one-sixth of the IPCC’s central estimate. Its models all predict that as the Earth warms less radiation will escape to space, but the measured reality is that more radiation gets out, so less warming arises. Climate sensitivity of 0.5 C is thus determined (Lindzen & Choi, 2009). End of scare.
To support his contentions you might want to read on, in order to avail yourselves of more details on the science.
Flag 1
How measured outgoing radiation
determines low climate sensitivity
Reality vs. predictions: All UN models (11 of them shown in red) predict that as sea surface temperature rises the outgoing radiation escaping from the Earth to space diminishes because temperature feedbacks cause water vapor – the most significant greenhouse gas - to accumulate in the atmosphere. However, direct measurement using the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Satellite (green) shows that as temperature rises more outgoing radiation, not less, escapes to space.
Each point on the ERBE observed-data scatter-plot represents a period during which the change in sea surface temperature was sufficient to prevent spurious results (known as “noise”). The point is placed at the intersection of the observed sea-surface temperature change (horizontal axis) and of the corresponding change in the flux of outgoing radiation measured by the ERBE satellite (vertical axis). Each point on the models’ scatter-plots represents a period identical to that which is used in the observed-data scatter-plot. The sea-surface temperature change over each relevant period is then input to the model to “force” it. The model then predicts how much outgoing radiation will escape to space in response to the input amount of temperature change.
The substantial discrepancy between what the models predict and and what is measured in reality occurs because the IPCC incorrectly assumes that the most important of the temperature feedbacks that reinforce any initial warming as the planetary surface warms – the increase in water vapor concentration – will occur at all altitudes, whereas recent results (Paltridge et al., 2009) have demonstrated that subsidence drying carries any additional water vapor to lower altitudes, where it has less warming effect because at lower altitudes the sheer quantity of pre-existing water vapor is sufficient to ensure saturation of the principal radiation-absorption wavelengths of water vapor. Hence the model-predicted tripling of the tropical surface warming rate at altitude is not observed (Douglass et al., 2008).
Simple calculation based on the observed discrepancy between the models’ predictions and measured reality establishes that the warming to be expected if CO2 concentration doubles – the “climate sensitivity” – will be just 0.5 C°, not the 3.3 C° that the IPCC takes as its current central estimate.
Flag 2
Why carbon mitigation cannot be cost-effective
2 trillion tonnes of CO2 emissions must be foregone
to prevent just 1 C° of “global warming”
An exercise in futility: The table demonstrates how many tonnes of CO2 emissions must be foregone to prevent just 1 C° of “global warming”, on the assumption that the IPCC’s climate sensitivity prediction – a warming of 3.4 C° during the 21st century – will actually occur unless efforts at mitigation are made.
The 21st-century increase in CO2 concentration that is predicted to occur under the IPCC’s A2 emissions scenario (which conforms most closely to today’s emissions) is divided by the IPCC’s prediction of 21st century “global warming” on that scenario, yielding a CO2 concentration increase of 140 ppmv per Celsius degree mitigated. This value is multiplied by the measured quantity of CO2 emissions per part per million by volume of CO2 increase over the past 30 years – i.e. 14,150 million tonnes of CO2 (excluding transient volcanic effects). Accordingly, the emissions cuts necessary for achievement of a 1 C° cooling are 2 trillion tonnes. This value is essential to evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of climate mitigation.
The relationship between changes in CO2 concentration and changes in surface temperature is not linear, as assumed in this calculation, but logarithmic. Therefore, if the calculation were extended over a longer period than a century – the current standard time-horizon for IPCC calculations – an even greater tonnage of CO2 emissions would have to be foregone to achieve each subsequent 1 C° reduction in surface temperature.
If, as Flag 1 demonstrates, climate sensitivity is less than one-sixth of the UN’s central estimate, then the quantity of carbon emissions foregone to prevent 1 C° of warming would rise from 2 to 12.5 trillion tonnes. The world only emits 30 billion tonnes a year. Therefore, even an outright ban on the use of all fossil fuels worldwide would take 67-417 years to prevent 1 C° of warming, and the same outright ban would take 227-1417 years. The cost would be nothing less than the destruction of around three-quarters of the world economy: the climatic value would be negligible, and would not occur in time to make any difference.
Therefore mitigation is inescapably cost-ineffective, even if the most drastic measures are taken. Mitigation must fail.fos
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