l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 当我问英国气候变化部的人在每年花纳税人300亿的情况下暖化被遏制了多少时，在一
片可怕的沉默之后，回答是“我们从没算过”
Posted on February 3, 2012 by Anthony Watts
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Today’s resignation of Chris Huhne, the UK Minister for Climate Change,
offers the prospect of a belated return to sanity at the former Ministry of
Agriculture in Whitehall. Huhne now faces prosecution for an alleged attempt
to pervert the course of justice by asking his then wife to say that she
was driving at the time when one of Britain’s thousands of speed cameras
caught him going faster than the law allows.
Under Huhne, the Climate Change Department has been indistinguishable from a
lunatic asylum. I first came across him – or, rather, didn’t come across
him – when he and I were due to debate the climate at the annual jamboree
of a massive hedge-fund in Spain three years ago. Huhne only found out that
I was to be his opponent when he reached Heathrow Airport. He turned
straight around and went back to London.
When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate
Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s
chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist
nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations
detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this
century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department
was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.
There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister
adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor
Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was
disappearing would swallow him up entirely.
Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that
is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax
increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific
assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind
faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get
around to doing the calculations next October.”
They still haven’t done the calculations – or, rather, I suspect they have
done them but have kept the results very quiet indeed. Here’s why.
The UK accounts for 1.5% of global business-as-usual CO2 emissions. At an
officially-estimated cost of $1.2 trillion by 2050, or $834 billion after
inter-temporal discounting at the minimum market rate of 5%, the Climate
Change Act aims to eradicate 80% of these emissions. So just 1.2% of global
emissions would be abated even if the policy were to succeed in full.
Business-as-usual CO2 concentration, as the average of all six IPCC emission
scenarios, would be 514 ppmv in 2050. A full and successful reduction of UK
emissions by 80% over that period would reduce that concentration to –
wait for it – 512.5 ppmv. This dizzying reduction of 1.5 ppmv over 40 years
would have the effect of abating 0.008 K of the 1.05 K of warming that the
IPCC would otherwise have expected to see by 2050.
The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1
Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same
cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated.
The policy’s global abatement cost – the cost of abating all of the 1.05 K
warming that would otherwise occur over the policy’s 40-year lifetime –
would be $113 trillion, or $16,000 per head of the global population, or
almost 7% of global GDP over the period.
To determine how much better it would be to do nothing than to try to abate
that warming, it is necessary to agree on how much damage the warming might
abate. The Stern Report on the economics of climate change produces some of
the most extreme and exaggerated cost estimates, so we shall use it for the
sake of being as fair as possible.
Stern agrees with most sources that if there is 3 K warming this century (
which the IPCC predicted at the time), it will cost 0-3% of global 21st-
century GDP (actually, he says “now and forever”, but that is one
exaggeration too many). However, the IPCC’s current central estimate is
that the CO2 we emit between 2000 and 2100 will cause little more than 1.5 K
of warming. So let us assume that this 1.5 K of CO2-driven warming will
cost us 1.5% of global 21st-century GDP.
Yes, I know that anything less than 2 K will probably be beneficial, but we
have to bear in mind the already-committed warming of 0.6 K that the IPCC
says is already in the pipeline on account of our past sins of emission, and
the warming from the non-CO2 greenhouse gases that is not addressed in the
UK’s CO2-reduction policy.
However, Stern’s calculations are all based on an inter-temporal discount
rate of just 1.4%, which is far lower than the minimum rate of return on
capital, which is 5%. Correcting the Stern-based 1.5%-of-GDP cost of taking
no action to allow for the minimum market discount rate brings that cost
down to 0.3% of GDP.
Accordingly, the 6.85%-of-GDP cost of taking action to mitigate the warming
would give an impressive action/inaction ratio of 22.8. Bottom line: it is
almost 23 times more expensive to pursue the policies outlined in the
Climate Change Act than to sit back, do nothing, enjoy the sunshine, and
adapt in a focused way to the consequences of what little warming the IPCC
predicts may occur.
Just one problem with this entire calculation. It depends upon the
assumption that the $1.2 billion spent by Mr. Huhne’s former department to
2050 would actually achieve an 80% reduction in Britain’s CO2 emissions.
And that may not be a justifiable assumption. Real-world climate-mitigation
policies are proving far more costly than government estimates.
The United Kingdom is no longer a democracy. We still have all the trappings
, but in reality it no longer matters who we vote for. Five-sixths of our
laws, including overall policies on environmental matters, are set by the
unelected, unaccountable, unsackable Kommissars (that’s the official German
name for our new and hated masters) of the failed European Union. For the
seventeenth year in a row, the EU’s own court of auditors has declined to
sign off the Kommissars’ annual accounts as a true and fair record of how
they have squandered the $3 million an hour we pay them. It is these
Kommissars who dictate that we must have carbon trading.
So let us compare the pie-in-the-sky cost estimates in the Climate Change
Act with the actual, real-world cost of the EU’s four-times-collapsed
carbon trading scam – er, scheme. The calculation is similar to that which
we did for the UK alone.
Over the ten-year timeframe of the EU’s scheme, CO2 concentration will have
risen to 413 ppmv, or 412.4 ppmv if the scheme is fully successful, abating
0.004 K of “global warming”. The cost of the scheme, according to Bjorn
Lomborg, is 2.5 times the cost of the trades actually executed: call it $230
billion a year, or $2.1 trillion after 5% discounting over the ten years.
The mitigation cost-effectiveness of the EU scheme is $535 trillion per
Kelvin abated; its global abatement cost over the period 2010-2020 is $117
trillion, or $17,000 per head of global population, or 22% of global GDP
over the ten-year period. And that is 72 times more costly than the 0.3%-of-
GDP cost of the climate-related damage that the policy is intended to
forestall.
This, too, understates the true cost-ineffectiveness of trying to tax, trade
, regulate, reduce or replace CO2. For the predicted rate of warming is not
occurring. By many methods, the climate literature demonstrates that the
models are over-predicting CO2-driven warming at least threefold. If so,
then the true cost of the EU’s mad policy, of which Mr. Huhne and his party
are such enthusiastic supporters, could be at least 200 times greater than
the cost of climate-related damage from doing nothing at all.
Will Mr. Huhne’s successor get the sums done and scrap the Climate Change
Act? Will the EU come to its senses? Don’t count on it. Gradually, though,
reality is breaking through. Desubsidization of solar and even of
fashionable wind energy has now begun in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Spain.
The sheer cost of these pointless, environment-wrecking “alternative”
energy sources is so crippling that European governments, already near-
bankrupted by their incompetent management of the mickey-mouse Euro, cannot
any longer afford these self-indulgent indulgences. The removal of Mr. Huhne
from the scene will at least take Britain one step nearer to sanity,
scientific reality and economic common sense about climate change. |
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