British government to release report on economic cost of global warming (Oh boy Alert!)

ap on San Diego Union - Tribune ^ | 10/27/06 | Thomas Wagner - ap

[NormsRevenge]

LONDON – A comprehensive report on the global economic cost of climate change, to be released by the British government on Monday, is expected to be the world's most serious effort to quantify the long-term effect of doing nothing.

The Independent newspaper reported Friday that the long-awaited review would say global warming could cost the world's economies up to 20 percent of their gross domestic product if urgent action is not taken to stop floods, storms and natural catastrophes.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the report's author, met privately with Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet ministers on Thursday to brief them about his findings. Stern, a government adviser on climate change, is a former chief economist of the World Bank. Quoting unidentified officials at the briefing, The Independent said Stern warned the world would have to pay 1 percent of its annual gross domestic product now to avert catastrophe but that doing nothing could later cost five to 20 times that amount.

“Business-as-usual will derail growth,” the paper quoted Stern as saying as he briefed the government on his 700-page report, covering a period up to the year 2100.

At a news conference on Friday, Blair's spokesman refused to discuss Stern's comments or the report's findings.

The report was mandated by Blair's treasury chief, Gordon Brown, who is expected to replace Blair when he steps down as prime minister next year. Brown recently said he would use the report to alert governments around the world that they have been too slow to recognize – let alone fight – the threat of climate change.

Blair and his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende, wrote an open letter last week to their fellow European leaders on global warming.

“We have a window of only 10 to 15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” it said. “These would have serious consequences for our economic growth prospects, the safety of our people and the supply of resources, most notably energy.”

Earlier this week, the European Union's environment agency said member states such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain were not doing enough to fight global warming, jeopardizing the bloc's commitments to cut down gas emissions by 8 percent by the year 2012 under the Kyoto treaty.

Sweden and Britain are the only EU-15 nations that can meet their targets without implementing any additional measures, the European Environment Agency said.

The international agreement was reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 and it expires in 2012. President Bush has kept the United States out of the Kyoto international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, saying the pact would harm the U.S. economy.

[Wuli]

"The Independent newspaper reported Friday that the long-awaited review would say global warming could cost the world's economies up to 20 percent of their gross domestic product if urgent action is not taken to stop floods, storms and natural catastrophes."

GLOBAL IGNORANCE ALERT

First, you cannot stop floods, storms and "natural catastrophes" - you cannot stop the natural functions of the natural systems of the earth. They will occur, with or without global warming. If politicians create the mistaken lie that that is not true, then the people will expect that every flood, storm and natural catastrophe is "global warming" related and thus will deserve the extraordinary efforts, assistance and subsidies that the handwringing politicians will offer for "global warming" related events. Thus, the "global warming" political agenda is in part an agenda for more government, more government intervention and more government subsidies and thus more taxes.

Second, there is no evidence that there is any increase in "floods, storms and natural catastrophes", in spite of any "evidence" concerning global temperature changes.

More importantly, even the scientists that advocate for the human caused global warming theories acknowledge that any changes that the world's economies are able to do, vis-a-vis "greenhouse" gases, will not be expressed in major changes to the total global atmospheric accumulation of those gases for a hundred years or more. Thus "manmade" efforts to positively offset "global warming" will not alter or reduce any alleged negative affect, from "manmade" global warming, for more than a hundred years.

Therefore, in as much as it will take effort and technology to deal with "global warming" FOR THE NEXT 100 YEARS, the most effective investments in dealing with it, and the investments that will have the most immediate improvements, will be those technology investments that deal with offsetting the affects of "global warming", not another "manmade" effort to alter the climate.

And, equal reductions in greenhouse gases, to what punative government mandates and punative penalty taxes can achieve, will likely occur from the marketplace that will continue to penalize (higher prices) fuels based on increasingly tighter fossil fuel supplies.

Let markets and technology work on the problem and they will probably come up with more effecient solutions in less than 100 years and without the ecnomic manipulations of scared politicians.

Al Gore is living out his own charge against Bush - "He played on our fears!!!!!".