Latest Climate Report Feeds into Alarmist Fearmongering
I'm trying to refrain from any hint at sarcasm so as not to trigger our junior scientists, so I'll just post the article....
I'm trying to refrain from any hint at sarcasm so as not to trigger our junior scientists, so I'll just post the article....
The doomsday scenarios in the National Climate Assessment are close to impossible.
The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public. Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media. After all, disaster sells.
But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren’t just highly unlikely; they’re close to impossible. For example, the report speculated that climate “inaction” could result in as much as a 10 percent drop in U.S. gross domestic product by 2100. Admittedly, a lot can happen in 82 years. But a 10 percent drop in GDP is more than twice the loss suffered during the Great Recession.
How could things get so bad? Well, put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out. The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer, calculates these costs by assuming that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. That mind-boggling assumption is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.
Other scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5) — one of four trajectories that climatologists use to estimate the effects of different greenhouse-gas concentrations.
To put it plainly, RCP 8.5 assumes a combination of extreme factors — all bad — that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”
This extraordinary scenario assumes a massive increase in coal consumption — completely ignoring the dramatic increase in natural-gas production from the shale revolution. It also ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.
The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public. Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media. After all, disaster sells.
But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren’t just highly unlikely; they’re close to impossible. For example, the report speculated that climate “inaction” could result in as much as a 10 percent drop in U.S. gross domestic product by 2100. Admittedly, a lot can happen in 82 years. But a 10 percent drop in GDP is more than twice the loss suffered during the Great Recession.
How could things get so bad? Well, put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out. The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer, calculates these costs by assuming that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. That mind-boggling assumption is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.
Other scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5) — one of four trajectories that climatologists use to estimate the effects of different greenhouse-gas concentrations.
To put it plainly, RCP 8.5 assumes a combination of extreme factors — all bad — that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”
This extraordinary scenario assumes a massive increase in coal consumption — completely ignoring the dramatic increase in natural-gas production from the shale revolution. It also ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.
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