Climate Alarmism In One Statement: "Limited Evidence, High Agreement"
The draft version of the report's Summary For Policymakers made the startling admission that the economic damage caused by "climate change" would be between 0.2 and 2 percent of global GDP - significantly less than the doomsday predictions made in the 2006 Stern report (which estimated the damage at between 5 and 20 percent of global GDP).
But this reduced estimate did not suit the alarmist narrative of several of the government delegations at the recent IPCC talks in Yokahama, Japan. Among them was the British one, comprising several members of the deep green Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which insisted on doctoring this section of the Summary For Policymakers in order to exaggerate the potential for more serious economic damage.
"Losses are more likely than not to be greater, rather than smaller, than this range (limited evidence, high agreement)"
There was no evidence whatsoever in the body of the report to justify this statement.
I find it fascinating that there can be "high agreement" to a statement for which there is limited or no evidence. Fortunately these are all self-proclaimed defenders of science or I might think this was purely a political statement.
Note that the most recent IPCC reports and new published studies on climate sensitivity tend to say that 1) warming in the next century will be 1-2C, not the much higher numbers previously forecast; 2) That warming will not be particularly expensive to manage and mitigate and 3) we are increasingly less sure that warming is causing all sorts of negative knock-on effects like more hurricanes. In other words, opinion is shifting to where science-based skeptics have been all along (since 2007 in my case). No surprise or shame here. What is shameful though is that as evidence points more and more to the lukewarmer skeptic position, we are still called evil heretical deniers that should be locked in jail. Like telling Galileo, "you were right about that whole heliocentric thing but we still think you are evil for suggesting it."
