Climate Letter #1211

Joseph Stiglitz has written an expert witness court brief supporting the Hansen-backed children’s lawsuit that seeks to enforce a variety of strong government actions (Inside Climate News).  Stiglitz lends big-name authenticity to the need for correctly identifying and evaluating the economic issues that are involved.  “Stiglitz has been examining the economic impact of global warming for many years. He was a lead author of the 1995 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative assessment of climate science that won the IPCC the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Al Gore.”  The case, which is about constitutional rights and thus likely to end up in the Supreme Court, should get considerable attention during current hearings for the new court vacancy nominee.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072018/joseph-stiglitz-kids-climate-change-lawsuit-global-warming-costs-economic-impact

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Economic models are being produced with the aim of picturing all of the likely consequences of a well-designed, revenue neutral carbon tax.  There are slight differences but nothing shows up that would be a cause for worry, and the benefits are plentiful.

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From a new report, the consumption of energy for air conditioning is likely to be five times higher than today in 2050 (Yale e360).  That unfortunate consequence of global warming is almost unavoidable.  The rise in electric power that is required will gobble up a large share of projected renewable installations, adding considerably to the difficulty of fully replacing fossil fuels.

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The debate over climate sensitivity to increases in the CO2 level has not been resolved.  This is something we would really like to know, but scientists have a wide variety of opinions and there are no quick answers that would be easy to prove.  The basic problem is that when CO2 increases, which causes warming, there are a number of feedbacks that also have an effect, usually adding more warming, and the nature of those feedbacks differs depending on the situation.  The situation heading into the future most certainly differs from that which we experienced or know much about in the recent past, when we had all those ice ages, and it is full of complications.  The assumptions used in setting the carbon budget, like in the Paris Agreement, must be thought of realistically as premature, and probably wrong.  I.e., if sensitivity is actually higher than the assumptions so will be the amount of warming we need to deal with over the course of this century, and beyond.

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