President Trump says he doesn’t believe the recent federal climate change report. He’s right — not because the entire game’s a scam, or because the liberals have colonized the subject. The standard science on the subject tells us that this report, as with so many others, is wrong. They’re committing what I call “Worstall’s Fallacy” to get to their answer.
“Worstall’s Fallacy” is to ignore what we’re already doing to solve a problem when considering what we need to do to solve it. If we’re going to look at how much we need to spend to abolish poverty, then we’ve got to start from how much poverty there is after accounting for what we already spend to kill it off. Here with climate change, we’ve got to start from how much have we already done to beat it to see how much more we’ve got to do.
This is exactly what this report is not doing.
To give an example, my native Britain now has more renewables generating capacity than fossil fuels. Yes, it’s capacity, not generation. Still, that’s something of a change from a decade or two back. This is very much the point of why we shouldn’t believe these latest hair-raising warnings. We’ve already done some stuff. We’ve already done quite a lot, actually. Yet the prediction is still based upon our having done nothing.
We need to delve into some science, some jargon, I’m afraid. Assume all of the science is correct here. Our emissions cause warming and we’ve got to do something about it. Okay, what next? We’ve got to work out what emissions will be in the future in order to be able to worry about how much warming there will be. For this, we need to know how many people there will be, how rich they’ll be, and which technologies they’ll be using to power their civilization. More people, more emissions; poorer people, more emissions (yes, that’s the way the models work, poverty increases emissions); more fossil fuels, more emissions.
We have a series of models making different assumptions here. The one that concerns us today is Representative Conservation Pathway 8.5. That’s a world with more people than we think there will be, the people being poorer than we think they’ll be (the driving force being that people impose idiotic policies akin to those of America’s benevolent socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and that we’ll be using very much more in the way of fossil fuels than we do now. A greater portion of energy will come from them than any human civilization has ever used.
Do note this model doesn’t just assume that we’ll carry on as we are. Rather, it assumes that we’ll do everything worse than we already do. It’s this which gives us all of the blood-curdling outcomes like Mount Washington disappearing below the waves and people dying of heat stroke on the shores of Hudson Bay.
But quite obviously this model is entirely inconsistent with all the work we’ve already done to make solar cheap, refine how windmills operate, and so on. We simply cannot have a world where both a major industrial nation has a 50 percent renewables capacity and also we’re not going to be using renewables but stoking civilization up with fossil fuels.
And yet each and every one of those reports telling us that we’ve got to be entirely changing our civilization use this RCP 8.5 model, the one that we know absolutely isn’t going to happen. Yes, this federal report that Trump doesn’t believe commits this error too.
We’re continually being told what will happen if nothing is done. But that is “Worstall’s Fallacy” — we’ve already done a lot and we must take that into account when considering what still needs to be. None of us should believe any climate change report that doesn’t make this point. We’ve already done a lot of work on the technologies necessary to beat climate change, therefore the worst outcomes are already not going to happen.
That’s a lesson straight from the settled science on the subject, and don’t let anyone tell you different.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
