Climate change is going to cause civilizational collapse, apparently. We’re told this by David Attenborough, which gives us our first good laugh of the assertion. This is part of the U.N.’s “peoples’ seat” idea, where a representative not of the establishment, or of the political class, gets to stand up and tell them what we all think. That Attenborough, a knight of the realm and a national institution, is not part of said establishment is indeed laughable. He’s also got some distinctly untasty ideas about matters environmental, having been involved with the Optimum Population Trust, the people who think that 6 billion should die, or at least not breed, as 1 billion is all we should have.
But it’s his assertions about climate change itself which are also more than a little odd. They are risible, rather than rigorous. For this civilizational collapse idea, there’s nothing of that in any of the scientific reports underpinning the idea. Not even the IPCC’s own work says that. This is long before we get to the recently noted point that the predictions about the future are fixated upon the worst possible outcomes.
What the IPCC does say, what all those scientific reports tell us, is that the future will be poorer than it needs to be if we don’t do something about climate change. Note that qualifier there. Poorer than it need be, poorer than it could be. There is absolutely nothing at all about it being poorer than it is today. For to make that claim would be absurd, which is why none of the projections about the future, those predictions which tell us we should be doing something at least, try to make that insistence.
The entire point of the whole modeling process is that as civilization advances we’re going to be making more emissions — assuming we power everything off fossil fuels. It is logically impossible for us to have, therefore, the increased emissions of an expanding civilization and also civilizational collapse. That’s just not what is being predicted in the first place.
No, really, this is the way it works. The original scenarios, back in the 1990s, were made when the world GDP was about $50 trillion. There are four families, each based upon a reasonable enough at the time set of possible futures. One had the global economy growing reasonably up to 2100, the best of them rather nicely up to that date. No predictions were made beyond that for the economy.
That lowest had the global economy expanding to $250 trillion by 2100. That’s a five-fold increase. The best had it going to $550 trillion. Yes, of course those numbers are after accounting for inflation.
That is, our assumption underpinning the idea that we’re going to have climate change is that we have a growing economy, that we don’t have a civilizational collapse. No, we cannot take the assumption that we’ll not to prove that we shall, that’s not the way logic works.
The IPCC tells us the climate change could be a problem, something we’d rather like to do something about. It does not tell us that we’re about to have a collapse of civilization, it’s absolutely based on the assumption that we’ll not — whatever stalwarts of the establishment like Sir David Attenborough tell us at public conferences.
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.
