DALLAS (October 30, 2006) – The British government has enlisted the support of former Vice President Al Gore and has dispatched the author of a report warning of worldwide recession to the U.S. in an attempt to win American support for cutting carbon emissions to prevent global climate change. Yet according to H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), U.S. policy makers would be better served taking steps to prepare for a warming world.
"The new British study really presents nothing more than the usual doom and gloom" said Burnett. "What's more, it lacks any real analysis of the likelihood that the measures they suggest will work at preventing further warming and the devastation they claim is coming."
Further, Burnett pointed to serious flaws in the report's methodology. For example, the report is based on International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios that are in the high range for population growth, warming, its costs and the levels of present and expected emissions, and the low range for economic growth absent significant mitigation.
"They cherry picked the scenario to spread alarm," said Burnett. "Had they chosen to base their analysis on different IPCC scenarios – ones based on accurate emission calculations, more reasonable population growth figures, more expected temperature rise, and more widely expected economic growth rates – the numbers would have come out quite different and the conclusions would have been less alarming."
Burnett also noted that this new study ignores the significant work that has been done, cited by earlier House of Lords economic reports, that many of the problems predicted to be exacerbated by future warming, could be better addressed through focused adaptation rather than mitigation.