 There will be: more extreme weather; melting glaciers; rising sea levels which will make some coastal areas uninhabitable and a place some inland areas at greater risk of floods; declining crop yields, particularly in Africa; and the possible extinction of around half the species on the planet.
Sir Nicholas Stern thinks that taking action to tackle global warming right now will cost 1 percent of global GDP by 2050. Doing nothing will cost the world 5-20% of GDP forever. He thinks that global economy might shink by around 20%, which amounts to £200 billion per year in the case of Britain.
He adds that climate change threatens the basic elements of life, including access to food, water and health care; changes to local climate could trigger mass migrations and heat up local conflicts; and coastal regions and major cities will be at increased risk from flooding.
But if we act now, and act internationally, we can save the planet by spending just 1% of the world's annual income.
The first thing to bear in mind is that Stern is guessing. He doesn't know for a fact that spending his 1% now will save 20% in the future. It's only a guess. It may well turn out that wasting money now, instead of investing it in something useful, will make things worse one or two decades hence.
When he says that the effects of global warming on Britain will be worse than two world wars, that's just a worse-case guess. He has no idea what will really happen.
All that we can be sure about is that Stern will be long gone and forgotten before anyone knows for sure how close to the mark, or wide of it, his guesses are. At the moment, his guesses will just be used by this dishonest government as an excuse for raising taxation and wasting the money – i.e. business as usual.
| Sir Nicholas Stern | • Is a major generator of greenhouse gases. His detached house in Wimbledon produces three times as much carbon dioxide as a 3-bedroom semi, he drives a high-emissions car and he is noted for flying around the world and encouraging airlines to release tons and tons of carbon dioxide.
• As a civil servant, he is in line for a vast pension [at least £65K] from his multi-million-pound pension fund and he will therefore be well insulated from Brown's Green Taxes.
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 Would YOU trust this man to save the planet?
• He has a long history of sleaze and making exceptions for his pals, New Labour's pals and donors to the party, so he can't be trusted to put the planet before his cronies.
• He has a track record for chasing headlines with his 'initiatives' and then moving on without actually doing anything.
Stern says that only an international effort can achieve anything. New Labour is offering a 20% cut in our 2% of global carbon dioxide production by humans. As the charts (above) show, it's not going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference – around 0.05% – and it's well within the margin of error for estimating how much carbon dioxide the big players, the United States and China, produce.
 Yet New Labour will be using the gesture as justification for piling on the Green Taxes on carbon dioxide production. Even though the consequences, and the costs, of climate change are hugely uncertain, and there is no proof that carbon dioxide makes much of a difference anyway!
The Man Who Stole Your Pension is coming back for more!
"The Stern Report is just a set of guesses, some of them pretty wild. It has stretched the data to the limits of credibility and beyond."
| Most climate-change research commissioned by governments has 2 main objectives: | 1. To 'prove' that something dire is about to happen in 20-100 years' time; certainly long after the current administration will have left office.
2. That the government concerned can do something to halt/reverse the change if its members are allowed to attend enough international junkets and the government is allowed a free hand in imposing new taxes. |
What is known FOR CERTAIN?
• For once, we British are not the problem - assuming there is a problem!
• The world's climate does change with time as a purely natural process, and so does the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
• The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is higher than 100 years ago, but there is no direct correlation between carbon dioxide level and global average temperature.
• The International Panel on Climate Change acknowledges that the 'facts' that support the global warming theory are subject to large error margins and the computer models which have predicted global catastrophe are highly unreliable as they are heavily loaded with sheer guesswork and fiddle factors.
• "On the issue of global warming, ideology is driving out solid evidence."
• Green Taxes are just taxes. The government won't spend the cash on saving the planet because it doesn't know how to save the planet. The government will just waste the money.
• Unilateral taxes won't work. Taxing only British airlines and businesses will sent the airlines to France and Holland and move the businesses to Eastern Europe and China.
• Everything else; massive rises in sea levels, the destruction of agriculture, the extinction of sea life, etc.; is guesswork.
• Water vapour in the atmosphere is a much more potent greenhouse gas but the British government has no strategy for managing clouds. Water vapor and clouds absorb nearly 90% of the infrared radiation from the Sun while carbon dioxide and the other minor greenhouse gases together absorb the remaining 10%.
• The average global temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Centigrade over the last 120 years and human industrial activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40% – which amounts to an increase of greenhouse gases of only 2%. Most of the temperature rise occurred before 1940 but more than 80% of the additional carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere after 1940.
• Analysis of ice cores from holes drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic has found that the temperature can be high when the atmospheric carbon dioxide level is low and vice versa.
• The Earth's elliptical orbit changes due to the gravitational influence of other planets, changing the amount of solar radiation which reaches the planet. Changes in the degree of tilt of the Earth's axis has the same effect. To complicate things further, the energy output of the Sun also varies, and that changes the amount of energy falling on the Earth. (But the British government has no strategy for managing solar output.)
• The amount of additional energy added to the Earth's climate system by the doubling the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is very small (4 Watts per square metre) compared to the average amount of solar radiation received by the top of the atmosphere (342 Watts per square metre) and small compared to the above natural variations in the amount of solar radiation received by the Earth.
• The possible increase in energy stored in the atmosphere due to human activity is also small when compared to uncertainties in the computer simulations of the Earth's climate used to predict global warming. For example, knowledge
• In computer models of the Earth's climate system, the amount of energy flowing from the equator to the poles contains an uncertainty factor of 25-30 Watts per square metre and the amount of sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere, or reflected by the surface, contains an uncertainty factor of up to 25 Watts per square metre.
• Some of these computer models include fiddle factors in the energy flows of as much as 100 Watts per square metre plus a further uncertainty of 25 Watts per square metre over the effect of clouds. So a mere 4 Watts per square metre from doubling the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere is neither here nor there!
• • There is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural changes in the energy output of the Sun. (But the British government has no strategy for managing solar output.)
| What to do about global warming: | 1. Move the Earth further from the Sun to cut down on the amount of solar radiation received and slow down the Earth's rotation speed so that there are still 365¼ days in a year but the days are 25 hours long instead of 24 hours long.
2. Scrap all analogue clocks in favour of digital ones, which go from 01:59 to 01a:00 every morning, and from 01a:59 to 02:00 to give everyone an extra hour in bed each night. |
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Q. Why did Gordon Brown get Sir Nicholas Stern, the government's chief economist, to draw up a list of guesses about the consequences of global warming?
