The Paris agreement involves estimates of future damages because of global warming assumed to be caused by burning of fossil fuels. Looking into the numbers raises a surprising predicament, as explained by Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine. The title of his article points to the problem:

Climate Change Will Reduce Incomes in 2100 from $97,000 to $95,000

Global per capita income now is $10,000. How much should we spend to prevent climate change losses in 2100?

Set aside the flawed science claiming CO2 is the climate control knob, even the damage estimates pale in comparison with the march of prosperity. Bailey works with the numbers from alarmist economists Nordhaus and Moffatt. Excerpt below with my bolds.

The Yale economist William Nordhaus has spent decades using a combination of econometric and climate models to estimate global warming’s future effects. He isn’t the only researcher who’s been attempting to make such projections, and Nordhaus’ latest study considers a range of different estimates. (Get your salt shaker ready.)

In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Nordhaus and his colleague Andrew Moffatt survey 36 different estimates (derived from 27 studies) of climate change’s impact on gross world product by the year 2100. Nordhaus and Moffatt note that “there are many studies of theoretical temperature increases in the 2 to 4°C range, and that they cluster in the range of a loss of 0 to 4% of global output.” After crunching the numbers, they report:

The estimated impact from the preferred regression is 1.63% of income at 3°C warming and 6.53% of income at a 6°C warming. We make a judgmental adjustment of 25% to cover unquantified sectors….With this adjustment, the estimated impact is -2.04 (+ 2.21)% of income at 3°C warming and -8.16 (+ 2.43)% of income at a 6°C warming.

The authors note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report declined to make an estimate of future losses, but in the Fourth Report, the panel stated that “Global mean losses could be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4°C of warming.” This means that Nordhaus and Moffatt’s findings are broadly in line with the climate change consensus.

So what do these findings portend for people lucky enough to be alive in 2100? Let’s consider the best-case scenario first. Annual gross world product is currently somewhere around $75 trillion, which without adjustments means that global income stands at around $10,000 per capita. Assume 3 percent economic growth from now until 2100, and a global population that year of 9 billion. Without climate change, world GDP would rise to $872 trillion and income would be $97,000 per capita. Assuming a 3°C increase in average temperature, that would reduce global GDP from $872 trillion to $854 trillion, and income to $95,000 per capita. At 6°C, the figures would be $800 trillion and $89,000 per capita.

In the unlikely event that global economic growth dawdles along at only 2 percent per year for the rest of this century, gross world product would rise to only $388 trillion and income to $43,000 per capita without warming. A 3°C rise in average temperature would reduce global GDP to $380 trillion and income to $42,000 per person; a 6°C increase would cut global GDP to $360 trillion and income to $40,000 per person.

The Nordhaus and Moffatt survey of studies also found “no indication from the damage estimates of a sharp discontinuity or high convexity.” In other words, the studies do not identify threshold effects in which damages from climate change accelerate in the future.

These calculations bring up this question: How much should people living today making an average of $10,000 apiece spend in order to prevent the future incomes from falling from $97,000 to $95,000 per capita?

Now is the time to get out your salt shaker and liberally apply the sodium chloride to these calculations.

See also post Climate Policies Gouge the Masses

Excerpt: David R. Henderson, public policy economist at the Stanford Hoover Institution, puts the issue this way:

Claims that human-caused global warming will raise average temperatures by 2o C to 5o C over the next 100 years and cause serious harm to society are controversial. However, assuming that global warming will be a big problem, there are two important questions: (1) What should be done about it? and (2) When should it be done?

There is much debate about what discount rate to use when comparing environmental costs and benefits. Generally, the more one values today’s dollars over tomorrow’s, the higher is one’s discount rate. At one extreme, an infinitely high discount rate would imply that we place almost no value on future consumption. Conversely, using a discount rate of zero means that benefits today are no more valuable than benefits 100 years from now..

However, the choice of which discount rate to use is not about the weight given to the well-being of future generations but about opportunity costs. Investments people make today are likely to increase the wealth of their descendants, giving future generations greater resources to exercise their preferences regarding environmental protection.

The higher the rate of return that can be earned by investing a dollar today, the more wealth future generations are deprived of if the money is spent now. Thus, Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago argues that we should use the market interest rate as the discount rate because that is the opportunity cost of climate mitigation. Interestingly, even Stern’s own model assumes that people 200 years from now will have real incomes that are more than 10 times incomes today. This means that if the government taxes people today explicitly or through regulations to reduce climate change 200 years from now, the government will be taxing the poor to help the rich.

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September 22, 2017 at 03:12PM

It looks as if a lot of car makers will have to raise prices of some models at least, to meet the cost of EU mega-fines tied to average CO2 emissions that are due to come into force in 2021. Phys.org reporting.

Big-name carmakers including Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler face fines running into the billions for failure to meet tough new European carbon dioxide emissions limits slated for 2021, a study has found.

“Only four out of 11 carmakers are forecast to meet the EU 2021 CO2 emission target, with the rest facing significant fines,” researchers from British firm PA Consulting said in a statement Friday.

European Union nations agreed in 2014 that carmakers should limit CO2 emissions to 95 grammes per kilometre across their entire model range within seven years. The figure for 2015 stood at some 130 grammes per kilometre on average.

If the target is not met, the groups must pay fines of 95 euros ($114) per gramme over the limit, multiplied by the number of cars they sell in 2020. “Most carmakers will face penalties,” especially German manufacturers which often offer larger, more polluting engines, the study authors forecast.

“There is nothing less than a revolution facing the car industry and those manufacturers who fail to keep up face potential fines in the billions,” PA auto expert Thomas Goettle said.

