Matt Ridley

A response to my critics on global warming

My Spectator cover story on the net benefits of climate change sparked a lot of interest. There was an explosion of fury from all the predictable places. Yet not one of my critics managed to disprove my central assertion, that climate change is probably causing net benefits now and is likely to continue doing so for some decades yet.

I’ve written responses to some of the critical articles and reproduce them here.

1. Duncan Geere in the New Statesman.Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 09.23.59

Four paragraphs in his piece in turn begin with ‘He’s right…’ so I am glad that Geere confirms that I am right about all my main points. If you read my article you will find that each of Geere’s assertions about the eventual harm of climate change are also in my piece. For example, I say:

‘Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter?’

I do not ignore sea level rise: and anyway it is taken into account in all of the studies collated by Prof Tol, on whose research my piece was based.

Geere’s main point, that the graph of benefits starts declining at 1C above (today’s) is very misleading. What this means is that the benefit during one year is slightly smaller than the benefit during the year before, not that there has been net harm during that year. Geere seems to have misunderstood Tol’s graph.

My points about probably fewer droughts and probably richer biodiversity are grounded in the peer reviewed literature. Many models and data sets agree that rainfall is likely to increase as temperature rises, while the evidence for global greening as a result of carbon dioxide emissions (and rainfall increases) is now strong. Greater yields means more land sparing as well.

The main point I was trying to make is that very few people know that climate change has benefits at all, let alone net benefits today; even fewer know that it is likely to have net benefits in the future for about 70 years.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in