The third and latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which deals with mitigation of global warming, has set off quite a debate about the costs associated with reducing carbon emissions worldwide.
According to John Abraham and Dana Nuticelli in The Guardian, many media outlets misconstrued what the IPCC said about the cost of avoiding climate change when they reported that the panel concluded it is cheaper to adapt to climate change than to avoid it.
The mistake, they say, stems from the IPCC's second report when it said that income losses from additional temperature increases would likely be greater than the "incomplete estimates of global annual losses for additional temperature increases," which range from between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income. Then the panel's third report claimed that mitigation scenarios entail losses in global consumption between 1.6 percent and 3.0 percent per year.
Economists have expressed concern that the IPCC greatly underestimates the costs of emission reduction and understand the third report to say those costs are outweighed by the long-term benefits of reducing global temperatures, according to a report in News Tonight Africa. They say the targets set by the IPCC for reducing emissions–to keep the global rise in mean surface temperatures to less than 2 degrees centigrade compared to pre-industrial times–are unrealistic and lead to feelings of failure when they are not reached.
The IPCC panel, critics say, puts great weight on carbon capture and storage to keep costs down when the process is unproven on a large scale. In their view, the costs of reducing greenhouse gases have always been much higher than anticipated.
Others complain that the IPCC report is not the "policy relevant and yet policy-neutral" panel it claims to be. The Economist reports that pressure from governments forced it to omit from its deliberations a table showing the link between greenhouse gases and national income, probably because it made clear that middle-income countries such as China are the biggest contributors of new emissions. The panel also struck any references to historical contributions, which show that the wealthiest countries have disproportionately contributed to climate change.
But the issue is simple for economists like Paul Krugman.
"The science is solid; the technology is there; the economics look far more favorable than anyone expected," Krugman said. "All that stands in the way of saving the planet is a combination of ignorance, prejudice, and vested interests."
Source : http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/ipcc-reports-looks-at-costs-of-reducing-greenhouse-gases/
