"Green" policies are destroying this country
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Thanks for the links Akrasia. Let me address a few of your points in no particular order:
"Our children won't thank us for moaning about the cost of petrol in 2022 when they're looking at their own kids struggling to survive."
True. However, nobody will thank us for torpedoing the economy now because of scenarios for our great great grandchildren in 2100 which turn out to be implausible. What's more, nobody will be able to force through climate mitigation policies that squeeze the pips too hard. We are seeing that across Europe at the moment. Like it or not, you can only act within what is politically possible.
While it would be nice to have a crystal ball to know exactly what we are up against, we do not. We are going to have to take our best guess and take the most common sensical approach to both mitigation and adaptation. The advantage of adaptation policies is that they can be applied as the need arises.
Fortunately, there is reason to believe that worst case scenarios of previous IPCC reports are now implausible. The AR6 report says this explicitly: "The likelihood of of high emission scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 is considered low in light of recent developments in the energy sector (Hausfether and Peters, 2020a, 2020b)". They project that SSP2-4.5 is more likely, while acknowledging that higher scenarios could still be reached because of uncertainty in carbon-cycle feedbacks.
So the scenarios that were considered "most likely" in previous reports are considered unlikely in AR6. Strangely, many of the papers cited in AR6 still reference the extreme scenarios. RCP8.5 was predicated on high population increase and massive increase in coal consumption (6.2x increase per capita) which nobody now thinks is going to happen. It's also puzzling that the UN Secretary General greeted AR6 as a "code red for humanity", that the "alarm bells are deafening" and that we are "putting billions of people at immediate risk". Such alarmism from Guterres is decidedly unhelpful (though pretty typical of him), especially now that hundreds of millions of people are actually at immediate risk from high food and fuel prices.
However, there is reason to believe that even AR6 is unduly pessimistic. The IEA World Energy Outlook that informed AR6 showed coal consumption growth at the low end of IPCC scenarios (even under current policies, let alone stated policies).
A paper (PDF here) in Environmental Research Letters suggests that other trends also may diverge from IPCC baseline scenarios, including population and GDP growth, and energy and carbon intensity of the economy. Needless to say, these trends depend on continuing trends of decarbonisation, though not necessarily extreme ones.
“By mid-century, the world stands to lose 10% of total economic value from climate change”.
And yet an IMF 2019 working paper (PDF here) says that it will only be 7% by 2100 and that’s in the absence of any mitigation strategies whatsoever. What’s more, even an extremely low economic growth path (1% per annum) would see global GDP rise by 120% by 2100. In the (admittedly unlikely) case that growth matched the historical average for the last 60 years (4% per annum), the increase would be 2,200%. A 7% loss would barely be a rounding error. But in any case we will not lose 7% because we are not on an extreme path where we employ no mitigation strategies.
“At these levels, we're going to see 'natural disasters' hitting levels that humans have never experienced in our history”
So far there is scant evidence that “natural disasters” will do that. Tropical cyclone activity shows no trends. Forest fires show minimal trends. What we do know is that human deaths from climate-related disasters have fallen dramatically – about 90% in the past century. That is because of adaptation, early warning systems, and improved social infrastructure. Affluence is the key to resilience. By all means, employ mitigation strategies, but do not sink the economy in the process as it is the key to reducing harm from climate change. Economic damage from climate change will certainly increase as we continue to build more human habitation in harm’s way. But in relative terms, as a proportion of GDP, it is manageable especially if we employ some common sense.
“Climate change is already reducing crop yields”
Your graphs show changes in length of growing season. And yet, for many places this is not the driver of crop yields. Consider West Africa which is considered vulnerable to climate change due to possible changes in monsoonal rainfall patterns. One doom-laden 2009 paper I read (sorry, don’t have the reference to hand) predicted crop yields to fall precipitously as early as 2020. Instead, they went up by 15%.
For a general look at the difficulties of forecasting crop yield changes, have a look at a meta-analysis (PDF here) in which the projections for West Africa span a range from -50% yield to +90% yield. It also reminds us that “adaptation is a fundamental issue in assessing future crop yield scenarios if one wants to avoid an overestimation of climate change impacts”. Few of the projections take adaptation into account.
