Der ‘wissenschaftliche Konsens’ wird in Yokohama gerade ausgehandelt: Many governments want sterner warnings of probable economic damage from global warming in a draft U.N. report due on Monday, saying that existing estimates of trillions of dollars in losses are only part of the picture. A final draft before talks this week among governments and scientists in Japan projected that warming would cut economic output by between 0.2 and 2.0 percent a year by damaging human health, disrupting water supplies and raising sea levels.
But many countries reckon that is an underestimate because it excludes risks of catastrophic changes, such as a runaway melt of Greenland’s ice, collapse of coral reefs or a drying of the Amazon rainforest that could cause massive economic losses.
Trying to address the objections, an updated draft text from the meeting on Friday, obtained by Reuters, adds that impact estimates “do not yet account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other details.”
IPCC WGII has been ‘Pachauri-ised’
The economic costs of ‘global warming’ have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report - shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has admitted.
Previous reports - notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review - have put the costs to the global economy caused by ‘climate change’ at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.
But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP…
Unfortunately, those expecting the IPCC’s Working Group II’s report to effect a new note of realism in global economic policy on climate change may be disappointed.
That’s because the Summary for Policymakers (the only part of the IPCC’s reports that policymakers tend to read) will - as usual - strike a much more alarmist tone than the contents of the more detailed report actually justify.
“Basically, it has been Pachauri-ised,” says Benny Peiser of the independent think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Peiser is referring to the IPCC’s jet-setting chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian former railway engineer who has consistently put an alarmist complexion on all the IPCC’s Summaries for Policymakers.
