Fruitless as it is to focus on the least expensive pointy end of the IPCC analysis, bypassing entirely the non-catastrophic but still economically costly reductions in productivity and loss of resources, we might as well have a closer look at this flawed analysis.
Temperatures stopped rising (the pause), extreme weather did not increase (IPCC SREX), Australian drought turned to flood, Tuvalu has not disappeared, and polar bears thrive. So AR5 WG2 finally said adaptation might be a better response.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193
No pause after a 32 year lapse, and you can do the math for the changes in temperature it would take for a pause to appear on a climate timescale.. Why haven’t you done that math?
Further, the law of conservation of energy tells us that if energy isn’t becoming heat at the surface in the short term, it’s becoming something else somewhere in the short term; the thermomechanical principle anticipates that at least half of this energy is mechanical motion in the short term. That’d be more wind, faster ocean currents, changes in pressure.. oh, hey.. that’s called more extreme weather. You want your cake in the long term, don’t try to eat it in the short term too. And even this is too narrow an analysis: what has changed is the Risk of extreme events; the instantiation of any one set of actual extreme events cannot be construed to reflect that changing probability distribution function any more than flipping a coin once and turning up heads tells us it’s a two-headed coin.
Australia’s a big island; big enough to have droughts (that don’t last forever) and floods (that also don’t last forever), and which have to both be called extreme. Other than an excuse to seem cosmopolitan, what’s the point of mentioning Austrialia. There’s droughts and floods in the US, too, and Americans aren’t fooled by claims what they’re experience isn’t extreme.
Tuvalu.. yeah. Cosmopolitan ostentation aside, also invalid: http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/1/343.short is one of some two hundred results of a search of Google Scholar for Tuvalu Sea Level Rise since 2014 alone. Asserting that Tuvalu still hasn’t sunk yet is cold cynicism, not analysis.
Which polar bears, exactly, are thriving? The ones in zoos? How about one single population thought to be increasing and two holding steady while two dozen other populations — all the populations of polar bears in the wild — are dwindling. And while that population is double what it was at the nadir of the species, some seven decades ago after decades of hunters doing pretty much everything in their power to wipe out the species, it is at most at a quarter of its pre-contact numbers.
Adaptation is an inevitable response, because it’s too late to just mitigate. We’re already in AGW conditions, and we cannot expect the trend to stop digging us deeper into these conditions any time soon. Suggesting, however, that mitigation isn’t more urgent than ever, from the point of view of simple economics, forgetting all that Green feelgood stuff, is just plain fiscally irresponsible.
Limiting an analysis, pruned of all other evidence, just to the most speculative portion of the most difficult to assess, exploiting the uncertainty and ignorance afforded by that strategy, is not a trustworthy act.
