His [Steven Koonin’s] book is full of important, factual information and insights. One of his main messages is that there is much more uncertainty about where the climate is headed than many climate scientists and even a higher percentage of people in the media are willing to admit. And the good news is that the long-term economic effect of even substantial global warming will be small.
Among the scientific sources Koonin uses to make his case are the very reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that reporters draw on. The difference is that Koonin spells out what the reports actually say, whereas reporters tend to draw selectively from the reports in ways that – according to Koonin – mislead the reader. It would probably come as a surprise to most people, for example, that the oceans are still rising slowly, that forest fires have not become more common, and that hurricanes are not more frequent than they were 100 years ago. Koonin, who agrees that the earth has warmed and will likely warm further, considers the various options for slowing global warming. He shows how hard it would be, especially in developing countries, to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or even by 2075. So he considers various alternative ways of slowing global warming and also the idea of adapting to global warming.
This is from David R. Henderson, “Good Reasoning on Global Warming,” Financial and Economic Review, Vol. 21, Issue 2, June 2022.
Another excerpt:
One of people’s biggest worries is that global warming will cause glaciers to melt and, therefore, increase the global average sea level. The CSSR mentioned earlier added to this worry by pointing out that the average had increased much more quickly after 1993 than before, rising by 7 centimetres in the later period. Koonin wondered if one could find other recent 25-year periods in which sea levels also rose quickly. He found one, the period from 1935 to 1960, when the average rose by 6 centimetres. Koonin argues that one should look at the whole period and not “cherry pick” the periods in which sea levels rose particularly quickly. Koonin notes that he sent his criticism to the lead author of the CSSR report, Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois, and to Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, the main author of the CSSR’s chapter on sea level rise. Both, he writes, agreed with his criticism, though claimed that they would have pointed this out in their report, but that it was too late.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 30 2022 at 4:48pm
“He shows how hard it would be, especially in developing countries, to reach net zero global emissions by 2050 or even by 2075.” [It would be inefficient and unnecessary for each country to reach negative emissions.]
Well, I have not read his book, so perhaps he has some insight I have not thought about, but from what I’ve read of the problem, it would be very hard at all to reach negative CO2 emissions by 2050 if the instrument adopted were a tax levied by each country on the net emission of CO2. I mean by “hard” the present value of the “dead weight loss,” the reduction in consumption. [Depending on which other taxes reduced (corporate income taxes?), the cost might even be negative.]
This is not to say that in setting the trajectory for this tax rate one can ignore the uncertainty about the value of the future losses that we want to reduce. I say “trajectory,” becasue I presume that it will not be the same year by year as the costs of alternatives to CO2 emissions and CO2 capture and sequestration change and we continue to improve modeling of the costs of CO2 concentrations. [As a technological optimist myself, I suspect the tax rate will come down, technological progress will proceed faster than built into current models.]
BTW it will NOT come as a surprise to anyone that the IPCC rise in sea levels is a very slow process. And I believe the costs attributed to climate change from droughts is not their frequency but their intensity and economic loss caused, losses that can be mitigated, but the cost of mitigation are themselves part of the cost of climate change, for example the detection of the error Koonin discovered in Wuebbles and Knop’s findings.
Kevin Corcoran
Jun 30 2022 at 9:10pm
The quote from Stephen Schneider towards the end of your review is emblematic of how, in my opinion, environmental activists have shot themselves in the foot. Schneider suggested that environmentalists make overly dramatic and oversimplified statements beyond what the evidence actually supported as a way to stir people to action. But much, if not most, of the global warming skepticism I have encountered among my peer group is due precisely to this kind of overblown rhetoric. There’s an joke that cold fusion is 30 years away and always will be, and many environmentalists over the years have seen their “predictions” take the same track. (I put “predictions” in scare quotes because comment’s like Schneider’s suggest that many of these were not sincere predictions to begin with.) I recall a while back seeing a headline from, I think, The Onion, saying something to the effect of “Scientists warn we are running out of time before they are forced to change the timeline on global warming again.” I think that captures a lot of the cynicism over how people receive environmentalist’s predictions today.
Of note, I am not personally expressing skepticism about AGW, because I know next to nothing about the topic and I haven’t invested much time or energy into studying it. And I acknowledge that just because scientists and activists have previously made deliberately overblown statements in the past is not evidence that current predictions are false. My point is simply that when environmental activists abuse the public’s trust, they have no right to be surprised when the public stops trusting them. This is one reason why exaggerating for effect in the service of a good cause is not the right approach to take. Another better reason is simply that one should say things that are true and refrain from saying things that are false. Call me a daring and controversial contrarian for that take if you must, but I stand by it.
Jon Murphy
Jun 30 2022 at 10:05pm
Good point, Kevin. One of the issues that comes up in the literature on experts is that nonexperts see experts who express uncertainty about their predictions as more trustworthy. Overblown rhetoric is a major problem, but so is unjustified precision and confidence.
Michael Rulle
Jul 3 2022 at 9:44am
I am still one of those skeptics who would like to see the historical damage that warming has done before buying into the models about the damage it will do. Still waiting.
Re: rising seas. One need not hunt down “climate denial” websites to get a good understanding of certain facts. For example, the EPA has a good article at EPA.gov—-“Climate Change indicators—-Ice Sheets”. The below is derived from that essay.
While their tone and style is alarmist,they are very accurate and precise in what they present.
The EPA states “1,000 billion metric tons is equal to about 260 cubic miles of ice—enough to raise sea level by about 3 millimeters”. Their graph shows the Antarctic ice sheet having melted 3,000 billion metric tons in the last 30 years. This is the equivalent of 780 cubic miles of ice. The Antarctic Ice sheet is 6,400,000 cubic miles of ice.
So, this translates to 9mm in 30 years or .35 inches. (It is also true, that I can use other pages from EPA to get seemingly different results). Not all of that .35 inches contributes to sea rise—-as one must subtract the ice beneath the surface—about 20%
So about .28 inches inches in 30 years from Antarctic ice sheet?—-which is 90% of global ice sheet. How can that possibly be a problem? Yes, change can accelerate—-it can also decelerate.
I am anxious to understand how this can be explained as a problem.
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