Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
practicablerateofeconomicdevelopment,andthusthefastesteliminationofpovertyinthe
developing world. In a nutshell, and on balance, global warming is good for you.
The IPCC does its best to contest this by claiming that warming is bad for food
production:initsownwords,'negativeimpactsofclimatechangeoncropyieldshavebeen
more common than positive impacts'. But not only does it fail to acknowledge that the
mainnegativeimpactoncropyieldshasbeennotclimatechangebutclimatechangepolicy,
as farmland has been turned over to the production of biofuels rather than food crops. It
also understates the net benefit for food production from the warming it expects to occur,
in two distinct ways.
In the first place, it explicitly takes no account of any future developments in
bioengineering and genetic modification, which are likely to enable farmers to plant
drought-resistant crops designed to thrive at warmer temperatures, should these occur.
Second, and equally important, it takes no account whatever of another effect of increased
atmospheric CO
2
, and one which is more certain and better documented than the warming
effect. Namely, the stimulus to plant growth: what the scientists call the 'fertilisation
effect'. Over the past 30 years or so, the earth has become observably greener, and this has
even affected most parts of the Sahel. It is generally agreed that a major contributor to this
has been the growth in atmospheric CO
2
from the burning of fossil fuels.
This shouldnotcome asasurprise. Biologists have always knownthat CO
2
isessential
for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no
human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic
scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as 'pollution'—which, whether
or not they warm the planet, they most certainly are not—and deliberately mislabelling
forms of energy which produce these emissions as 'dirty'.
In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as 'clean', seemingly oblivious to
the fact that by far the largest source of renewable energy in the world today is biomass,
and in particular the burning of dung, which is the major source of indoor pollution in the
developing world and is reckoned to cause at least a million deaths a year.
Compared with the likely benefits to both human health and food production from
CO
2
-induced global warming, the possible disadvantages from, say, a slight increase in
either the frequency or the intensity of extreme weather events is very small beer. It is,
in fact, still uncertain whether there is any impact on extreme weather events as a result
of warming (increased carbon emissions, which have certainly occurred, cannot on their
ownaffect the weather: it is only warming which might). The unusual persistence ofheavy
rainfall over the UK during February, which led to considerable flooding, is believed by
the scientists to have been caused by the wayward behaviour of the jetstream; and there is
no credible scientific theory that links this behaviour to the fact that the earth's surface is
some 0.8°C warmer than it was 150 years ago.
