• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1571 0

. Over time, it is possible that the IPCC’s analysis and forecasts would be vindicated. But I doubt it.”15 A third highly credible critic is the Yale environmental economist William Nordhaus, who has made a similar point about the inbuilt bias of those who are sounding the alarm about climate change. He writes that the UK government-commissioned Stern Review, which gave such an impetus to global public policy on climate change and fed into the Copenhagen Summit, was written with undue haste and without peer review, in order to satisfy a political agenda: “The Review was published without an appraisal of its methods and assumptions by independent outside experts. Nor can its results be easily reproduced. These may be seen as minor points but they are fundamental for good science. The British government is not infallible in questions of economic and scientific analysis of global warming.”16

These kinds of allegations about the institutional flaws of the climate change “community” are supported by the behavior and errors that have come to light recently.

Other critics of the consensus also say the forecasting methods used by the IPCC are flawed. It must be true that the margin of uncertainty in these forecasts is very large, not only because the Earth has experienced big swings in climate in the distant past not caused by human economic activity, but also because forecasting a complex dynamic system like the world’s weather is hard for the next two days never mind two decades. What’s more, there is an uncertain economic forecast superimposed on the uncertain climate forecast: future emissions forecasts, which affect the predictions about temperature change, depend on future economic growth and also future innovation and investment in energy-efficient technologies, which in turn depend on the incentives created by the price of carbon-based and alternative energy sources. But the specifics of the critique matter less than the fact that respected economists with a record of work on the environment are making such strongly worded criticisms of the international institutions assessing the risk and shaping government policies that might impose big costs on their citizens. This points to the conclusion that the IPCC process is flawed. The IPCC represents a massive intellectual and scientific effort, and almost all climate scientists back its conclusions. However, it is not sufficiently transparent, has not engaged effectively with critics, and lacks political legitimacy. Even if everyone involved in the debate agreed about the climate science, no political consensus on what action to take will be possible without a better policy framework ensuring accountability to voters. In the second half of the book I return to what seem like rather minor points about process, which in fact turn out to be profoundly important for sustainability.

In addition to these doubts about the climate change establishment, there is also a divergence in philosophical approach between economists and environmentalists. It is encapsulated by a well-known bet between economist Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, author of a popular book, The Population Bomb, which warned of environmental catastrophe due to the pressure of population growth. In 1980 Simon challenged Ehrlich to name five commodities of his selection and predicted their price would be lower (relative to the general price level) in a decade. In 1990, Ehrlich had to pay up. Every one of the five commodities he had expected to soar in price because of the pressure of demand was cheaper than it had been at the time of the wager. The moral economists draw from this tale is that it is misleading to extrapolate trends far into the future, as Ehrlich and many environmentalists do. If pressures emerge such as growing demand for a particular resource, its price will rise and people will switch their behavior to use something else, or invent a new technology to replace the shortage commodity. Even accepting that markets underprice energy and many other resources, given the externalities involved, economists