Posts

Showing posts from February, 2010

SCEPTICS NOW WELCOME

Over the last few months there has been a remarkable change of tone among the climate science community. Until recently sceptics were treated as barely worth the consideration of ‘real’ climate scientists. The CRU emails showed clearly how attempts were made to prevent the publication of any paper questioning climate orthodoxy or, should such a paper have been published, to prevent it appearing in any IPCC publication. That has now changed; or at least the rhetoric has changed; only time will tell if the underlying philosophy has changed. One sign of this was a recent article in a national newspaper by the UK government’s Chief Scientist, John Beddington. In the article he says “The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change.” Not to be outdone his predecessor, David King, has weighed in with an article which makes a similar point. This is in m

NICHOLAS STERN - "'A BLUEPRINT FOR A SAFER PLANET"

This book could have equally have been called “A Blueprint for Copenhagen 2010”. Now, it might seem a bit unfair to comment on a book written before December 2010 in relation to what happened in that month. In Nicholas Stern’s case it is fully justified. As a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and of the World Bank and as the author of the UK government’s, globally influential, review of the Economics of Climate Change the author has been deeply involved in shaping policy. The book is well written and the author has the ability to clarify complex issues. One of these is the relative merits and disadvantages of controlling CO2 emissions by a Carbon Tax or by Carbon Trading. With a Carbon Tax you know what it will cost but not how much it will reduce emissions; with Carbon Trading (Cap-and-Trade in the US) you know by how much it will reduce emissions but not what the financial implications are. He also deals with one of the main criticisms of