To the surprise of (I'm guessing) nobody, the latest report on climate change from the IPCC says the same as all of its earlier reports: the earth's climate is changing, and it's your fault.
The scientists have reached this conclusion despite the fact that global temperatures seem to have stopped rising in about 1998. Their response to "deniers" who say this means the climate change consensus may need rethinking is interesting: they point out that the past decade was on average warmer than the decade before. You probably don't need a degree in advanced statistics to figure out that such a statement is fully compatible with the possibility that warming stopped dead in 1998: it's just a "baseline effect".
Anyway, when the climate scientists deign to admit that maybe things haven't been going as forecast for the last decade and more, they refer to the apparent slowing in global warming as a "hiatus". It's not one that they predicted, but don't you dare suggest that the science might need a tweak. In fact, there's now a favoured hypothesis to explain the "hiatus": all the extra energy being produced by man's depredations is being stored in the deep oceans, a process that can't go on for ever. There's no evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis, and again it's something that nobody forecast, but that isn't stopping the experts from attempting to stifle further debate by asserting that "the science is settled' -- which always strikes me as being a profoundly unscientific thing to say.
Be that as it may, it looks as though the UN will summon its members together sometime next year to try to strong-arm them into taking action to prevent the supposedly looming climatic disaster. Good luck persuading China or India or any other rapidly-industrialising country to go along with that. Richer countries may be easier to persuade, however, and indeed one -- Germany -- is already hurtling along the green path. And as this recent article from the New York Times makes clear, it's not a pretty sight.
Chancellor Merkel's government, under pressure from the country's sizeable Green Party, has set a goal of closing all the country's nuclear plants, phasing out the use of coal and moving to 80% renewable energy by mid-century. The costs are staggering, and they're leading to real changes in ordinary people's lifestyles -- like that of the man who told the NYT that high energy bills compelled him to use only one 5 watt light in his home and to stay out of his unheated living room! The engineering challenge of connecting all of the renewables to the grid is proving formidable, even for the Germans, and businesses are fretting about losing their competitiveness.
And here's the real killer point: it isn't working. As the article points out, Germany's carbon emissions actually rose last year, because coal-fired plants have to be fired up on the very frequent occasions when it's not sunny enough or windy enough for the renewable sources to be effective. Unless someone comes up with a whole new way of storing energy efficiently, this will always be the case.
If you want to eliminate fossil fuel-based power generation, there's a tested and reliable alternative out there: nuclear. But Germany has already ruled that out, and there's little enthusiasm for it in the rest of the developed world either, so we face a future of expensive and inherently unreliable energy supplies. The fact a major determinant of energy policies these days seems to be the Fukushima disaster -- which was caused by a catastrophic Act of God, and has led to precisely no radiation-related casualties -- is simply insane.
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