If doom really exudes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest jeremiad, it relates more to politics than planetary temperature.
News reports brewed hysteria from IPCC’s solemn appeal for centrally planned overhaul of energy systems and, insidiously, diets to prevent catastrophic warming.
Yet IPCC’s special report on limiting Industrial Age warming to 1.5°C.—which “would require rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”—shows why that overhaul won’t happen.
Appearing more than once amid several hundred pages of oppressively meticulous analysis are numbers toxic to humans.
Worldwide marginal abatement of carbon dioxide emissions, the report says, requires a CO2 price of $135-475/tonne in 2030 and $245-1,100/tonne in 2050.
To the price of gasoline containing the standard 10 vol % ethanol, the extra burden would be $1.16-4.07 in 2030 and $2.10-9.43/gal in 2050.
The diesel-price increment: $1.36-4.80/gal in 2030 and $2.47-11.11 in 2050.
Costs of everything involving hydrocarbon combustion would rise.
Politics will not allow it.
Political pushback has beset nearly every regime that tried to punish the use of fossil energy with imposed cost—in Europe, in Canada, and in Australia. Where those governments are not in retreat, their successors are. The revolts began long before prices reached anywhere near the IPCC projections.
The problem lies not in the attempt to moderate warming, which is prudent and necessary, but rather in approach.
The IPCC hinges policy recommendations to temperature targets asserted with impossible but politically expedient precision.
Its own estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity—the rise in long-term global mean surface temperature assumed to result from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere—covers a wide range: 1.5°-4.5°C.
The IPCC therefore cannot know how much CO2 abatement is needed to meet a given temperature target. It can only err on its best approximation of the safe side.
People know pain when they feel it and ambiguity when central authorities rely on it to explain why they hurt.
Climate mitigation needs a political overhaul—probably soon.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Oct. 12, 2018. To comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)