WSJ Offers Sanity on Global Warming Report
This Wall Street Journal editorial examines last week’s “breathless” global warming report. The IPCC has pulled back from their previous dire predictions:
More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy has just released an illuminating analysis written by Lord Christopher Monckton, a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming.
Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.’s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report’s high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.
The WSJ agrees with me that even if Man is to blame for global warming the cure may be worse than the disease:
While everyone concedes that the Earth is about a degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago, the debate continues over the cause and consequences. We don’t deny that carbon emissions may play a role, but we don’t believe that the case is sufficiently proven to justify a revolution in global energy use. The economic dislocations of such an abrupt policy change could be far more severe than warming itself, especially if it reduces the growth and innovation that would help the world cope with, say, rising sea levels. There are also other problems–AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example–whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.
AJ Strata warns us of the tunnel vision model builders sometimes get. That’s not to say the global warming crowd is disingenuous–although power-grabbing policy makers are. It’s just that we need to maintain deep skepticism about their models and their solutions.
“Climate of Opinion” [via memeorandum]
Monckton is a crank who regularly spews misinformation about global warming. That the WSJ takes him seriously on their opinion page is an embarassment. The entire opinion piece is debunked here; suffice to say, anybody who can read the IPCC’s report can see that it says almost the exact opposite of what this piece says it says.