Matt Ridley's Blog, page 29

Doing good by doing well

My Times column on the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative:

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan marked the birth of their daughter Max by promising to donate 99 per cent of their Facebook shares during their lifetimes to support good causes. For this they were pilloried by some. The economist Thomas Piketty called it a “big joke”. For author Linsey McGoey it was “business as usual, rebranding as philanthropy, and announced with a deceptive air of selflessness”.

We have reached new depths of cynicism when a couple say in a letter to their newborn child that “our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality” and some people can only sneer. Much of the carping is deeply confused. The Zuckerbergs have been criticised for not handing their shares to a tax-deductible charitable foundation now, which would net them a big tax break up front, and in the very same breath for not handing over their fortune in tax.

The young couple really do think they can help to make the world better off and more equal, and they are impatient to start. Indeed they think they have already started this through Facebook. I know this partly because I have met them and discussed these issues with them, but also because the letter they have written to their daughter, if you read it carefully, makes a well-reasoned case that technology can be the greatest leveller the world has seen: it can achieve what socialism promised but signally failed to deliver. (“Dot-communism”, it’s sometimes called.)

The greatest beneficiaries, by far, of vast business ventures such as Facebook are not the founders, but the customers. When Lancashire entrepreneurs made cotton textiles affordable for all, it was all who benefited; when Rockefellers did the same for oil, or Carnegies for steel, again the overwhelming majority of the benefits flowed to the customers. One study, by William Nordhaus, found that entrepreneurs end up with less than 3% of the societal value that they have created. Some goes to financiers, but the vast bulk of the benefit turns up as consumer surplus.

Likewise with today’s magnates: the fortunes amassed by the Messrs Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Zuckerberg are as nothing to the value that has been captured by their willing customers in the form of better services delivered far more cheaply and easily.

So let’s ditch the zero-sum mentality and remember that an entrepreneur who makes something that was once a preserve of the rich cheaply available to ordinary people has done an act of philanthropy through his business, even if he also makes a fortune in the process. To reach the number of followers anybody can now have on Facebook once required either a large sum of money to spend on paper and stamps and secretaries, or an even larger sum to buy a newspaper or a radio station.

Zuckerberg thinks that “the only way to achieve our full potential is to channel the talents, ideas and contributions of every person in the world”. To that end he wants to get the four billion people who do not have access to the internet online. Through “internet.org” he is trying to find ways to use solar-powered drones flying at 60,000 feet and equipped with infra-red lasers to bring the internet to remote parts of the developing world where they could give farmers weather forecasts and crucial market information, plus a chance to educate their children.

Yet even for this he is pilloried, because although internet.org is open to all low-bandwidth content, some purists felt giving free access through Facebook threatened the principle of “net neutrality” — that internet providers should not discriminate between different providers of content. In India, in particular, there has been a backlash, with politicians castigating Facebook for offering free access to diverse content.

Here my sympathies lie entirely with the blogger Tim Worstall, who wrote recently: “Someone is offering to give away one of the few things we know about that absolutely increases economic growth. And people are whining about it? Quite frankly, if Facebook was insisting that people must strip naked, spin thrice widdershins and then shout ‘Hail Zuckerberg’ before using internet.org I’d regard that as a small price to pay for the economic benefits that are going to flow from its use.”

It is hard to quantify the effect that the internet has on economic growth, but it is almost certainly huge. When Zuckerberg was in India in October, he cited the estimate, repeated in his letter to his daughter, that for every ten people who gain access to the web, one job is created and one person is lifted out of poverty. Was he in India to try to grab more customers in a lucrative market, or because he wants to bring philanthropic benefits to poor people? How about both?

Philanthropy does not have to hurt to do good. That some of today’s digital billionaires, such as the “robber barons” of a century before, are keenly aware of how lucky they are to have been in the right place at the right time and are therefore generous with their personal fortunes is merely an additional benefit. That some of them, notably Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are spending that money very carefully and effectively — far better than governments would spend it — is no bad thing.

Yet most foundations start out effective and gradually become captured by political correctness and vested interests. The Rockefeller Foundation did a truly brilliant thing in the mid-20th century when it supported Norman Borlaug’s tireless efforts to breed high-yielding varieties of wheat in Mexico and then to get them adopted in India and Pakistan, thus sparking the “green revolution” that has brought billions out of hunger. Later in the century, it succumbed to fashionable dictums and failed to back Borlaug’s attempt to do the same for Africa, arguing that high-yielding crops might be bad for the environment. (Recently it has reversed again and joined the Gates Foundation in supporting agriculture in Africa.)

With this sort of history, it is little wonder that the young Zuckerbergs want to retain flexibility in deciding how their Chan-Zuckerberg initiative does good work. So they have not made it into a charity, but a limited-liability company, which means it does not have to give away 5 per cent a year and can venture some of the funds by betting on risky and for-profit enterprises. Like, say, solar-powered drones, or software development for self-organised learning in schools.

The Zuckerbergs think that “advancing human potential and promoting equality are tightly linked”. The evidence suggests they are right: innovation has steadily improved global equality as well as prosperity.

 

 

 

The Paris Climate Summit

I have written five articles on climate change science and policy in the past week, for Scientific American, The Times (twice), the Wall Street Journal and the Spectator. They follow here in the form of a lengthy essay. Sentences in square brackets have been added back in after being edited out when the pieces were shortened for publication.

 

First, on the science - from Scientific American:

The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.

This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires.

In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was predicting that if emissions rose in a “business as usual” way, which they have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since, temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7 degree C above the 1986–2005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, in all scenarios, including the high-emissions ones.

At the same time, new studies of climate sensitivity—the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 0.03 to 0.06 percent in the atmosphere—have suggested that most models are too sensitive. The average sensitivity of the 108 model runs considered by the IPCC is 3.2 degrees C. As Pat Michaels, a climatologist and self-described global warming skeptic at the Cato Institute testified to Congress in July, certain studies of sensitivity published since 2011 find an average sensitivity of 2 degrees C.

Such lower sensitivity does not contradict greenhouse-effect physics. The theory of dangerous climate change is based not just on carbon dioxide warming but on positive and negative feedback effects from water vapor and phenomena such as clouds and airborne aerosols from coal burning. Doubling carbon dioxide levels, alone, should produce just over 1 degree C of warming. These feedback effects have been poorly estimated, and almost certainly overestimated, in the models.

[In AR5 it says: "The ECS can be estimated from the ratio of forcing to the total cli­mate feedback parameter."   And Table 9.5 of AR5 WG1 gives, for the CMIP5 multimodel mean,  forcing for a doubling of CO2 as either 3.7 or 3.4 W/m2 depending on estimation method, and the Planck feedback as -3.2 W/m2/°C. That is the basic negative feedback from the Earth warming in response to forcing, so in the absence of any other feedbacks (water vapour, lapse rate, cloud, albedo and any others) sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 in models (and presumably reality) is 3.4/3.2 or 3.7/3.2, i.e. just over 1°C.]

The last IPCC report also included a table debunking many worries about “tipping points” to abrupt climate change. For example, it says a sudden methane release from the ocean, or a slowdown of the Gulf Stream, are “very unlikely” and that a collapse of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets during this century is “exceptionally unlikely.” [The IPCC also stated that there is no evidence of a change in cyclones, floods or droughts. On droughts see here.]

If sensitivity is low and climate change continues at the same rate as it has over the past 50 years, then dangerous warming—usually defined as starting at 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels—is about a century away. So we do not need to rush into subsidizing inefficient and land-hungry technologies, such as wind and solar or risk depriving poor people access to the beneficial effects of cheap electricity via fossil fuels.

[The cold-weather death toll is higher than the hot-weather death toll in most parts of the world. Carbon dioxide emissions enhance plant growth and studies have concluded that they are responsible for a significant increase in green vegetation in all ecosystems, but especially arid areas, over the past 30 years, as measured by satellites. Crop yields are also higher than they would be without carbon dioxide emissions, to the tune of at least $100 billion a year, as calculated by Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.]

As the upcoming Paris climate conference shows, the world is awash with plans, promises and policies to tackle climate change. But they are having little effect. Ten years ago the world derived 87 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels; today, according the widely respected BP statistical review of world energy, the figure is still 87 percent. The decline in nuclear power has been matched by the rise in renewables but the proportion coming from wind and solar is still only 1 percent.

Getting the price of low-carbon energy much lower will do the trick. So we should spend the coming decades stepping up research and development of new energy technologies. Many people may reply that we don’t have time to wait for that to bear fruit, but given the latest lukewarm science of climate change, I think we probably do.

 

Next a preview of the Paris climate meeting itself, published in The Times:

Monday’s meeting in Paris of the “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (COP-UNFCC) is the 21st such meeting. The first was in Berlin in 1995 and since then the circus has travelled to Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Bonn again, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Buenos Aires again, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw and Lima. Not to mention quarterly subsidiary meetings in between.

The stated aim of these meetings is to agree to set limits on the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In this they have wholly failed. There are no internationally agreed limits on emissions (Kyoto only applied to a minority of nations and was never ratified by the United States). Yet here’s a funny thing: virtually every one of those 20 meetings has ended with announcements of triumphant success.

Yes, even Copenhagen in 2009, which everybody now agrees was a chaotic fiasco, was at the time reported by the media as ending in success. President Obama announced that a deal had been done: a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough”. Gordon Brown agreed it was a “vital first step”. But just like the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan and the Cancun Agreements, the “Copenhagen Accord” has melted away like snow in summer.

