Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
world for the better. But scientists are no better and no worse than anyone else. There are
goodscientistsandtherearebadscientists.Manyscientistsareoutstandingpeopleworking
long hours to produce important results. They must be frustrated that political activists
then turn those results into propaganda. Yet they dare not speak out for fear of losing their
funding.
Indeed, a case can be made for the proposition that today's climate science
establishment is betraying science itself. During the period justly known as the
Enlightenment, science achieved the breakthroughs which have so benefited us all by
rejecting the claims of authority—which at that time largely meant the authority of the
church—and adopting an overarching scepticism, insisting that our understanding of the
external world must be based exclusively on observation and empirical experiment. Yet
today all too many climate scientists, in particular in the UK, come close to claiming that
they need to be respected as the voice of authority on the subject—the very claim that was
once the province of the church.
If I have been critical of the latest IPCC report, let me add that it is many respects
a significant improvement on its predecessors. It explicitly concedes, for example, that
'climate change may be beneficial for moderate climate change'—and moderate climate
change is all that it expects to see for the rest of this century—and that 'Estimates for the
aggregate economic impact of climate change are relatively small … For most economic
sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers.'
So much for the unique existential planetary threat.
What it conspicuously fails to do, however, is to make any assessment of the
unequivocally adverse economic impact of the decarbonisation policy it continues to
advocate, which (if implemented) would be far worse than any adverse impact from global
warming.
Even here, however, the new report concedes for the first time that the most important
response to the threat of climate change must be how mankind has always responded,
throughout the ages: namely, intelligent adaptation. Indeed, the 'impacts' section of the
latestreportisexplicitlyentitled'Impacts,AdaptationandVulnerability'.InpreviousIPCC
reports adaptation was scarcely referred to at all, and then only dismissively.
Thisleadsdirectlytothelastofmyfourquestions.Totheextentthatthereisaproblem,
what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?
The answer is—or should be—a no-brainer: adapt. I mentioned earlier that a
resumption of global warming, should it occur (and of course it might) would bring both
benefits and costs. The sensible course is clearly to pocket the benefits while seeking to
minimise the costs. And that is all the more so since the costs, should they arise, will not
be anything new: they will merely be the slight exacerbation of problems that have always
afflicted mankind.
