Or The Good News That The Climate Change Lobby Doesn't Want You To Hear
By Robert Matthews
12th June 2005
Just when it seemed that the dark clouds had lifted, they all came back again. Not Britain's on-again, off-again summer, but climate scientists calling for action to prevent global catastrophe.
Last Wednesday, the scientific academies of all the G8 major industrial nations, as well as Brazil, China and India, said that they were now convinced that humans were chiefly to blame for making the planet hotter, and that measures must be taken to combat climate change.
In an unprecedented joint communiqué, the academies declared that: "The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action," adding that the threat posed "is clear and increasing".
Lord May, the president of the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific institution, put it more bluntly: "Never before have we faced such a global threat. And if we do not begin effective action now, it will be much harder to stop the runaway train as it continues to gather momentum."
Lord May is clearly hoping that his apocalyptic statement will win the ear of policymakers who have so far shown a reluctance to take any kind of drastic action. He may also be hoping that it will see off those dissenting scientists who remain sceptical of claims that humans are causing potentially catastrophic climate change.
Vilified as "climate-change deniers", they have been accused of being everything from lackeys of the oil industry to just plain stupid.
Yet, just as the clamour for action grows in anticipation of next month's G8 meeting in Scotland, another group of academics has begun fighting to have its voice heard. It includes experts in fields ranging from agriculture to medicine, and most of them agree that something strange is happening to the Earth's climate.
Where they part company with Lord May is in their assessment of the threat it poses. After studying the likely consequences for everything from crop yields to human health, their results are anything but apocalyptic. They have found that a hotter planet brings with it many benefits, and that humans can adapt perfectly well to it.
Indeed, far from joining the calls for action, some now warn that trying to prevent climate change could prove far more catastrophic than learning to live with it. Nor is this cheery vision based solely on questionable computer models. Analysis of past episodes of dramatic - but entirely natural - climate change repeatedly shows the benefits of a warmer world.
"If you could vote for a change in climate, you would always want a warmer one," says Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London. "Cold is nearly always worse for everything - the economy, agriculture, disease, biodiversity".
According to Prof Stott, times of historical prosperity have often been tied to unusually warm periods, such as the so-called Medieval Warm Period between 1100 and 1300. In contrast, the Little Ice Age between 1450 to 1890 was characterised by famines, pandemics and social upheaval. "We should be glad we've left that behind," he said.
The possibility that a warmer future could bring further benefits has long been noted by climate-change scientists, albeit reluctantly. The draft of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - regarded as the voice of mainstream scientific opinion - conceded that many developed nations could make "net economic gains", at least for moderate levels of warming. This rare glimmer of optimism was watered down when the final report emerged in 2001.
Since then, however, studies by researchers in a host of fields have cast doubt on the relentlessly gloomy forecasts. The heat-wave that struck much of Europe in 2003, killing more than 11,000 in France alone - was seized on by ecoactivists as proof-positive of the lethal effects of global warming.
Yet a review published last year by scientists at the University of London pointed out a basic medical fact: in many countries, cold kills far more people each year than heat. For the kind of temperature rise predicted for the UK over the next 50 years, the team estimated that heat-related deaths would rise by about 2,000 a year - but that this figure would be dwarfed by a cut in cold-related deaths of 20,000.
Other climate-related health scares have collapsed under close scrutiny. In 2002, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, added his voice to claims that Britain could be facing the return of malaria.
A subsequent analysis by experts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that changes in land use and socio-economic trends made the risk "highly unlikely". Oddly, the lifting of this eco-threat was not widely reported.
It is a similar story with agriculture. During the 1990s, researchers repeatedly claimed that global warming would have dire consequences for key crops. Even developed nations such as America were predicted to suffer. Apocalyptic scenarios of a sweltering world unable to feed itself began to gain currency.
Once again, however, more sophisticated studies are revealing a different picture, having taken account of a factor so often ignored: human adaptability. Global warming is also routinely regarded as disastrous for everything from Alpine ski resorts to tropical beaches.