Two years later in Durban, world leaders triumphantly announced that they had agreed to adopt a binding international legal agreement on emissions “no later than 2015” as if this was a victory in itself. Hence the significance of Paris when this deadline expires. There is now less prospect of agreeing legally binding carbon dioxide targets in Paris than of a snowball fight in Hades, so you might think that next week’s meeting will be a failure. Don’t be so silly. They have moved the goal posts so as to be able to declare success again.

The decision was taken months ago to abandon any attempt at a binding agreement as impossible. Countries like India simply won’t agree to bind themselves to stay in relative energy poverty by giving up their plans to extend the use of cheap coal, gas and oil. Nor will China, though it plays the game of vague promises well enough to hoodwink some wishful westerners. And other poor countries will not agree to limiting anything until they get a promised $100 billion per year from the rich west in compensation – that’s a trillion dollars a decade. The US Congress, among other bodies, won’t write such cheques.

Instead, each country has announced its own “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions”. Unfortunately, as Bjorn Lomborg has calculated, these INDCs add up to the square root of nothing. If implemented they would prevent about one-fifth of a degree of global warming by the end of this century. But worry not, for there is also to be a five-year review process (which may be legally binding), in which the INDCs can be adjusted in line with the latest science. And the beautiful thing about five-year review processes is that they require conferences to assess them. So the real success of Paris is already in the bag: to ensure that the meetings, with their tens of thousands of participants on expense accounts, continue ad infinitum.

 

Next, a discussion of why world leaders consider climate change such a high priority, published in the Wall Street Journal and co-authored with Benny Peiser:

Back in February, President Obama said, a little carelessly, that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. In a few weeks’ time he will fly into Paris, a city terrorized yet again by mass murderers, for a summit with other world leaders on climate change, not terrorism. What precisely makes these world leaders so convinced that climate change is a more urgent and massive threat than the incessant rampages of Islamist violence?

It cannot be what is happening to world temperatures, because they have gone up only very slowly, less than one-half as fast as the scientific consensus predicted in 1990 when the global warming scare began in earnest. Even with this year’s El Nino-boosted warmth threatening to break records, the world is barely half a degree warmer than it was about 35 years ago (the surface data sets say nearly 0.6 degrees, the satellite data sets about 0.4 degrees of warming since 1979). Also, it is increasingly clear that the planet was significantly warmer than today several times during the last 10,000 years. [An excellent source of charts and data on climate is at: http://www.climate4you.com]

Nor can it be the consequences of this recent temperature increase that worries world leaders. On a global scale, as scientists keep confirming, there has been no increase in frequency or intensity of storms, floods or droughts, while deaths attributed to such natural disasters have never been fewer, thanks to modern technology and infrastructure. Arctic sea ice has recently melted more in summer than it used to in the 1980s, but Antarctic sea ice has increased, and Antarctica is gaining land-based ice. Sea level continues its centuries-long slow rise – about a foot per century – with no sign of recent acceleration.

Perhaps it’s the predictions that worry the world leaders, then. Here, as we are often told by journalists, the science is “settled” and there is no debate. But scientists disagree: they say there is great uncertainty, and they reflected this in their fifth and latest assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It projects that temperatures are likely to be anything from 1.5C to 4.5C degrees warmer by the latter part of the century – that is to say, anything from mildly beneficial to significantly harmful.

As for the impacts of that future warming, a forthcoming study (accepted for publication) by the leading climate economist, Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in the UK, that warming may well bring gains, because carbon dioxide causes crops and wild ecosystems to grow greener and more drought-resistant. In the long run, the negatives may outweigh these benefits, he says, but “the impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5°C warming.”

Professor Tol summarises the effect we are to expect during this century: “The welfare change caused by climate change is equivalent to the welfare change caused by an income change of a few percent. That is, a century of climate change is about as good/bad for welfare as a year of economic growth. Statements that climate change is the biggest problem of humankind are unfounded: We can readily think of bigger problems.” No justification for prioritizing climate change over terrorism there, then.

The latest science on the “sensitivity” of the world’s temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide levels (from 0.03% of the air to 0.06%) is also reassuring. Several recent peer-reviewed studies of climate sensitivity based on actual observations, including one with 14 mainstream IPCC authors, conclude that this key measure is much lower – about 30-50% lower – than the climate models are generally assuming.

And a key study of the cooling impact of sulfate emissions has concluded they have held back global warming less than thought till now, again implying less sensitivity. So the high end of the IPCC range is looking even more implausible in theory as well as in practice. When politicians intone that, despite the slow warming so far, “two degrees” of warming is inevitable and imminent, remember they are using high estimates of climate sensitivity.

Yes, but if there is even a tiny chance of catastrophe, should the world not strain every sinew to head it off? Better to decarbonize the world economy and find it was unnecessary than to continue using fossil fuels and regret it. If decarbonisation was easy, then sure, this would make sense. But the experience of the last three decades is that there is no energy technology remotely ready to take over from fossil fuels on the scale and at a price the public is willing to pay.

Solar power is cheaper than it was, sure, but even if solar panels were free, the land, infrastructure, maintenance and back-up power (for night-time and cloudy days) would still make it more expensive than gas-fired electricity. Solar provides about 0.5% of our total energy. Wind has expanded hugely, but at massive cost, yet still supplies only just over 1% of global primary energy. Nuclear is in slow retreat, and its cost stubbornly refuses to fall.Technological breakthroughs in the production of gas and oil from shale have outpaced the development of low-carbon energy and made it even less competitive.

Meanwhile, there are a billion people with no grid electricity whose lives could be radically improved – and whose ability to cope with the effects of weather and climate change could be greatly enhanced – with the sort of access to the concentrated power of coal, gas or oil that the rich world enjoys. Already aid for such projects has been constrained by Western institutions in the interest of not putting the climate at risk. So climate policy is hurting the poor.

To put it bluntly, climate change and its likely impacts are proving slower and less harmful than we feared, while decarbonisation of the economy is proving more painful and costly than we hoped. The mood in Paris will be one of furious pessimism among the many well-funded NGOs who will attend the summit in large numbers: decarbonisation, on which they have set their hearts, is not happening, and they dare not mention the reassuring news from science lest it threaten their budgets.

Casting around for somebody to blame, they have fastened on foot-dragging fossil fuel companies and those who make skeptical observations about the likelihood of dangerous climate change, however well founded. Scientific skeptics are now routinely censored, or threatened with prosecution. One recent survey shows that 27% of US Democrats are in favour of prosecuting climate sceptics. This is the mentality of religious fanaticism, not scientific debate.

So what kind of deal will emerge from Paris, when thousands of government officials gather in two weeks to agree a new UN climate deal with the aim of replacing the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2020? Expect an agreement that is sufficiently vague and noncommittal for all countries to sign and claim victory. Such an agreement will also have to camouflage deep and unbridgeable divisions while ensuring that all countries are liberated from legally biding targets a la Kyoto. 


The political climate is conducive to such a toothless agreement. Concerns about the economy, terrorism and international security have been overshadowing the climate agenda for years. The fact that global warming has slowed significantly over the last two decades has reduced public concern and political pressure in most countries. It has also given governments valuable time to kick painful decisions into the long grass.

The next 10-15 years will show whether the global warming slowdown continues or whether a strong warming trend terminates the current pause for good. If the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than climate models assume, a deal with a 5-yearly review process should allow for the possibility of CO2 pledges to be relaxed in line with empirical observations and better scientific understanding.

Despite its rhetoric, the Obama administration is sufficiently concerned about the impact of unilateral decarbonisation policies on business to demand a transparency-and-review mechanism that can verify whether voluntary pledges are met by all countries. Developing countries, however, oppose any outside body reviewing their energy and industrial activities and CO2 emissions on the grounds that such efforts would violate their sovereignty.

They are also resisting attempts by the United States and the European Union to end the legal distinction (the so-called fire-wall) between developing and developed nations. China, India and the “Like-Minded Countries” group are countering Western pressure by demanding a legally binding compensation package of $100 billion per year of dedicated climate funds, as promised by President Obama at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. 



However, developing nations are only too aware that the $100 billion p.a. funding pledge is never going to materialize, not least because the US Congress would never agree to such an astronomical, annual wealth transfer. This failure to deliver is inevitable, but it will give developing nations the perfect excuse not to comply with their own national pledges.

Both India and China continue to build new coal-fired power stations. China’s coal consumption is growing at 2.6% a year, India’s at 5%: which is why coal was the fastest growing fossil fuel last year. China has pledged to reduce energy and carbon intensity, but that’s just another way of saying it will increase energy efficiency—it does not mean reducing use.

For the EU, on the other hand, a voluntary climate agreement would finally allow member states to abandon unilateral decarbonisation policies that have seriously undermined Europe’s competitiveness. The EU has offered to cut CO2 emissions by 40% below the 1990 level by 2030. However, this pledge is conditional on all nations represented at the Paris summit adopting legally binding CO2 emissions targets similar to and as a carry-over of the Kyoto Protocol.

According to the EU’s key demand, the Paris Protocol must deliver, “legally binding mitigation commitments that put the world on track towards achieving the below 2°C objective…. Mitigation commitments under the Protocol should be equally legally binding on all Parties.”
Yet the chances of such an agreement are close to zero. If there are no legally binding CO2 targets agreed in Paris, the EU will be unlikely to make its own conditional pledges legally binding.

