Why did the EU invite Greta Thunberg and never the Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus? – Watts up with that?
From the CLINTEL
Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) press release
Essay “Inappropriate Climate Rush”
April 21, 2021
An optimal economic result is achieved with a warming of 3.5 degrees Celsius in the year 2100
The death rate from extreme weather decreased spectacularly
Why did the EU invite young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg to speak in Brussels instead of the Nobel Prize-winning climate economist William Nordhaus? This question is answered in an essay titled Undue Climate Haste, published today by the CLINTEL Foundation. The essay concludes: “The The main message of this essay is that we are in no rush and that panic is not warranted. Climate change always deserves our attention, but the idea that we now have to turn our energy supplies upside down seems to be driven by emotions rather than sanity. “
The EU has decided to achieve zero net CO2 emissions by 2050. If this succeeds, Europe will become the first “climate neutral” continent. The media have above all welcomed this ambition. Politicians claim that this policy will have many advantages: They say it will strengthen the economy and create jobs. But are these claims justified, for example through a cost-benefit analysis?
They are not, says the article Undue Climate Haste. Remarkably, the climate economist William Nordhaus, who was awarded the Nobel Prize (2018), showed in his Nobel lecture in Stockholm that the “economic optimum” for climate policy is to allow warming by 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2100. Economically, it is better to accept a certain amount of climate damage and limit the costs of mitigation than the other way around: Ambitious goals like staying below 2 degrees or even 1.5 degrees are extremely costly.
Impossible
The EU’s climate targets are not only very costly, they cannot be achieved in practice either. A simple calculation shows that the EU will have to build a new nuclear power plant every week through 2050 in order to achieve net zero emissions in 2050. A total of 1650 new nuclear power plants would be required. Today, 60 years after the first nuclear power plan went into operation, there are only 450 such plants worldwide.
The EU strongly favors “renewable” energy sources such as wind and sun over nuclear power. In order to achieve zero point with wind, 450 new 2.5 MW turbines would have to be installed every two days by 2050. 82,000 windmills a year! Where would you put them all?
Unnecessary
The last part of the essay explains that the EU’s rush towards its climate goal is completely unnecessary. Almost all important parameters indicate that climate change is a controllable phenomenon. We now have the technology and the wealth to deal with it.
The number of victims of extreme weather has fallen by more than 95% in the last century. The damage caused by such phenomena, corrected for economic growth, has also decreased slightly. The sea level is rising, but very slowly, and there is no acceleration in long tide gauges.
There are now strong indications that climate models, on which climate policy is largely based, are “over-sensitive”, ie the real climate is less sensitive to CO2 than the climate models say. This means less future warming and that CO2 reductions required to stay below the 2 degree target don’t have to be as aggressive. Even if emissions remain above the 2020 level for the rest of the century, the 2-degree target remains in sight. Unfortunately, the climate science community rarely tells policymakers about these relatively recent findings and prefers to discuss scenarios based on climate models.
The essay Undue Climate Haste was commissioned by the ECR group of the European Parliament in Brussels.
You can read the essay here.
CLINTEL Foundation
The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that works in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by professor emeritus of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. The main goal of CLINTEL is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change as well as the effects of climate policy.
For more information, please contact Marcel Crok at marcel.crok@clintel.org
Website: https://clintel.org
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