How many lives has climate science saved?
As PM Turnbull wings his way to Paris for the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this one known as ‘Paris 2015’, he should ask himself a simple question. How many lives has climate science saved? In contemplating the question he should consider that since 1989 the United States Global Change Research Program (GCRP) has dispensed almost US$45 billion on climate science (Congressional Research Service, Federal Climate Change Funding). You can buy a lot of climate science for US$45 billion. As yet, climate science has not saved a single life. Remember, the IPCC has not claimed, for example, that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has caused wild weather events. And no one has drowned as a result of rising seas. So far, there is no threatening, or catastrophic, climate event attributable to AGW, so there is no death attributable to AGW. One does not have to be a climate denier to make this argument. The science journal Nature editorialised in 2012, following an IPCC report on the matter, ‘Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.’ The United States government spending on climate science is now tracking at $2.5 billion per year, with not a single life saved. There is, of course, anticipation of loss of life from AGW at some point in the future, but meanwhile the money may be better spent on other things.
True believers
Those attending Paris 15 will confess their belief in AGW and the need for practical responses. But, if they really and truly believed in the AGW thesis, why would they continue to fund the science? Why not spend all of the money on other responses such as abatement, adaptation, or geo-engineering? The argument for retaining climate science funding will be that science can better inform the response to climate change, but it seems clear that the science is used as the bulwark to press for action, not clarity. After 21 years of action the world is nowhere near being saved from greenhouse gas emissions.After all, while China has pledged that its CO2 emissions will peak by 2030, its emissions will climb by as much as 30 per cent in the period 2015-2030, and China is already the world’s largest emitter. In 2014 the United States spent US$11.6 billion on the total GCRP, of which US$8 billion was spent on abatement strategies, such as clean energy technologies. Keep in mind, of course, that the real breakthrough in ‘clean’ technology came with fracking, which is old technology, basically drilling for oil and gas, and was in any event, developed before the program.On other fronts, just US$110 million of the program was devoted to programs to encourage adapting to climate change and just US$900 million was for international climate change assistance, some of which was for adaptation. One would have thought that adaptation would be a viable activity under any climate change scenario, anthropogenic or not, but it barely rates a mention. At the catastrophic end of climate change scenarios, when it is too late to abate, geo-engineering would be the only viable response to climate change. And yet, no money has been allocated for geo-engineering in the United States GCRP. There is, elsewhere, for example, geo-engineering at Oxford University, but it is a puny US$11 million per year. It seems that the true believers in AGW only believe so far and no further. If one were convinced that climate change was a real threat to the world every last dollar would be poured into responses, not the science of proving it.
The real cost of climate science
Beyond the world of AGW there exists another. The real cost of climate science can be counted in the lives that could be saved, with some surety, while climate scientists try to prove their AGW thesis. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen consensus makes clear that clean energy research and adaptation show good returns on investment, but that reducing emissions by abatement, so as to stop the earth warming by 2 degrees, is a poor investment. More acutely, there are other things that can be done with climate science money that would save lives now. The greatest returns of any monies spent would be to reduce world trade restrictions, especially in Asia. In the climate change field, reducing subsidies to fossil fuels and providing modern cooking fuels, think electricity, to those nearly one billion people who do not have them would be phenomenal investments. What does it cost to save a life? Estimates from William Macallister, Doing Good Better of the cost of saving, or greatly enhancing the prospects for, productive lives are sobering. There are myriad ways of intervening to save lives, for example, it costs only $100 to distribute a bed net to help prevent infection from malaria, but Macallister suggests that the best estimates are that it costs about US$3,400 to save a life in the developing world. The US research on climate change so far has not saved a single life, and for true believers is no longer required. US climate science funds applied to the real needs of people would, however, save 735,000 people per year.The money spent on climate science costs 735,000 lives every year. Every year that climate science fails to provide a ‘solution’ to climate change means that, were it to do so, it would have to make up a huge deficit in preventable deaths. Prime Minister Turnbull should think about this in Paris.