A “lukewarm” climate agreement should be flexible enough so that voluntary pledges can be adjusted over the next couple of decades in the light of what the global temperature does. The best we can hope for is a toothless agreement that will satisfy most governments yet allow them to pay lip-service to action. In all likelihood, that’s exactly what we can expect to get in Paris.

 

Next, a column on why today's temperatures are not unprecedented and the harm from climate change lies in the future, published in The Times:

Today in Paris, 147 heads of government will give speeches on what they agree is the world’s most pressing problem, climate change. Today is expected to be comparatively mild in Paris but cold and snowy in Scotland. Nothing especially unusual for 30th November over the last few centuries.

So the problem they are discussing -- not warming, but dangerous warming -- has not yet manifested itself. It lies in the future. The climate has changed, for sure, as it always does -- but not yet in a way that is harmful or unprecedented. As far as we can tell from satellites, global average temperatures are less than half a degree warmer than they were in 1979, when satellite data became available, though surface thermometers suggest a bit more warming.

This year looks likely to be a lot warmer than last, though still not as warm in both standard satellite data sets as 1998, the last time that a strong El Nino in the Pacific Ocean boosted the global air temperature a lot (surface thermometers sets say it will be warmer than 1998, once adjusted in various ways). The average trend over the past 35 years is 0.1 degrees of warming per decade according to the satellite data, less than 0.2 per decade according to the surface thermometers. Neither trend is fast enough to produce significantly dangerous climate change even by the latter part of this century.

The warming has been much slower than was predicted when the scare began. Nor is it evenly spread. The Antarctic continent has warmed hardly at all, and the entire southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern. The Arctic has warmed more than the tropics, night has warmed more than day and winter has warmed more than summer. Cities have warmed faster than the countryside, but that’s because of local warming factors, not global ones: buildings, vehicles, industry, pavements and people trap warmth.

How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office had to say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953, November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last four months of the year at all.

I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “Medieval Warm Period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.

Go back yet further, still within the current interglacial period, to the so-called Holocene Optimum of 6,000-9,000 years ago. Ocean temperatures were up to two degrees warmer than today, the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free at the end of summer in many years, and the boreal forest in Siberia extended 150 miles further north than today. July temperatures were up to six degrees warmer than today in the Siberian Arctic.

Was this Holocene Optimum a horrible time of droughts, storms, disease and famine? Not especially. It was the period when agriculture spread rapidly across the globe from five or seven centres of invention. Abundant rainfall in Africa led to lakes in the Sahara with crocodiles and hippos in them, surrounded by green vegetation in the monsoon season.

Today’s gentle warming, progressing much more slowly than expected, is also accompanied by generally improving conditions. Globally, droughts are declining very slightly. Storms are not increasing in frequency or intensity: this year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons. Floods are worse in some places but usually because of land-use changes, not more rainfall. Death rates from floods, storms and droughts have plummeted and are now far lower than they were a century ago. Today, arid areas like western Australia or the Sahel region of Africa are getting generally greener, thanks to the effect of more carbon dioxide in the air, which makes plants grow faster and resist drought better.

Besides, we have to make allowance for a human tendency to read far too much into short-term weather changes -- and to assume that all change is bad. Consider this newspaper cutting: “The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. [There are] hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.” It’s not from recent decades at all, but from 1922. Or this one: “The ice of the arctic ocean is melting so rapidly that more than one third of it has disappeared in fifty years”. From 1940.

In fact, the Arctic, and the world as a whole then cooled between 1950 and 1970, which then led to these headlines, all from 1970: "Scientists See Ice Age in the Future" (Washington Post), "Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?" (Los Angeles Times), "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century" (Boston Globe), "U.S. and Soviet Press Studies of a Colder Arctic" (New York Times) and (my favourite) "Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age" (Sydney Morning Herald).

The 40,000 people meeting in Paris over the next ten days are committed to the view that the weather is certain to do something nasty towards the end of this century unless we cut emissions. In this they are out of line with scientists. A survey of the members of the American Meteorological Society in 2012 found that only 52% agree that climate change is mostly man-made, and as to its being very harmful if unchecked, only 34% of AMS members agree. The rest said they think it will be either not harmful or not very harmful.

 

 

 

Finally, a Spectator essay on the dubious morality of putting posterity's interests before that of poor people today:

The next generation is watching, Barack Obama told the Paris climate conference this week: "our grandchildren when they look back and see what we did in Paris they can take pride in what we did." And that, surely, is the trouble with the entire climate change agenda: putting the interests of rich people’s grandchildren ahead of those of poor people today.

Unfair? Not really, when you look at the policies enacted in the name of mitigating climate change. We’ve diverted 40% of America’s maize crop to feeding cars instead of people, thus driving up the price of food worldwide, a move which killed about 192,000 poor people in 2010 alone, according to one study, and continues to impact nutrition worldwide. We’ve restricted aid funding for fossil-fueled power stations in developing countries, leaving many people who would otherwise have had access to electricity mired instead in darkness, and cooking over wood-fires – the single biggest cause of environmental ill health in the world, responsible for more than three million deaths every year.

Closer to home, by pushing up energy prices with climate policies, we’ve contributed to the loss of jobs of steel workers in Redcar and Scunthorpe, and of aluminium workers in Northumberland (where I live and where coal from under my land has supplied the now-closed Lynemouth smelter — whose power station announced this week that it will reopen as a “biomass” plant, that is to say burning wood from American forests, producing more carbon dioxide per unit of energy and at twice the price of coal). We’ve also worsened fuel poverty among the poor and elderly and we’ve damaged air quality in cities. These human costs are not imaginary or theoretical: they are real.

But ends can be used to justify means, and omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs. We justify these painful impacts of policy by saying over and over that it helps to avert a far greater threat that faces “our grandchildren”. So exactly how great is that threat?

Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, a lead author of the IPCC and one of the world’s most respected climate economists, has had a stab at answering this question in a new paper accepted for publication in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, which takes all 22 published studies of all the impacts of climate change, good and bad, economic and environmental, and generates an average effect on welfare. This is :

“Global warming of 2.5C would make the average person feel as if she had lost 1.3% of her income…That is, a century of climate change is about as good/bad for welfare as a year of economic growth. Statements that climate change is the biggest problem of humankind are unfounded: We can readily think of bigger problems.”

Up till 2.2C, he says, our grandchildren will actually still be better off as a result of global warming. When I first reported in the Spectator in 2013 that the balance of evidence suggests that mild global warming will do more good than harm and that this would continue till the later decades of this century, I was subjected to torrents of abuse in the Guardian and other house organs of wealthy greens. Yet it has now come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.

Yes, but what if climate change proves worse than we expect and the century sees more than 2.5C of warming? (Actually, given what we now know about climate sensitivity, that’s very unlikely: the probability density function for such rapid warming is very slim and depends on unrealistically large net-positive feedbacks.) Professor Tol says the following: “the impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5°C warming.”

And remember that “our grandchildren” will on average be much richer than we are today. If they are not, then there’s not much of a problem because they won’t be generating emissions at a worrying rate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in its various scenarios that the people of 2100 will be 3-20 times as well off in income terms as the people of today – and that’s despite climate change. In the “middle-of-the-road” scenario prepared by the OECD for the IPCC, which sees generally disappointing global economic progress, the average Indonesian, Brazilian or Chinese will earn at least twice as much as today’s American does. That’s how rich “our grandchildren” will be, never mind Barack’s. In causing pain today for benefit tomorrow, we are transferring money from the poor to the rich.

So let’s just pause to reflect what is going on here. President Obama, President Putin, Prince Charles, Ban Ki-Moon and the Pope are urging us to worry about what will probably be a 1.3% fall in the income (or about 3.5% if we get 3.5C of warming) of a person who is at least three times as well off as we are today. That is to say, they would be at least 196.5% richer, instead of 200%. And yet world leaders are prepared to adopt and defend policies that hurt poor people today in order to try to avert this very slight pay cut for the very wealthy of tomorrow. In what universe does this entitle them to occupy the moral high ground?

Oh and by the way, perhaps we should ask the poor people of the world themselves what they think about this? On Monday Mr Obama quoted an Indonesian girl he met recently who was worried about climate change. I wonder how he managed to find her. The United Nations is carrying out a huge online survey of people’s priorities. Called My World, it allows people to rank 16 categories of things they care about. So far more than 8.5 million people have voted, mostly from poorer countries, and the number is growing all the time. Education, health, jobs and good governance come top. Action on climate change comes last – and not by a narrow margin either: it lags well behind the second-least popular priority (phone and internet access). Even among people of 15 years or younger, it comes last.

Climate change is an obsession of the rich not shared by the global poor, who care more about everything, even getting online. They can see all too well that a slight diminution of income in two generations’ time is not as important as decent health, education and a better living standard today. So let’s cut the humbug about speaking on behalf of poor posterity, please. Though they might not mean to, the Green Great and Good are on the side of the rich.

Not that the inhabitants of rich countries are any longer much enamoured of such policies. As Gallup reports: “warming has generally ranked last among Americans' environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.” In another poll last week just 13 percent of Canadians chose climate change as one of their top three concerns.

In Globescan’s poll for the BBC of 20 countries, there has been a marked decline in concern about climate change, and in enthusiasm for climate policies, since 2009: only four countries now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris, compared with eight before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009. Just under half of people in these countries consider climate change a "very serious" problem, compared with 63% in 2009.

