Right Pulse

From the UK spectator, in which environmental Yale Professor Robert O. Mendelsohn argues against the extreme and doom mongering promoted by Lord Stern and by implication Ross Garnaut here in Australia:

We run into problems when climate change advocates focus on only one side of the equation: how to cut the potential damage by the greatest amount, no matter what the cost. Such an approach is not balanced.

…Contrary to Lord Stern’s suggestions, most of the evidence suggests that the net effect of warming will be only moderately harmful over the next century, with only a small probability of dramatic consequences for the next 90 years. Nor is the effect uniform: some places will suffer, but others will benefit. Damage would, of course, be high if nobody adjusts to climate change — by building better infrastructure, etc. But people will adjust, certainly if the developing world becomes as rich as the projections in the IPCC report suggest.

Mendelsohn basically argues that if extreme and strict measures are adopted, as recommended by Stern et al, they are unlikely to be achieved and this will only undermine future efforts to curb greenhouse gases. Impoverishing ourselves now will only make it harder to ‘combat’ climate change if it becomes harmful in the future. We have to wait for technology to catch up and invest now, not carbon tax and bribe.

UPDATE

Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ who argues against any emissions tax or trading, saying it will fail and simply cost trillions of dollars and take attention and resources away from the real problems the world faces:

Biharis in Bangladesh, 45-year-old Momota Begum said, “When my kids haven’t got enough to eat, I don’t think global warming will be an issue I will be thinking about.”

Lomborg provides uses Malaria as an example of how carbon tax and trade policies represent a willful miss use of resources:

…for the money it would take to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

The whole article makes for sobering reading:

According to Oxfam, if rich nations diverted $50 billion to climate change, at least 4.5 million children could die and 8.6 million fewer people could have access to HIV/AIDS treatment. And what would we get for that $50 billion? Well, spending that much on Kyoto-style carbon-emissions cuts would reduce temperatures by all of one-thousandth of one degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years.

I am not too hung up on HIV/AIDS, although a serious problem. Hunger, malnutrition and a lack of access to clean water kill far more people every year. The point though is well made and Sentor Wong would do well to consider that the resources she wants to throw at an emissions trading scheme could instead be used to improve the lives of people here in Australia and around the world and actually save people’s lives now.