http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/world-bank-goes-to-unreal-extremes/story-fni1hfs5-1226671073671 (paywalled)

World Bank goes to unreal extremes
BY:BJORN LOMBORG From: The Australian June 28, 2013 12:00AM

THE World Bank offers a shoddy climate catastrophe in its latest report.

It is depressing the World Bank has embraced this worst-case thinking in a series of highly tendentious reports, co-written by Germany's leading doomsayer Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Bill Hare, long-term climate policy director for Greenpeace.

The report estimates that temperatures will increase by 0.7C in about 20 years. This is far outside the current reality. It is almost twice the rate of temperature increase across the past 160 years. It is exactly twice the rate of the 1980s and 90s, when temperatures rose the fastest. And given the almost flat recent temperature, it is more than 4000 per cent the speed of the temperature rise in this century so far.

It assumes a 0.5C rise per decade for the rest of the century, which is just silly. It assumes an increase that is higher than the absolute highest decadal temperature rise in the average of all the UN climate panel's worst-case scenarios (the so-called RCP 8.5) across the similar time period. Stunningly, it assumes a worse outcome for the world than the worst of the UN's worst-case scenarios.

The report briefly mentions recent studies that increasingly show high temperature increases to be unlikely (in technical terms, that the world has a relatively low climate sensitivity). Yet such an un-scary scenario clearly doesn't fit the storytelling of the report: it almost comically rejects the multiple findings of the past year or two by citing just a single paper - from 2008.

The report details pretty much all bad things it can conjure from rising heat. It seems unwilling to list anything but worst-case outcomes riding on the back of worst-case scenarios.

Take food production. The report is eager to show that food production will suffer from increasing temperatures. Yet it emphasises only downsides.

Increasing temperatures by themselves will be likely to reduce future yield increases in developing countries, where temperatures are already high. This, however, neglects several counterweighing factors.

First, CO2 acts as a fertiliser for most crops, which translates into higher yields. In a recent study in Science, it is estimated that across the past three decades, temperature increases have reduced yields for maize, rice, wheat and soybeans by an average of 2.8 per cent. Yet, the CO2 rise has simultaneously increased yields by 2.2 per cent on average, almost cancelling the temperature rise.

And of course, overall, yields have risen 42.9 per cent across the past three decades. Mentioning only the reduction, while neglecting to mention CO2 fertilisation and downplaying the total yield increase, is unhelpful.

Second, across the century, farmers will begin to grow more heat-loving varieties or switch to more heat-loving crops, which will increase production growth.

And, third, cold areas will see increasing agricultural productivity, which will increase future production. It is unclear which of these trends will win. Models that try to incorporate all of these with global agricultural trade show virtually no impact on global production before mid-century and, at worst, perhaps a total reduction of between 2 per cent and 4 per cent by the end of the century. With an annual production increase of almost 4 per cent in the past three decades, this is, at worst, the equivalent of not reaching a new, global agricultural production maximum in 2099 but one year later in 2100.

Yet the World Bank report makes no effort to balance its view and even ludicrously admits in parts of its summaries that it assumes the CO2 fertilisation will magically stop in the future: "the CO2 fertilisation effect does not increase above present levels".

A similar one-sided approach is on display for conflicts, where the report speculates that higher temperatures will lead to more conflict, although peer-reviewed studies show that historically it is cold that has led to more conflict in China and Europe.

Likewise, there are lots of mentions of more heatwaves with higher temperatures, but no consideration of many fewer cold waves, which kill many more almost everywhere in the world.

The list goes on. And it is depressing because it steers the World Bank and its president, along with large parts of the global population, towards focusing on useless or highly inefficient ways to help.

One good example is the world's ill-advised foray into biofuels, costing tens of billions of dollars a year, increasing food prices and starvation while making global warming worse.

A Greenpeace commentator puts it clearly: "Currently, fossil fuels are being extracted and burned in the name of development and prosperity, but what they are delivering is the opposite, as the World Bank's report so clearly underlines."

This is scarily wrong because 680 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the past 30 years, and they were lifted out by cheap coal power, not heavily subsidised wind turbines. Billions around the world would love cheap power. This is likely to be their way out of poverty.

At the entrance of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, brass letters on the marble exclaim: "Our dream is a world without poverty." With this shoddy worst-case analysis, there is a real risk we're going to endanger that dream.

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