Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, "the world’s premier debating society", held a debate on climate change policy, with skeptics carrying the day by a vote of 135 to 110.
Some may argue that the debate was a bit "stacked" given that it was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, an organization whose mission statement includes the following:
The Institute urges critical appraisal of legislative "climate fixes" for their social, political, and economic and security costs, along with their relative utility or futility. Proposals demanding prodigious economic or political sacrifices for the sake of negligible climatic benefits should be rejected in favor of policies to address graver, more immediate concerns about which something constructive can actually be done.
In addition the question to be debated was not phrased in terms of, "is man-made climate change real?", but in relative terms:
"That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change"
I know, I know, it's a false dichotomy because the "green economy" spurred on by climate change policy will more than make up for any lost economic activity due to higher energy costs.
Still, even the most committed climate change activist has to take notice when a group of scholars generally acknowledged to be amongst the smartest people in the world have an official debate, and the skeptics come out on top.
Some of the highlights:
Ms. Zara McGlone, Secretary of the Oxford Union, opposed the motion, saying that greenhouse gases had an effect; that the precautionary principle required immediate action, just in case and regardless of expense; that Bangladesh was sinking beneath the waves; that the majority of scientists believed "global warming" was a problem; and that "irreversible natural destruction" would occur if we did nothing.
. . .
Lord Whitty, a Labor peer from the trades union movement and, until recently, Labor’s Environment Minister in the Upper House, said that the world’s oil supplies were rapidly running out; that we needed to change our definition of economic growth to take into account the value lost when we damaged the environment; that green jobs created by governments would help to end unemployment; that humans were the cause of most of the past century’s warming; that temperature today was at its highest in at least 40 million years; and that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic.
. . .
Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about "global warming", they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the "global warming" that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: "And your reference is?" Lord Monckton replied: "IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2." [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of "global warming", so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.
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