Ross McKitrick is a distinguished economist at the University of Guelph. He specializes in environmental economics, and above all practices rigorous statistical analysis..He is also capable of turning statistics into intelligible English prose, which is no small achievement for any academic, let alone an economist..McKitrick, and a Bay Street analyst, Stephen McIntyre, are probably best known for demolishing the fraudulent “hockey stick” graph invented by Michael Mann and two other enviros. Their science fiction was published in the prestigious science journal, Nature..Mann is a typical climate alarmist. His hockey stick graph purported to show 900 years of more or less steady global temperatures — the handle of the hockey stick. This was followed by a massive warming trend, starting around 1900 — the blade of the hockey stick..It was featured prominently in several of the UN Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change. At one point the Government of Canada sent every high school in the country a copy of the graph. It rapidly became an icon of human-caused global warming..McKitrick and McIntyre showed the whole thing was bogus; nothing but the result of the statistical techniques they used..As statisticians say, it was an “artifact” of the computer program Mann and friends used to mine their data. Specifically, the computer program looked for hockey stick shapes. And it found them..McKitrick and McIntyre showed that, by running a data set consisting of random numbers through Mann’s program, it always resulted in hockey sticks. Sometimes the blade went up. Sometimes it went down..Here was a classic example of junk science getting exposed by real science..McKitrick’s latest discussion of climate policy was written for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa think-tank..It deals with adaptation to climate change as a viable alternative to mitigation. And mitigation is familiar as policies that aim at the reduction of CO2 emissions along with the promotion of renewable energy options, chiefly solar and wind..He does not discuss the question of the relative contribution of natural versus human-caused climate change nor how climate change is to be distinguished from changes in the weather. But then, hardly anyone does..The main questions he is concerned with are straightforward: why does mitigation enjoy an effective monopoly on discussions of climate policy? Why is decarbonization viewed as an end in itself? Why is it not compared to adaptation in terms of costs and benefits?.One reason, of course, is that proponents of mitigation might discover that adaptation works by substantially reducing the alleged negative effects of climate change. Worse, what if an adaptation policy showed the anticipated negative effects of climate change were in fact benefits?.For anyone supporting a rational climate policy that would mean abandoning decarbonization..Here are two preliminary facts..First, ever since people started getting anxious about so-called greenhouse gas emissions, about a generation ago, GHGs have continued to rise..Second, “even taking climate model warnings at face value,” which McKitrick thinks is foolish anyhow, most mitigation efforts to reduce CO2 emissions are unaffordable and harmful. In Canada, they are also declarations of political war on the prairie West..He then cited several scientific studies in support of the notion that even complete compliance with the 1992 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Climate Treaty would have had no effect of CO2 accumulation..The reasons are obvious..Kyoto and Paris bind some countries but not all. This leads to what is usually called “carbon leakage,” where CO2-producing industries are incentivized to move from participating to non-participating countries. The incentives worked and CO2 production has gone up. This is no surprise..So have the perverse consequences, as the Germans have demonstrated so beautifully..After heavily investing in wind and solar, along with Russian natural gas, when the Ukraine war began, Germany reduced its consumption of Russian gas. Then what? Not more wind and solar but a re-opening of coal mines to feed coal-burning generators and the construction of a new LNG terminal..Here was a major demonstration of the non-cost-effectiveness of renewables when affordable electricity became a problem..There are plenty of other studies, rather less dramatic than the German switch, that showed adaptation to be effective..For example, the decline in heat-related mortality has been directly linked to the most obvious way of dealing with heat waves: cheap electricity to run air conditioners. Who knew?.Other studies have indicated that in temperate parts of the world, which would include the prairie West, warming temperatures would benefit agriculture, provided energy and fertilizer remained affordable..But, McKitrick pointed out, “both of these are being put at risk by contemporary mitigation policies.” He did not need to specify further: those policies are being imposed by Ottawa, not Manitoba..Other arguments in favour of adaptation involved estimates on the costs of doing nothing to mitigate, to doing a little bit, and to doing as much as possible – call it net-zero by 2050 or even earlier. The results are exactly the opposite to what the alarmists have promised..McKitrick’s conclusions were obvious: reducing, with the aim of preventing, global CO2 emissions not only doesn’t work, it is impossible. Adaptation to heat waves and to changing growing conditions does work..Now, Ross McKitrick is an economist and, like other practitioners of the dismal science, finds long-term economic irrationality incomprehensible. Once you point out that a public policy is irrational, economists expect change from political leaders..Moreover, once it has been demonstrated that pursuing aggressive mitigation raises energy costs and reduces real income, whereas adaptation does the opposite, why would any sensible government pursue the former and avoid the latter?.Unlike economists, political scientists are much more tolerant of economic stupidity..Ask yourself, who pays the greatest price for shutting down hydrocarbon production? Who pays the greatest price for making energy and fertilizer prices unaffordable?.To ask the question is to answer it: the inhabitants of the prairie West. For the Laurentians, economic irrationality makes political sense.