The Paris climate has attracted about 40,000 conference delegates and camp followers, ranging from politicians and civil servants to journalists and campaigners. I don’t have the numbers, but I would be willing to bet that a very small number of them paid their own air fares or hotel bills. A goodly proportion will have sent the bill to taxpayers in various countries, either directly or via the grants that governments give to green pressure groups.

Perhaps the politicians should stop listening to the vested interest of the Green Blob begin asking what long-suffering taxpayers and real voters think about hitting poor people today so as to raise the incomes of very rich people by 1.3% in 2100?

 

The rise of humanism

My Times column on the rise of non-belief:

 

Fifty years ago, after the cracking of the genetic code, Francis Crick was so confident religion would fade that he offered a prize for the best future use for Cambridge’s college chapels. Swimming pools, said the winning entry. Today, when terrorists cry “God is great” in both Paris and Bamako as they murder, the joke seems sour. But here’s a thought: that jihadism may be a last spasm — albeit a painful one — of a snake that is being scotched. The humanists are winning, even against Islam.

Quietly, non-belief is on the march. Those who use an extreme form of religion to poison the minds of disaffected young men are furious about the spread of materialist and secularist ideas, which they feel powerless to prevent. In 50 years’ time, we may look back on this period and wonder how we failed to notice that Islam was about to lose market share, not to other religions, but to humanism.

The fastest growing belief system in the world is non-belief. No religion grew nearly as fast over the past century. Whereas virtually nobody identified as a non-believer in 1900, today roughly 15 per cent do, and that number does not include soft Anglicans in Britain, mild Taoists in China, lukewarm Hindus in India or token Buddhists in Japan. Even so, the non-religious category has overtaken paganism, will soon pass Hinduism, may one day equal Islam and is gaining on Christianity. (Of every ten people in the world, roughly three are Christian, two Muslim, two Hindu, 1.5 non-religious and 1.5 something else.)

This is all the more remarkable when you think that, with a few notable exceptions, atheists or humanists don’t preach, let alone pour money into evangelism. Their growth has come almost entirely from voluntary conversion, whereas Islam’s slower growth in market share has largely come from demography: the high birth rates in Muslim countries compared with Christian ones.

And this is about to change. The birth rate in Muslim countries is plummeting at unprecedented speed. A study by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt three years ago found that: “Six of the ten largest absolute declines in fertility for a two-decade period recorded in the postwar era have occurred in Muslim-majority countries.” Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait have all seen birth-rate declines of more than 60 per cent in 30 years.

Meanwhile, secularism is on the rise within Muslim majority countries. It is not easy being a humanist in an Islamic society, even outside the Isis hell-holes, so it is hard to know how many there are. But a poll in 2012 found that 5 per cent of Saudis describe themselves as fully atheist and 19 per cent as non-believers — more than in Italy. In Lebanon the proportion is 37 per cent. Remember in many countries they are breaking the law by even thinking like this.

That Arab governments criminalise non-belief shows evidence not of confidence, but of alarm. Last week a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a Palestinian poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to death for apostasy. In 2014 the Saudi government brought in a law defining atheism as a terrorist offence. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt, though tough on Islamists, has also ordered two ministries to produce a national plan to “confront and eliminate” atheism. They have shut down a café frequented by atheists and dismissed a college librarian who talked about humanism in a TV programme.

Earlier this month there was yet another murder by Islamists — the fifth such incident — of a Bangladeshi publisher of secularist writing. I recently met one of the astonishingly brave humanist bloggers of Bangladesh, Arif Rahman, who has seen four colleagues hacked to death with machetes in daylight. He told me about Bangladesh’s 2013 blasphemy law, and the increasing indifference or even hostility of the Bangladeshi government towards the plight of non-religious bloggers. For many Muslim-dominated governments, the enemy is not “crusader” Christianity, it is home-grown non-belief.

The jihadists of Isis are probably motivated less by a desire to convert Europe’s disaffected youth to fundamentalist Islam than by a wish to prevent the Muslim diaspora sliding into western secularism. In the Arab world, according to Brian Whitaker, author of Arabs Without God, what tempts people to leave the faith is not disgust at the antics of Islamist terrorists, but the same things that have drained church attendance here: materialism, rationalism and scepticism.

As the academics Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman wrote in an essay eight years ago: “Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.” America is no longer much of an exception. Non-believers there outnumber Mormons, Muslims and Jews combined, and are growing faster than southern Baptists.

Whitaker found that Arab atheists mostly lost their faith gradually, as the unfairness of divine justice, the irrationality of the teaching, or the prejudice against women, gay people or those of other faiths began to bother them. Whatever your origin and however well you have been brainwashed, there is just something about living in a society with restaurants and mobile phones, universities and social media, that makes it hard to go on thinking that morality derives exclusively from superstition.

Not that western humanists are immune from superstitions, of course: from Gaia to Gwyneth Paltrow diets to astrology, there’s plenty of room for cults in the western world, though they are mostly harmless. As is Christianity, these days, on the whole.

I do not mean to sound complacent about the Enlightenment. The adoption of Sharia or its nearest equivalent in no-go areas of European cities will need to be resisted, and vigorously. The jihadists will kill many more people before they are done, and will provoke reactions by governments that will erode civil liberties along the way. I am dismayed by the sheer lack of interest in defending free speech that many young westerners display these days, as more and more political groups play the blasphemy card in imitation of Islam, demanding “safety” from “triggering” instances of offence.

None the less, don’t lose sight of the big picture. If we hold our resolve, stop the killers, root out the hate preachers, encourage the reformers and stem the tide of militant Islamism, then secularism and milder forms of religion will win in the long run.

Wind makes electricity expensive and unreliable without cutting emissions

My Times article on wind power is below. An astonishingly poor attack on the article was made in The Guardian by Mark Lynas. He failed to address all the main points I made: he failed to challenge the argument that wind power has not cut emissions, failed to challenge the argument that wind power has raised the cost of electricity, he failed to challenge my argument that wind speeds are correlated across Europe. And he made a hash of attempting to criticise my argument that wind has made the system less reliable. The gist of his case was that the recent short-term emergency that gave rise to price spikes was caused by coal-fired power station outages. But the point was that these coincided with a windless day. In a system of coal and gas, the weather would not matter, but in a system dependent on wind, then coal outages on a windless day cause problems. Surely this was not too difficult to understand, Mark? Note that Germany had a windless day too.

Mark Lynas then took to twitter boasting in troll-fashion that he had debunked my article where he was joined by the usual green cheerleaders. They have shot themselves in the foot, I am afraid. I remain astonished at the fervour with which greens like Mark defend wind power at all costs, despite growing evidence that it does real environmental harm, rewards the rich at the expense of the poor and does not cut carbon dioxide emissions significantly if at all. It might even make them worse, as I argue here. If they really are worried about emissions, why do greens love wind? It isn't helping.

 

Anyway, here's the article

Suppose that a government policy had caused shortages of bread, so the price of a loaf had shot up and was spiking even higher on certain days. Suppose that the high price of bread was causing massive job losses. Suppose that the policy was justified on the grounds that the bread was now coming from farmers whose practices were better for the environment, but it turned out they were probably worse for the environment instead. There would be a rethink, right?

For bread, read electricity. The government needs to rethink its electricity policy. Last week’s emergency was a harbinger of worse to come: because the wind was not blowing on a mild autumn day, the National Grid had to call for some large electricity consumers to switch off, and in addition offered to pay up to £2,500 a megawatt-hour — 40 times the normal price — for generators capable of stepping into the breach at short notice.

Among other lessons, this teaches us that letting Liberal Democrats run the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) for five years was an expensive mistake. What puzzles me is how little the current government seems to realise it must make a U-turn or get the blame itself.

The coalition promised secure, affordable and low-carbon power, but instead gave us unreliable, expensive and high-carbon power. What is worse, this outcome was “wholly predictable but wholly unanticipated by policymakers”, in the words of Rupert Darwall of the Centre for Policy Studies, speaking to a House of Lords committee (on which I sit) earlier this year.

Mr Darwall’s argument is that wind farms, which cost a lot to build and maintain but pay nothing for fuel, can sell electricity for very low prices when the wind’s blowing. Being intermittent, this power therefore destroys incentives to invest in highly efficient “combined-cycle” gas turbines (CCGTs).

If, when the wind blows, a new gas plant has to switch off, then the return on investment in gas is negative. Combined-cycle plants are sophisticated machines and don’t like being switched on and off. Therefore the gradual replacement of coal-fired power by much more efficient gas-fired power has stalled as a direct result of the wind-power boom.

To solve this problem, the government came up with a “capacity mechanism”, a fancy name for subsidising fossil fuels. But this further impost on the hard-pressed bill payers (likely to exceed £1.3 billion by 2020), instead of bringing forward new gas turbines, last year went mostly to keep old coal-fired stations going. The next auction, due in December, has brought a rash of bids from diesel generators. This is madness: wind power has made the country more reliant on dirty, high-carbon coal and diesel. (I declare my usual interest in coal, but note that coal has probably benefited from the policy I am criticising.)

Meanwhile, the old coal stations that have not attracted a subsidy are closing because of the coalition’s unilateral carbon tax (sorry, “floor price”). Eggborough, for instance, tried to switch to subsidised biomass, better known as wood — a fuel that emits even more carbon dioxide than coal per unit of energy — but was refused and so is closing. Thus, when the wind drops, we are plunged into crisis.

