A few days back, I mentioned the BMJ conference on the purported links between climate change, security and health. Videos of some of the talks have been posted up on YouTube and I've spent some time going through them.
The discussions were not recorded, but there were still was some surprising (or perhaps not so surprising stuff) in the lectures.
- Prof Sir Andy Haines, the head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reported that the social cost of carbon (the externality in other words) has been estimated in some recent papers to be $1000/tonne, a figure Richard Tol, a specialist in the area, describes as "complete nonsense". Sir Andy has kindly pointed me to the source for this figure - a discussion paper by Ackerman and Stanton of the Stockholm Environment Institute. I think it's fair to say that the paper's upping of the cost of carbon from $21/tonne to $1000 and higher is fairly jawdropping. I think this is what climatologists call "the power of models".
- Prof Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance, described a fence being built between India and Bangladesh, alleging that this was being done to deal with the threat of climate refugees. Why would you build a fence now to deal with a problem you think will only affect you decades into the future, I wondered? I asked the geographer Bob Bradnock - a Bangladesh specialist - about Prof Montgomery's idea. This was his reply
The plan to build a fence between Bangladesh and India has a long history. When Bangladesh separated from Pakistan in 1971 some 10 million refugees fled across the border 'temporarily'. Most went back, but there has been a long term significant influx of Bangladeshi migrants into India. The building of a fence was planned to prevent this flow, and in its inception and building had nothing to do with the anticipated effects of climate change. It is true that pressure on resources has grown greatly in Bangladesh, despite great increases in agricultural productivity over the last thirty years, because population has also grown fast, doubling over the last thirty years or so. The idea that the fence was constructed to prevent climate induiced migration is completely without foundation, even though today some Indians use threatened climate change as an ex post facto justification
- Jon Snow the newsreader said that the media has "lost faith in climate change" - it won't cover global warming any longer because of Climategate. He speaks of the "war fought by the opponents of the belief in climate change"; "we are in a bad state", he says. (here from about 2min). "We" is an interesting choice of pronoun.
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