Yet the picture now emerging from more sophisticated studies is far less apocalyptic. Last year, a team at the University of Hamburg showed that a modest temperature rise would lead to 30 per cent more tourists visiting countries such as Russia and Canada.
The benefits to UK tourism may also be substantial, according to a recent study by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which concluded: "We may witness not only an expansion in the domestic market, but an expansion in the inbound international market as the UK develops a more Mediterranean climate."
Even the frightening prospect of rising sea-levels caused by the melting of the polar ice caps - widely regarded within the climate-change lobby as one of the most devastating consequences of global warming - is now under serious scrutiny. Millions of people, from those living in the coastal cities of the West to the inhabitants of Pacific islands, are at risk, we were warned.
But then the early claims of 5ft rises started to give way to far less dramatic predictions; the most recent estimate, published last year by the International Quaternary Association, puts the figure at a sea-level rise of somewhere between 8in and zero. A recent study found that sea levels around the allegedly threatened Maldives have actually fallen.
In any case, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now concedes that there is little fear of millions being made permanently homeless by flooding. Its most recent report states: "Human settlements are expected to be among the sectors that could be most easily adapted to climate change, given appropriate planning and foresight."
Climate scientists have made little of the benefits of a warming planet, and even less of the ability of humans to cope with the consequences. From the changes in irrigation and new crops made by American farmers that prevented a repetition of the 1930s Dust Bowl, to the sea-wall system that protects northern Vietnam, there is no lack of evidence for human inventiveness in the face of climate change.
Yet this is routinely left out or played down in predictions of the impact of climate change. Describing the likely impact of extremes in weather in his recent book, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, Sir John Houghton cites 23 threats - adding only in a footnote that all of them could be "lessened by appropriate response measures".
Including them can transform the implications of climate change. "If you just take an agronomic model and make conditions hotter and drier, then, yes, crop yields go down," says Professor Richard Adams, an agricultural economist at Oregon State University. "But if you're a farmer, you see your crops aren't doing so well and plant a more heat resistant type."
Prof Adams is one of a group of academics pioneering the use of studies that take into account such adaptability. The results frequently contradict the simplistic models, with dire losses turning into sizeable gains.
During the 1990s, studies of the impact of climate change on the US agricultural economy predicted huge declines amounting to more than 20 per cent of US Gross Domestic Product. By taking into account adaptation, studies by Professor Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University, now point to growth of more than 13 per cent.
Ironically, some of the benefits come from the growth-promoting effect of the very greenhouse gas now causing so much alarm: carbon dioxide. Global yields of wheat and rice are expected to rise by 18 per cent, while yields of clover - a key foodstuff for grazing animals - looks set to rise by 36 per cent.
Global vegetation density seems to be benefiting already, with net gains in growth across the whole planet since the early 1980s. Even tropical forests and the Amazon are reported to be growing more luxuriant as CO2 levels rise.
"I am optimistic about the future," Prof Adams told The Sunday Telegraph. "I am continually amazed by what farmers can do. We are not going to have mass starvation."
According to Prof Adams, the real problems lie in distributing the food that is grown - and ensuring that developing nations have the means to develop new crops. Many economists are convinced that the best hope of that lies in continued economic growth. Their fear is that this is precisely what is now being threatened by the calls for immediate action over global warming.
"Economic studies clearly show it will be far more expensive to cut greenhouse gases than to pay for the cost of adapting to a warmer planet", says Professor Bjorn Lomborg, of Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose critique of the climate change debate has incensed environmentalists.
Even if we shut every fossil-fuel power station, crushed every car and grounded every aircraft, the Earth's climate would still continue to get warmer, according to Prof Stott. "The trouble is, we would all be too impoverished to cope with the consequences," he said.
From:
http://motoring.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/12/nwarm12.xml
So that settles that then!