Matt Ridley (2016) promotes global greening of the climate

Matt Ridley: Global warming versus global greening (40:29; 2016)

I am a passionate champion of science. I have devoted most of my career to celebrating and chronicling scientific discovery. I think the scientific method is humankind’s greatest achievement, and that there is no higher calling. So, what I am about to say this evening about the state of climate science is not in any sense anti-science. It is anti the distortion and betrayal of science.

I am still in love with science as a philosophy; I greatly admire and like the vast majority of scientists I meet; but I am increasingly disaffected from science as an institution. The way it handles climate change is a big part of the reason. After covering global warming debates as a journalist on and off for almost 30 years, with initial credulity, then growing skepticism, I have come to the conclusion that the risk of dangerous global warming, now and in the future, has been greatly exaggerated while the policies enacted to mitigate the risk have done more harm than good, both economically and environmentally, and will continue to do so. And I am treated as some kind of pariah for coming to this conclusion.

Why do I think the risk from global warming is being exaggerated? For four principal reasons.

1. All environmental predictions of doom always are; 2. the models have been consistently wrong for more than 30 years; 3. the best evidence indicates that climate sensitivity is relatively low; 4. the climate science establishment has a vested interest in alarm.

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What’s more, all the high estimates of warming are based on an economic and demographic scenario called RCP 8.5, which is a very, very unrealistic one.

• It assumes that population growth stops decelerating and speeds up again.

• It assumes that trade and innovation largely cease.

• It assumes that the ability of the oceans to absorb CO2 fails.

• It assumes that despite all this the income of the average person trebles.

• And most absurd of all, it assumes that we go back to using coal for almost everything, including to make motor fuel, so that by 2100 we are using ten times as much coal as we are today.

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Let me turn to the topic of fossil fuels. To paraphrase Monty Python, “What have fossil fuels done for us?” Apart from a new continent’s worth of green vegetation. And removing the need to cook over a wood fire, the smoke from which is one of the biggest killers in the world, dispatching over three million people a year according to the World Health Organisation. And removing the need to fetch wood from the forest and dismantle an ecosystem in doing so.

Apart from that what have fossil fuels done for us? Well, I suppose they supply the power to pump water so that it does not have to be fetched. They allow electric light and hence help literacy and education. They bring the refrigeration of food and vaccines. They enable the child to catch a lift to school. They make the fertilizer that raises farm yields, ending most hunger and sparing land for wildlife.

Yes, but apart from ending starvation, enabling kids to get to school, refrigerating vaccines, boosting literacy, pumping water, reducing the pressure on forests, reducing indoor air pollution, and creating 14% more green vegetation – apart from all this, what have fossil fuels done for us?

“Fossil fuels don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they take a dangerous climate and make it safe,” says Alex Epstein.

From time to time, I stand accused of letting the fact that I have a commercial interest in coal, which I have declared many times and hereby do again, influence my assessment of climate science. But if my critics argue that way about me, then I can argue that way about them. Perhaps Al Gore’s commercial interest in renewable energy influences his assessment of climate science. Perhaps Michael Mann’s grants and James Hansen’s prizes for studying man-made climate change influence his conclusions. I don’t think they should be censored, so why should I be?

If climate change is not dangerous then there’s no justification for renewable energy subsidies. It is beyond question that global warming has generated enormous research funds, measured in many billions, that this has stimulated all sorts of scientists, from botany to psychiatry, to link their work to climate change, and that almost none of this money flows to those with skeptical views. As the distinguished NASA climate scientist Roy Spencer has written,

“If you fund scientists to find evidence of something, they will be happy to find it for you. For over 20 years we have been funding them to find evidence of the human influence on climate. And they dutifully found it everywhere, hiding under every rock, glacier, ocean, and in every cloud, hurricane, tornado, raindrop, and snowflake. So, just tell scientists 20% of their funds will be targeted for studying natural sources of climate change. They will find those, too.”

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We are encouraging forest destruction by burning wood, ethanol and biodiesel. We are denying poor people the cheapest forms of electricity, which forces them to continue relying on wood for fuel, at great cost to their health. We are using the landscape, the rivers, the estuaries, the hills, the fields for making energy, when we could be handing land back to nature, and relying on forms of energy that nature does not compete for – fossil and nuclear. But there is a further reason why it matters. Real environmental problems are being neglected. The emphasis on climate change as the pre-eminent environmental threat means that we pay too little attention to the genuine environmental problems in the world. We bang on about ocean acidification when it is overfishing and run-off that is most hurting coral reefs. We misdiagnose climate change as the cause of floods when it is land drainage and urban development that is the cause. Please remember that the IPCC agrees with me that, in terms of its economic impact, climate change is a minor issue. Once again, I am not departing from the consensus. The opening words of the executive summary of working group 3’s report on the impacts of climate change in AR5 read as follows: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.” That’s the IPCC’s consensus view.

And why icebergs are always leaving Greenland. And think about this: How did Greenland get it's name? And no, it was not a marketing campaign to sell Norsemen on settling on the new land.