Wind’s advocates have long argued that cables to Europe would help on windless days because we could suck in power from Germany when the wind’s blowing there but not here. Yet last week, as we were debating this very issue in the Lords, I checked and wind was generating about 1 per cent of our electricity, and even less of Germany’s. Studies by the Renewable Energy Foundation published as long ago as 2008 have shown that wind speeds are well correlated across Europe most of the time. Was anyone listening?

Prices charged to electricity consumers have been rising because of the high cost of subsidies for wind power, especially offshore wind. The DECC’s numbers show that small businesses will be paying 77 per cent more per unit for electricity by 2020 than they would be if we were not subsidising renewables. The cost of the subsidies is on track to hit roughly £10 billion a year in 2020 and that’s before paying for the fleet of diesel generators being subsidised under the capacity mechanism and extra grid infrastructure costs. What are we getting for that money? A less reliable electricity system, a big increase in cost, lost jobs in the aluminium and steel industries and no discernible cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

If that last claim seems far fetched, consider the following calculation. According to the wind industry, a 2-megawatt onshore wind turbine could cut emissions by about 1,800 tonnes a year in average conditions, offshore a bit more. With about 13 gigawatts of wind now in service, that would mean the total wind fleet can displace at most 15 million tonnes, or 2 per cent of our 700 million tonnes of total annual emissions.

But, since the effect of the wind boom (solar production, by the way, is an irrelevance lost in the decimal points) has been to deter new gas and prolong the life of inefficient coal, and since it wastes power to get a fossil-fuelled power station up to speed when the wind drops, and since expensive wind power has driven energy-intensive industries abroad to more carbon-intensive countries, the actual emissions savings achieved by wind are lower and probably negative. We would have been far better off buying new gas or “clean-coal” capacity instead: replacing coal with gas more than halves emissions.

After Wednesday’s near emergency, ministers must surely realise that we cannot rely on the weather to produce the right amount of electricity, and gas is far cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the DECC’s dirty diesel solution. As for nuclear power, Hinkley C was supposed to help with the supply crunch, but it will only come on stream in the mid-2020s, and at a gigantic cost.

The poor and the elderly are hardest hit by high electricity bills. What Chris Huhne and Ed Davey have done to our electricity supply, following the lead of Tony Blair’s foolish 2007 decision to accept a European Union target for renewables, is bonkers.

It has cost wealth, jobs, landscapes, wildlife, security of supply: and all for nothing in terms of emissions savings. It is no comfort to know that some of us have been predicting this for years.

Humanity's best days lie ahead

I took part in a Munk debate on 6 November, in which Steven Pinker and I argued that "humanity's best days lie ahead" while Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton argued against us. It was entertaining and we shifted the audience our way a little, although three-quarters were on our side at the start (which is probably not representative of the population as a whole).

Here's a video of the debate: http://munkdebates.com/livestream. 

Here's the text of my opening statement:

 

Woody Allen once said: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

That’s the way pretty well everybody talks about the future. When I was young the future was grim. The population explosion was unstoppable, famine was inevitable, pesticides were giving us cancer, the deserts were advancing, the oil was running out, the rain forests were doomed, acid rain, bird flu, and the hole in the ozone layer were going to make us sick, my sperm count was on the way down, and a nuclear winter would finish us off.

You think I am exaggerating. He’s what a best-selling book  by the economist Robert Heilbroner concluded in the year I left school: "The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed."

It was only a decade later that it dawned on me that every one of these threats had either been a false alarm or had been greatly exaggerated. The dreadful future was not as bad as the grown-ups had told me. Life just keeps on getting better and better for the vast majority of people.

Human lifespan has been growing at about five hours a day for 50 years.

The greatest measure of misery anybody can think of – child mortality – has gone down by two thirds in that time.

Malaria mortality has fallen by an amazing 60% in 15 years.

Oil spills in the ocean are down by 90% since the 1970s.

An object the size of a slice of bread lets you send letters, have conversations, watch movies, find your way around, take pictures, and tell hundreds of people what you had for breakfast.

And what’s getting worse? Traffic, obesity? Problems of abundance, note. 

Here’s a funny thing. Most improvements are gradual so they don’t make the news. Bad news tends to come suddenly. Falling airliners always make the news; falling child mortality doesn’t.

As Steve says, every year the average person on the planet grows wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal.

More equal?

Yes, global inequality is on the way down. Fast. Why? because people in poor countries are getting rich faster than people in rich countries.

Africa is experiencing an astonishing miracle these days, a bit like Asia did a decade ago. Mozambique is 60% richer per capita than it was in 2008. Ethiopia’s economy’s growing at 10% a year.

The world economy has shrunk in only one year since the second world war – in 2009 when it dipped by less than 1% before growing by 5% the next year. If anything the march of prosperity is speeding up.

But my optimism isn’t just based on extrapolating the past. It’s based on WHY these things are happening.

Innovation, driven by the meeting and mating of ideas to produce baby ideas is the fuel that drives them.

And far from running out of fuel, we’re only just getting started. There’s an infinity of ways of recombining ideas to make new ideas.

And we no longer have to rely on North Americans and Europeans to come up with them.

The internet has speeded up the rate at which ideas have sex.

Take vaping. In my country there are now more than 3m people who’ve given up smoking because of e-cigarettes. It’s proving to be the best aid to quitting we’ve ever come up with.

It’s as safe as coffee.

And it was invented in China, by a man named Hon Lik, who combined a bit of chemistry with a bit of electronics.

OK, but isn’t all this progress coming at the expense of the environment? Well no, often the reverse. Many environmental indicators are improving in many countries: more forest, more wildlife, cleaner air, cleaner water.

Even the extinction rate’s down compared with 100 years ago, for the creatures we know about, birds and mammals, thanks to the efforts of conservationists.

And the richer countries are, the more likely their environment’s improving – the biggest environmental problems are in poor countries. 

But what about population? The population growth rate’s halved in my lifetime from 2% to 1% and the birth rate’s plummeting in Africa today. The world population quadrupled in the 20th century but it’s not even going to double in this century, and the UN thinks it will stop growing altogether by the 2080s.

Not because of war, pestilence and famine, as gloomy old Parson Malthus feared, but because of prosperity, education and health.

There’s a simple and beautiful fact about demography. When more children survive, people plan smaller families.

With slowing population growth and expanding farm yields, it’s getting easier and easier to feed the world.

Today it takes 68% less land to grow the same amount of food as 50 years ago. That means more land for nature.

In theory, you can feed the world from a hydroponic farm the size of Ontario and keep the rest as a nature reserve.

And the planet’s getting greener. Satellites have recorded 14% more green vegetation today than 30 years ago, especially in arid areas like the Sahel region of Africa.

But am I like the man who falls out of the skyscraper and as he passes the second floor, shouts “so far so good”? I don’t think so.

You’ll probably hear the phrase “turning point” in this debate. You’ll be told this generation is the one that’s going to be worse off than its parents, that it’s going to die younger, or see sudden deterioration in its environment.

Well, let me tell you about turning points. Every generation thinks it stands at a turning point, that the past is fine but the future’s bleak. As Lord Macaulay put it, “in every age everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point – that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason.”

We filter the past for happy memories and filter the future for gloomy prognoses.

It’s a strange form of narcissism. We have to believe that our generation’s the special one, the one where the turning point comes. And it’s nonsense.

Macaulay again:

“On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

The western environmental movement's role in China's one-child policy

My Times column on the western origin of the one-child policy:

 

The abolition of China’s one-child policy brings to an end one of the most futile and inhumane experiments in top-down social engineering the world has seen. I say futile because it did not work. China’s birth rate roughly halved in the decade before the policy was introduced, then fell not at all in the next decade. A less coercive policy would probably have slowed China’s population growth just as much, if not more — as it did that of other countries in Asia.

I say inhumane, because the policy was implemented with great cruelty. Mandatory sterilisations, mandatory abortions, mandatory insertion of intra-uterine devices, the outlawing of births to mothers under the age of 23, the imprisonment of those who fled to give birth elsewhere, the fining of whole communities for failing to report illegal births — these were features of the implementation of the policy.

But there is a disturbing fact that the world has not yet faced. The policy’s origins lie not in oriental culture, nor even in Marxism, but in western environmentalism. As the sinologist Susan Greenhalgh has documented in her book Just One Child, the one-child policy’s father got the idea directly from reading two of the western environmental movement’s founding texts, which he came across while at a conference in Helsinki in 1978.

Mao Zedong, despite being one of the worst butchers in history, took a relatively permissive approach to population control. His “Later, Longer, Fewer” slogan encouraged lower fertility through delaying marriage, spacing births and stopping at two. In just seven years after 1971 this — together with improving living standards — brought the birth rate down from 31 to 18 per thousand people. Then under Deng Xiaoping, the policy changed after a guided-missile designer named Song Jian attended a technical conference on control systems in Helsinki.

While there, he came across two bestselling books: The Limits to Growthand A Blueprint for Survival. The first of these was published in 1972 in America by the Club of Rome, a talking shop of the green great and good, and it used control system theory to project ecological disaster as a consequence of global population growth and resource exhaustion.

The second book was published in Britain in the same year to push the ideas of the Club of Rome, to warn of the inevitable “breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet, possibly by the end of the century” and to “give rise to a national movement to act at a national level, and if need be to assume political status and contest the next general election”. It was co-authored by Sir Edward Goldsmith (uncle of Zac) and signed by a galaxy of knights and panjandrums of science.

