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CAGW rears its ugly head [Stoat]
Whenever I descended into the den of iniquity that is WUWT, I’d get “CAGW” flung at me. And I’d always reply that they had made it up. See for example my If it isn’t catastrophic we’ve got nothing to worry about, have we? or comments in When will it start cooling? But now, alas, the philosophers are back (I wasn’t impressed last time; ATTP clearly was) with an open letter.
TheConversation blurb contains the regrettably vague Those most responsible for climate change are relatively few compared to the vast numbers of people who will be harmfully affected. I don’t know how to interpret that: do they mean that the population of, e.g., the US and Western Europe and a few other places is small compared to the world population? That seems unlikely Or are they following the popular and deeply silly meme that those “responsible” are a tiny number of Evil Capitalists and Plutocrats? For people claiming academic rigour such vagueness is unimpressive.
But on to my main point. The intro to the letter starts We invite academics from all countries and disciplines to sign this Open Letter calling for world leaders meeting in Paris in December this year to do what is necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. So, they’ve blown it. I can no longer say that CAGW is a made-up thing by the Watties and the denialist nutters; a whole pile of people at least a few of whom must be respectable are now endorsing the same. Are any of them respectable? Of the first 500 I recognise only Mike McCracken, but he is definitely respectable.
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry about that too much; I no longer bother to descend into the filth-heaps. Let’s look at the substance:
Yet it looks unlikely that the international community will mandate even the greenhouse gas reductions necessary to give us a two thirds chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. At the moment, even if countries meet their current non-binding pledges to reduce carbon emissions, we will still be on course to reach 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. This is profoundly shocking, given that any sacrifice involved in making those reductions is far overshadowed by the catastrophes we are likely to face if we do not: more extinctions of species and loss of ecosystems; increasing vulnerability to storm surges; more heatwaves; more intense precipitation; more climate related deaths and disease; more climate refugees; slower poverty reduction; less food security; and more conflicts worsened by these factors. Given such high stakes, our leaders ought to be mustering planet-wide mobilization, at all societal levels, to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This, too, lacks any attempt at academic rigour. How, exactly, would one measure the balance between the sacrifices required and the damage to be done? The most obvious way is a cost-benefit analysis; if they’ve got another method in mind, they don’t trouble themselves to mention it. Perhaps its “obvious”? As I was taught many years ago as a maths undergraduate, “that’s obvious” is what you say when you don’t actually know the answer. Anyway, if you try to do the balance (maybe Stern?) you don’t come out with “far overshadowed”. Or perhaps they’re using some kind of moral balance, rather than an economic one? These are philosopher-y type folks, not economists, it looks like. In which case, I’m even more puzzled, because I’ve no idea how you’d construct a moral balance. At least with numbers you can just add and subtract.
Another thing wrong is the constant use of “more” in the above. The current amount of warming is not very large – so far – perhaps 1 oC above pre-industrial. Adding another 2 oC on top of that would be massively different. And so the same must be true of the consequences.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2015/11/23/cagw-rears-its-ugly-head/
