Climate Change

…and hot air:

In other words mitigation to slow or halt GHG emissions will be costly today with little payout over the next 100, if not 1000, years, making it unlikely that large mitigation projects have a positive net present value. And for these results to occur, the United States would have to be joined by the rest of the industrialized nations as well as the developing ones, something that is not going to happen.

Given that mitigation has gained little policy traction, many climate scientists seem to be paying more attention to adaptation. Indeed, the subtitle of the IPCC’s 2014 report is Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. In contract to earlier IPCC reports, the press release in April mentioned mitigation only once and adaptation 12 times. According to Chris Field, chairman of one of the IPCC working groups, “The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change.”

What a concept.

[Noon update]

Math is math: “(100,000′s of Jobs + Billions of Taxpayer $’s) x 85 years = 0.018° C.”

10 thoughts on “Climate Change”

  1. “mitigation to slow or halt GHG emissions will be costly today ”

    That’s a very interesting prediction. Got a cite for that?

      1. Rand, you need to Believe. I suppose you are one of those killjoys in the audience when Tinkerbell drinks poison who won’t clap to show your Belief to save her?

    1. A few months ago Watts featured a report showing that cutting carbon dioxide emissions would cost more than the damage projected from warming, using the greens’ own numbers.

      Given that the climate models have been invalidated it would be high folly to base policy on them even if the numbers did favor cutting CO2.

  2. We should focus on adapting because the future is uncertain and we don’t know what mother nature will throw at us. We might find that while climate change hysteria is bunk, that engineering shorelines, or other adaptations, could help with hurricanes, tsunamis, or earthquakes.

    1. Definitely; strengthening coastlines is a No Regrets Policy. It is a good idea regardless of climate change.

    2. That would be called spending money on infra-structure.

      The problem is republicans don’t like to acquire the revenue to do this.

      1. When we repeal Davis-Bacon, then we’ll have plenty of money for infrastructure.

        Unfortunately we’ll have less money for beer

    1. I never bought the comet theory, because we’ve only been hit by objects as large as Chicxulub about 70 times, according to scientists who haven’t been hit by a large impactor. To form the oceans, we’d need to get hit with about 30,000 of them.

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