Speaking of boondoggles, over at Sp!ked, Rob Lyons interviews Aynesley Kellow, an Australian expert reviewer for the IPCC. He quickly reveals just why all those temperature predictions we hear about – and all the devastating effects associated with them – are fundamentally misguided:

According to the scenarios on which the climate models are based, the developing world will go through an enormous economic leap forward over the next century – and apparently this will have many deadly consequences. Kellow is not convinced by such claims: ‘The IPCC is assuming rates of economic growth that dwarf the nineteenth-century success of the USA, the twentieth century in Japan and so on. The USA experienced, I think, a ninefold increase in GDP per capita; these are making assumptions about 30-fold increases. So you can question their credibility. But if you do that, you’re questioning the emissions scenarios that are driving the climate models.’ There seems to be a contradiction in the IPCC’s thinking. It believes developing countries will experience potentially enormous growth rates over the next 100 years – yet it treats these countries as being just as vulnerable to droughts, floods and so on as if they were trying to tackle the symptoms of climate change in their present poverty-stricken condition. Either the IPCC has overestimated the growth, in which case climate change is likely to be less severe – or it has got the growth rates right (and certainly a 30-fold increase in output in the Third World would be welcome) and these countries will therefore be more likely to have the resources to cope with climatic change.

Kellow also identifies just why Jacques Chirac and even David Cameron find the IPCC and Kyoto so appealing:

For Kellow, the IPCC process is hopelessly politicised. ‘The scientists are in there but it is, after all, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists are there at the nomination of governments. Governments fund the exercise and sign-off on it ultimately’, he tells me. Kellow sees more mileage in the Asia-Pacific Partnership or AP6 (Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States), which takes the approach of developing new technologies rather than adopting the Kyoto approach of emissions reductions.
He says: ‘The emphasis on CO2 suits largely post-1990 decarbonised European economies worried about justifying high levels of taxation, energy security policies and so on. It doesn’t suit those with ample coal supplies at a quarter of the cost production of seaming coal in Europe – which includes India and China. There’s a very European slant to Kyoto.’

And as Europe declines in power and India and China increase, the attractiveness of Kyoto-style mitigation policies will diminish further. Adaptation and technology transfer are the way of the future if we want to ‘do something’ about global warming. We throw in our lot with the Old World Order if we go for Kyoto, or even Kyoto-lite, now. That’s really ignoring the future.