A Blueprint for Survival reads today like a rant by an embarrassingly extreme member of both Ukip and Greenpeace. It demands that governments “declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration”. Song Jian was struck that the book recommended reducing Britain’s population from 56 million to 30 million. “I was extremely excited about these documents,” he later wrote.

Mr Song went back to China, published the main themes of both books under his own name, gaining rapid promotion for himself and his allies, and argued that Deng’s regime must act decisively to depress its population trajectory, as if it were a guided missile, lest the Chinese economy become ecologically unsustainable.

Championed by vice-premier Wang Zhen, Mr Song proposed a prescriptive and forcible one-child policy and, at a conference in Chengdu in December 1979 he confronted and defeated his critics, who argued that coercive population control might prove inhumane. Deng was persuaded, the policy was adopted and an army general was put in charge of implementing it.

The one-child policy has attracted occasional praise from the green fringes of the left, and especially from the United Nations. In 1983, giving an award to the general who ran it, the UN secretary-general expressed “deep appreciation” for the way in which China “marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale”. In the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, greens such as Jonathon Porritt repeated the myth that the policy had prevented 400 million births and that this was a valuable contribution to emissions control.

In fairness, most western environmental organisations no longer urge coercive population control. But they have yet to face up to their own movement’s serious flirtation with explicit recommendations of coercion in the 1960s and the influence these had on China. Garrett Hardin, in his much admired 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” said we must accept “the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed”.

President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, published a book jointly with the celebrity ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich recommending that a “planetary regime” be “given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits”.

More generally, the itch to order people about explains the environmental movement’s occasional admiration of China. As Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times in 2009, in congratulating China on its solar-power investment: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people [sic], as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” The Club of Rome’s aim, as expressed in 1974, was that “now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system”. “Democracy,” it opined in 1993, “is no panacea.”

Yet in fact, as a few lonely voices argued even in the 1960s, the solution to the population crisis lay in prosperity, not coercion. In country after country, once people were healthy and wealthy enough that most of their children survived and had a chance to get educated, then they planned small families so they could invest in each child. Health, wealth, education and freedom (plus of course contraception) proved the best form of birth control. Such a voluntary demographic transition, not brutal dirigisme, is what has halved the world population growth rate in the past half century.

How technological innovation happens

The Wall Street Journal carried an extract from my new book The Evolution of Everything.

The article caused a lot of interest, and was criticised by some as being anti-science. Nothing could be further from the truth and most of those making this case are not quoting the article accurately. The article is about technology and how it changes. It argues that technology is more often the mother than the daughter of science, but that's not a criticism of science. I am a passionate supporter of science, but I think it deserves to be liberated from the straitjacket of being seen as necessarily there mainly to give birth to technology. In addition I argue that science would attract funding from sources other than governments, but again that's not to say I think governments should suddenly cut off funding from science, given how many other things they fund. Anyway, here's what I actually wrote:

 

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the light bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. No fewer than 23 people deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison, according to a history of the invention written by Robert Friedel, Paul Israel and Bernard Finn.

The same is true of other inventions. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the very same day. By the time Google came along in 1996, there were already scores of search engines. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

It is just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had precisely the same idea after reading precisely the same book, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. It thus qualifies as a living organism, at least in the sense that a coral reef is a living thing. Sure, it could not exist without animals (that is, people) to build and maintain it, but then that is true of a coral reef, too.

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And who knows when this will no longer be true of technology, and it will build and maintain itself? To the science writer Kevin Kelly, the “technium”—his name for the evolving organism that our collective machinery comprises—is already “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.” It “wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself.”

By 2010, the Internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses. Today, a significant proportion of the whispering in the cybersphere originates in programs—for monitoring, algorithmic financial trading and other purposes—rather than in people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the Internet off.

The implications of this new way of seeing technology—as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge—are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa. Short of bumping off half the population, there is little that we can do to stop it from happening, and even that might not work.

Indeed, the history of technological prohibitions is revealing. The Ming Chinese prohibited large ships; the Shogun Japanese, firearms; the medieval Italians, silk-spinning; Americans in the 1920s, alcohol. Such prohibitions can last a long time—three centuries in the case of the Chinese and Japanese examples—but eventually they come to an end, so long as there is competition. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, these technologies continued to grow.

Today it is impossible to imagine software development coming to a halt. Somewhere in the world, a nation will harbor programmers, however strongly, say, the U.N. tries to enforce a ban on software development. The idea is absurd, which makes my point.

It is easier to prohibit technological development in larger-scale technologies that require big investments and national regulations. So, for example, Europe has fairly successfully maintained a de facto ban on genetic modification of crops for two decades in the name of the “precautionary principle”—the idea that any possibility of harm, however remote, should scuttle new technology—and it looks as if it may do the same for shale gas. But even here, there is no hope of stopping these technologies globally.

And if there is no stopping technology, perhaps there is no steering it either. In Mr. Kelly’s words, “the technium wants what evolution began.” Technological change is a far more spontaneous phenomenon than we realize. Out with the heroic, revolutionary story of the inventor, in with the inexorable, incremental, inevitable creep of innovation.

Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things. And indeed, it is rare for a Nobel Prize not to leave in its wake a train of bitterly disappointed individuals with very good cause to be bitterly disappointed.

Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and deterring rivals as about sharing ideas. And that discourages innovation.

Even the most explicit paper or patent application fails to reveal nearly enough to help another to retrace the steps through the maze of possible experiments. One study of lasers found that blueprints and written reports were quite inadequate to help others copy a laser design: You had to go and talk to the people who had done it. So a patent often does not achieve the openness that it is supposed to but instead hinders progress.

The economist Edwin Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania studied the development of 48 chemical, pharmaceutical, electronic and machine goods in New England in the 1970s. He found that, on average, it cost 65% as much money and 70% as much time to copy products as to invent them. And this was among specialists with technical expertise. So even with full freedom to copy, firms would still want to break new ground. Commercial companies do basic research because they know it enables them to acquire the tacit knowledge that assists further innovation.

Politicians believe that innovation can be turned on and off like a tap: You start with pure scientific insights, which then get translated into applied science, which in turn become useful technology. So what you must do, as a patriotic legislator, is to ensure that there is a ready supply of money to scientists on the top floor of their ivory towers, and lo and behold, technology will come clanking out of the pipe at the bottom of the tower.

This linear model of how science drives innovation and prosperity goes right back to Francis Bacon, the early 17th-century philosopher and statesman who urged England to catch up with the Portuguese in their use of science to drive discovery and commercial gain. Supposedly Prince Henry the Navigator in the 15th century had invested heavily in mapmaking, nautical skills and navigation, which resulted in the exploration of Africa and great gains from trade. That is what Bacon wanted to copy.

Yet recent scholarship has exposed this tale as a myth, or rather a piece of Prince Henry’s propaganda. Like most innovation, Portugal’s navigational advances came about by trial and error among sailors, not by speculation among astronomers and cartographers. If anything, the scientists were driven by the needs of the explorers rather than the other way around.

Terence Kealey, a biochemist turned economist, tells this story to illustrate how the linear dogma so prevalent in the world of science and politics—that science drives innovation, which drives commerce—is mostly wrong. It misunderstands where innovation comes from. Indeed, it generally gets it backward.

When you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration. The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles.

Technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do. As Adam Smith, looking around the factories of 18th-century Scotland, reported in “The Wealth of Nations”: “A great part of the machines made use in manufactures…were originally the inventions of common workmen,” and many improvements had been made “by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines.”

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. This conclusion of Mr. Kealey’s is so heretical as to be incomprehensible to most economists, to say nothing of scientists themselves.

For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. It was the economist Robert Solow who demonstrated in 1957 that innovation in technology was the source of most economic growth—at least in societies that were not expanding their territory or growing their populations. It was his colleagues Richard Nelson and Kenneth Arrow who explained in 1959 and 1962, respectively, that government funding of science was necessary, because it is cheaper to copy others than to do original research.

“The problem with the papers of Nelson and Arrow,” writes Mr. Kealey, “was that they were theoretical, and one or two troublesome souls, on peering out of their economists’ aeries, noted that in the real world, there did seem to be some privately funded research happening.” He argues that there is still no empirical demonstration of the need for public funding of research and that the historical record suggests the opposite.

After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. After World War II, the U.S. and Britain began to fund science heavily from the public purse. With the success of war science and of Soviet state funding that led to Sputnik, it seemed obvious that state funding must make a difference.

The true lesson—that Sputnik relied heavily on Robert Goddard’s work, which had been funded by the Guggenheims—could have gone the other way. Yet there was no growth dividend for Britain and America from this science-funding rush. Their economies grew no faster than they had before.

In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.”

As the economist Walter Park of American University in Washington, D.C., concluded, the explanation for this discrepancy is that public funding of research almost certainly crowds out private funding. That is to say, if the government spends money on the wrong kind of science, it tends to stop researchers from working on the right kind of science.

To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements.

And we can never know what discoveries were not made because government funding crowded out philanthropic and commercial funding, which might have had different priorities. In such an alternative world, it is highly unlikely that the great questions about life, the universe and the mind would have been neglected in favor of, say, how to clone rich people’s pets.

The perpetual-innovation machine that feeds economic growth and generates prosperity is not the result of deliberate policy at all, except in a negative sense. Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention; they can only make sure that they don’t hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change.

