Climate Change Will Not Be Dangerous for a Long Time

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 12/03/15

Matt Ridley of the Scientific American opines that the climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is real, man-made and dangerous, as Pres. Obama thinks, or it is a hoax, as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility ... that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time. This lukewarm option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is correct, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa ... that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires. In 1990, the IPCC was predicting that if emissions rose in a business as usual way, which they have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since, temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7 degree C above the 1986 to 2005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, in all scenarios, including the high-emissions ones. The decline in nuclear power has been matched by the rise in renewables but the proportion coming from wind and solar is still only 1%, even with subsidies.