https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/08/obrien-climate/
With climateers now saying the fabled two-degree warming limit won’t be enough after all, a decent PM might react thus: ‘As the science is settled, we’re redirecting all those climate dollars to fixing the grid because, if it’s going to get hot, we’ll need cheap, reliable power and lots of air conditioning’.
An interesting juxtaposition in a recent Australian. My eye was first caught by an article about a paper, lead-authored by Professor Will Steffen, predicting that beyond 2C of global warming all hell will break loose. Fortunately there was also an eminently readable piece by Professor Ian Plimer arguing the case for the beneficial effect of CO2 and demolishing the notion that it could lead to Steffen-like outcomes.
The apocalyptic ‘hothouse earth’ alarmism postulated by Steffen et al was quite common about ten years ago but has been somewhat muted of late as a consequence of the planet’s refusal to behave as catastropharians insisted it would: CO2 has risen but the global temperature, even with BoM-style gingering of temperature records, has not risen to any significant degree if at all. I wonder if President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement might have anything to do with the re-emergence of this kind of junk ‘science’? As the US was the primary source of all those climate dollars and they have dried up, the panic amongst climate careerists is very nearly palpable. Expect to see many more of Big Climate’s rent-seekers and grant-snafflers stepping up the hysteria.
Steffen’s theory is that, once we get to 2C warming above pre-industrial levels – now only 1.2C away, as it happens –there will be “a cascade of feedbacks with terrible consequences for ecosystems, society and economies”. Without action, we are told, “the feedbacks could lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years.”
The theory used to be that increasing atmospheric CO2 would drive increasing atmospheric temperature, which would, in turn, lead to more floods, droughts, cyclones and extinction of species. Whilst increasing CO2 is regarded as the initial trigger, the real damage, warming-wise, will be done as other factors come into play — methane released by a melting arctic tundra, for example. This is the “feedback” that has climate scientists so preoccupied it is a wonder they can marshal the concentration to lodge their latest grant applications. Well, perhaps not.
In any case, the IPCC has a metric to gauge all this “climate sensitivity”. There are two main versions – Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Transient Climate Sensitivity. They are defined as follows:
