The Rational Optimist (53 page)

p. 329 ‘that there were warmer periods in earth’s history in medieval times and about 6,000 years ago yet no accelerations or ‘tipping points’ were reached’. Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies.
Energy & Environment
18: 1049-58; and Moberg, A., D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko, and W. Karlén, 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.
Nature
433:613-7.‘the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’. The full IPCC reports are available at www.ipcc.ch.

p. 331 ‘the Dutch economist Richard Tol’. www.ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061031_tol.pdf.

p. 331 ‘With a higher discount rate, Stern’s argument collapses’. See Weitzman, M. 2007. Review of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change.
Journal of Economic Literature
45 (3): ‘The present discounted value of a given global-warming loss from a century hence at the non-Stern annual interest rate of 6 per cent is one-hundredth of the value of the same loss at Stern’s centuries-long discount rate of 1.4 per cent.’

p. 331 ‘Nigel Lawson asks, reasonably enough’. Lawson, N. 2008.
An Appeal to Reason
. Duckworth.

p. 331 ‘all six of the IPCC’s scenarios assume that the world will experience so much economic growth that the people alive in 2100 will be on average 4–18 times as wealthy as we are today’. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipcc reports/sres/emission/014.htm.

p. 332 ‘In the hottest scenario, income rises from $1,000 per head in poor countries today to more than $66,000 in 2100 (adjusted for inflation)’. Goklany, I. 2009. Is climate change ‘the defining challenge of our age’?
Energy and Environment
20: 279–302.

p. 332 ‘Note that this is true even if climate change itself cuts wealth by Stern’s 20 per cent by 2100: that would mean the world becoming ‘only’ 2–10 times as rich.’ See http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001165a_comment_on_ipcc_wo.html.

p. 332 ‘the Prince of Wales said in 2009’. http://www.spectator.co.uk/politics/all/5186108/the-spectators-notes.thtml.

p. 332 ‘All the futures use market exchange rates instead of purchasing power parities for GDP, further exaggerating warming.’ Castles, I. and Henderson, D. 2003. Economics, emissions scenarios and the work of the IPCC.
Energy and Environment
14:422–3. See also Maddison. A. 2007.
Contours of the World Economy
. Oxford University Press.

pp. 332–3 ‘The trouble with this reasoning is that it applies to all risks, not just climate change.’ http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d16b/d1686.pdf; and http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/weitzman/files/ReactionsCritique.pdf.

p. 334 ‘some countries will continue to gain more land from siltation than they lose to erosion’. Despite this, the journalist George Monbiot incites murder: ‘Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.’ (
Guardian
, 5 December 2006); and James Hansen demands trials for crimes against humanity for having an outlying view: ‘James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming’ (
Guardian
, 23 June 2008).

p. 334 ‘even the highest estimates of Greenland’s melting’. Luthke, S.B. et al. 2006. Recent Greenland ice mass loss from drainage system from satellite gravity observations.
Science
314:1286–9. If anything the rate of melting in Greenland is slowing: van de Wal, R.S.W., et al. 2008. Large and rapid melt-induced velocity changes in the ablation zone of the Greenland ice sheet.
Science
321:111.

p. 334 ‘warming will itself reduce the total population at risk for water shortage’. Arnell, N.W., 2004. Climate change and global water resources: SRES emissions and socio-economic scenarios.
Global Environmental Change
14: 31–52. Commenting on how the IPCC’s summary for policymakers misreported this paper by omitting all mention of the positive effects caused by more rain falling on populated areas, Indur Goklany writes: ‘To summarize, with respect to water resources, Figure SPM.2 – and its clones – don’t make any false statements, but by withholding information that might place climate change in a positive light, they have perpetrated a fraud on the readers.’ See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/18/how-the-ipcc-portrayed-a-net-positive-impact-of-climate-change-as-a-negative/#more-3138.

p. 334 ‘previous warm episodes’. The famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that seemed to prove that the Medieval Warm Period never happened has since been comprehensively discredited. It relied far too heavily on two sets of samples from bristlecone pine trees and Siberian larch trees that have since been shown to be highly unreliable; it spliced together proxies and real thermometer data in a selective way, obscuring the fact that the proxies did not mirror modern temperatures, and it used statistical techniques that made a hockey stick out of red noise. Subsequent nontree-ring proxies have emphatically reinstated the Medieval Warm Period as warmer than today. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168. Holland, D. 2007. Bias and concealment in the IPCC process: the ‘hockey-stick’ affair and its implications.
Energy and Environment
18:951–83; http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf; www.climateaudit.org/?p=4866#more-4866; http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/steve-mcintyres-iccc09-presentation-with-notes/#more-6315; http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168. See also Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies.
Energy and Environment
18:1049–58; and Moberg, A., Sonechkin, D.M., Holmgren, K., Datsenko, N.M. and Karlén, W, 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.
Nature
433:613–17. For papers on the Holocene warm period, between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago, see http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/dont-panic-the-arctic-has-survived-warmer-temperatures-in-thepast/; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F; and http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/EGU2009-13045.pdf; and http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq.html#summer_ice.

p. 334 ‘the net population at risk of water shortage by 2100 falls under all their scenarios’. Goklany, I. 2009. Is climate change the defining challenge of our age?
Energy and Environment
20:279–302.

p. 335 ‘no increase in either the number or the maximum wind speed of Atlantic hurricanes making landfall’. Pielke, R.A., Jr., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M.A. and Muslin, R, 2008: Normalized hurricane damage in the United States: 1900–2005.
Natural Hazard Review
9:29–42.

p. 335 ‘death rate from weather-related natural disasters has declined by a remarkable 99 per cent’. Goklany, I. 2007. Deaths and death rates due to extreme weather events.
Civil Society Report on Climate Change
. International Policy Network.

p. 335 ‘cold weather continues to exceed the number of excess deaths during heatwaves by a large margin’. Lomborg, B. 2007.
Cool It
. Marshall Cavendish.

p. 336 ‘malaria is not limited by climate’. Reiter, P. 2008. Global warming and malaria: knowing the horse before hitching the cart.
Malaria Journal
7 (supplement 1):S3.

p. 336 ‘says Paul Reiter, a malaria expert’. Reiter, P. 2007. Human ecology and human behavior.
Civil Society Report on Climate Change
. International Policy Network.

p. 336 ‘the possibility that global warming might increase that number by 30,000’. Goklany, I. 2004. Climate change and malaria.
Science
306:56–7. The treatment of Paul Reiter, an expert on malaria, by the IPCC is a strange tale: ‘The IPCC rejected Professor Reiter’s nomination to write the malaria segment of the health chapter of its 2007 Climate Assessment Report first by pretending he had not been nominated and then by pretending that it had not received the four copies of the nomination papers that he had sent to separate officials. The two lead authors of that segment, unlike Professor Reiter, were not experts on malaria, and had published only one paper on the subject between them. One was not a scientist but an environmental campaigner.’ From http://scienceand publicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/scarewatch/scarewatch_agw_spread_malaria.pdf.

p. 336 ‘a jump in tick-borne disease in eastern Europe around 1990’. Randolph, S.E. 2008. Tick-borne encephalitis in Central and Eastern Europe: consequences of political transition.
Microbes and Infection
10:209–16.

p. 337 ‘Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum doubled the number of climate deaths to 315,000 a year’. For a good discussion of this issue see http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/what-is-wrong-with-non-empirical-science-5410; also http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/06/the-age-of-the-age-of-stupid.html; also the
Wall Street Journal
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124424567009790525.html.

p. 337 ‘Wheat, for example, grows 15–40 per cent faster in 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide’. Pinter, P.J., Jr., Kimball, B.A., Garcia, R.L., Wall, G.W., Hunsaker, D.J. and LaMorte, R.L. 1996. Free-air CO
₂
enrichment: Responses of cotton and wheat crops. In Koch, G.W. and Mooney, H.A. (eds). 1996.
Carbon Dioxide and Terrestrial Ecosystems
. Academic Press.

pp. 337–8 ‘leaving only 5 per cent of the world under the plough in 2100, compared with 11.6 per cent today’. Goklany, I. cited in Bailey, R. 2009. What planetary emergency?
Reason
, 10 March 2009. See http://www.reason.com/news/show/132145.html.

p. 338 ‘The richest and warmest version of the future will have the least hunger’. Parry, M.L., Rosenzweig, C., Iglesias, A., Livermore, M. and Fischer, G, 2004: Effects of climate change on global food production under SRES emissions and socio-economic scenarios.
Global Environmental Change
14:53–67.

p. 338 ‘will have ploughed the least extra land to feed itself ‘. Levy, P.E. et al. 2004. Modelling the impact of future changes in climate, CO
₂
concentration and future land use on natural ecosystems and the terrestrial carbon sink.
Global Environmental Change
14:21–30.

p. 338 ‘hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute’. UN estimates: 3.7m deaths from hunger each year; 1.7m from dirty water, 1.6m from indoor smoke; 1.1m from malaria.

p. 338 ‘Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings 90 cents of benefits’. Lomborg, B. 2008. How to get the biggest bang for 10 billion bucks.
Wall Street Journal
, 28 July 2008.

p. 338 ‘The polar bear, still thriving today (eleven of thirteen populations are growing or steady)’. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm. See also Dyck, M.G., Soon, W., Baydack, R.K., Legates, D.R., Baliunas, S., Ball, T.F. and Hancock, L.O. 2007. Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change: Are warming spring air temperatures the ‘ultimate’ survival control factor?
Ecological Complexity
4:73–84. See also Dr Mitchell Taylor’s presentation at http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=I63Dl14Pemc.

pp. 339–40 ‘Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist ... Alex Rogers of the Zoological Society of London’. Both quoted in the
Guardian
, 2 September 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/coral-catastrophic-future.

p. 340 ‘not even in the Persian Gulf where water temperatures reach 35C’. This is what a Canadian biologist wrote on a blog in August 2008: ‘I just got back from Iranian side of the Persian Gulf – the Asaluyeh/Nyband Bay region. Air temps 40, sea temps 35. (Email me privately if you want comments on the joys of doing field work under those conditions.) We observed corals at depths from 4–15m. No corals, at any depths, were bleached. Gives perhaps some relevance to the term “resilience.” BTW, those mostly undescribed reefs had coral cover of approx 30% – higher than the Florida Keys.’ http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2008-August /037881.html.

p. 340 ‘corals become more resilient the more they experience sudden warmings’. Oliver, T.A. and Palumbi, S.R. 2009. Distributions of stressresistant coral symbionts match environmental patterns at local but not regional scales.
Marine Ecology
Progress Series 378:93–103. See also Baker, A.C. et al. 2004. Coral reefs: Corals’ adaptive response to climate change.
Nature
430:741, who say: ‘The adaptive shift in symbiont communities indicates that these devastated reefs could be more resistant to future thermal stress, resulting in significantly longer extinction times for surviving corals than had been previously assumed.’

p. 340 ‘Some reefs may yet die if the world warms rapidly in the twenty-first century, but others in cooler regions may expand.’ Kleypas, J.A., Danabasoglu, G. and Lough. J.M. 2008. Potential role of the ocean thermostat in determining regional differences in coral reef bleaching events,
Geophysical Research
Letters 35: L03613. (doi:10.1029/2007GL032257).