The latest UN report on climate change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which gathered last week in Yokohama, Japan, asserted that the impacts of global warming will be “severe, pervasive and irreversible.” In what is being called the most comprehensive assessment to date, authors of the second of three major reports abandoned scrutinized data from the first report, which boldly claimed it is “extremely likely” humans are the primary cause of climate change, for scare tactics.
According to the IPCC, up until now the cost of climate change has mostly impacted natural systems, but now will be increasingly felt by humans.
While the latest UN report on climate change made a few new, wildly unsupported claims, much of the stated costs would be familiar to those who remember the 1970s. The assertion that global warming could put the world’s food supply at risk, particularly in poorer countries, was a favorite of the left during the Carter years.
“Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” the report said.
But, one Reagan recovery and unfulfilled doomsday prophecy later, and the “world will run out of resources in thirty years” mantra disappeared. Still, the report projects widespread hunger will befall a generation largely too young to remember prior end of the world UN reports.
Crop yields for maize, rice, and wheat were projected at over 25 percent in about one tenth of the reports projections. In parts of the tropics and Antarctica, fish species are expected to decline drastically, leading to catches shrinking by as much as 50 percent. What isn’t mentioned, however, is the failure of the United Nations to stop or restrict overfishing, a legitimate and proven cause of shrinking fish catches.
Also addressed in the report was the melting of artic sea ice, and the increasing risk of drought, heat waves, and heavy rains. “Now we have overwhelming evidence that it is happening,” said on of the authors, “and it is real.”
Debate over, right? Not so fast, because not everyone agrees. A dissenting report was released after the first UN report, which criticized the IPCC’s methods and conclusions.
The report’s concludes, that “the human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.”
The potential benefits of global warming is an often-overlooked aspect of the debate that Danish economist, Bjorn Lomborg, addressed in a column after the first IPCC report.
“Globally, and in almost all regions, many more people die from cold than heat,” Lomborg wrote. “With increasing temperatures, fewer cold deaths will vastly outweigh extra heat deaths.”
“Likewise, CO2 fertilizes crops and will increase production more in temperate countries than it will slow down crop increases in tropical countries. It will lower heating costs more than it will increase cooling costs,” he added.
The UN, through the IPCC, is expected to release a third and final report calling for wealth distribution policies, or global communism, as a prescription to combat the effects of global warming. And all of this at a time when leftist economists continue to blame an unusually cold winter for the lack of economic growth.
Of course, it couldn’t at all be the economic regulations weighing down economic growth.
