As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its strongest warning yet about global warming, politicians are facing a stark scientific consensus: the average global temperature is likely to rise by at least 1.5C within 20 years, unless immediate action is taken to cut emissions.
Actually, the IPCC report says that whatever is done now the 1.5oC is baked in. Whether we believe the report is another matter but that is what it says. So, that’s a sunk cost then. No decision we make now will change that.
Our decisions – again, whether we believe or not – is what we do next? Ignoring, as a sunk cost, what is already bound to happen. And the decision must be driven by the costs of what we do against the benefits of having done so. This logic being true whatever our views of the entire subject. It is still true that sunk costs are sunk costs, also that decisions must be made upon the costs and benefits of those decisions.
We were told we had to spend vast sums of our money on trying to prevent the bottle of milk being pushed to the table’s edge and falling to the floor to be smashed to pieces.
Now, they are saying it’s too late, the bottle has toppled off the table and is hurtling earthwards, yet they still want us to pay the costs of trying to prevent the bottle being pushed to the table’s edge………
These people are insane.
T understand that the base for the 1.5 degree increase is not today but the claimed beginning of the rise in CO2 some time in the last century and we have had 0.8 of it already. According to the IPCCs own figures, not necessarily so. Also that nothing is baked in in a world where the variation due to partly-understood natural processes is greater than even the hypothetical effect of CO2 rise.
Or to put it another way, how long are we going to keep giving this load of bollocks credibility?
The experts are all united and the warnings are dire so you’d have to be a luddite to deny the report.
Just as the experts were all united and the warnings dire when the UN Environment Programme issued a similarly bleak set of predictions in 1989.
That was exactly my thought. Report says “it’s irreversable!” Good, time to stop trying to reverse it then. Thank Cnut.
“We Have 10 Years To Stop The Catastrophe” – Maurice Strong UN 1972
Remember when scientists and climate “experts” were confidently predicting another ice age was imminent.
Here we are now in 2021, and the UN are warning us again that we have 10 years to save the planet.
Why are these cnuts never judged on their track record.
You wouldn’t hire a tradesman or car mechanic who had a record of failure.
I’m sure that the 1.5 degree rise will occur on time… Why? Simple – just keep making the adjustments to the historical record (oddly always downward) and Bingo! it’s now 1.5 degrees warmer than the baseline temp.
The concept of an “average global temperature” is a complete bloody nonsense anyway – especially as it, like just about everything else in climate “science”, is “modelled” rather than observed.
Yeah BJ. I do remember when the temperature records in Oz were ‘adjusted’ to account for the heat island effect.
They can’t even forecast the local weather for the next day within 1.5C so what chance do they have worldwide over a number of years.