No, Global Warming Isn’t the End of the World. Here’s Why.

Environmentalist doomsayers are back again, trying to frighten Americans into radically altering the American economy, supposedly to save the earth.

This week’s Armaggedon proclamation came courtesy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released a much-ballyhooed report suggesting that a 2 degree Celsius change in global temperature by 2040 would result in catastrophe. The New York Times quickly amped up the panic, reporting the possibility of “a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.” . . .

If you are wondering what you can do about climate change:

The world's top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.

I mean, if you are looking for something to do. https://t.co/e5l7EWnRSC

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 8, 2018

There are just a few problems with the reporting on the IPCC report. First off, the actual headline should have been that the IPCC had revised downward its estimate of impending doom since the IPCC’s AR5 report in 2014: according to the report itself, scientists agree that the “remaining carbon budget for 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius would be larger than the estimates at the time of the AR5.”

Then there’s the question of how much damage will actually be done. While the report states with high confidence that more environmental damage will occur at 2 degrees Celsius than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report is far less confident about the specific damage that will occur by 2040. And the predicted damage isn’t actually catastrophic. Species loss and coral reef bleaching are certainly bad things. But there’s no actual prediction of mass death or hellfire.

So, here’s the real question: even if you believe that environmental consequences from climate change are worth worrying about, we have to determine when intervention is worse than non-intervention. After all, the IPCC is calling for a radical revision of the capitalist system – a system that has raised half the world’s population from abject poverty in the last three decades. One half of the world population is now middle class or richer. That’s thanks to capitalist economics. (Read more from “No, Global Warming Isn’t the End of the World. Here’s Why.” HERE)

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