“The global economic benefit of limiting warming to 2C is reported to exceed the cost of mitigation in most of the assessed literature (medium confidence).”

OK, that’s interesting.

In fact, it’s fascinating, Because they’re using their “medium confidence” in 2C to demand that 1.5C be done. That is, they’re using the costings where they think they’re about right to demand what they’re not certain about at all. Which is an interesting misuse of their own calculations, don’t you think?

Our position has long contained two base insistences. One, that we should only do what makes sense. Any action should add more value - or reduce damages - more than the cost of taking the action. In this we are in accord with the Stern Review and the work that led to the Nordhaus Nobel. In fact, this is in accord with simple basic logic - do those things which add value, don’t those that don’t.

The second is that whatever we do we do it efficiently. For humans tend to do less of more expensive things, more of cheaper. So, by using efficient methods we thus gain more of the thing, whatever it is. Political planning has had Germany opening up the lignite mines again, the UK burning American woodchips in Drax and just everyone growing corn to feed into cars not people. Such planning, we can see by the simple evidence of our own experience, does not in fact work. So, market methods with suitably adjusted prices it has to be - again we are in accord with Stern and Nordhaus and 93% of polled economists.

In short, OK, climate change, fine, but for the Lord’s Sake don’t try dealing with it the way you have been. Oh, and don’t try to accelerate it, not until you’ve proven that it’s worth doing so.

We also found this interesting:

Meanwhile, it adds with medium confidence that “the lifestyle consumption emissions of the middle income and poorest citizens in emerging economies are between 5-50 times below their counterparts in high-income countries”.

Emissions are very closely related to standard of living - obviously so in an emissions powered economy. The true meaning of that being that we in the rich world have no poverty - not when there are people out there living on 20%, or 2%, of what we have. And there’s really no arguing with this non-existence of poverty idea either. For the IPCC is indeed the home, residence, of the accepted science of our age, isn’t it?