IPCC SR15 Report lacks cost/benefit analysis of ‘Goldilocks thinking’

The UN climate report known as SR15 calls for high carbon taxes from $135 to $5,500/ton while a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg of Oct. 9, 2018 says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts are not worth it, leading the Friends of Science Society to slam the UN report as Goldilocks thinking without any rational cost-benefit analysis or practical plan.

Friends of Science says the WSJ paragraph in which Lomborg describes the economic impact on Europe of cutting emissions 80% by 2050 should be front page news in every newspaper in Europe and North America. Lomborg notes that, with a well designed and coordinated climate policy (i.e. the opposite of what European and North American governments have now), the annual costs will reach U.S. $3.3 trillion, “more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined”.

“The policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.”

Friends of Science Society says much of the global push for “climate action” comes from the ClimateWorks Foundation billionaires who are pushing a global cap and trade system along with their vested interests in renewables. According to a Wikileaks document they have spent some $600 million a year for over a decade, funding influential Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations (ENGOs), as confirmed by a 2018 research paper by Matthew Nisbet published in Wiley Climate Change.

Canadian investigative researcher and author, Donna Laframboise, revealed in her 2011 book “The Delinquent Teenager…” that the IPCC reports were unduly influenced by ENGOs Greenpeace and WWF.

In the Summer 2018 edition of “Issues in Science and Technology,” Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote a compelling review of the IPCC’s push for “Goldilocks” solutions like BioEnergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) which he says have jumped from a notion to a central part of mitigation recommendations, with no critical or cost-benefit analysis.

BECCS is a theory for “negative emissions” using large scale plant growth to absorb CO2; the crops are burned to create energy while the CO2 is captured and buried in the ground.

There are no such large-scale BECCS operations today.

Pielke notes that “full implementation of BECCS ‘at scale’ would require the use of a global land area one and a half times the size of India.”

Pielke also notes the IPCC tends to rely on academic papers using the highest estimates for warming (Representative Concentration Pathway – RCP 8.5) with little reference to the more realistic low end RCP2.6.

The IPCC report pushes wind and solar as solutions to global warming, but two recent studies have found they increase temperatures, one reported by The Harvard Gazette, Oct. 4, 2018. Another paper in DES Tech Transactions on Computer Science and Engineering PCMM conference 2018 shows that “Carbonless Anthropogenic Global Warming” is caused by wind and solar.

The actual global warming trend over the last 40 years is less than half (47%) of the climate models’ simulation on which the UN IPCC report is based, and half of the actual warming is due to natural ocean cycles.

Friends of Science Society says carbon dioxide is not the control knob that can control climate. The IPCC is fraught with conflicts of interest. Official reports filled with Goldilocks thinking but without cost-benefit analysis or practical plans are useless. The alleged climate catastrophe claims are damaging to people’s psyche, especially that of children.

Friends of Science Society is an independent group of earth, atmospheric and solar scientists, engineers, and citizens who are celebrating its 16th year of offering climate science insights. After a thorough review of a broad spectrum of literature on climate change, Friends of Science Society has concluded that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide (CO2).