The House of Lords challenges the House of Commons

My Times column on the constitutional confrontation between the Lords and the Commons:

 

‘How can you have a constitutional crisis without a constitution?” asked a Dutch friend coming to a meeting in the House of Lords last week. Of course, it is because there is no written constitution that today’s attempts by Labour and the Liberal Democrats to defeat the will of the elected Commons in the unelected Lords on tax credits, or tomorrow’s on the electoral register, are a constitutional outrage, even if not strictly illegal.

But given that the two main opposition parties heavily outnumber the government in the Lords and are now combining to defeat just about anything they choose in the upper house at whim, then even without this week’s votes a crisis is looming. Some Lib Dem peers, in particular, seem almost pleased at the prospect: after their near-total ejection from the Commons, and now that they are the only party over-represented in the Lords, throwing their weight around in the unelected house feels good. If it results in blowing up the Lords altogether, so be it; they have little left to lose after the failure of their own preferred reform, which would have given them the balance of power through an alternative-vote system.

The government may still win today’s votes on three motions to delete or delay the cuts to tax credits — if sufficient cross-benchers heed the advice of the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler that the Lords is getting “too big for its unelected boots”. He argues that we would be breaking long-established conventions that the unelected house should not vote down financial measures, let alone by defeating a statutory instrument on policy grounds.

The problem the government has is that today’s debate will not be seen in the media as being about the constitution, but about tax-credit cuts. Plenty of Tories, though keen on the policy of gradually ceasing to subsidise big firms such as supermarkets by topping up the wages of their cheapest employees, worry that the measures are going to hit the poorest too hard and too soon, before the living wage helps them.

Tomorrow’s crisis is more clear-cut. The Labour party wants to delay individual registration of voters, which is a process designed to cut fraud, because that way the country can redraw constituency boundaries on a register that slightly favours them. Again, they plan to do so by voting against a statutory instrument.

Shortly after the election in May, I wrote in this space that the loss of the Liberal Democrats from government to opposition “bodes ill for the government winning votes” in the House of Lords and that “it becomes hard now to see how the Conservatives will ever win a controversial vote”. The government has lost three quarters of all votes in the Lords since the election.

My prediction hardly required the skills of Nostradamus, but some thought I was being too pessimistic and that the Lib Dems and Labour would not join forces or would respect the long-standing conventions that the Lords never oppose government manifesto business, never block financial measures and rarely vote down statutory instruments. They are trying to do all three this week.

There is no longer much veneer of respect for these conventions. Last week I listened to some Labour peers seriously arguing that the Conservative manifesto promises to abolish “new public subsidies” for onshore wind power applied only to new types of subsidy, not payments to new applicants. Therefore, in voting against that part of the energy bill, they were not in breach of the “Salisbury convention” that the opposition should not wreck manifesto commitments in the Lords.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, was more honest: the Salisbury convention is out of date, he said. That convention came about, remember, because in 1945 the Attlee government had just 16 Labour peers facing more than a thousand Conservative opponents. But it got its nationalising legislation through because of a self-denying ordinance agreed by the Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, with his opposite number, Lord Addison.

So the established constitutional position that the House of Lords exists to scrutinise legislation and improve it, rather than to score party political points and overrule the Commons, is being torn up. The Lords is becoming a place where Jeremy Corbyn’s 212 Labour peers in alliance with 111 Liberal Democrats can inflict frequent defeats on the government’s 249 (of which I am one). The 176 cross-benchers and 26 bishops, who hold the balance of power and, in theory, ensure that votes are won on the argument rather than party lines, tend to split down the middle most of the time when they vote in numbers at all.

The prime minister got a lot of stick over the summer for appointing extra peers. But after the latest round of appointments, the Conservatives will have a net gain of just seven seats — or less than 1 per cent. Scarred by the failure of the Clegg reform last time, David Cameron pledged not to radically reform the Lords in this parliament. But the appetite for reform is now strong among peers themselves. The general public increasingly think we are all too old, incompetent, venal and numerous.

So a gradual consensus is building inside the Lords that we should use this crisis to reform ourselves, probably by bringing in some combination of a retirement age, a minimum attendance requirement and a rebalancing of party strengths by internal election. So, after retirements are taken into account, the parties would vote out a proportion of their members so their strengths reflected either the votes cast at the last election or the seats won in the Commons (or an average of the two). The size of the house would shrink to match that of the Commons, though with cross-benchers retaining the balance of power.

Of course, there are complications in such a scheme. Ukip might need extra peers. It currently has three — 108 fewer than the Liberal Democrats, despite getting 60 per cent more votes in the last general election. The Scottish Nationalists might be granted a proportionate number of seats that they could choose to leave vacant if they wished (they currently refuse to appoint peers). Some provision would need be made for rolling retirements to enable the introduction of new blood.

Something has to give. Whatever the merits of any individual issue, it is outrageous that the losers of the general election are exercising, from an unelected chamber, a continual power of veto over the will of the elected chamber.

The benefits of carbon dioxide

My Times Column on the surprisingly large benefits of carbon dioxide emissions:

 

France’s leading television weather forecaster, Philippe Verdier, was taken off air last week for writing that there are “positive consequences” of climate change. Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of mathematical physics and astrophysics at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, declared last week that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are “enormously beneficial”. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, said in a lecture last week that we should “celebrate carbon dioxide”.

Are these three prominent but very different people right? Should we at least consider seriously, before we go into a massive international negotiation based on the assumption that carbon dioxide is bad, whether we might be mistaken? Most politicians today consider such a view to be so beyond the pale as to be mad or possibly criminal.

Yet the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions are not even controversial in scientific circles. As Richard Betts of the Met Office tweeted last week, the “CO2 fertilisation effect” — the fact that rising emissions are making plants grow better — is not news and is discussed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The satellite data show that there has been roughly a 14 per cent increase in the amount of green vegetation on the planet since 1982, that this has happened in all ecosystems, but especially in arid tropical areas, and that it is in large part due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Last week also saw the publication of a comprehensive report on “Carbon Dioxide — the Good News” for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by the independent American scientist Indur Goklany, to which Freeman Dyson wrote the foreword. The report was thoroughly peer-reviewed, as was almost all of the voluminous literature it cited. (Full disclosure: I helped edit the report.)

Goklany points out that whereas the benefits of carbon dioxide are huge and here now, the harms are still speculative and almost all in the distant future. There has so far been — as the IPCC confirms — no measurable increase in droughts, floods or storms worldwide, no reversal in the continuing rapid decline in deaths due to insect-borne diseases, and no measurable impacts of the continuing very slow rise in global sea levels. In stark terms, Bangladesh is still gaining land from sedimentation in its rivers’ deltas, has suffered no increase in cyclones, but has benefited from reduced malnourishment to the tune of billions of dollars from higher crop yields as a result of carbon dioxide emissions.

[This is the summary from Goklany's report:

1. This paper addresses the question of whether, and how much, increased carbon dioxide concentrations have benefited the biosphere and humanity by stimulating plant growth, warming the planet and increasing rainfall.

2. Empirical data confirms that the biosphere’s productivity has increased by about 14% since 1982, in large part as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels.

3. Thousands of scientific experiments indicate that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the air have contributed to increases in crop yields.

4. These increases in yield are very likely to have reduced the appropriation of land for farming by 11–17% compared with what it would otherwise be, resulting in more land being left wild.

5. Satellite evidence confirms that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations have also resulted in greater productivity of wild terrestrial ecosystems in all vegetation types.

6. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations have also increased the productivity of many marine ecosystems.

7. In recent decades, trends in climate-sensitive indicators of human and environ- mental wellbeing have improved and continue to do so despite claims that they would deteriorate because of global warming.

8. Compared with the benefits from carbon dioxide on crop and biosphere productivity, the adverse impacts of carbon dioxide – on the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, on sea level, vector-borne disease prevalence and human health – have been too small to measure or have been swamped by other factors.

9. Models used to influence policy on climate change have overestimated the rate of warming, underestimated direct benefits of carbon dioxide, overestimated the harms from climate change and underestimated human capacity to adapt so as to capture the benefits while reducing the harms.

10. It is very likely that the impact of rising carbon dioxide concentrations is currently net beneficial for both humanity and the biosphere generally. These benefits are real, whereas the costs of warming are uncertain. Halting the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations abruptly would deprive people and the planet of the benefits of carbon dioxide much sooner than they would reduce any costs of warming.]

It is worth remembering that commercial greenhouses buy carbon dioxide to enhance the growth of plants, so the growth responses are well known — and it’s not until carbon dioxide reaches five times current concentrations that the benefits level out. As Patrick Moore pointed out, those were normal levels for much of earth’s history.

In addition, hundreds of “free-air concentration experiments” have measured how much increased carbon dioxide levels enhance crop yields in open fields. So it is fairly easy to work out how much carbon dioxide emissions are helping world agriculture: by about $140 billion a year, or $3 trillion in total so far. If reparations are to be paid, perhaps farmers should pay coal producers (full disclosure: I’m both).

Actually, this may be an underestimate: experiments show that crops tend to benefit more than weeds (most crops have a more responsive kind of photosynthetic machinery called C3, while weeds mostly have a less responsive kind called C4). Increased carbon dioxide enhances drought resistance in plants, benefiting dry regions such as the Sahel, which has greened significantly in recent decades. And Goklany calculates that we need 11-17 per cent less land for feeding the world than we would if we had not increased carbon dioxide levels: so emissions have saved — and enhanced the growth of — a lot of rainforest.