Continued here.

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September 22, 2017 at 12:03PM

Global warming is “settled science,” we hear all the time. Those who reject that idea are “deniers.” But as new evidence trickles out from peer-reviewed science studies, the legs beneath the climate change hypothesis — that the earth was doing just fine until carbon-dioxide spewing human beings came along — is increasingly wobbly.

A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience purports to support action by global governments to reduce carbon dioxide output in order to lower potential global warming over the next 100 years or so. But what it really does is undercut virtually every modern argument for taking radical action against warming.

Why? The study admits that the 12 major university and government models that have been used to predict climate warming are faulty.

“We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models,” said Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford and one of the authors of the study. “We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

And, of course, he’s quite right. As we’ve noted here numerous times, the much-feared “global warming” trend seems to have halted somewhere around 1998. We know this is true because satellite temperature readings — the most accurate temperature gauge since it takes in the entire atmosphere, not just parts of it — show there’s been virtually no change.

Based on the U.N.’s models, temperatures should have been shooting up sharply starting in about 1995. By this year, model temperatures show we should have had just under a 1.0 degree centigrade rise in temperature, a significant temperature spike in what is, in geological time, an extremely short period. It was those models that were used to sell the world on the idea that we needed a drastic reordering of our global economic priorities immedialy.

The reality: virtually no change in temperature. Put simply, the models are wrong.

And yet, advocates of the global warming dogma continue to ruin the careers of scientific apostates and hurl insults like calling skeptics “deniers” — which likens those who disagree about global warming science to those who “deny” the existence of the Holocaust — while denying painfully obvious facts about “climate change.”

As we noted back in May, we noted that the Sunday Telegraph of Britain had reported that temperatures had dropped sharply early this year following the supposed “hottest year on record” in 2016. How could that be? 2016 was an El Niño year, which are always unusually hot.

“In recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more than 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Niño.” Not only that, but despite doom-and-gloom prognostications by global warming’s biased, bought-and-paid for “scientist” forecasters, ice in the Arctic and Greenland both grew this year.

Recent revisions of climate data have all been in one direction: Older data have been revised to show cooler temperatures, more recent ones, warmer temperatures. Statistics would suggest that random errors would be not all in one direction.

So it looks suspiciously like scientist-statisticians who are getting big fat checks from governments that have every interest in selling the idea of inevitable and disastrous global warming are, if you will, cooking the books.

Full editorial

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September 22, 2017 at 11:44AM

Apocalyptic warnings about the end of the world as we know it are as old as humanity itself, but recent news should give the doomsayers some food for thought and lower the temperature, so to speak, in the debate about global warming and its future effects on the planet.

In a previous column, I noted that the typical audience reaction to my talks about the improving state of the world is not joy and thankfulness for the progress that humanity is making in tackling age-old problems such as infant mortality, malnutrition and illiteracy. Rather, it is the concern about the exhaustion of natural resources and the supposedly irreparable harm that humanity is causing to the environment.

Apocalyptic warnings about the end of the world as we know it are as old as humanity itself, but recent news should give the doomsayers some food for thought and lower the temperature, so to speak, in the debate about global warming and its future effects on the planet.

In a new study that was published in the journal Nature Geoscience, leading climate scientists have adjusted their previous predictions about global warming and stated that the worst impacts of climate change are still avoidable. Professor Michael Grubb, an international energy and climate change scientist at University College London, said that previous scientific estimates were incorrect, because they were based on computer models that were running “on the hot side.”

According to the new estimates, the world is more likely than previously thought to achieve the main goal of the 2015 Paris agreement and limit global warming to only 1.5°C higher than was the case in the pre-industrial era. Only two years ago, many scientists dismissed the 1.5°C goal as too optimistic and Professor Grubb went as far to say that “all the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5°C” is unattainable.

While it is true that the average global temperature is 0.9°C higher than in the pre-industrial era, the scientists now admit that there was a slowdown in warming in the 15 years prior to 2014 – a slowdown that the models did not predict or account for. Professor Myles Allen, another one of the study’s authors, said “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

What has changed in the model forecasts since the Paris summit in 2015? The data showing that the climate models are running “on the hot side” has been available for years. In 2015, my colleagues Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger noted that climate models have been overestimating the rate of warming for decades. In 2016, John Christy from the University of Alabama in Huntsville testified before the US Congress that the climate models were inaccurate. For their trouble, all three have been labelled “climate change deniers.”

The Nature Geoscience study suggests that humanity has more time to transition away from fossil fuels. Should it? That’s debatable, argues William Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale University, and his coauthor Andrew Moffatt, in a recently released paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper combines econometric and climate models to estimate the future impact of global warming on worldwide income.

By studying 36 estimates of the costs of global warming, the pair predicts that 3°C warming will reduce global income by 2.04 percent and 6°C warming will reduce global income by 8.16 percent by 2100. Nordhaus and Moffatt’s estimates parallel the broad consensus. For example, the IPCC in their Fourth Report estimated that global “mean losses could be 1 to 5 per cent of GDP for 4°C of warming”.

As Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine calculates, current global average income per capita is about $10,000. If the world grows at 3 percent per year over the next 80 years or so, global average income per capita will rise to $97,000. According to Nordhaus and Moffatt’s estimations, therefore, an increase in global temperature by 3°C would reduce global average income per capita by $2,000 to $95,000. A 6°C increase in global temperature would reduce global average income per capita by $8,000 to $89,000.

Full post

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September 22, 2017 at 11:29AM