With the United Nations climate change summit now underway in Paris, those opposed to tackling greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels are engaged in a last-ditch desperate attempt to prevent a new international agreement.
It is little surprise then that ‘The Wall Street Journal’ has published a long and rambling polemic by two of the UK’s most prominent campaigners against the regulation of the pollution from fossil fuels.
The article by Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which lobbies against policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, recycles a series of ‘sceptic’ talking points, to create a false impression of the science and economics of climate change.
They start with the standard ploy of misrepresenting the scientific evidence for climate change.
First they claim that global mean surface temperature has “gone up only very slowly”. They add that “the world is barely half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was about 25 years ago”. In fact, the World Meteorological Organisation has warned that the last five years are the warmest such period since instrumental records began in the 19th century, and that the average global temperature for 2015 is likely to be about 1 centigrade degree higher than the average during the pre-industrial era, before the burning of fossil fuels started to dump large volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Viscount Ridley and Dr Peiser downplay the significance of this rise in global mean surface temperature, which may seem small compared to local daily fluctuations. But it should be remembered that the global mean surface temperature during the last Ice Age was only about 5 centigrade degrees lower than today. During the last major interglacial period, which ended about 116,000 years ago, global mean surface temperature was no more than 2 centigrade degrees higher than today, but the polar land-based ice sheets on West Antarctica and Greenland were much smaller, and global mean sea level was between 5 and 10 metres higher than today. This shows the profound consequences of what may appear to be relatively small changes in global mean surface temperature.
Viscount Ridley and Dr Peiser next seek to obscure the impacts of the rise in global mean surface temperature that has already occurred, falsely claiming that “on a global scale, as scientists keep confirming, there has been no increase in frequency or intensity of storms, floods or droughts”. This is blatantly misleading.
The most authoritative assessment of the scientific evidence, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013, concluded: “Changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed since about 1950”, including a likely rise in the frequency of heatwaves in large parts of Europe, Asia and Australia, and an increase in the number or intensity of heavy precipitation events in North America and Europe.
Viscount Ridley and Dr Peiser try to hide the true picture on floods and droughts by ignoring the fact that the impact of climate change varies between regions, which means some parts of the world are becoming drier while other parts are becoming wetter.
Hence the IPCC noted that “although the most evident flood trends appear to be in northern high latitudes, where observed warming trends have been largest, in some regions no evidence of a trend in extreme flooding has been found”.
And on drought, the IPCC found that “it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”.
Similarly the data for storms across the world also presents a complex picture, but the IPCC noted that it is “virtually certain” there has been an “increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s” in the North Atlantic basin.
Hence, the attempt by Viscount Ridley and Dr Peiser to focus only on global trends is really an obfuscation of the evidence of regional changes.
They also turn a blind eye to the growing number of studies that have analysed how climate change has increased the probability of different types of extreme weather. Recent research by scientists around the world found that climate change influenced the probability of the frequency and severity of many extreme weather events in 2014.