[Here's one weed experiment, as described in Goklany's report:

"A Chinese experiment tested this idea by enriching carbon dioxide levels over plots of rice to almost twice the ambient level. This enhanced the ear weight of the rice by 37.6% while reducing the growth of a common weed, barnyard grass, by 47.9%, because the faster-growing rice shaded the weeds.40 Figure 1 illustrates the differing responses to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations of rice, a C3 plant, and the green foxtail Setaria viridis, a grass some- times proposed as a genetic model system to study C4 photosynthesis."]

[For instance a study published last week found the following:

Since 2012, the researchers have pumped extra CO2 into three of six basketball court-sized rings of 80-year-old bush. This has raised the CO2 concentration in the three plots to about 550 parts per million, up from the ambient level of 400 ppm. Measurements revealed that for each unit of water absorbed, the trees in the CO2-enriched rings reaped 35 per cent more carbon than the trees in the control plots.

Well, all right, but surely the climate harms will one day outweigh the growth benefits? Not necessarily. At the moment, impacts from the modest warming we saw in the 1980s and 1990s are also positive: slightly fewer premature deaths, which peak in cold weather more than in hot weather, slightly longer growing seasons and so on. A paper published last week concludes that if the world does warm significantly, China’s rain systems will shift north, increasing rainfall in the dry north and reducing flooding in the hot south.

Besides, human adaptation means we can capture the benefits and avoid the harms. The IPCC’s forecast warming range includes the possibility that we will still be enjoying net benefits by the end of the century, when the world will (it says) be three to 16 times richer per capita. The fastest way to cut deaths from bad weather today (such as the storm that just battered the Philippines) is to make people richer, not to make weather safer: we have already cut world death rates from droughts, floods and storms by 98 per cent in the past century.

As Goklany demonstrates, the assessments used by policy makers have overestimated warming so far, underestimated the direct benefits of carbon dioxide, overestimated the harms from climate change, and underestimated the human capacity to adapt.

Well, what about the ocean? Here too there’s good news. More carbon dioxide means faster growth rates of photosynthesisers in the sea as well as on land, an effect that is being observed in algae, eelgrasses, corals and especially plankton, such as the abundant creatures known as coccolithophores, whose biomass has increased by 40 per cent in the last two centuries.

[This is what the authors said about coccolithophores:

"Here, we present laboratory evidence that calcification and net primary production in the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi are significantly increased by high CO2 partial pressures. Field evidence from the deep ocean is consistent with these laboratory conclusions, indicating that over the past 220 years there has been a 40% increase in average coccolith mass. Our findings show that coccolithophores are already responding and will probably continue to respond to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures, which has important implications for biogeochemical modeling of future oceans and climate."]

That’s not to say coral reefs and fisheries are not in trouble — they are, but because of pollution, overfishing and run-off, not carbon dioxide. The tiny reduction in alkalinity (misleadingly termed “acidification”) caused by dissolved carbon dioxide is potentially negative in the distant future, but has been much exaggerated — as a big review of 372 studies has concluded. One recent experiment with a common Caribbean coral found that rising carbon dioxide levels would have no impact on its ability to build reefs for several centuries, while modest warming would actually help it slightly.

[This is what that meta-analysis concluded from a comprehensive survey of all studies:

"In summary, our analysis shows that marine biota is more resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions identifying ocean acidification as a major threat to marine biodiversity (Kleypas et al., 1999; Orr et al., 2005; Raven, 2005; Sponberg, 2007; Zondervan et al., 2001), which may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century. Ocean acidification will enhance growth of marine autotrophs and reduce fertility and metabolic rates, but effects are likely to be minor along the range of pCO2 predicted for the 21st century, and feedbacks between positive responses of autotrophs and pH may further buffer the impacts."]

With tens of thousands of activists and bureaucrats heading for a UN conference in Paris next month, there is such vast vested interest now in demonising carbon dioxide that it will be hard to change the world’s mind. Freeman Dyson laments that “scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany’s evidence convincing”, but hopes that a few will try. Amen.

[Dyson went on: 

"That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?...Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence. Goklany and I do not claim to be infallible. Like the climate-model experts, we have also evolved recently from the culture of the cave-children. Like them, we have inherited our own set of prejudices and blindnesses. Truth emerges when different groups of explorers listen to each other’s stories and correct each other’s mistakes."]

 

Voting to leave the EU looks like Britain's best option

My Times column on Britain's renegotiation with the European Union:

 

So the battle lines are drawn. “Vote Leave, Take Control” (of which I am a vice-president) is the campaign to leave the European Union if the renegotiation is inadequate. It launched last week and “Britain in a Stronger Europe”, the campaign to remain, launches today. Yet one argument increasingly unites both sides: the futility of the renegotiation. At both ends of the spectrum many people are now convinced that little will be asked for, or offered, or won.

The distribution of public opinion on the EU resembles a Christmas cracker: roughly one third would stay whatever happens, one third would leave whatever happens and one third could go either way — perhaps depending on what the prime minister wins in a renegotiation. The referendum will pull the cracker and see who gets the middle bit complete with paper hat and miniature stapler. So you would think that the partisans of “remain” would be pinning their hopes on successful renegotiation as the best hope of pulling the middle section of the electorate their way.

But they have largely given up. Andrew Duff, a former MEP and well-informed Brussels insider, recently commented that the government’s attempt at renegotiation “continues to distress Britain’s pro-Europeans, antagonise its anti-Europeans and bamboozle its EU partners”. He thinks the government is “overselling its ‘renegotiation’ and under-delivering” — disobeying both ends of the Benjamin Jowett dictum that Margaret Thatcher sometimes quoted: don’t expect too much and don’t attempt too little.

Mr Duff argues that the prime minister has realised that he can never breach the two cardinal principles of freedom of movement and no discrimination on the ground of nationality; has suspended hostilities against the European Court of Justice; has not even begun to butter up MEPs, whose approval will be needed; and already has as many opt-outs as he is ever likely to get — a fact confirmed by the coalition government’s review of EU competences last year.

To most of which analysis the partisans of “leave” will heartily agree. With the possible exception of an agreement to restrict benefits for unemployed migrants, what they want is just not going to be on offer. If recent reports are right, Britain’s demands consist of an “explicit statement” that the euro is not the official currency of the EU so we can keep the pound, a reorganisation to prevent the euro countries dominating the non-euro countries in financial services, a red-card system designed to allow some directives to be blocked, and an “explicit statement” that Britain is exempt from the drift towards “ever closer union”.

The Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan responded: “A statement that the EU has more than one currency? How about a statement that Wednesday comes after Tuesday? In what conceivable way is it a concession to state the obvious?” At the other end of the spectrum of views on Europe, Andrew Marr yesterday described the four proposed changes as “weak as water” and “things we already have”. Ken Clarke didn’t disagree. It will take all Mr Cameron’s powers as a public relations expert to dress these vague promises — assuming he achieves them — as anything other than a damp squib.

It was noticeable that the one mention of the EU reform debate in David Cameron’s conference speech focused on that fateful phrase “ever closer union”. But this, Mr Duff says, is far harder to unpick than it looks. Even if we can persuade others to promise to water down that commitment, because it implies “a future rupture with the UK’s previous treaty commitments” it cannot be offered in any form that is likely to survive a challenge at the European Court of Justice.

In short, our list of demands is getting thinner, but so are the chances of achieving any of it. Anything meaningful will require treaty change, which cannot happen till long after the referendum. Meanwhile we will have to take the IOUs on trust from a system that has twice recently let us down — by getting Britain to join the third Greek bailout, despite a clear, written promise that it wouldn’t happen, and by quietly paying the £1.7 billion “prosperity surcharge” for economic growth.

We are also short of allies. The East Europeans will not tamper with free movement of people. The Germans, desperate as they are for us to remain in the EU to counterbalance Latin fiscal incontinence, have other concerns, and are in no mood for radical change as Angela Merkel no doubt made clear in the Chequers garden last Friday. The French are reduced to wailing: “What does Britain want?”

On tactics, Europhiles tend to argue that our foot-stamping and threatening to leave is the worst way to persuade our partners to concede anything, while Eurosceptics argue that being nice has got us nowhere. They are probably both right: neither tactic will win concessions from partners immune to charm offensives and quick to take offence. (Since David Cameron became prime minister, the UK has voted against 40 measures and lost all of them — more losses than all the other prime ministers combined.)

We may yet be pleasantly surprised, and a magnificent rabbit may emerge from Mr Cameron’s hat. I hope so. But here is where our civil servants have let us down. It’s no secret that most officials are horrified by the whole process, and have never really taken seriously Mr Cameron’s promise in his Bloomberg speech to seek “fundamental” change. Had they done so, it might have been different.

Daniel Hannan thinks truly fundamental change is on offer but it has not been pursued. Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium, calls it “associate membership”, Jacques Delors “privileged partnership”. The European Federalist Movement has called for the same thing. They all envisage it as free-trade-plus, something close to what Switzerland has. Mr Hannan adds: “The problem isn’t that we can’t get it; it’s that Sir Humphrey in Brussels and Jim Hacker in London don’t want to ask for it.”

The launch of the two campaigns in recent days effectively recognises that the renegotiation will make little difference and that the referendum will in practice be a plebiscite on the unsatisfactory status quo. That surely means advantage Out.