Have a look at wheat yield statistics for the same period as covered by your graphs (here). Look at Mali, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria in 1980 with crop yields in tonnes per hectare at 1.33, 1.0, 2.0, 0.79 and 2.4 respectively. In 2018 these numbers are 3.54, 2.96, 2.24, 1.33, and 0.79. How did Mali and Niger manage to nearly triple their yields, while Chad and Cameroon only went up modestly, and Nigeria went down?
For wheat production in Nigeria the answer is a skill deficiency, low level of mechanisation, inadequate technology, and insecurity (article here). The opportunity for Africa to modernise its way to better food security is enormous, and far greater than the median projected diminution in crop yields due to climate change. For this they will need cheap, reliable energy. Subsistence farmers rarely fret about climate change – they have bigger concerns on their minds.
Can you even imagine the increase in climate resilience that could be wrought in West Africa with just the €125 billion that the Greens want the Irish public to spend on EVs and retrofits between now and 2030? (Not that I am advocating this – Africa will have to solve it’s own structural problems, and it is doing so. However, the difference in impact between Ireland saving 0.05% of global emissions by 2030 and what this level of investment in African economies could do is stark).
… which is leading to increased levels of suicide”
The cited study seems extremely tendentious and even taken on its own terms seems highly uncertain. It’s the sort of torturing of statistics that gives research a bad name. It doesn’t even seem to distinguish between agrarian (farmer and farm laborer) suicides and other sectors. How do you attribute a suicide to heat as opposed to other stressors? (Yes, I read the paper and looked at the error bars and said "meh"). And even if all the suicides they included were attributable to climate change it would still only be 10% of them.
However, much more curious is that practically everything in your cited paper is contradicted by a more recent analysis of the same Indian National Crime Records Database by Sthanu Nair, a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management (link here). It shows agrarian suicides going down, not up, as farm productivity increases. It also compares the suicide mortality rate across sectors and shows that the agrarian rate is going in the opposite direction to non-agrarian, having declined almost continuously since 2003.
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If there is one thing China is not it is economically stupid. They are using coal as an energy source because it is cheap and they have shown they have no intentions of changing anytime soon with their plans to open more such plants. Similar to Japan on coal, China is very much "preserving all its options for power generation".
I do not see where you are getting that this increase in planned coal burning plants is somehow due to regional authorities going against central government policy. Under China`s "unitary state system" local laws and regulations must not contravene national laws and State Council-issued regulations.
In case you or anybody else is confused as to just how many coal burning plants are in China at present with more being planned.
There was much being made here some time back on China`s per capita carbon footprint when compared to Ireland and that we should not be criticising due to our per capita footprint being higher.
2017 China`s per capita carbon footprint was 7.7. 2020 that had risen to 8.2. For Ireland in 2017 it was 8.2. 2020 that had dropped to 6.68. Source: worldpopulationreview.com
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What you believe that explains I have no idea.
Your own link shows you are incorrect on regional authorities being allowed to make their own decisions on coal burning plants. China allowed that in 2014, but reversed that in 2016, and despite all their promises on reducing their use of coal, have recently reversed that decision.
Considering we are talking about China, this idea that their central government has no control over what local authorities decide to do is even less plausible than the Irish government being unable to do anything if Kerry County Council decided to keep Moneypoint open indefinitely. It`s nothing other than a very feeble excuse as to why they have broken their commitments where they are using more coal now, not less, that the gullible will swallow.
China are using coal now in even greater volume for no other reason than even your own link states. It`s cheap and its for their economic benefit. Same as Japan is doing. Whereas here the Irish Green Party, where we have a per capita smaller carbon footprint than China are determined to ruin ours, based on some madcap idea that our 3% of China`s population is going to negate the damage China is doing. Or even more madcap, that somehow us doing that will embarrass China into changing their policies.
At least with China, they have recognised that nuclear is the future. Here we are not supposed to even discuss it according to greens.
Btw. whenever that link was made it is out of date. The percentage for China`s electrical generation by coal is not 50%. It`s 63%.
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